A First Rate Tragedy (40 page)

As Cherry-Garrard sadly observed: ‘The whole business simply bristles with “ifs”.
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Yet, criticism is all too easy with hindsight and, tempting as it is to focus on what went wrong, the fact remains that Captain Scott and his companions achieved something remarkable, exhibiting courage, loyalty and extraordinary physical endurance. The final trio struggled for 1,450 out of a 1,600 mile journey in the worst conditions on earth. Had the weather been just a little better and had they only managed just 350 yards a day more after leaving the Pole, they would have reached One Ton Depot. The point is not that they ultimately failed but that they so very nearly succeeded.

Epilogue

On 18 January 1913 a spruce and festive
Terra Nova
, flags a-flutter, arrived at Cape Evans under the command of a healthy and renewed Teddy Evans. He and his crew leaned over the edge, eager to hear the news, but the figures on the ice seemed strangely subdued. Teddy Evans shouted through a megaphone, ‘Are you all well?’
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There was an ominous silence before Campbell could bring himself to reply that while Scott and his party had reached the Pole, all were dead. Flags were immediately lowered to half mast, the banners and ribbons decorating the wardroom taken down and the champagne and cigars put out to welcome the returning heroes removed. What should have been a joyful reunion became a sombre leave-taking. Before boarding the
Terra Nova
the men gathered around the simple nine-foot-high cross of Australian jarrah they had erected on Observation Hill. On it they inscribed the names of the five who had died and at Cherry-Garrard’s suggestion their epitaph was taken from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. This quotation had been inscribed in a volume of Browning’s poems found in the tent by Scott’s body.

The grief of the survivors was a bond between men who had shared an extraordinary experience and suffered a common loss. However, on their return to civilization, they found their
emotions mirrored on a vast scale. As Cherry-Garrard described, they landed ‘to find the Empire – almost the civilized world – in mourning’. The news, telegraphed by the men of the
Terra Nova
, was made public in Britain in early February 1913. After Amundsen’s vict ory interest in Antarctica had declined and other topics like suffragette militancy, coal strikes and tension in Ulster had dominated the headlines. Now the newspapers vied with each other in emotional and patriotic outpourings. The disaster pushed other news items such as ‘
Crimes passionelles
in France’, ‘The Motor Bandits Trial’, ‘Rioting in Tokyo’, ‘Serbian and Montenegran Attacks’ and ‘The Race Question in South Africa’ off the front page.
The Times
of 11 February declared that: ‘For a time after the arrival of the news yesterday afternoon, people hoped against hope, wondering whether the information had not been understood, since Arctic and Antarctic news at first is largely impregnated with rumour.’ It also recalled Tennyson’s lines on the death of Sir John Franklin while seeking the North-West Passage but changed one word:

Not here! The white south hast thy bones and thou heroic sailor-soul

Art passing on thine happier voyage now

Toward no earthly pole

Headlines like ‘How Captain Scott died’, ‘Eight days of starvation’, ‘His dying appeal to England’, ‘Homage to Heroes’ and ‘No Surrender Oates’ held the public in thrall. Scott had become a national icon. The King’s message of sympathy reflected the mood when he referred to ‘that shocking catastrophe which the English race and the whole scientific world are lamenting’. Only ten months earlier the nation had mourned the loss of the
Titanic
.
Now, as one leader put it, ‘Captain Scott died in more awful circumstances than the
Titanic
.’ Emotional crowds packed into St Paul’s Cathedral on 14 February for a memorial service attended by the King, while thousands stood outside. On the same day, at noon, the 750,000 children of London’s County Council Schools were told the story of Scott’s death by their teachers. It certainly caught the imagination of the young – the Mitford sisters nicknamed their freezing loo ‘the Beardmore’.

