by Sara Wheeler
A winter journey to Cape Crozier lay at the heart of his book, and as he grew older it took on an iconic role in his life. During their first winter on the ice, Cherry, Bill and Birdie had set out to collect the eggs of the Emperor penguin, incubated, alone in the natural world, during the Antarctic darkness. At the time, it was widely believed that if examined at an early stage of development, Emperor embryos would yield a rare Darwinian prize: they would reveal the link between birds and reptiles. The journey to fetch the eggs took five weeks: the temperature fell to minus 75 degrees Fahrenheit, the tent blew away and the men’s necks froze the moment they bent to pull their sledges. Then their teeth shattered in the cold. Yet, Cherry wrote, ‘We did not forget the Please and Thank you . . . And we kept our tempers, even with God.’ Only seven months later Bill and Birdie perished on the Great Ice Barrier with Scott, and when Cherry finally got the precious eggs home the staff at the Natural History Museum made him wait in a corridor, then turned up their noses. The eggs became the central symbol of Cherry’s parable. ‘If you march your Winter Journeys,’ he wrote at the end of his epic, ‘you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin’s egg.’ He had thought his way beyond crampons and rations and snow-blindness, and entered the immortal zone.
For a time it appeared that the process of writing his Antarctic story had quietened his anxieties: a kind of cathartic redemption. There had been happy months and years when the house was filled with the talk of young people. Girlfriends had come and gone; new friendships had been forged. But as the years unravelled, the various editions of The Worst Journey lined up on the glazed bookshelves could not assuage Cherry’s guilt and self-recrimination. The truths he had captured in his work were more difficult to find off the page.
He was born, on 2 January 1886, at 15 Lansdowne Road, a detached, red-brick house on a tree-lined avenue in deeply respectable Bedford. There was nothing ornate about the houses in the street: they were designed for large, middle-class families with more aspirations than cash. His father, Colonel Apsley Cherry, was fifty-three, the second son of a prosperous family of lawyers and civil servants who had settled in Berkshire a generation before him; his mother, Evelyn Sharpin, was twenty-eight, the daughter of an eminent Bedford doctor.
Colonel Cherry had crinkly brown hair streaked with grey, white sideburns, a high forehead and a strong nose above a neatly waxed handlebar moustache, and he was an upright figure in both the physical and the moral sense. After school at Harrow, which he hated, he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and then, like many younger brothers, went off to fight wars. He joined the 90th Light Infantry as a junior officer, and in 1857, on his way to China with a detachment of his regiment, he was shipwrecked close to Sumatra, not far off the Equator. The soldiers rowed to a small island, and although Apsley Cherry lost most of his gear, his bed floated ashore. The men ate pineapples and coconuts for a week, and then a passing ship brought rescue and news. ‘The sepoys have kicked up a row in India,’ Apsley wrote to his mother. It turned out to be more than a row: it was the Indian Mutiny. China was forgotten, Apsley Cherry packed up his dried-out bed and the detachment was re-routed to Calcutta on a relief ship. He went on to serve with gallantry in the Mutiny, fighting in the assault, relief and capture of Lucknow, and in the reconquest of Oude. He got a medal with two clasps for all that.
Apsley wrote frequently and affectionately to his family. From Alumbagh, near Lucknow, he asked his mother, ‘Send this please to Amy and Emily, just to shew them, what of course they must know already, that they are never forgotten by their brother Apsley.’ He was a natural soldier. ‘I don’t think,’ he wrote to his mother during the siege of Lucknow, when men were falling all around him, ‘you need be in much fear for my being hit at this work, for I don’t think I was born to be shot.’ A cosy domesticity clings to the letters, cheating the miles and the years. Describing an abscess on his hand, he wrote, ‘I can fancy you examining into the subject in the brown medicine book!’
After three years’ staff service in Bengal, he returned on leave to Denford, the family estate in Berkshire. In his heart he had never really left. What gripped him most keenly was the shooting. ‘Mind you give me an account of any good bags,’ he wrote to his brother George from Lucknow. George in turn made sure that Apsley was involved in such vital issues as the appointment of a new gamekeeper. It helped diffuse the tension of war. ‘It seems to be a great partridge year,’ wrote Apsley in the same letter, continuing without even a line break, ‘A battlefield is the most awful place you ever saw.’ He was a committed correspondent, once dashing off a letter ‘during an interval in the firing’. When George wrote asking if he or Mother could help out financially, Apsley replied breezily, ‘I thank you exceedingly for thinking of it but truly I have lots here . . . we live on our rations and loot the rest.’
