FORMER Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins has defended himself from a “surreal smear” that his family fortune derives from the slave trade.

The Sunday Telegraph said one of his direct ancestors, Henry Dawkins, accumulated 1,013 slaves in Jamaica by the time of his death in 1744.

The paper said the Dawkins’ 400-acre family estate near Chipping Norton was paid for “at least in part with wealth amassed through sugar plantations and slave owners”.

Prof Dawkins said: “At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I can’t help wondering at the quality of journalism which sees a scoop in attacking a man for what his five-greats grandfather did.”

He said the family estate was in fact a “small working farm, struggling to make ends meet” which had been largely “squandered” in the 19th century.

* Prof Dawkins will debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the nature and origin of human beings at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford on Thursday.