by Sara Wheeler
Following his father into medicine, Wilson studied at Cambridge, where he rowed in the college boat. But while pursuing further medical studies in London he contracted tuberculosis, and was obliged to take a year off in Switzerland. Against the odds, he recovered, but the disease left him with scarred lungs. He remained deeply involved with the natural world, and after qualifying as a doctor he continued to work as a zoologist and naturalist. Wilson was mostly interested in small things. When he was asked why he had made no contribution to the study of the stars, he replied that he would love to try, if only he could hold and examine a cluster of them in his hand. In the field of natural history he was a keen and gifted illustrator, a fact that was to stimulate Apsley to take up sketching and painting.
Wilson was a tall, lean figure with clear blue eyes, reddish-brown hair and a swift, raking stride. A committed Christian prone to asceticism, he strove to rise above the comforts of the flesh and draw closer to the God who lived in his heart. Once, staying in a hotel while away from home with his research, he realised that he was beginning to prefer bathing in hot water to cold, a bad sign, ‘and something must be done to stop it’. He sought to sublimate the self, and aspired to a Christ-like ideal. As a young medical student he worked among the poor and resolved ‘to let nothing stand in the way of doing everyone a good turn’. But he was not outwardly pious, in that he kept his religion to himself, and he was a genial companion. In public he was funny and playful, and when he was amused the corners of his mouth twisted into a quizzical smile. In short, he was a man of action and a mystic: a potent combination. He was also highly-strung like Reggie Smith, and suffered from a kind of social neurosis. As a young man he took sedatives before taxing social encounters, and it required far more courage for him to face an audience than to cross a crevasse. Apsley found Wilson’s belief in a divine purpose deeply attractive, as it imposed a pattern on an otherwise inchoate, confusing universe. Besides recognising Wilson as a mentor, he saw an inner calm in the older man that he badly wanted.
Shortly before he left on the Discovery, Wilson married Oriana Souper, the daughter of a clergyman who was also a headmaster. She was the matron of a preparatory school. Like Wilson, Oriana was a committed Christian. Her relationship with her husband was tightly bound up with their religious faith. ‘Without a love for God,’ he wrote to her from the Antarctic, ‘I can’t imagine either loving you or being loved by you.’
Wilson had first become attracted to the Antarctic in 1900. He was spotted sketching at London Zoo by its Secretary, a friend of his father’s and one of the organisers of Scott’s first polar endeavour, the British National Antarctic Expedition which was to set sail the following year. Despite a poor health report, Wilson was selected as second medical officer, vertebrate zoologist and artist, and he turned out to be a vital presence, whether on board ship, out sledging or cooped up in the hut. He was quite capable of cavorting naked in the wardroom when horseplay broke out after dinner; yet he always had time to listen to a shipmate’s troubles. On the Discovery expedition Wilson marched to within 500 miles of the Pole with Scott and Shackleton; he also carried out groundbreaking work on the embryology of the Emperor penguin.
Both Scott and his fellow explorer Ernest Shackleton were powerfully drawn to Wilson. Shackleton wrote to him in February 1907 (‘My dear Billy’) literally begging him to be second-in-command on his own Nimrod expedition: ‘it will be a thousand times better with you’. Wilson was not only an outstanding sledger and inspirational scientist. He was also adaptable and good at improvising: key qualities in any camp. Most importantly, he was an unquenchable fountain of emotional support and wise counsel. But to Shackleton’s bitter disappointment, Wilson wouldn’t go with him. He had been appointed field researcher, physiologist and anatomist to the Department of Agriculture’s Grouse Disease Inquiry, investigating a bizarre ailment that was decimating birds on British moors. It was a major project, and one that Wilson was committed to seeing through. But he was determined to return to the Antarctic when it was finished.
