A First Rate Tragedy (18 page)

The brief honeymoon was spent in France. Kathleen described that it passed ‘as confusedly and insecurely as most honeymoons’, presumably a reference to the sexual side. However, it was soon clear to curious onlookers that this marriage of opposites was a success. In Kathleen, Scott had found ‘the only woman to whom I can tell things’.
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At last he had someone to whom he could confide his faults. He knew for example that he was bad-tempered and irritable and made her promise that she would never compromise her own ideas just to humour him. He continued to worry that he was unworthy of her. ‘I’ve a personality myself, a small mean thing besides yours . . . I’m obstinate, despondent, pigheaded, dejected, there’s something growing bigger inside that keeps shouting the greatness of you . . . You’re so exalted, I somehow can’t reach up.’
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She in turn had found a man she could trust, respect and love ‘desperately, deeply, violently and wholly’, though she was not yet truly ‘in love’ with him. That was to come later. She certainly understood him. When a Miss Madeleine Morrison told his fortune at tea and commented on his laziness, untidiness, touchiness and tendency to look on the gloomy side,
Kathleen cheerfully remarked that Miss Morrison must have been married to him for years instead of just reading his palm.

Scott returned to sea to captain
HMS Bulwark
and Kathleen resumed a life perhaps not so different from before. She went out to dinner, parties, plays, danced a lot and pursued her sculpture vigorously. She was delighted when she sold a mask for 18 guineas and wrote triumphantly to her more equivocal husband that she loved making money not because she did not wish to spend his, but because she did not wish them to have to think about money. Her private correspondence with Scott at this time provides some further insights into their lives, characters and motivation. She cajoles him to further his career, to make himself indispensable: ‘You must have the first ship in the Fleet or what’s the use of you?’ He is sometimes melancholy or depressed and regrets what were clearly arguments when they last met. ‘Girl, I can’t describe what comes over me. It’s too indefinite . . . I’m obsessed with the view of life as a struggle for existence. I seem to be marking time, impotent to command circumstances. The outward signs are the black moods that come and go with such apparent disregard for the feelings of those dear to me . . . Wife dear, my own wife, for every lapse believe there is repentance.’ A few weeks later he wrote ‘I think you hurt me unintentionally and then perhaps meanly. I strike back with vague intention to hurt. My sweetheart . . . try to understand – I want someone to anchor to, someone sweet and sound and sure like yourself and how I long to be up and achieving things for your sake.’
³³

Kathleen too wrote of such tiffs. ‘Oh my darling, I’m so sorry, how persistently and brutally we do hurt each other and would it hurt so each time if we were not all important to each other?’ Their letters are also full of their wish to meet more frequently to ‘make a baby’ and of their disappointment when each month
Kathleen proved not to be pregnant but in January 1909 Kathleen learned that she was indeed expecting a baby, to be born in the autumn. Scott’s reaction when he heard the news was to roll a fellow officer to the floor in jubilant horseplay. Shortly afterwards he was delighted to be told that he was to be given a desk job in the Admiralty. His pay would be increased and he could live at home.

In March 1909 news came that Shackleton had made an astoundingly successful journey south but that he had not reached the South Pole. Scott saw the newspaper headlines at a railway station and came running along the platform, paper in hand, to say excitedly to Crean, then his coxswain, ‘I think we’d better have a shot next.’
³⁴

In June Shackleton returned to a hero’s welcome. His achievements were inspiring. Though he had failed the final hurdle he had crossed the Ice Barrier, found a way up the mighty Beardmore Glacier, named for his sponsor, and got within ninety-seven geographical miles of the Pole. However, here he had deemed it wiser to turn back, commenting that he assumed his wife would rather have a live donkey for a husband than a dead lion. He had accomplished his great odyssey using ponies, not dogs, a fact not lost on Scott.