Apsley stayed in India for twenty years. He was promoted to major in 1874, and three years later, still with the 90th Light, he went to southern Africa, where settlers were fighting over their territorial rights. Relations between the first colonists, the Dutch-speaking Boers, and the more recent British immigrants had been tense for decades. That year, 1877, Britain annexed the Boer Republic of the Transvaal as the first step in a campaign to create a South African federation, thereby bringing the whole southern region of the continent under British control. Terrible battles followed, and Apsley Cherry was present at the most gruesome. ‘All the morning,’ he wrote on 1 May 1878, ‘I have been burying men.’ He was mentioned in despatches and received a medal with clasp and the brevet (temporary promotion) of lieutenant-colonel, later to be made permanent. The responsibility lay heavily. ‘If you have to fight against great odds,’ he wrote, ‘do so as a subaltern, not as one in command, sleep and rest is better than a brevet.’
As the bodies piled up, he grew disenchanted. ‘What a fearful mistake the annexing of the Transvaal now appears,’ he wrote in January 1879. ‘What on earth we want of millions of square miles of such a country when we have millions of unoccupied land in hand which only, they say, wants scratching to produce anything, I can’t imagine. It seems to me that whatever you read about South Africa in books is a falsehood.’ The lies printed about the African campaigns in the British newspapers is a leitmotif of his correspondence. In a letter to his friend Alfred Welby from Balte Spruit in Zululand on 29 March 1879, Apsley Cherry explained that he couldn’t write to his mother: she would be terrified if she knew how shattering it was there. He wasn’t even able to write to his brother, as the women of the house would recognise his handwriting when they saw the envelope on the hall table.
His bitter feelings in Africa never dented his faith in the virtues of imperialism. He remained an exemplary soldier. The one-eyed Field Marshal Lord Wolseley, an outstanding soldier himself, called Apsley Cherry the bravest man he had ever seen. Yet Apsley was not afraid to be human. On Easter Sunday 1879 he confided to Welby from Balte Spruit, ‘Between you and me, don’t send this on to Denford, the incessant work and anxiety to do the best, etc, etc, is a little beyond what I am able for, as long as what I am responsible for goes straight I am fit enough, but when orders are misunderstood or not carried out and things don’t go straight, it is not in me to take it easy, and I get seedy.’ It could have been his son writing, when orders were misunderstood in the Antarctic.
Colonel Cherry left Africa at the end of 1879, after two grim years of service, and sailed back to India. The news from home was bad the next spring: his mother had died. She had gone on for thirty-two years longer than her husband. Some time after that Apsley Cherry returned to England, and in July 1883 he was put in charge of the garrison at Kempston Barracks on the outskirts of Bedford, about fifty miles north of London. It was tame work compared with the Zulus and the sepoys and the heat and disease of India and Africa, but perhaps he was grateful. He was fifty years old.
Bedford was a logical home for the old soldier. It was a strong Anglo-Indian centre: a man who went to Bedford Modern School in the 1880s rem
embered that seventeen of his classmates had been born in India. The retired soldiers, sailors, planters and officials who made up such a large part of the townsfolk were known as Squatters, presumably because they had taken up at Bedford after decamping from the colonies. They were not wealthy – the richer ones probably went to Cheltenham – but they liked to play the Society game. Army officers and the top layer of professionals, which meant mainly doctors and lawyers (no trade!), paraded up and down the High Street every morning from eleven o’clock to half-past twelve in a frenzy of hat-doffing. The regatta at the end of July signalled the end of the Season and a mass exodus to the seaside. It was said that you could fire a cannon down the High Street in August without hitting anyone.
It might have been at the morning walk, or at a meet of Major Carpenter’s Harriers, or perhaps at one of the quarterly concerts of the Bedford Musical Society, that Apsley Cherry met Evelyn Sharpin. Dr Henry Wilson Sharpin, her father, was a well-known local figure, ministering to gouty colonels and febrile infants, and he was held in high regard.1 Born in India, where his father had served in the 4th Light Dragoons in Bombay, he had been shipped off to attend Great Yarmouth Grammar School, and at sixteen he began studying medicine at Bedford Infirmary. He finished his training at St Bartholomew’s in London, where he was a prize-winning student, and after qualifying returned to Bedford Infirmary as House Surgeon. Later he set up in private practice on the ground floor of his home at No. 1, St Paul’s Square, a prime site along from the Corn Exchange. Sharpin’s wife Edith, baby Apsley’s maternal grandmother, was the daughter of John Nicolle of St Helier’s, Jersey. She bore Henry six children, the eldest of whom was Evelyn Edith.