The polar regions were in fashion in the early years of the twentieth century. They represented the last white spaces on the map, mysterious, romantic and untamed, and the power of the unknown worked hard on the human spirit. Victorian explorers, geographers and chancers had filled in the map of Africa, naming its lakes, claiming its lands and gasping for their lives in its broiling climate. The icy purity at the world’s ends encapsulated a more potent kind of romance. ‘Of all the continents,’ wrote a celebrated American explorer, ‘Antarctica is the fairest, white and unspoiled, spacious and austere, fashioned in the clean, antiseptic quarries of an Ice Age.’
The High Arctic, remote and perilous though it was, had been at least partially charted by generations of explorers. The Antarctic still lay behind a hoary veil: before Captain James Cook’s second voyage in 1772 many had believed that there was a fertile Shangri-La in the far south. Cook, the first man to cross the Antarctic Circle, laid the myth to rest when he announced that there could be no people down there: it was too cold. The continent itself was sighted through the sepulchral fog in 1820, and although it is not clear who spotted it first, it was probably the Estonian Thaddeus Bellingshausen, despatched south by Tsar Alexander I. Bellingshausen was a fine explorer, but it was the Englishman James Clark Ross who discovered great swathes of the ice shelf surrounding Antarctica during a Royal Navy voyage between 1839 and 1843. From the bridge of the ice-strengthened Erebus, Ross, reputedly the most handsome man in the navy, looked over at the glittering peaks of Victoria Land, and at a mighty smoking volcano that he named after his ship.
Sealers and whalers eddied round the bleak sub-Antarctic islands, but the golden age – the period that came to be known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration – did not begin until the Sixth International Geographical Congress, which took place in London in 1895. At its closing session, Congress passed a resolution urging scientific societies throughout the world to start planning Antarctic expeditions, on the grounds that ‘the exploration of the Antarctic regions is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken’. Congress had a point. Antarctica, the highest, driest, coldest and windiest continent, a landmass one-and-a-half-times the size of the United States, was still almost unknown: barely twenty-five expeditions had even glimpsed it.
Between 1897 and 1899, a multi-national, Belgian-led expedition discovered and mapped sections of the Antarctic coastline, and its ship, the Belgica, inadvertently became the first to winter in the pack ice of the Southern Ocean. The 26-year-old Roald Amundsen was on board, an accomplished sailor and skier keen to acquire valuable experience of the capricious and often murderous Antarctic conditions. Even the austere Norseman yielded to the romance of the south. ‘Beauty is still sleeping,’ he wrote of the Antarctic heartlands, ‘but the kiss is coming, the kiss that shall wake her!’11
That same year Carsten Borchegrevink, a Norwegian by birth, led a British venture, raising the Union Jack over Antarctic land for the first time. Borchegrevink and his men went on to winter on the continent itself. Germans and Swedes led pioneering expeditions at the turn of the twentieth century, and in 1901 the young Royal Navy commander Robert Falcon Scott sailed south in the Discovery. By trekking inland, Scott and his companions undertook the first significant exploration of the Antarctic landmass. They were true pioneers, and their findings convinced the scientific establishment that a continent, as opposed to an archipelago, existed south of the Antarctic Circle.
French, Scottish, Norwegian and Argentine vessels, some of them whalers, continued to explore Antarctic waters, but it was Ernest Shackleton who was to come thrillingly close to the Pole. Having been invalided home with scurvy on Scott’s Discovery expedition, in 1907 he sailed south on the Nimrod, in command, at last, of his own show. ‘The stark polar lands,’ wrote Shackleton, ‘grip the hearts of the men who have lived on them in a manner that can be hardly understood by the people who have never got outside the pale of civilisation
.’ He discovered more than 300 miles of the main Antarctic mountain range, found coal deposits at Mount Buckley and claimed the Polar Plateau for Edward VII. In January 1909, the year after Apsley met Wilson at Burnside, Shackleton and three companions marched to within 112 miles of the South Pole. He was knighted later in the year.
