by Sara Wheeler
Atch and other friendly Antarcticans went up and down to Lamer, where their trains were met at the station by the rackety Lamer carriage. They slept outside in the green surge of summer, Cherry’s tribe of sisters entertained them on the piano, and the mowing machine buzzed lazily down the slope to the river as they finished their picnics with wobbly puddings and bottled blackberries. It was not quite the fabled Edwardian country house set, but it was an agreeably cosy scaled-down version.
Ory was often there that first summer. Cherry had been helping her locate and sort Bill’s possessions. She offered him his green leather copy of Tennyson back, but Cherry wanted her to keep it. Ory too was suspicious of the London committee, now in full spate marshalling material for publication, raising funds for the widows and moulding the public image of the dead heroes. It was chaired by the autocratic figure of Lord Curzon, president of the Royal Geographical Society since 1911, former viceroy of India and a man, Cherry noted, whom nobody in England would dare gainsay. The expedition belonged to the committee now. In June Cherry was told off by Francis Drake, its secretary, for communicating with a firm which had donated a typewriter to the Terra Nova back in 1910. ‘It is very undesirable,’ Drake wrote officiously, ‘to have any interference in our business arrangements . . . You should have consulted either Captain Evans or myself.’ Depressed by the direction post-expedition events were taking, Cherry was cheered only by indications from Kathleen that Teddy was not going to have it all his own way. (‘Reginald Smith,’ she confided to her diary in October, ‘comes to show me a preposterous letter written by that disgraceful creature Evans.’)
Reggie suggested that Cherry have the volumes of his journal typed up by a secretary at his firm’s offices. Before handing them over, Cherry went through them carefully underlining critical passages which were to be edited out of the typed version. After the job was done, the original handwritten notebooks were locked in the Lamer strong room. At the same time, Leonard Huxley, a former schoolmaster and one of Reggie’s readers at Smith, Elder, was editing Scott’s diaries for publication and commissioning supplementary material. At Huxley’s request, Cherry lent him a copy of his typed journals. Huxley told Smith they were ‘gorgeous’.
Meanwhile, late in the summer of 1913, Cherry delivered the three Emperor penguin eggs from Crozier to the Natural History branch of the British Museum, that supreme piece of bombastic Victorian architecture in South Kensington. At first, a junior assistant was reluctant even to accept the bitterly won specimens. Cherry was passed to a senior member of staff and then forced to wait in a corridor while the man conversed at length with a more important visitor. Finally, someone grudgingly took the eggs in, and with immense difficulty Cherry extracted a receipt. To compound the insult, when Cherry visited the museum some time later accompanied by Grace, one of Scott’s sisters, the first person they spoke to denied ever having seen the eggs (‘How stupid that minor custodian was!’ Grace remembered).
The frosty reaction of the museum staff was memorably parodied, nine years later, in The Worst Journey: Cherry represents himself as the Heroic Explorer in the exchange, his frustration rising to a murderous plot in the hushed museum corridors. The episode was a potent metaphor for Cherry’s fractured ideals, and as the book took shape in his mind the painful disparity between the effort of retrieving the eggs and the response they met with at the museum came to exemplify one of his central themes. (Furthermore, when Dr C. W. Parsons published the official results of the embryo work many years later, he concluded that ‘neither [the three Emperor embryos nor the series of Adélie embryos] has added greatly to our knowledge of penguin embryology’.)33
Called Scott’s Last Expedition and appended with supplementary material, Scott’s diaries appeared in two volumes in October 1913. They were received with widespread acclaim. The long review in Punch, unsigned but in fact written by A. A. Milne, noted, ‘There is courage and strength and loyalty and love shining out of the second volume no less than out of the first.’ Cherry believed Milne’s thoughtful piece was ‘quite the nicest thing that has been written on the expedition’. But he was uneasy with the glib heroism which Scott’s prose fostered in the public imagination. Scott and the myth-makers had turned the story into a simple allegory of the Christian journey, a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress on ice. Yet Cherry’s two best friends were dead, and no amount of allegories could bring them back. Cherry was struggling not to blame Scott; he was not yet able to acknowledge his anger towards him, even to himself. Later, he came to feel deeply threatened by Scott’s Last Expedition, convinced that it didn’t tell the whole story, or even the true story. It was an unfair assessment, and a reflection of Cherry’s lack of perspective. Scott’s diaries were edited for publication, but not substantially. Most of the cuts dealt with critical remarks: it was natural for a leader to express doubts about individuals in the privacy of his diary, and equally natural for his remarks to be edited out when the diaries were published. Cherry’s general unhappiness about the excisions had not yet formed in 1913, but he was disturbed by one point in Scott’s Last Expedition from the day it appeared. The book failed to make it clear that Scott had taken the dogs on further than planned, and that as a result of jumbled orders there was no dog food laid at One Ton.