Scott agonized about how he should greet his fellow explorer. In the end common sense and generosity got the better of animosity – although Shackleton’s broken promise was not forgotten – and he joined the crowds thronging Charing Cross Station to greet the returning hero. It was a far cry from the
Discovery
’s muted reception and of course Shackleton revelled in it. He was as keen to court publicity as Scott had been to avoid it, reflecting the profound difference in their temperaments – one of them the flamboyant showman, the other the reserved naval officer. Scott
added his voice to the chorus of praise. At a dinner he referred to ‘these great works of Mr Shackleton’.
³⁵
He also promised to profit from Shackleton’s discoveries before some other country intervened. However he took the precaution of writing to Shackleton explaining his intention to return to the Ross Sea and there was more than a little irony in his letter: ‘. . . of course I should be glad to have your assurance that I am not disconcerting any plans of your own.’
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On 13 September 1909 the Antarctic Expedition was formally announced. Scott told an eager public that ‘The main object of the expedition is to reach the South Pole and to secure for The British Empire the honour of this achievement’. He declared that the journey would be made with motor sledges, Manchurian ponies and dogs. The very next day, and it must have seemed like an omen, his son was born. Kathleen had spent the latter stages of her pregnancy on the south-west coast, bathing by moonlight and sleeping on the beach, determined that her child would love the nights and the sea. It was a defining moment for both husband and wife, but particularly for Kathleen who later wrote: ‘Very large, very healthy, quite perfect was my boy baby; and then a strange thing happened to me. I fell for the first time gloriously, passionately, wildly in love with my husband. I did not know I had not been so before but I knew now. He became my god; the father of my son and my god. Until now he had been a probationer, a means to an end.’ The object of this passionate joy was named Peter Markham, after that perpetual little boy Peter Pan, and Sir Clements Markham, who, with Barrie, was one of his godparents.

As the year drew to a close each of the Scotts now had a grand purpose. Kathleen to nurture the child she had dreamed of for so long and Scott to return south and finish what he had begun.

9

A Matter of Honour

And so the die was cast. The coming months were to introduce new characters and reunite former comrades. As far as Scott was concerned, Wilson was the cornerstone of the expedition so he was delighted by his agreement to serve as chief of the scientific staff and official artist. Wilson’s motivation was complex. He wrote to his wife about his fear that ‘I am getting more and more soft and dependent upon comforts, and this I hate. I want to endure hardness and instead of that I enjoy hotel dinners and prefer hot water to cold and so on – all bad signs and something must be done to stop it’. He also believed he would survive to write and publish all the things in his head. ‘This conviction makes me absolutely fearless as to another journey South, for whatever happened I know I should come back to you.’ Most powerful of all, though, were his feelings for Scott. He confessed that ‘I should not feel it was right now to desert Scott if he goes . . .’
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His task was to pull together the largest, best-equipped scientific team ever sent to Antarctica.

Another prime mover during the early stages was the super-energetic twenty-eight-year-old Lieutenant Teddy Evans who had
been second officer on the relief ship
Morning
. His loud rumbustious nature was the antithesis of Scott’s quiet reserve. As a boy he had been expelled from one school and sent to another specializing in dealing with problem boys. It seems to have succeeded because in 1895 he joined the
Worcester
where he won a naval cadetship. He loved horseplay and such ludicrous feats of strength as picking his fellow officers up by the seat of their trousers with his teeth or ripping packs of playing cards in half. He abandoned plans of his own for an expedition in return for appointment as second-in-command and responsibility for helping Scott select the officers and men. In the months ahead, and particularly once they had reached Antarctica, Scott would come to question his abilities writing ‘I cannot consider him fitted for a superior position.’ Other expedition members would question Evans’s competence on non-naval matters and also his loyalty to Scott. His appointment was also a severe embarrassment to Scott, who had at least half promised the position of second-in-command to Reginald Skelton, who had done so well on the first trip and had been helping Scott to develop the motor sledges. Skelton wrote to Scott, ‘Hang it all, judge the case fairly’,
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but on this occasion Scott seems to have sacrificed loyalty to expediency.