Shackleton’s near miss attracted intense publicity and raised the stakes considerably: the Pole, surely, was there for the taking. News swirled around geographical and naval circles that other nations were preparing to launch expeditions: Japan, some said, or Germany. Emotions were already running high when the news came through that three months after Shackleton’s dash towards the South Pole two Americans had reached the North Pole on separate expeditions. One was Frederick Cook, the doctor on the Belgica. His claim was soon questioned, and Commander Robert Peary of the US Navy was honoured as the first man to reach ninety degrees north.12 The Antarctic was a fine setting for national chest-puffing. (It still is.)13 British empire-builders never flinched from the conviction that the white spaces of the polar regions should be coloured pink just as vast tracts of the rest of the world had been in the nineteenth century. When it was reported that an American had reached the North Pole first, it became increasingly urgent for an Englishman to bag its southern counterpart. The South Pole was now perceived as the last great geographical prize, and Antarctica as the last remaining continent to be conquered by the triumphant armies of imperialism – a mighty terra incognita waiting to be ushered into the known world, like the dark continent before it.
In September 1907 Scott went up to Burnside to stay with the Wilsons. The Smiths were also there, and all five enjoyed the dying days of summer on the moors and in the rolling, coarse-grass fields around the lodge where they took picnics. Scott, Wilson and Reggie Smith went out shooting in the afternoons, and Scott once deliberately let a roe-deer leap away because it was so pretty.
Scott was four years older than Wilson and eighteen years older than Apsley. Born into an ordinary middle-class family in Devon, he had enlisted in the navy as a cadet when he was thirteen. His early career had been unexceptional, and it seemed unlikely that he would make a name for himself. When he was twenty-nine his circumstances unexpectedly changed for the worse: his father died and left the family penniless. The following year Scott’s only brother also died. He had always been hard-pressed for cash, but now, already scraping by on the meagre pay of a lieutenant, Scott was solely responsible for his widowed mother and unmarried sisters.
Searching for a way to boost his career, in 1899, two years after his father died, Scott appealed to Sir Clements Markham to support his application to lead the forthcoming British expedition to the Antarctic. The aged and crusty Markham was president of the Royal Geographical Society, and as a young midshipman he had spent a winter in the Arctic on one of the searches for Sir John Franklin. Markham was a man of energy, passion and prejudice, a throwback to the glory days of British exploration. Scott had caught his eye many years earlier when, as an eighteen-year-old midshipman, he had won a cutters’ race off the island of St Kitts. Markham was to be the powering force behind both the expeditions Scott led to the Antarctic.
A handsome man of medium height, with unusual dark blue eyes that sometimes looked almost purple, Scott had broad shoulders and a small waist, and at thirty his dark hair was already beginning to thin. His naval experience had not provided him with any of the specific skills that polar exploration demanded, and as a lieutenant he had specialised in torpedo work, hardly a useful asset when out sledging. But he was an ambitious, restless man who saw that the blank spaces of the Antarctic offered a tempting challenge to the commander who dared take his ship through the pack ice. A successful expedition would almost certainly lead to promotion, prestige and a secure financial footing: important considerations to a man with onerous responsibilities.
As for Markham, although his cherished expedition was a private venture he badly wanted a naval man in command. In addition, he believed that youth was more important in a leader than experience. Scott was still in his early thirties, and his enthusiasm impressed Markham. Shortly after being promoted to the rank of commander, Scott was appointed to lead the British National Antarctic Expedition.
The whole venture was organised under the auspices of the Royal Geographical Society, which championed exploration, and the Royal Society, which was dedicated to science. The differing demands of these twin goals almost inevitably led to conflict. During the chaotic years of planning and preparation, the Societies and the Admiralty clashed over the respective authority of the chief of scientific staff and the captain of the ship. Scott considered resignation when it seemed the scientists were winning; but in the end he was given sole command of both ship and expedition.
The Discovery finally set sail in 1901. Despite disappointments, and the drama of a costly relief expedition when the ship was frozen in, the whole venture was rightly judged a success. Scott and his men travelled far inland for the first time, examined the coast of Victoria Land and the Ross Ice Shelf and discovered King Edward VII Land. Besides the exploration, expedition scientists contributed to an understanding of the magnetic fields of the southern hemisphere, vital information for Britain’s maritime trade, and discovered plant fossils that threw new light on the continent’s geological origins. The jubilant Scott was fêted on his return, and promoted to captain. He even sat at the King’s table at Balmoral.
