From Ice Floes to Battlefields

by Anne Strathie

  4. The Times, 7 March 1918.

  5. Ibid., 11 March 1918.

  6. Shackleton and Wild are both recorded as holding NEC shares; Campbell, Barnes and McIlroy may also have been issued with shares.

  7. In 1912 Norman Craig booked a first-class cabin on the Titanic but changed his plans and did not sail with her (see http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/cave-list.html). David Thomson’s role in the expedition is mentioned on www.discovergravesham.co.uk.

  8. Ponting mentioned a meeting with Shackleton at the RGS event on Spitsbergen in December 1918, RGS/CB8/Conway).

  9. Anderson’s letter is quoted more fully in Ponting, The Great White South, p. 292.

  10. Hull Daily Mail, 15 February and 2 September 1918. According to public records, Cheetham’s son who was serving in France returned home safely.

  11. Newspapers including Dundee Courier, 1 October 1918.

  12. The articles in The Financier were advertised in The Times of 7 October 1918 and numerous regional newspapers. It has been suggested that Ponting, who had previously worked as a war correspondent, may have written the articles but one article refers to him (in the third person) arriving on Spitsbergen after other expedition members. Given the range and depth of information in the articles it may be that several writers, including Ponting and/or NEC director Harry Brittain (also a journalist), collaborated in producing them.

  13. RGS/C88/Conway.

  14. Ibid., 13 November 1918.

  15. There appears to be no trace of Ponting’s photographs of Spitsbergen. He brought them with him to show at the RGS and took them away again (the RGS usually made their own copy of lecturers’ lantern slides). There are boxes with the word ‘Spitsbergen’ written on them at the Scott Polar Research Institute, but they contain other photographs and SPRI has no record of Ponting’s Spitsbergen photographs.

  16. Oates’ leg wound from the Boer War had troubled him in the low temperatures on the return from the South Pole.

  17. Atkinson to Cherry-Garrard, 24 August 1918, SPRI/MS559/24/42.

  18. Described in Atkinson’s Albert Medal citation (quoted in Guly, ‘Edward Leicester Atkinson’).

  19. Atkinson to Cherry-Garrard, 8 October 1918, SPRI/MS559/24/43.

  20. Atkinson to Cherry-Garrard, 17 November 1918, SPRI/MS559/24/44; see chapter 2 for background to Atkinson’s reference to Meares’ actions in 1911–12 in Antarctica.

  21. The basis for Atkinson’s reference to Meares and a ‘white feather’ at Ypres is unclear. While Meares was not decorated or mentioned in dispatches his service records show he resigned his commission; his commanding officer also appears to have been keen to retain his services. Many cavalry officers found conditions difficult in the trenches, as they were unable to fulfil their traditional roles of charging and surveillance. Atkinson and Cherry-Garrard both suffered from the knock-on effects of Meares’ decision to leave with the Terra Nova in early 1912, but Meares’ departure had been signalled by him and anticipated by Scott, Bowers and others. In terms of his personal views on Meares, Atkinson was an exceptionally brave man who appears (like Churchill, and Teddy Evans) to have thrived on the challenge and variety of war.

  22. Atkinson to Cherry-Garrard, 5 December 1918, SPRI/MS559/24/45; 11 December 1918 (2 letters), /46 and /47; 31 December 1918, /48.

  23. I.D. Levack and S.W. McGowan, ‘Alexander Hepburne Macklin: physician, polar explorer, and pioneer’, British Medical Journal, 18 December 1993, 307(6919), pp. 1597–9.

  24. Huntford’s description of the encounters between Atkinson and Marshall and Macklin (Shackleton, pp. 665–6) do not seem to prove that members of the South Pole party had or died from scurvy. Atkinson’s claim that Evans’ was an isolated case is backed up by Frank Debenham’s comment that ‘Teddy really was a very naughty boy and wouldn’t eat his seal meat’ (referred to in May, ‘Could Captain Scott have been saved?’).

  25. Vennell, ‘John Hugh Mather and the north Russian campaign, 1919’.

  26. Atkinson to Cherry-Garrard, 15 March 1919, SPRI/MS559/24/49.

  27. This suggests that Atkinson may have purchased shares in NEC. Campbell would probably have been issued shares in 1913–14, but may have subsequently purchased more.