The news of the expedition attracted over 8,000 eager volunteers. They included Captain Oates whose cool self-sacrifice on the retreat from the Pole would capture the public’s imagination as a perfect encapsulation of the values of the day. The fuss would have embarrassed this horse-loving, upper-class cavalry officer known as ‘Titus’ by his comrades. He was a quiet man with well-defined views on duty and honour, but not the ‘stiff upper lip’, unimaginative, conventional representative of his caste sometimes painted. He was certainly reserved but those he
liked found him good company and enjoyed his wry very English sense of humour. Like Scott he had a close relationship with his mother. Caroline Oates was a woman of powerful personality who, rather ominously from a psychologist’s point of view, called him ‘Baby Boy’ for years, despite the subsequent birth of another son. She was a wealthy and generous woman but was careful to control Oates’s purse strings and hence his actions throughout his adult life.

Like Wilson, Oates had been a delicate child. At one stage Caroline feared that he might have tuberculosis and took him to South Africa for a while. The local people near the family seat at Gestingthorpe in Essex remarked on this frail little boy. One later described how ‘He looked as if a good meat pudden would’ve done him more good than going to the South Pole’.
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However, he grew more robust and at Eton distinguished himself as a sportsman rather than as a scholar. He became a good middle-weight boxer, but his career at Eton was terminated by severe pneumonia and he completed his education at a crammer’s specializing in preparing boys for the army exams.

Oates wanted to gain his commission through going to Oxford, but the entrance exams proved too much for him. He probably lacked application rather more than intelligence and much preferred hunting to studying. One phrase sums it up – ‘so bored am I with exams’.
⁴
You can almost hear the yawns of a young man who simply could not see the relevance of Greek unseens and Latin prose, the statutory subjects of the day. Neither did he have any time or gift for mathematics as Scott would later discover – ‘I had intended Oates to superintend the forage arrangements but rows of figures, however simply expressed, are too much for him.’
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He was also a poor speller and quite possibly dyslexic.

Oates joined the 2nd Volunteer Battalion of the Suffolk
Regiment which provided an outlet while he continued to wrestle with academia. However, in the event it also provided his route into the regular army. In 1900, at the height of the Boer War, all qualified militia officers were offered commissions without examinations. A cockahoop and relieved Oates was gazetted into the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons on 6 April. His correspondence at the time shows his love of fine horse flesh with eloquent appeals to his mother for money to buy good horses. However, his overriding ambition was to join his regiment in South Africa and fight in the Boer War. He worried that it would end before he had his chance of glory, but in November 1900 he was on his way. His youth and inexperience did not inhibit him from criticizing his commanders as he would one day criticize Scott. Oates wrote scathingly of one officer that ‘I only hope that I am not under him if I go to the front, he is one of those fussy people who are I believe perfectly hopeless on service’.
^6
3

When the news of Queen Victoria’s death reached the troops in South Africa, Oates’s reaction exemplified the general mood of gloom and foreboding as Britain squared up to the new century. ‘We heard about the Queen’s death while on the march, and were all very much cut up. It is awfully sad and the worst thing that could happen to England.’
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His reaction was entirely in tune with an era which took an exalted view of motherhood and had now lost its imperial mother figure. As Henry James put it, ‘We all feel motherless today.’
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However, Oates’s reaction also exemplified
a natural pessimism and uncertainty about the meaning of life which he would seek to assuage in Antarctica. Like Scott, he needed a sense of purpose to galvanize him.

Shortly after the news of the Queen’s death, Oates saw action at last when the fifteen-man patrol he was commanding came under attack. Outnumbered and surrounded on all sides by the Boers, he refused to surrender, managed to send most of his men to safety and earned himself the name ‘Never-say-die Oates’ and a mention in despatches for conspicuous bravery. His left thigh was shattered by a bullet but he continued to hold the position for eight and a half hours until a rescue party reached him. According to the senior medical officer he never uttered a murmur, though he must have been in great pain with the bone protruding through his skin.
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It took Oates months to recover and his mother insisted that he consult a specialist, whose verdict was that the injured leg would always be an inch shorter than the other and that he would have a permanent limp. In fact the wound gave him permanent trouble which he concealed with his usual stoicism.