by Sara Wheeler
While Cherry boiled, Evans was busy in the wardroom establishing a six-man committee for winding up the expedition. Atch, who was on it, reported to Cherry in low tones that Evans wanted to doctor Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ before it was cabled to the world at large. Specifically, he wanted to omit the references to the oil shortages. Atch was determined to stop him.
Cherry and Atch were already close, and now they were thrown together in their desire to prevent Evans from taking over. Cherry recognised that his angry outbursts about Atch in his diary in October had been unfair, as his friend had been doing his best in a difficult situation. ‘I consider him to be straight as a die,’ he now wrote. Once again, Atch grew alarmed at Cherry’s overwrought state. He told him he needed a complete change and plenty to occupy him when he got back. ‘I see he is afraid that things generally are worrying me too much,’ Cherry recorded.
In the early hours of 10 February the Terra Nova crept into Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand like a phantom ship. ‘With what mixed feelings,’ Cherry remembered later, ‘we smelt the old familiar woods and grassy slopes, and saw the shadowy outlines of human homes.’ Atch and Pennell landed incognito to send the official telegram (including Scott’s comment on the oil shortage: Atch had won), and the ship cruised around for a day to allow the news to get to the relatives first, and to fulfil the expedition’s exclusive contract with the Central News Agency. Cherry had a bath, shaved off his beard and got out a new blue landing suit. How strange it felt to be sheathed in its stiff cleanness.
They steamed through Lyttelton Heads at dawn on 12 February, the white ensign at half-mast. The harbour master chugged out to meet them, bringing Atch and Pennell, who had gone on from Oamaru. ‘Come down here a minute,’ Atch shouted to Cherry over the growl of the engine. The tug belched out its exhaust fumes. ‘It’s made a tremendous impression,’ he said conspiratorially when Cherry got to him. ‘I had no idea it would make so much.’
The Empire was in mourning. Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ and the story of Oates’ end had gone to the heart of the civilised world. In London the King and Queen spoke out publicly in sympathy, as did the Prime Minister and representatives of both Houses of Parliament. Messages poured in from beyond the Empire: President Taft sent a telegram to King George from New York, and the Italian Chamber of Deputies voted to convey their sympathies to the House of Commons. The myth-making began before the survivors even got their land legs. Scott and his dead companions gratified the need of the hour for heroes who could demonstrate that Britain was still great ( The Times announced confidently that their actions proved Britons were still ‘capable of maintaining the Empire that our fathers builded’). Only seven months before the news of Scott broke, the press had had an orgy over the Titanic disaster. Here was another monster story – the second in a year – facilitating feet, not inches, of column space hymning the uplifting virtues of gallantry in the teeth of catastrophe. And now, by an unwitting sleight of hand, it seemed that the polar party had won after all. Defeat on this earthly plain would surely be supplanted by British victory in the world to come: The Times concluded that the real value of the expedition was ‘moral and spiritual’. The Admiralty decided that their men – Scott and Taff Evans – had been killed in action. In his luminous death Oates embodied the code of the era (or what was perhaps already the past era), that of chivalry and sacrifice.
Cherry again stayed with the Burtons, who were standing on the wharf to meet him in the pale morning sunshine. For years he remembered the first night in a soft bed and the first dinner off a white tablecloth with gleaming silver spoons and forks. He relished the bright colours and the balmy air, had a number of baths, and found that he could not sleep. The day after he arrived, Oriana Wilson asked him to visit her at the home of Joseph Kinsey, the expedition agent, where she was staying. She had sailed down from England early and enjoyed happy travels in New Zealand while waiting for Bill. She heard the news while on the train to Christchurch from a newspaper vendor parading along the platform shouting, ‘Scott’s dead! Scott’s dead!’ Cherry hurried over, and Ory read him part of Bill’s last letter and told him all the nice things Bill had said about him. She wanted him to handle Bill’s things. ‘She is as fine a woman as he was a man,’ Cherry concluded.