  18

  Moving on

  On 17 January 1922 The Times published an article entitled ‘Scott’s Dash to the South Pole’, in which ‘A Correspondent’ reminded readers that a decade had now passed since Captain Scott and his companions had planted their Union Jack at 90° South.1

  Two weeks later newspapers reported the death, on South Georgia, of Ernest Shackleton. He had left London on 17 September 1921 on the Quest, accompanied by Antarctic and north Russian stalwarts, Wild, Macklin, Worsley, Hussey and McIlroy. He had suffered a major heart attack in Rio de Janeiro but had insisted that the expedition must continue. After the Quest docked in South Georgia on 4 January 1922, Shackleton collapsed again. He died in the early hours of 5 January, a few weeks short of his 48th birthday.

  Shackleton’s friends had agreed that Hussey would accompany Shackleton’s body back to England and Wild would take command of the expedition. While Hussey was in Montevideo waiting for a passage to London he received a cable from Emily Shackleton asking him to take her husband’s body back to South Georgia for burial. By April the Quest was back in South Georgia, defeated by the ice. When Frank Wild and Shackleton’s longest serving shipmates visited their leader’s grave, they built a cairn over it. Almost ten years previously Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard and their companions had done the same for Scott, Wilson and Bowers.

  On 3 March 1922 Kathleen Scott married Hilton Young, Viscount Kennet, a former lawyer and journalist and Member of Parliament for Norwich.2 Victor Campbell had introduced his late leader’s widow to Young, with whom he had served during the Zeebrugge raid. During the action, Young had been badly injured, but the subsequent loss of one arm had not prevented him from travelling to north Russia and commanding an armoured train on the line which ran south from Archangel.

  The wedding, at which the Bishop of St Albans officiated, was held in the crypt of the House of Commons. The bride was given away by Austen Chamberlain, Leader of the House of Commons, and wore (according to The Times) ‘a draped fringed gown and cloak of dove-grey chiffon velvet, with a sable collar, and a toque of the same velvet with an upstanding silver plume’. Guests included the bride’s 12-year-old son Peter, members of both families, several of Young’s political circle and a small number of personal friends.

  Kathleen Scott continued to be much in demand as a sculptor of portrait busts and full length statues: her recent subjects included Lloyd George and Arnold Lawrence, younger brother of T.E. Lawrence, whom she had already sculpted, dressed in his Arab robes.3 She had also been commissioned to make a sculpture of a soldier for a war memorial in the town of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

  On 16 May 1922 Herbert Ponting announced his new invention, the ‘Kinatome’, which would bring film into the home, as the pianola and gramophone had done for music.4 He had already intimated that he was working on a new film about the Terra Nova expedition which would include previously unseen new footage.5 He had given over 1,000 lectures and film showings at the Philharmonic Hall, which had, according to The Times, made the expedition ‘imperishable’ and, thanks to his films of penguins and seals, ‘added vastly to the gaiety of London during difficult times’.6 Ponting’s account of the expedition, The Great White South, had been published in 1921 and was due to be reprinted during 1922.

  Cherry-Garrard had delivered a final draft of his account of the expedition in May 1922. It was, following a parting of the ways with the expedition’s publications committee, a personal account of the expedition which had at its heart the Cape Crozier expedition and the heroic kindness of Wilson and Bowers. Cherry had been open regarding where he thought things had gone wrong, but he had decided that there would be no villains in his story.

  After Pennell had died, Cherry had written a eulogy to him and their equally hardworking fr
iends, Wilson and Bowers.7 In it Cherry imagined Pennell in his own personal heaven, where everyone worked for thirty hours a day, but from where, Cherry hoped, Pennell might sometimes descend to take him and other friends out for dinner. The passage, like others, was perhaps too personal for publication.