As the news reached Britain one journalist reminded his readers that there was ‘one who is still ignorant of the frightful tragedy, that hapless woman, still on the high seas, flushed with hope and expectation, eager to join her husband and to share in the triumphs of his return’. Kathleen, who would not have relished being depicted in this way, had set out in January. After ‘vagabonding’ with cowboys on a ranch in Mexico, sleeping round a cedar wood campfire at night and riding on the engines of trains as they tore across the Mexican prairies she had boarded the RMS
Aorangi
in San Francisco. On 19 February as the ship steamed between Tahiti and Raratonga a nervous captain handed her a wireless message: ‘Captain Scott and six [sic] others perished in a blizzard after reaching the South Pole.’ A stunned Kathleen thanked him politely and went off to have a Spanish lesson, have lunch and then read a book on the
Titanic
. Yet her outward display of strength, so characteristic, masked a deep anguish. She wrote that had she believed ‘firmly in life after death’ she would have thrown herself overboard. However, as she did not, her duty was to make the best of things and exercise the ‘complete self-control’ she had learned from Scott.

On Kathleen’s arrival in New Zealand Atkinson handed over Scott’s journals and his last letter. Their powerful, beautiful language and the spirit they conveyed were what she would have
expected. However, during the months that followed, she must have been struck by the irony that so many things which had eluded Scott in life were posthumously heaped on him. Kathleen was given the status of a wife of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath on the grounds that this honour would have been bestowed on Scott had he survived. The money for which he had always had to struggle began to pour in as the nation responded to his ‘Message to the Public’. By July 1913 the Scott Memorial Fund amounted to £75,000, more than Scott had ever raised in his lifetime. This provided grants of £8,500 to both Kathleen and Oriana, with an additional £3,500 for Peter, £6,000 to Hannah Scott and her daughters, £4,500 to Bowers’s mother and her daughters and £1,250 to Lois, the widow of Edgar Evans. As Oates had been a wealthy man a donation was made to a memorial planned by his regiment. There were also government annuities and pensions – Lois Evans received £48 a year for herself and her three children while Kathleen received £100 a year plus her Admiralty pension of £200 with £25 a year for Peter. Scott’s mother and sisters received an annuity of £300. The residue from the fund of some £12,000, after debts had been settled, was put towards the foundation of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University.

Kathleen resumed her independent and gregarious life, seeking occasional solace in trips abroad to escape from the ‘eulogy and sympathy and notoriety of the Antarctic disaster’,
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and was passionately, even obsessively, devoted to her son. She was gaining increasing recognition as a sculptress and her work now included busts and figures of her dear ‘Con’ like the bronze figure clad in full sledging gear unveiled in London’s Waterloo Place by Balfour in 1916. Others were placed in Portsmouth and Christchurch, New Zealand. In 1922 she married the politician Edward Hilton
Young, later created Lord Kennet of the Dene, after flirting with the idea of T.E. Lawrence, whom she was sculpting in marble, as a suitor. She lived to see her son Peter fulfil Scott’s ambition for him by becoming a renowned naturalist. She died in 1947.

But what of the others whose lives were touched by the tragedy? Amundsen was profoundly moved by Scott’s death. ‘Horrible, horrible,’ was his response when he heard the news in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Scott’s tragedy eclipsed his own achievement. The popular feeling grew that, by robbing Scott of his rightful prize, Amundsen had broken Scott’s heart. Amundsen also agonized over his decision not to leave a spare can of fuel for Scott at the Pole, now knowing that this might have made a difference to the final outcome.

Amundsen never married but continued to seek new challenges. In 1923 he tried to fly from Alaska to Spitsbergen but his plane crashed on take-off. In 1925 he and some companions set off in two planes on a flight from Spitsbergen towards the North Pole but were forced down onto the pack ice. In 1926 he commanded the first expedition to cross the Arctic in an airship called the
Norge
piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile. Two years later Nobile crashed on a flight to the North Pole aboard the airship
Italia
. Amundsen took off in a small seaplane to his rescue, flying into a chill winter sky, and was never seen again. Some months later the plane’s floats and a petrol tank were found. Amundsen and his comrades had clearly used them as liferafts but had nonetheless perished – a not inappropriate Polar end for Amundsen.