Thousands came to Lyttelton and Christchurch to offer their condolences, messages poured in from all over the world and flags up and down the country fluttered sadly at half-mast. Cherry went to a memorial service at the cathedral. ‘I believe I am only just beginning to realise what has happened,’ he wrote. The day after the service he had one of his headaches, and got annoyed at the small talk over dinner at the Burtons’: ‘the old, old story of running down colonials, which I cannot keep silent about’. Meanwhile he was occupied by a myriad expedition affairs, as well as arrangements for his passage home. He met up with Atch, who was himself embroiled in meetings and arrangements. Atch told him that Evans was ‘quite hysterical’.
The press had little information and much space to fill (a Toronto newspaper reported soberly the day the Terra Nova reached Lyttelton that sixty-six men had died), and as always, the critics were ready. Cherry read in several American papers that ‘all that could be done was not done’, and in The Times that the returning parties might have ‘tapped’ oil from the depôts, leaving Scott short. Worse, many editorials focused on the inaction of Cherry and Dimitri during their dog journey to One Ton. The Sydney Morning Herald cited a rumour ‘that relations between the present heads of the expedition are more than a little strained, and the suggestion is made this may possibly be in connection with the work of the relief parties in March of last year’. It was not all the fault of the newsmen. The bulletins sent out to the press by the committee were truncated, and sometimes manipulated. Cherry was furious that Evans and others had referred to his already infamous dog journey to One Ton as a relief journey, a term he angrily rejected. And above all the noise Cherry heard the parroted cry cui bono – what was the point of these hazardous expeditions? ‘All these questions and many others were discussed by comfortable old gentlemen sitting plumply before their club fire with a condensed official report and some pages of hearsay on their knees,’ he wrote later in an unpublished draft of The Worst Journey. ‘Given one April day on the Barrier they themselves would have curled up and died.’
His mother cabled her sympathy. ‘Do not worry about press criticism,’ he wired back. ‘I know all we could do was done there was not shadow dissension among us all the year please post this Reggie Apsley.’ She cabled in reply that ‘congratulations’ were pouring in to Lamer on his safe return. ‘Longing to get you home’, she added.
The public had no idea of the sequence of events that had resulted in Cherry being stuck at One Ton. Nobody was interested in that kind of tedious detail. ‘All kinds of wild conjectures in the papers this morning,’ Cherry wrote in his diary on 15 February. The reports included Dimitri’s assertion that he had wanted to take the dogs on alone from One Ton. If Cherry had allowed Dimitri to go on, pundits mused, he might have found the polar party alive. Cherry tried to keep calm. ‘I don’t know that it matters,’ he wrote bravely. There were bright spots. He saw more of Mrs Wilson (‘Oh! She is wonderful’) and dined with Kinsey’s daughter at her house on Papanui Road. ‘Beautiful table, good dinner, pretty girls in London frocks: what does a miserable explorer want better than that?’ Sunday was a good day, as there were no papers. He played tennis, and enjoyed an excursion to Ashley Gorge, smelling the pines with his host Henry Burton.
He had foreseen criticism: in the last weeks on the ice he had discussed the reaction they would face with Atch and the others. But he had never imagined it would be personal; it hadn’t crossed his mind that people would say he could have – should have – gone on from One Ton. He sat in his room at the Burtons’ and went back to his journal. Leafing through to the note he had written on the Barrier after finding the bodies, he added to it, ‘It seems to be necessary to point out that w
hen we started back from One Ton Depôt we had no reason to suppose that there was anything wrong with the polar party.’ He had thought this was obvious; but it wasn’t. On 21 February he wrote:
a horrid day. Everybody everywhere seemed to be saying the wrong thing. One asked whether ‘there would have to be an enquiry’: a shopman told me they had been supposing all kinds of things about my journey south etc ad nauseam. I wish official sources would tell the truth and finish the whole rotten business. Meanwhile I am in the dirt tub and except an official denial of rumours nothing has been done. What a rotten end it is to a good expedition.
‘Official sources’, however, persisted in not telling the whole story. On the day Evans left for England Cherry found papers on the floor of the Terra Nova wardroom which included information about Scott’s original orders for the dogs. These papers would, he inferred, almost certainly have been tossed over the side had he not picked them up, and he ascribed what was probably carelessness to a cover-up concocted by Evans and Francis Drake, a navy paymaster and the expedition secretary.