Cherry suspected the committee of a cover-up to make Scott look perfect. Nobody was prepared to say that the dog food depôt had never been laid: not Evans, not Kathleen, not Curzon. Atch tried to say it, but he was bludgeoned into quietude. Seeing that Atch had little weight against the steamrolling tactics of the committee, Cherry decided to go to Lincoln’s Inn Fields for an official interview with Farrer, who was the expedition’s solicitor as well as his own. But Farrer wasn’t playing. ‘They would not listen,’ he insisted when Cherry said he wanted to go up before the committee himself to explain the role of his dog journey. ‘They will say you are overstrained. You see, there must be no scandal.’ It was not just a refusal: it was an implied threat. ‘The committee,’ Cherry noted in the margin of his Antarctic journal, ‘meant to hush up everything. I was to be sacrificed.’
The other Antarcticans had taken up where they had left off before the expedition, the navy men returning to service, the scientists to their research. Atch, who as a naval research surgeon was in both camps, was working on his polar parasites at the London School of Tropical Medicine. The civilian scientists were writing up their material as well as arranging postgraduate or teaching positions to supplement their meagre incomes. There had been endless talk, during the long days spent waiting for the ship, of how they would manage to produce their reports on the paltry expedition fees. They were all full of plans.
Silas Wright went straight back to Cambridge and took up a position as lecturer in surveying and cartography in the Department of Geography. In 1914 he married one of Ray Priestley’s sisters. Griff Taylor, who had come home after the first year down south, had been working for the Australian federal government, carrying out geological surveys. In 1913 he was granted permission to move to England to collaborate with the other Antarctic scientists. He joined Silas at Cambridge, and married another Priestley sister. Deb (Frank Debenham) also moved to England to finish his postgraduate studies at Cambridge, taking up a place at Caius, Wilson’s old college. As for Ponting, he had produced his moving picture film and had a heavy lecture programme planned for 1914.
Leading stoker William Lashly was forty-five when he returned from the Antarctic. He was discharged from the navy with a pension; but, with characteristic determination, the day after he was formally released he enlisted in the Naval Reserve. For Lashly’s colleague Tom Crean the call of the Antarctic remained irresistible. In the spring of 1914 he was again loaned by the navy to a ship heading for the polar regions. He was returning to the Antarctic with Shackleton, serving – not in the ranks but as second officer – on an ambitious expedition which was to be the first to march the whole way across the continent. According to Shackleton’s plan, his ship, the Endurance, was to deposit a small
party on the Weddell Sea coast, from where the men would march to the Pole, on across the Plateau and down the Beardmore to Cape Evans. On the last leg they would pick up depôts laid by another party left by the Aurora on the Ross Sea side.
Unlike his former shipmates, Cherry had no fixed plans, and no career to follow. When the grouse season opened he went up to the Smiths’ Scottish cottage to cool down with a spot of shooting on the moors of Glen Prosen. It was where he had met Wilson, so the ghosts were there too. He strode along the broomy banks of the South Esk streams and dwelt on what to do next with his life, still keen to acquire a profession. His interminable correspondence with his solicitor had led him to abandon his plan to study law. He now turned instead to medicine, a career with the defined sense of purpose that he sought. He was surrounded by successful doctors on his mother’s side of the family and, more significantly, he was still under Bill’s influence (‘I feel how happy Bill would be to know that you are doing this,’ Ory wrote). But he had no real conception of the years of hard labour involved in qualifying as a doctor from a standing start as a 27-year-old with a mediocre history degree and a taste for travel.