Slim and not unattractive, Evelyn wore her brown hair tightly pinned at the back and curled to a gentle froth at the front. Her features were even and well proportioned except for a slightly large mouth; she liked dancing; and she was moderate in all her habits. Her education had been typically sketchy, and she rarely read anything more substantial than Punch. She had seldom ventured beyond the south Midlands: her expectations began and ended with marriage and a family. Above all, she was docile and obedient, and her bedroom was hung with an array of biblical scenes that reflected a keenly felt piety.
The rituals of courtship proceeded smoothly, and in 1884 the old soldier determined to ask for Evelyn’s hand. She was twenty-five years his junior, but as far as her parents were concerned, it was a good match. The colonel had a solid reputation, and while he was a second son without a fortune, he had a small private income and the prospects of a decent enough military pension. Besides, three younger girls were queuing up behind her.
They were married in St Paul’s Church, the largest in Bedford, on 29 January 1885. A row of non-commissioned officers from the regiment formed a guard of honour at the west door and processed in after the bride, who wore a confection of ivory satin, pearls, ostrich feathers and lace with a diamond pendant and bracelet. She was attended by eight bridesmaids wearing, according to a fulsome account in the local paper, ‘dresses of braided cream, trimmed with cream Astrakhan, toques of Astrakhan with cream aigrettes, and muffs of silk and lace to match, with sprays of Neapolitan violets in their muffs and at their throats, and gold brooches with the initials “AE” fastened to their toques’. Alfred Welby, the friend who had been such a faithful correspondent during the groom’s long years at the wars, was best man, and one of Evelyn’s uncles officiated. The Sharpin progeny had the impressive total of three vicar uncles; the house in St Paul’s Square was teeming with churchmen and doctors (by the time Evelyn married, one of her brothers had already qualified as a doctor and the other was at medical school). Perhaps the abundance of ecclesiastical and medical men that crowded his childhood contributed to Apsley junior’s subsequent mistrust of both organised religion and the medical profession.
After a lively wedding breakfast the new Mrs Cherry changed into a grey cashmere travelling dress and sealskin jacket, and the couple left in a shower of rice for a night in Oxford on their way to honeymoon in Devon.
Brown-eyed baby Apsley was born at home eleven months later. From the start he was surrounded by loving relations. Large faces smiled in the glow of the crocus-shaped jet of the nursery gaslight, and the most regular of the visitors, Evelyn’s doting younger sisters Minnie, Maud and Nellie, became familiar to the infant Apsley as soon as he could focus. When he was six weeks old he was taken down to Denford in Berkshire to be cooed over by his Cherry aunts. On a glacial February morning the family processed into the chapel built on the estate by the baby’s long-dead paternal grandfather, and Apsley George Benet was baptised in the same font as his father before him. His Christian names were all plucked from the paternal family tree, and his surname was Cherry: the Garrard was some years ahead.
Like little Lord Fauntleroy,2 as a toddler Apsley was dressed for public outings in a black velvet suit with buttoned knickerbockers and a large lace collar; either that or a starched sailor suit. But his reign as little emperor was short. On 21 March 1887 his sister Ida was born in the house on Lansdowne Road. She was only fourteen-and-a-half months younger than her brother, and the pair were soon dubbed ‘Lassie’ and ‘Laddie’. The nicknames stuck for years.
It was a quiet street. The loudest noises were the bell of the butcher’s boy’s tricycle and the muffled clatter of housemaids polishing brass door knockers. Laddie and Lassie were wheeled out by their nurses while their mother went visiting. But Evelyn was not a remote, matriarchal figure who ascended to the nursery occasionally in a cloud of perfume. She was an attentive and loving mother. She had a strong sense of what was right and proper, and naturally followed her military husband’s lead in matters of domestic discipline. Deeply conventional, like most women of her background, she rarely absorbed fresh ideas. Along with everyone she knew, she was a royalist and a Conservative. When there was a mix-up over a visiting political agent at a Cherry estate and it was erroneously implied that the family might support a Liberal candidate, the suggestion brought Evelyn out in a fit of the vapours.