  Cherry had told the story of the South Pole journey largely through extracts from Bowers’ journal and that of the return of the second returning party through extracts from that of William Lashly. Cherry, knowing Lashly enjoyed reading about his Terra Nova companions, sent him a copy of Shackleton’s South, in which Lashly’s friend Tom Crean had been praised by Shackleton.8

  By 1922, Frank Debenham’s dream of establishing a permanent home for the expedition’s scientific papers was beginning to become a reality.9 The idea had come to Debenham in November 1912 when he and Raymond Priestley had been ‘geologising’ around Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition hut at Cape Royds. Debenham had realised that, although their investigations built on work carried out during the Nimrod expedition, they were unsure where the Nimrod records currently were. When Debenham found some abandoned writing paper in Shackleton’s hut he jotted down some ideas for a ‘Polar Centre’.

  When Debenham and Priestley returned to Cambridge after the war they discussed the idea with Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard, Shackleton, Dr Arthur Shipley, RGS council members and other interested parties. In late 1920 Debenham’s detailed plans had been approved by the appropriate university bodies. By 1922 he was installed in an attic office in the Sedgwick Museum (home to a famous earth sciences collection), working to turn his dream into reality. It was early days, but Debenham hoped that one day his polar research institute might have its own building and that he might be its first director.

  Dennis Lillie had been discharged from Bethlem Hospital in January 1921 and returned to Cambridge. He had begun lecturing again but by October that year had suffered a relapse and been admitted to Buckinghamshire Mental Hospital. He had been readmitted to Bethlem before Christmas 1921 but there was no sign of improvement in his mental state.

  Raymond Priestley had ended the war as a major, in command of the 46th (North Midland) Divisional Signal Company of the Royal Engineers. After writing a history of the signal service, he had returned to Cambridge where he had been awarded a BA for his expedition work on glaciers and been admitted to Fellowship of Clare College. He and Silas Wright were now preparing the final report on their expedition findings for publication.

  During the final year of the war a second Priestley brother had been killed. Donald Priestley, a lance corporal with the Artists’ Rifles, had died when advancing through waist-deep mud towards a German position in the Ypres salient. Of 500 Artists’ Rifles who had gone into battle that morning, only 150 were in fighting condition by nightfall.10 The ‘very beautiful, rolling wooded country [with] very pretty villages’ which Cecil Meares described in October 1914 was now a trench-scored, shell-pocked quagmire, punctuated by leafless tree stumps, rubble where buildings had been and a series of makeshift burial grounds.

  Wright, who had also risen to the rank of major, had been mentioned twice in despatches for his work on wireless transmission between trenches; he had also been awarded a Military Cross and OBE and been appointed a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour. He was now working at the recently established Admiralty Research Department as assistant to its founding director, Frank Smith.

  Priestley’s other brother-in-law, Griff Taylor, had remained in Melbourne with his wife and young family, working at the Bureau of Meteorology and writing up his Antarctic research at the city’s university. A declared pacifist, he had worked as a meteorologist and lecturer at a flying school, completed a university doctorate and garnered good reviews for his expedition memoir, With Scott: the Silver Lining, which had been published in 1916. Since 1920 he had been working in Sydney, where he had established Australia’s first dedicated university department of geography.

  George Simpson had spent most of the war working in India, but undertaken tours of duty as a meteorological adviser to the British Expeditionary Force in Mesopotamia and as assistant secretary to the Board of Munitions. By 1922 he was back in Britain, working as director of the Meteorological Office, a post Colonel Lyons, of the expedition’s publications sub-committee, had held during the war.

  Murray Levick had retired from active war service in 1916 on fitness grounds, but subsequently transferred to a military orthopaedic centre in London, developing new uses for electrotherapy, including on trench foot and other war injuries.11 Since the war he had worked on new methods of rehabilitation and had recently been appointed physiotherapist to a home and craft school for wounded men. The results of Levick’s scientific work during the Terra Nova expedition had been published before the war. His reports on the social habits of penguins at Cape Adare had been published in both pamphlet and book form, but his shorter paper, ‘The Sexual Habits of Adélie Penguins’, had only been circulated privately rather than risk offending sensitive nature enthusiasts.12

  Edward Nelson had, following demobilisation, left his work at the Board of Invention and Research in London and returned to Plymouth and the Marine Laboratory. He had not, however, returned to live with his wife and daughter.13 In 1921 he had moved to Aberdeen, where he was now working as scientific superintendent of the Fisheries Board for Scotland, supervising a project which used drift bottles to track North Sea currents. This job, which drew on his Antarctic and other earlier work, was proving professionally fulfilling but his marriage appeared to be troubled. His wife, after failing to secure his return to Plymouth by offering to ‘let bygones be bygones’, was currently seeking a decree of restitution of conjugal rights through the courts.