Scott’s other great rival Shackleton was in New York when he first heard the news of Scott’s death. Reuters quoted him as saying: ‘It is inconceivable that an expedition so well equipped as Captain Scott’s could perish in a blizzard,’ adding that he had faced the severest blizzards without disaster.
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Shackleton also
continued to explore. In 1914 he put together an expedition with the ambitious aim of crossing Antarctica from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. However, his ship the
Endurance
was crushed by the ice. The crew, under the command of Frank Wild, sought refuge on Elephant Island while Shackleton and five of his men, including Thomas Crean, made a desperate but successful bid to row nearly 1,000 miles to South Georgia to fetch help in a 22-foot whaler. The crew was eventually rescued. In 1922 an undeterred Shackleton set out once again with Frank Wild as his second in command to explore Graham Land, but the physical weakness he had fought so hard to master overcame him. He died of heart failure on board ship and was buried on South Georgia. He was forty-seven. Wild went to Africa, but developed drink problems. He died in Transvaal of pneumonia in 1930.

Sir Clements Markham was cut to the heart by the loss of Scott. In fact, his own death was only three years away. Preferring to read by candlelight, despite the availability of electricity, his bedclothes caught fire and he died of shock at the age of eighty-five.

Hannah Scott was granted a grace and favour apartment in Hampton Court – a place with pleasant associations as it was where she had seen her son married. Oriana Wilson, who had sat so quiet and sphinx-like as the
Terra Nova
carried her husband away from her, proved as practical in her own way as Kathleen. She threw herself into activity, winning the CBE for her work with the New Zealand Red Cross during the First World War. However, the death of her husband caused her to lose her faith in God, once so central to her life and that of Edward Wilson. She later kept in close touch with the work of the Scott Polar Research Institute, never remarried and died at seventy in 1945.

Captain Oates’s mother, Caroline – the only woman he had ever loved, as he confided in Wilson on the eve of his death
– never recovered. Every night she slept in the room which had been his at Gestingthorpe and she carried one of his regimental epaulettes in her bag. She also erected a brass plaque to her son on the north wall of Gestingthorpe Church which she cleaned every week, and ordered his diary to be destroyed, though not before her daughter Violet had secretly copied extracts from it. Letters of condolence flooded in – the manner of Oates’s death struck a chord around the world as the epitome of what was to be expected from an English officer and a gentleman. Anton, the little Russian who became Oates’s stable boy, had a strange fate – he fought in World War One, joined the Red Army during the revolution and helped establish a collective farm, but was killed by lightning in 1932.

Lois Evans, described by a condescending
Western Mail
as ‘quite a superior and refined little woman’, erected a memorial to her husband Edgar in Rhosili Church and settled in a Swansea suburb in a house she named ‘Terra Nova’. She was thankful that her husband had been spared the later suffering of the others, but had to contend with a persistent suggestion in the press that Edgar Evans’s mental and physical breakdown had cost the others their lives. In 1948 she attended the premiere of the Royal Command Film
Scott of the Antarctic
and watched James Robertson Justice play her husband. John Mills played Scott. She died in 1952.

The surviving members of the expedition had varying fates. The ebullient Teddy Evans had suffered the death of his wife Hilda from peritonitis on board ship returning from New Zealand. Later he had a highly successful naval career, winning the DSO, rising to Vice-Admiral and created a Labour Peer, Lord Mountevans of the
Broke
, in 1946. The
Broke
was the destroyer he had fearlessly commanded during a fierce engagement against a pack of German destroyers in 1917.

Oates’s soulmate Dr Atkinson survived the war, winning the DSO and then the Albert Medal for rescuing men from a burning ship in Dover harbour, which cost him an eye. He died at only forty-six in 1929.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the sensitive and short-sighted young man who made the memorable mid-winter journey to Cape Crozier with Wilson and Bowers to collect emperor penguin eggs, never recovered from the loss of his companions and was haunted for the rest of his life by the thought that in March 1912 he should have taken the dogs beyond One Ton Depot to look for the Polar party, only some sixty miles away on the Barrier. He had a recurring dream that ‘the hut door opens, letting in its mist of cold air, and the Polar party walks in, shaking the snow from their clothes and the ice from their faces . . . The disappointment of finding that it is only a dream will last for days.’
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In 1913, as the sole survivor of the Winter Journey, he took the eggs to the Natural History Museum, where they were received without a word of thanks. He even had to insist on being given a receipt. During the First World War he commanded a squadron of armoured cars. Afterwards he lived quietly, periodically troubled by illness, both mental and physical, and died in 1959.