by Sara Wheeler
This was just the ticket. A chance to escape again, and on a medical expedition to boot. Cherry was soon off on another round of visits gathering equipment and supplies, his Harrods account bending under the strain. In the middle of the preparations a letter arrived at Lamer which was to have a decisive effect on the course of the next decade. It was from Colonel H. G. Lyons, secretary of the expedition’s publications committee. After a poor start (‘Dear Mr Garrad’), Lyons revealed that Evans, who as Scott’s deputy was naturally first in line to write the official narrative of the expedition, was too busy to take on the job. Would Cherry do it? This too was Atch’s suggestion. It was what both he and Cherry had wanted all along. Cherry immediately wrote to Lyons, gleefully accepting his offer. They agreed to meet on his return from China.
On 20 February 1914, ten months after he had arrived home from the Antarctic, Cherry boarded the P. & O. steamer SS Malwa with Leiper and Atch. Reggie was to accompany them as far as Marseilles. Kathleen and Ory saw them off as if they were returning to the Antarctic, and the event was recorded in The Times. ‘Among all the heroes of the [Terra Nova] expedition,’ trilled the report, ‘survivors state that no-one acquitted himself more usefully than Mr Cherry-Garrard.’
As the air on deck grew warmer, Cherry wore the old arguments threadbare with Atch and once again relished the confined freedom of an oceangoing ship. But at Port Said he was intercepted by a wire from Farrer concerning the tenants of Watling Street, the old Garrard property in the City of London. The house had been occupied for many years by a large firm of cotton traders who wanted to buy the dilapidated property so that they could pull it down and build a new one. Farrer advised him to sell, interest being more favourable than rent. Cherry cabled back Yes.
After an uneventful passage through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea they crossed the Indian Ocean and changed ships in Colombo, arriving in a rainy Shanghai on 30 March. Proximity to both the coast and the Yangtze River made the city an ideal base for an expedition researching a condition afflicting people living and working close to water (in some regions sixty per cent of the population had the disease). Leiper and his men hired a houseboat, turned it into a floating laboratory and pottered up the canals of the Yangtze, the main trade route to the largest silk- and tea-producing regions of China. Their first task was to find an infected patient from whom they could collect the worm’s eggs.
Since Cherry’s last visit to Asia on his cargo ship tour, China had lost her emperor. The parliament established to replace dynastic succession was barely lurching from one week to the next, threatened by such baleful enemies as the army and even more volatile warlords. Before setting off on the houseboat, Cherry wrote to Farrer from Shanghai’s Astor House Hotel.
The country is in a most disturbed state. White Wolf looks like setting up an independent kingdom in Szechuan, and he is a better soldier than the Imperial troops; trade is more or less at a standstill, one man shot himself 3 days ago owing to financial difficulties and I hear that there are many in the same state. At present this part of China seems all right as regards safety – but they are expecting another revolution later on and they say that it is going to be much worse than the last. The general opinion is that China is in practically the same state as 400 years ago and they may do just the same things.
Cherry was carrying round a small maroon Winsor & Newton notebook in which to jot suggestions for his official expedition narrative. From the outset he and Atch were concerned about potential editorial interference from committee bogeyman Lyons, already a Porlockian figure in Cherry’s imagination. But Cherry was too methodical to hold off important list-making. Jiggling in a rickshaw along the muddy lanes that filleted the fertile lowlands abutting the canals, he compiled a rough inventory of drawings to be commissioned (‘eye goggles, sledge, tapered runners of sledge . . .’) and a formidable ‘To Do’ list which included requests to relatives for permission to use the polar party’s notebooks; correspondence with suppliers asking for details of exactly what had been supplied; and multitudinous notes to himself (‘Find out the cause of the fur falling out of the sleeping bags’). He started writing letters to this effect, and posted them when he returned to a chilly Shanghai, where he found time to carouse in the club-rooms with Atch (as a sizeable port and manufacturing centre Shanghai had a lively expatriate community). His good watch was stolen.