None the less, as the first plane trees yellowed on the cambered streets of the capital he began hospital work as a junior trainee observer. Right from the start he found it difficult to apply himself to the job, as he was still spending much of his time sorting the expedition’s zoological specimens at the Natural History Museum. He had also begun working up his notes on Antarctic birds for official publication, corresponding on the subject with Sidney Harmer, a zealous departmental head at the museum. It was the start of an unhappy and misguided attempt to reproduce an academic report as if he were a scientist. As for the relationship with Harmer, it was to end very badly indeed.
In addition, Cherry was busy giving illustrated lectures on the Antarctic to schools and working men’s clubs around Wheathampstead. When Ponting found out that his slides were being used, he fired off a long and aggrieved letter insisting that he had exclusive rights in expedition images. Cherry hosed him down, pointing out that his lectures were small and free of charge, and Ponting was extinguished until the following February, when he learned that Cherry was speaking in Leeds. Once again he erupted into thunderous protest. The disagreement finally petered out when the pair united against a common enemy: Evans. In the summer of 1913 Teddy had embarked on an ambitious lecture tour of his own. He was still officially on cordial terms with Cherry, who chaired his lecture in St Albans that November, but Ponting was furious that Evans was using his expedition slides so fecklessly.
Meanwhile Kathleen wanted to know what was to be done about the South Polar Times. In the end Cherry handed the originals over to Reggie to prepare for reproduction, and the early numbers subsequently went on display at the British Museum. Cherry was annoyed to see that they were labelled ‘Lent by Lady Scott’, as he didn’t consider them hers to lend. He was beginning to feel wary of Kathleen. ‘Lady Scott’s possessive instinct,’ he noted, ‘not only of Scott but of the whole expedition, is a very strong one.’ He kept the final volume to himself.
Since Cherry had left Cape Evans and its bitter memories he had been coping with both bereavement and a growing sense of personal betrayal by Evans, the committee and the press. Now, as he settled back in to the rhythms of home, he also had to acknowledge the collapse of the moral certainties that had characterised the England of his youth.
Between the death of Edward VII and the war, a period which coincided almost exactly with the absence of Scott’s second expedition, Britain had been traumatised by a series of shattering challenges to the existing order. The House of Lords had lost its power of veto (the crucial vote took place the day Lassie walked up the aisle), and the notion of the paternal responsibility of the noble few had vanished with it. The Liberals had been preparing legislation to abolish the power of the Lords just before the Terra Nova left England, and while he was in the Antarctic Cherry had read reports of its progress when the ship brought news. Back at home in the aftermath of the great parliamentary drama – probably the greatest of the century – he recognised that the ground had shifted under the feet of his class. In his childhood the cabinet had been peopled with mighty landowners such as the bearded giant Lord Salisbury down the road at Hatfield House. Now the absolute power of the Lords had been removed, the vast landed estates were crippled, and well-fed patricians like the General no longer spoke for the masses.
After August 1911 turbulence on other fronts had further shaken the tottering British establishment. The notion of Home Rule in Ireland had preoccupied the nation for years, and while Scott was struggling up the Beardmore it had become an obsession. There was even talk of civil war. In 1913 the Lords twice rejected the Home Rule Bill, and in the spring of 1914 a fresh Home Rule crisis engulfed the country. The idea of an Irish parliament was even more alien to thorough-going imperialists like Cherry than the objectives of the suffragette movement, another symbol of the rejection of the existing order. The women, as intrepid, brave and pioneering as any polar explorer, had come a long way since the Terra Nova sailed out of Cardiff. In the summer of 1912 they had started setting fire to post-boxes, and in the first months of 1914 they embarked on a more ambitious arson spree. There was still no evidence of conflagration in Wheathampstead, but Cherry noted with bewilderment that the pretty girls walking through St James’s Park near the expedition offices were no longer trussed up in Victorian fashions that thrust out their buttocks and breasts.