Among his friends and colleagues it was no secret that Scott planned to lead another expedition. He wanted to complete what he had started, and march to the South Pole. But he was so dependent on his naval pay that he could not afford to be precipitate. When he visited the Smiths’ shooting lodge in September 1907, he was immersed in his plans, though he had made no public announcement. Before proceeding further, he wanted Wilson to sign up. The combination of physical prowess and quiet moral authority he had seen in Wilson throughout the Discovery years was irresistible to a man like Scott.
By the time Apsley arrived ten months later, it was decided. ‘When I first knew Wilson,’ he noted, ‘it was certain that he and Scott were going south again if possible: they wanted to finish the job. I do not know whether Scott would have gone again without Wilson.’
In Edwardian Britain explorers embodied the imperialist ideal. By 1908 the very name of Scott evoked the whiff of romance, heroism and adventure, a heady mix that Apsley identified with his father. In the bracing Scottish breezes the 22-year-old walked with Wilson on his morning field trips through the glen, and following long afternoons shooting they sat on the balcony after dinner, watching the lights of Kirriemuir twinkle in the distance and listening to whitethroats singing in the saw-pit. Wilson’s Antarctic plans struck a note of longing. Apsley resolved to follow their progress.
He battled on with family business throughout the autumn, returning briefly to Oxford in October to collect his degree. The Denford estate was now let. Everything had had to be valued for probate purposes, and hundreds of pages of legal documents trundled between Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Lamer. One of the Denford lists included a garden swing, bushels of seed potatoes (two), and a chestnut cat (one), though according a value to the cat was a task that defeated even the scrupulous lawyers. Half-yearly accounts came in from Denford, Little Wittenham and an estate in Swansea on which Apsley had inherited the role of mortgagee, and farms and cottages on all of them demanded attention, as did the sprawling acres of Lamer itself.
As soon as the General died, Evelyn had started organising Lamer with a view to her own departure. As a widow with a son she was expected to move into a dower house so that her husband’s heir could take his place as lord of the manor and bring up the next generation. (‘I shall be only too pleased to see a daughter-in-law at Lamer,’ she wrote to Apsley in 1910.) She had been well provided for: the General had bequeathed her the right either to reside at Denford or to live off the rent it brought. The trustees were to manage it all. As always, Evelyn bowed to her duty, though as Apsley showed
no sign of marrying she did not move out of Lamer for nine years.
Poor Evelyn. The General was gone, Apsley badly wanted to go abroad and the older girls were loosening the apron strings. She was concerned about her youngest daughter, Edith, a physically weak child often confined to a wicker spinal chair. Edith is a shadowy figure in the family story, briefly appearing with her nurse and the spinal chair, usually looking on at events organised by her older sisters or parked under a chestnut tree. But she must have shaken off her disabilities: in the 1920s a photograph of her appeared in a local magazine standing on the summit of the Matterhorn.
Apsley found his chance to travel in an unlikely place: a church mission. The Oxford House in Bethnal Green in London’s East End was one of the first missions of the settlement movement. Settlements were urban communities in which the educated classes set about the social reform of the poor. In 1884 the Oxford House had been founded on that principle by men from Keble College, partly in reaction to the élitism of the Anglican Church in late-Victorian Oxford. It provided a centre for religious, social and educational work through the promotion and management of clubs for men and boys. Missions were an integral part of public school and Oxbridge life, and active participation, as well as donations, were perceived as part of the seigneurial duty of the ruling classes. Apsley became familiar with settlement work at Winchester, and as an undergraduate he had helped out at a summer camp for East End boys. For him, as for many, it was more a question of social responsibility than religious commitment. Through his mission work, he made friends with the Head of the Oxford House, Harry Woollcombe.