The search for an infected patient had proved fruitless, and to exacerbate their scientific problems, Atch and Leiper were quarrelling bitterly. Cherry did his best to support Atch. But he was only half in China. ‘Get details of acetylene gas plant,’ he noted in the maroon book one day, and on another, ‘Plentiful supply of nails needed for boots.’ The notebook became a kind of brainstorming receptacle, each thought neatly separated from the next by a ruled line. The volume which would come out of it, in Cherry’s mind, was to be both official history and travel guide: it would include an elaborate descriptive list of every item used by every member of the British Antarctic Expedition, rather like an upmarket scout manual. His sorrow was still too deep for more pliable words.
After a glorious rail journey on his own up through Harbin to Siberia and across central Russia, Cherry arrived home on 10 May to find The Times sprouting with stories about the escalating crisis among the great powers, and the news that in the National Gallery a suffragette had slashed Velázquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ with a meat cleaver. He had enjoyed his adventure immensely. Atch had been sorry to see him go: ‘I have missed you a very great deal,’ he wrote from Shanghai later in the month. Atch was not the only one missing Cherry. His letters contained greetings from a woman called Maidie. ‘She asked me to say,’ wrote Atch, ‘she was always thinking about Chewwy-Gawward.’
Meanwhile, Cherry broke up with his English girlfriend. Nothing is known of the cause of the rupture, but judging from the consolatory words despatched from Shanghai by Atch, Cherry was badly shocked. ‘Some day you will meet Miss Right,’ Atch offered lamely. Cherry cheered himself up with plans for another trip to Shanghai. The search for human patients had been abandoned, and Atch and Leiper, still quarrelling, were now looking for infected dogs.34
At the beginning of June Cherry went down to London to meet Lyons at the Army and Navy Club. He asked directly what his authority would be as the writer of the official narrative, and was assured that he would have a free hand. On that happy understanding, Cherry issued Lyons with a list of requests to various people for information about their work on the expedition. It included enquiries about photographic gear to Ponting, who, when Lyons forwarded the questions, immediately replied that he was too busy to answer.
Hospital work was abandoned – for good, as it turned out – as Cherry threw himself into research for the book. He was soon drowning in material. He spent many days in London, and started going round to firms who had supplied the expedition with equipment and food. At the beginning of July he broke off to take the train over to Cheltenham. There he joined thousands of people watching Sir Clements Markham unveil a memorial to Wilson. Sculpted by Kathleen (who modelled Bill’s bottom half on Cherry’s corduroy trousers, which she had borrowed), it was an imposing larger-than-life bronze depicting Bill in his sledging harness.
Cherry saw a lot of Kathleen in 1914, despite his developing wariness. She refused to play the part of the distraught and housebound widow. Her first priority was her five-year-old son Peter, but from time to time she still disappeared on her exotic travels: at the beginning of the year she went to the Sahara alone. Her social life was fearsomely active. She had luncheon and dinner engagements almost every day, often squeezing in a tea party too, and Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, regularly turned up at her house for a confidential talk. Besides all that she remained devoted to her sculpture, and was rarely short of commissions. She sculpted Kris, Cherry’s Antarctic dog, despite the fact that he refused to lie down. (Kris was now living in grander style than any polar dog before or since. Cherry had had a special pen built behind the house, with a
properly drained floor laid with white tiles, a wrought-iron gate and a board inside spelling out Kris’s full name – ‘Kris the Beautiful’ – in Russian.)
Sculpture was one of the few subjects in which Kathleen and Cherry found genuine communion. Although Cherry was conventional by nature, he responded to artistic excellence rather than established models of what constituted art. Stumping briskly round the London galleries with an eye to acquisition, he embraced newness. He bought a Rodin bust at a time when Rodin represented the most avant of the avant-garde, and began to build a modestly impressive collection for Lamer which foxed the servants and flummoxed visiting clergy for decades.