Lilian Burton wrote to Evelyn that Cherry was strong and well and bright. ‘He looks just a little older,’ she said tactfully, ‘and one can see the shadow on his face in repose which the awful strain of these last two years must leave for a while.’ Atch again told him to rest, and to take a roundabout journey home, but Cherry had already organised his passage on a mail ship. He would not leave the country until the zoological specimens were either despatched to England or safely donated to museums in New Zealand. There was time for golf and more tennis, and even a little theatre, but it was interspersed with mail, telegrams, visits to Ory and organisation of the specimens. Atch went up to Wellington to meet Kathleen, now Lady Scott, when her ship arrived. She too wanted the matter of the oil shortage kept as quiet as possible, and again Atch put his foot down.
At least Kathleen was not prepared to hand control to Evans, especially after she had read the criticisms of him in her husband’s diary. This was a relief to Cherry. ‘It is a horrid business,’ he wrote, ‘for her and for everybody: but there it is, and it would be an everlasting shame if the story of this expedition were told by the one big failure on it.’ A few days later Cherry received a note from Kathleen. ‘I know’, she told him, ‘how splendidly you stuck through it all . . . I feel you’ve borne the strain with a heroism equal to anybody’s, and bless you for it.’ He was very glad, and wrote to Reggie that she was one of the few people whose opinion mattered to him.
On 6 March the Terra Nova sailed for England under Pennell’s command with Cherry’s dog, Kris, howling cravenly on deck in a most un-Bolshevik manner. Cherry was then free to spend more time with Kinsey. Scott had thought a lot of him, and now Cherry took a liking to him too, partly because Kinsey was suspicious of Evans. He gave Cherry a copy of Scott’s last letter to him, written in the tent. ‘You will pull the expedition together I’m sure,’ it said. ‘Teddy Evans is not to be trusted over much though he means well.’
Cherry spent his last week in New Zealand playing tennis, motoring about the countryside and sorting specimens at Christchurch Museum. He was touched by a letter he received from Deb, already back in Sydney, exclaiming that he was ‘damned disgusted’ about the misunderstandings in the newspapers, especially the one about Dimitri wanting to go on from One Ton. It made him boil, fulminated Deb, ‘that the men who should have did not set the papers right on that point, even at the expense of showing Dimitri up . . . But I believe these things will only make us stick closer together, and anyhow damn the world!’
On 17 March Cherry left Lyttelton on the mail steamer Osterley with a note from Atch in his pocket wishing him bon voyage and thanking him for his loyalty. New Zealand had been a mixed experience. There was sweetness in the return to the world – the exotic colours, the ripe fruit, the new faces. On the other hand, reading about himself in the papers had been agony. But he kept his head. At one point he said it almost seemed as if the interlude in the Antarctic had never happened. It had already taken on the quality of a dream.
8
Kipling in Real Life
The Osterley steamed wearily into the Bay of Naples through a warm April shower, and on the glistening wharf Evelyn and her daughters Peggy and Edith strained for the first sight of Laddie. After a very happy reunion they sailed back to Plymouth together and were soon gratefully enveloped within the familiar quiet bustle of Lamer. The servants had prepared for the young master’s return with mounting excitement, and only one was disappointed: Mrs Hyde, the aged wife of a long-serving gardener, had been standing at the window of the lodge all morning, waiting eagerly for the carriage bearing Cherry home at last. But when she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on, the carriage swept up the drive unseen.
It was as he remembered. He walked out on the shaved lawn in the cool night air and stood in the shadows of the chestnuts. Owls were hooting in the pear trees, nightjars chugging in the wood, and in the walled garden the willows flexed their limbs over the pond. Crayfish still jittered in the shallows of the Lea at the bottom of the slope, and laburnum and lilac still bloomed on the wall of the kitchen garden where raspberry canes were standing guard, neatly trussed with Tilbury’s green twine. Indoors the silk was a little more faded on the back of the piano, but his gloomy relatives still glowered down from their old positions on the walls. These were the places of his childhood imaginings, and they embodied something deeply loved.