Finally, the wave of labour unrest that had unsettled Cherry when he learned of it in the Antarctic (‘the rumblings of the storms to come’) had indeed continued on its unstoppable trajectory. By the summer of 1914 a general strike was looming out of the foggy hinterland. In his absence, the security of Cherry’s past had dissolved like so many fragments of ice. Throughout his childhood he had inhaled the vapour of paternalistic Toryism and the moral seriousness of Victorian virtue; it was part of him. He was not yet thirty, and he was a relic.
On the cultural front, too, iconoclastic new movements had sprung forth in almost every arena. Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet had caused a sensation, and at the end of May 1914 London was shocked by the deeply modern music of Richard Strauss. Kathleen Scott’s friend Isadora Duncan had been enjoying fabulous success for some time – she had even danced for King Edward – but many were still offended by her free-style methods and the tunic in which she insisted on deploying them. A Post-Impressionist exhibition at a London gallery had provoked an angry and almost hysterical reaction among critics and public alike. On the lower cultural slopes, moving pictures continued to capture the popular imagination. The men had come back from the ice to find that the number of cinemas in London had quadrupled.
Antarctica, like the past, was a place where the anxieties of the twentieth century did not intrude. The expedition cut like a canyon between Cherry’s childhood and the rest of his life, and when he looked back beyond it to his youth he saw, dimly, the lost world of Rupert Brooke, the flaxen-haired poet who, rightly or wrongly, came to embody the romantic, self-sacrificing ideal of the young Englishman of Cherry’s generation. After the war, Brooke’s poetry appealed to many nostalgic for the certainty of the past, a sunlit era when the Grantchester clock stood permanently at ten to three. But for Cherry, it was not the war that had transformed that world of lyrical innocence. By the spring of 1914 it was already gone.
The allure of an Antarctic explorer was comparable to that of a major sports star in our own less heroic age, and when good looks, a whopping income and a country seat were thrown in it wasn’t surprising that Cherry found himself surrounded by pretty girls. Over the winter of 1913 he had become attached to one admirer in particular, and if they weren’t dancing to the ragtime that was all the rage at the Berkeley Hotel or breathing in cigar smoke at the Café Royal, Cherry was showing her off in the chaotic expedition offices or at Reggie and Isabel’s house in Green Street. She remains anonymous, as no information about her has su
rvived.
Yet he was still immersed in the expedition. For many years after his return from the ice Cherry quietly undertook small acts of kindness towards the Terra Nova crewmen; during the war he was even on the look-out for needy Discovery men. The chief beneficiary was Petty Officer George Abbott, a naval gymnastics instructor and wrestling champion who had been a member of Campbell’s Northern Party. Despite severing the tendons of three fingers in a disagreement with a Weddell seal, Abbott had held up well during the horrors of Inexpressible Island, but on the voyage home he had a breakdown. Especially sensitive to cases of nervous collapse, a condition with which he closely identified, Cherry went down to visit Abbott in hospital in Southampton and paid for his treatment. When Abbott lost his pension because he had been transferred from a naval hospital to a civil one, Cherry campaigned on his behalf and secured his rights, a process which eventually culminated in general reforms in the treatment of invalided servicemen.
Cherry had plenty to do, but despite his new girlfriend and his half-baked medical plans, he didn’t have enough to think about. Atch saw yet again that his tendency to dwell on the expedition and its aftermath was threatening his mental wellbeing. He had an idea. He had just been seconded to a medical research expedition to eastern China led by Dr Robert Leiper, a distinguished Scottish helminthologist at the London School of Tropical Medicine and a scientist so devoted to his subject that he once swallowed a fish tapeworm to observe the effect it had upon his stomach. The expedition had been funded both to investigate a parasitic flatworm which was finding its way inside British seamen in Chinese waters and causing Asiatic schistosomiasis, and to study the spread of bilharziasis. Why didn’t Cherry come along to help out for a month or two in his familiar role as zoological assistant?