On 12 June 1887 news was brought up from Denford that George Charles, Apsley senior’s elder brother, had died after a short illness. The Bedford Cherrys were shocked: George Charles had been an energetic man, and young for his sixty-five years. Evelyn swathed herself in black crêpe, and the whole family went into mourning. A bachelor without issue, George Charles had bequeathed everything bar a couple of small annuities to Apsley, his only brother. Overnight, the colonel and his expanding family acquired a small fortune, land, prestige and responsibility. One-year-old Apsley would never have to follow a profession or struggle to find a red-brick house of his own: he was to be a landed gentleman. Everything had changed.
The colonel decided to move his family to Berkshire. He no longer needed his army salary: he had a large estate, and rents from other land in Berkshire to keep him. The summer of 1887 was taken up with arrangements. On 1 September – his fifty-fifth birthday – Colonel Cherry retired from the regiment, a much-loved and much-admired old soldier with a distinguished campaign record. He was given the rank of honorary major-general.
As for Laddie: he had taken his first tottering steps in Bedford, but before he was two he was led to the carriage and entombed among the sheepskin rugs for the long journey to Denford.
The Cherrys traced their ancestry to the de Chéries of Picardy and Lombardy, lords of Beauval, Liguière and Villencourt. Thomas de Chérie and his son John had settled in Northamptonshire at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and were soon anglicised to Cherrys. By the end of the eighteenth century Cherry men were forging careers in India. George Frederick Cherry, great-grandfather of the subject of this book, joined the Bengal Civil Service in 1778 and was later appointed Resident at Benares on the Ganges, where he was subsequently murdered by the recently deposed Nabob of Oude. His widow took their small son George Henry back to England, and they settled in London. The boy was educated at Harrow and Oxford – he took a double first in Classics – and in 1819
he married Charlotte Drake Garrard of Lamer Park, Hertfordshire. The following year he became a member of parliament. The Cherrys made their home in Gloucester Place in London’s Marylebone, and there, in 1822 and 1823, George Charles Cherry and his sister Lucy were born.
At about that time George Henry – baby Apsley’s paternal grandfather – decided to put down roots in good English soil. From the back row of an auction at Garaway’s Coffee House in London’s Cornhill he purchased Denford, an 800-acre estate in the south-west corner of Berkshire, on a trouty part of the River Kennet. It was about two miles from Hungerford and sixty-three from London, roughly half-way between the capital and fashionable Bath. The Berkshire Downs unfurled to the north like a great green wave, and southwards, plainly visible from the bedrooms of the big house, were the north Hampshire Downs. Besides a sand-coloured late-Georgian manor house, the estate included stables, a park bristling with oak and beech, a watermill, two farms, a dozen cottages, plantations and meadows.
George Henry became a justice of the peace, and in 1829 served as High Sheriff of Berkshire. Mechanisation and industrialisation were creeping over the south-west of the county, but the stirrings of progress did not impinge significantly on daily life at Denford. A dozen servants lived in, and many others rented cottages on the estate. More daughters arrived at the big house and were baptised (one buried, too) in the Norman church at Avington, a hamlet on the River Kennet, and finally Charlotte had a second son, whom she called Apsley. He was the Antarctic explorer’s father. Besides extending the house, George Henry had commissioned a chapel 150 yards from his front door – it was a minor Gothic extravaganza among the beech trees – and Apsley was the first baby to be baptised in its font.
George Henry died on 6 January 1848. His elder son George Charles, a young barrister, was soon ready to take on his father’s mantle. Eight hundred acres did not put him among the top thirty landowners in the county, but his was a respectable holding, and in addition to Denford he owned a large chunk of land his father had bought at the other end of Berkshire. George Charles became a county magistrate and held a range of important judicial positions. Like his father before him, he was High Sheriff for a year. He laid foundation stones, served on a vast number of committees, presented prizes, commanded the 3rd Berks Rifle Corps and contributed handsomely to the Church of England. Strong-featured and infinitely wholesome, he was described in a contemporary memoir as ‘one of those men who form the backbone of English provincial life’. He never married. Various sisters had found husbands, and their offspring kept the house young. Emily, the fifth of the Cherry siblings, had wed a barrister called John Smith in 1853, and they frequently sent their children to Denford during school holidays. Reginald Smith, their brilliant second son, was baptised in the estate chapel. He was to play a crucial role in the life of his polar cousin.