He dangled his gurgling baby niece Susan on his knee, and shook the hand of his new brother-in-law the vicar, whose two children from his previous marriage had found a second home at Lamer. As for the girls, Elsie had been to Jamaica and New York before coming out to meet him in Italy, and Mildred was about to go to India: as a neighbour wrote to Evelyn, there must have been a travelling microbe lurking among the family genes.
There was a mountain of business, as usual, including fresh drafts of his sisters’ settlements, Lassie’s marriage necessitating complicated changes. On the estates tenants had vacated, electricity had been installed and cottages built, and in his study Cherry perused the prices of prudently purchased debenture stock. He had come back a richer man. Rents had been flowing in from Denford, Lamer, Little Wittenham and the Watling Street house in London, and at the end of 1913 he received a payment from the Swansea estate on which he had inherited the role of mortgagee to the tune of £27,500 (well over a million today). He instructed his brokers to reinvest.
Beyond the gentle slopes of Hertfordshire, expedition business pressed upon him. Days after his return he hurried down to the hectic Victoria Street offices, where letters were going out in their hundreds on black-edged expedition paper, soliciting funds (the expedition had virtually gone bankrupt while its members were in the Antarctic), thanking donors and keeping relatives informed. Teddy Evans, much in evidence, was recovering from fresh tragedy: his wife Hilda had died of peritonitis on the journey home from New Zealand. But he threw himself into expedition work, and addressed an audience of 9,000 at the Albert Hall. On Atch’s advice, Cherry was on the platform alongside him, maintaining an appearance of taciturn dignity while churning hotly inside. More happily, Cherry was able to pick up Kris, who was a free hound after eight days in quarantine.
Cherry was drawn to the families of his dead friends. He became fond of Birdie’s mother Emily (‘Sometimes you seem a little bit of him left to me,’ she told him), and his sister Mary, known as May, and he went down to Henley-on-Thames for tea with Scott’s mother and one of his sisters. He often saw Kathleen. But of all the relatives, he was closest to Oriana Wilson. Like Kathleen and Scott’s mother she had been up to Lamer in his absence, and now she and Cherry embarked on a friendship that was to last until her death in 1945. A tall and handsome, though not beautiful, woman, Ory was restless and independent, and she hated publicity, a characteristic that appealed deeply to Cherry. She had a strong smile with a hint of the iceberg, and was reserved and friendly at the same time. If she didn’t like someone – Kathleen
Scott, for instance – she behaved as if that person didn’t exist. She felt protective of Cherry, as her husband had. But she was not as soft as Bill.
On 14 June the Terra Nova sailed into Cardiff under Pennell’s command, three years after she had left. There were no banquets. Cherry was there to meet her, and so were Ory and Caroline Oates, Titus’s formidable mother. Mrs Oates had already read her son’s diary, as it had been brought back ahead of the ship, and she had been interviewing survivors in an attempt to establish what had really happened (‘Oh, he was just champion,’ one of the seamen kept saying when remembering Titus). A strong and intelligent woman quite capable of reading between the lines, she did not accept the notion of heroic explorers dying for the honour of their country: she suspected that Scott had been a bungler. Teddy Evans and Atch both told her that Titus had regretted going on the expedition – on one occasion he had to be talked out of returning with the ship before the southern journey had even begun. Her son, Caroline concluded, had been ‘disgusted with the way in which the whole thing was done’.
A few weeks later King George received the Terra Nova men at Buckingham Palace to present them with Polar medals.32 The officers lined up with gleaming buttons and burnished epaulettes while the scientists and Cherry skulked in the background in top hats and spats. The widows had been invited, and afterwards everyone thronged into a reception at Caxton Hall for sherry and stewed tea. The King told Ponting he hoped every British schoolboy would see his pictures, as they were sure to promote the spirit of adventure that had made the Empire. As it turned out many hundreds of thousands of schoolboys did; but it was too late for the Empire.