Fresh interests did not displace his obsessions. He scrutinised the press for references to the expedition, and when he spotted errors he fired off letters demanding corrections. As these were usually minor, and often in minor publications, he cut a rather ridiculous figure, a youthful Sir Bufton Tufton marooned in a study deep in a leafy shire. Scanning The Times over breakfast one morning he noticed that the sculptor Albert Hodge, commissioned to carve a memorial to the dead men, had included on the back a trophy depicting snowshoes. Cherry leapt for pen and paper. ‘We never used snowshoes,’ he told Hodge firmly. ‘Always ski.’ More seriously, he was increasingly convinced that lean and hungry conspirators were at work hushing up aspects of the expedition that did not fit the heroic ideal: an omission in the typed version of his journal was ascribed to collusion between someone at the Smith, Elder offices and Lord Curzon. The evidence is inconclusive, the theory unconvincing; but both fuelled Cherry’s anxieties for years.
Cherry had been so pleased, on the other hand, with what A. A. Milne had written about Scott’s Last Expedition that when a facsimile of the South Polar Times was published, he sent him a copy. Milne duly obliged him in print. ‘I cannot read or see too much of the men who are my heroes,’ he wrote in Punch, confessing that when it came to Wilson’s illustrations, ‘I envy Mr Cherry-Garrard so prolific and brilliant a contributor.’ The warm-hearted review focused on an article by Griff called ‘The Bipes’, purporting to be a paper given by Titus’s escaped rabbit to the Royal Society of Rabbits on the subject of the wingless bipeds at Cape Evans. Cherry appeared in the piece as a Bipe classified as B. Kiplingi. ‘This is an interesting type,’ ran his taxonomic description. ‘He is adorned with a cheery smile, accessory transparent membranes over the eyes and literary leanings . . . I found a series of beautiful little journals in his burrow labelled Kiplingi which deal with portions of his career . . .’ Griff’s observation was sound: Cherry was devoted to Kipling and his robust imperial ideas (on some subliminal level he also identified with the dark, depressive strain present in both the man and the work). In a fit of reverential munificence when sorting through his Antarctic packing cases, he decided to send his well-thumbed copy of Kim to its author. The novel had been read by almost everyone in the shore party. ‘I can say quite truthfully,’ Cherry wrote to his hero, ‘that there were no books which we had which were so much used, gave so much food for conversation or more enjoyment.’
Nineteen fourteen was a gorgeous summer, and at home Cherry and Evelyn had cook’s special plum cake for tea underneath the flowering chestnuts while Lassie’s daughter Susan toddled after butterflies. Indoors the sash windows were left permanently open and sunblinds were unfurled to protect the motionless ancestors. Cambridge was only an hour away, and, as Deb, Silas, Griff and several other expedition men were ensconced there as postgraduates or junior fellows, Cherry often zipped over in his new, low-slung motor car, still a rare sight on the quiet Hertfordshire lanes. He was immensely fond of Deb in particular, and regularly dragged him away from his specimens in the Sedgwick Museum. Deb was still deeply involved in matters expeditionary, since he was writing up the geological results, and although he was to evolve into more of a geographer than a geologist he remained a central figure in the British polar community for many years. He was straight, a characteristic that ranked highly with Cherry, spoke his mind, and liked to have fun.
In the early summer days they picnicked in the elmy sunshine of the Backs with Silas and Griff or, if their girls were with them, punted indecorously along the Cam, sometimes joined for short visits by Harry Pennell, the cheerful, steady navigator on the Terra Nova who had worked so hard that he had slept under his chart table. Everyone, especially Cherry, admired Pennell tremendously.
The crisis precipitated by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June did not rattle them: there had already been two Balkan wars in three years, and parliament remained preoccupied with Home Rule. Cherry was feeling satisfied with his own position regarding the estates and his extensive portfolio. ‘My income seems to be increasing considerably,’ he wrote to Farrer two days before the decisive Austrian ultimatum to Serbia at the end of July. Britain continued to remain neutral, while busily preparing her battleships. On 3 August long, grey columns of soldiers marched into Belgium, and at eleven o’clock the following evening, at the end of a hot, tense bank holiday weekend, Britain declared war on Germany.