  Edward Atkinson, who had seen little of his beloved ‘Missus’ during the war, had recently been seconded to the Royal Hellenic Navy as part of a British naval training and organisational mission. Since the war he had been awarded an Albert Medal, for saving lives on HMS Glatton, and the Chadwick Medal, awarded every five years to the medical officer in the armed forces who had done most to promote the health of his fellow officers. Atkinson, who continued to undergo treatment and surgery for his burns and other wounds, also managed to find time to write up his Terra Nova and wartime scientific findings.

  On 3 May 1922, at St Andrews, on the east coast of Scotland, J.M. Barrie, to whom Scott had written one of his last letters, was installed as Rector of the city’s ancient university. Barrie had been born in Kirriemuir, about 30 miles from St Andrews, and educated at schools in Glasgow, Forfar and Dumfries and Edinburgh University. The students of St Andrews had elected Barrie as their rector during Armistice week in November 1919 but his rectorial address had been postponed several times. When Earl Field-Marshall Haig, Barrie’s predecessor as rector, was appointed chancellor of the university, it was agreed that the two installation ceremonies would be combined.14

  New rectors were, by custom, invited to submit names of those whom they felt worthy of receiving an honorary degree.15 Barrie had suggested Thomas Hardy, ‘the chief man of letters living’, John Galsworthy and several others from the world of letters and artistic circles. Essayist Charles Whibley’s wife was the sister-in-law (and a regular subject) of James McNeill Whistler. Edward Lucas, a regular contributor to Punch, worked for publishers Methuen and Co and played in an amateur cricket team established by Barrie and consisting of his writer friends.16 Sidney Colvin, an art and literary critic, was a long-standing friend of Robert Louis Stevenson (with whom Barrie had corresponded but never met). Scottish cleric William Robertson Nicoll, founder of the London-based British Weekly, had given Barrie some of his first writing commissions. Actor-manager Squire Bancroft and much-loved actress Ellen Terry represented the world of theatre, to which Barrie owned much of his fame.17

  Barrie had also nominated his doctor, Douglas Shields, an Australian who had moved to London from his native Melbourne and also counted amongst his patients Galsworthy, opera singer Dame Nellie Melba, cricketer Don Bradman and me
mbers of the British and European aristocracy. Shields had also been knighted for his services as surgeon to Australian forces in France, the Royal Navy and the British Army.

  Barrie’s final nominee for an honorary degree had been Bernard Freyberg, VC, DSO (and two bars), the highest ranking officer of his age in the British army. Since the war Freyberg had spent much of his time in London living in Barrie’s apartment, recovering from his wounds while Barrie was nursed through various bouts of ill health.

  Four others were being granted honorary degrees that day. Sir Herbert Lawrence, one of Haig’s senior staff officers, had overseen the withdrawal from the Cape Helles sector on Gallipoli. Lord Wester Wemyss, who had family estates in Fife, had been governor of Lemnos, and in charge of the naval base at Mudros harbour during the Gallipoli campaign.18 Sir James Guthrie was one of Scotland’s best known painters and portraitists.19 The final graduand, Thomas Paxton, was Lord Provost of Glasgow, but had, like Barrie, been brought up near St Andrews.

  The day before the graduation Barrie had been warmly and boisterously welcomed by the students and pulled through the streets in a carriage.20 The morning of the graduation Barrie had attended the unveiling of a new war memorial in the university chapel and been granted the freedom of St Andrews.

  In the early afternoon students, staff members and other guests gathered in the Volunteer Hall to hear Barrie’s rectorial address.21 After a humorously self-deprecating introduction, Barrie turned his topic of ‘Courage’. He encouraged his younger listeners to engage with the older generation, even though their actions and decisions had led to the recent war. He reminded them that those who died in wars were young and might, in the future, include their as yet unborn children. He suggested that they, the young people of Britain, had more in common with young people of other countries than with old men of their own. He recalled his own early days in London, when, knowing no one and lacking money, he had enjoyed working until nightfall and reminded them that their principal still sometimes burned the midnight oil on their behalf.