Men like Cherry with an ingrained sense of duty threw themselves at the war (‘Now, God be thanked’, wrote Rupert Brooke, ‘Who has matched us with His hour’). Within days he had offered to organise Lamer as a fiftybed Red Cross hospital for wounded officers, a plan he had harboured for many years; but that, of course, was nothing like enough. He had to act. While he was engaged in discussions about the hospital, the famous surgeon Sir Frederick Treves, a luminary of the Red Cross, had the idea that dogs might be usefully deployed at the front to sniff out wounded men. As an experienced dog-handler, this was a perfect job for Cherry. A major in Harrow offered his pack of bloodhounds, and arrangements were hastily made while the country erupted in jingoistic frenzy and the black lines of the German advance crept down the maps.
Uniforms and passports were provided by the Red Cross, though Cherry and the major were to pay their own expenses and operate as an independent unit attached to the Belgian army. On 19 August – two weeks after war was declared – Cherry, the major and the yapping bloodhounds boarded a ferry to Ostend. But after three days and ‘an awful wild goose chase’ they were back, each with his tail firmly between his legs. It had become clear almost as soon as they arrived in Belgium that with communications cut by the Germans it was impossible to work dogs at the front. As Cherry ruefully acknowledged, ‘We might have as well run a confectioner’s shop as try and work dogs.’ Red Cross people motored out to them from Brussels and Sir Arthur Keogh, who led the first Red Cross commission to Belgium, announced that Cherry and the major had better take the dogs home.
The idea that dogs might have a role to play in the unfolding slaughter was a poignant symbol of public innocence in the late summer of 1914. As for Cherry, he felt vaguely humiliated and, rather unfairly, resented the way he had been hurried into a hare-brained scheme. In any event, it was a bad start to the war.
In Wheathampstead the villagers were borne along by a tide of patriotic enthusiasm bordering on hysteria, but apart from the sweaty swarm to the recruiting office, there was little to do. Newspapers were scanned for instructive articles on war preparation, notices went up about blackout arrangements and the price of butter rose. The Times ran a helpful column advising readers to instruct their keepers not to feed corn to pheasants. The press bristled with the same patriotic language extolling duty and sacrifice that they had used about Scott not much more than a year before.
Cherry badly wanted a job. Each day, as he came down to breakfast, his father’s stare became more reproachful. But a colonic disorder had been troubling him since the end of the Antarctic expedition, and his doctor refused to pass him fit for service. Enlisting, therefore, was out of the question. He considered a position helping to run a converted yacht as a hospital for the wounded, but it never came to anything. There was also talk of working as an orderly in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Sir Frederick offered him a car to transport wounded men. That, t
oo, fell through. In the middle of September he finally hit on the idea of despatch riding. This, surely, was a useful job, and one that he could do well. He worried that his eyesight might let him down, but bought a Douglas motorcycle anyway and set about learning how it worked.
He was quickly accepted as a private into the 14th Signalling Company of the Royal Engineers and sent down to Aldershot for training. The RE had so many casualties among its first batch of despatch riders that it determined to prepare the next lot more effectively, and Cherry was sent out on signalling and ordinary training. ‘Here I am living as a Tommy,’ he wrote to Farrer, ‘and a good life too.’ He was very pleased to have got the job. His eyes were still an issue, but his commanding officer said he would find him other work if his sight became a problem. Cherry enjoyed the barracks rough-and-tumble with 150 other men, smoking incessantly, fighting for a place in the porridge queue and laying bets for an extra sardine at tea. ‘They are a splendid lot of men,’ he wrote. ‘It’s just Kipling in real life!’
It is a comment – freighted with terrible irony – that exemplifies the sporting, high-jinxy concept of war prevalent in the British army at that time. Nobody had experienced an all-out European war: in living memory, there hadn’t been one.
In the second week of October Cherry was informed that a wire had arrived from a commander in the Admiralty asking if he would accept an appointment with an armoured car squadron. He was baffled. He had not applied for the job; he had not applied for anything in the navy. He got leave and hurried up to Reggie’s in Green Street, wondering if he wanted a commission at all. ‘I am not sure,’ he wrote to Farrer, ‘that I don’t prefer to see this through as an NCO [he was about to be promoted] in a good RE company with a lot of rough but very good diamonds, rather than becoming an Officer Boy.’ It was an admirably egalitarian urge. But Cherry went on: ‘The one thing which fairly makes me squirm is to have to salute the very young and raw material of the said boys!’ Squirming was out of the question.
