Scott of the Antarctic A Life of Courage and Tragedy Hardback - 2006

Excerpt

Chapter One: St. Paul’s, 14 February 1913

I am more proud of my most loved son’s goodness than for anything he has done and all this glory & honour the country is giving him is naturally a gratification to a Mother’s heart but very little consolation—you know how much my dear son was to me, and I have never a bitter memory or an unkind word to recall. Hannah Scott, 21 February 1913

Your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying “What mean these stones?” Joshua IV. 21. Scott Memorial, Port Chalmers, New Zealand

In the early hours of 10 February 1913, an old converted whaler “crept like a phantom” into the little harbour of Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island and dropped anchor. For many of the men on board this was their first smell of grass and trees in over twenty-six months, but with secrecy at a premium only two of her officers were landed before the ship weighed anchor and slipped back out to sea to disappear into the pre-dawn gloom from which she had emerged.

While the ship steamed offshore in a self-imposed quarantine, the officers were taken by the nightwatchman to the harbour master’s home, and first thing next morning to the Oamaru post office. More than two years earlier an elaborate and coded arrangement had been set in place to release what everyone had then hoped would be very different news, but with contractual obligations still to be honoured, a cable was sent and the operator confined to house arrest until Central News could exploit its exclusive rights to the scoop the two men had brought.

The ship that had so quietly stolen into Oamaru harbour was the Terra Nova, the news was of Captain Scott’s death on his return from the South Pole, and within hours it was around the world. For almost a year Britain had been learning to live with the fact that Scott had been beaten by the Norwegian Amundsen in the “Race for the Pole,” but nothing in any reports from the Antarctic had prepared the country for the worst disaster in her polar history since the loss of Sir John Franklin more than sixty years earlier. “There is a dreadful report in the Portuguese newspapers,” a bewildered Sir Clements Markham, the “father” of British Antarctic exploration and Scott’s first patron, scrawled from his Lisbon hotel the following day, “that Captain Scott reached the South Pole on January 18th and that he perished in a snow storm—a telegram from New Zealand . . . If this is true we have lost the greatest polar explorer that ever lived . . . We can never hope to see his like again. Telegraph if it is true. I am plunged in grief.”

If there had ever been any doubt of its truth in London, it did not last long, and with Scott’s widow, at sea on her way to New Zealand to meet her husband, almost alone in her ignorance, the nation prepared to share in Markham’s grief. Less than a year earlier the sinking of the Titanic had brought thousands to St. Paul’s Cathedral to mourn, and within four days of the first news from Oamaru the crowds were out in even greater force, silently waiting in the raw chill of a February dawn for a memorial service that was not scheduled to start until twelve.

There could have been nowhere more fitting than the burial place of Nelson and Wellington for the service, no church that so boldly embodied the mix of public and private sorrow that characterised the waiting crowd. During the second half of the old century Dean Stanley had done all he could to assert the primacy of Westminster Abbey, but as London’s Protestant cathedral, built by a Protestant for a Protestant country, St. Paul’s spoke for a special sense of Englishness and national election as nowhere else could. “Within the Cathedral all is hushed and dim,” recorded The Times’s correspondent. “The wintry light of the February morning is insufficient to illuminate the edifice, and circles of electric light glow with  a golden radiance in the choir and nave and transepts. Almost every  one attending the service is in mourning or dressed in sombre garments. Gradually the building fills, and as it does so one catches glimpses of  the scarlet tunics of distinguished soldiers, of scarlet gowns, the garb of City aldermen, and of the golden epaulettes of naval officers shining  out conspicuously against the dark background of their uniforms. The band of the Coldstream Guards is stationed beneath the dome . . . and this, too, affords a vivid note of colour. Behind the band sit a number of bluejackets.”

For all the trappings of the occasion, however, the statesmen, foreign dignitaries and diplomats, it was the simplicity of the service that was so striking. On the stroke of twelve the King, dressed in the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, took his place, and as the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London and the Dean of St. Paul’s processed with the other clergy into the choir, the congregation sang “Rock of Ages.” The Lord’s Prayer was then read, followed by the antiphon “Lead Me Lord in Thy Righteousness,” and Psalms XXIII—“The Lord Is My Shepherd”—and XC—“Lord Thou Hast Been Our Refuge.”

It was a short service, without a sermon. “Behold I shew you a mystery,” Dean Inge read from 1 Corinthians XV:

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal
must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass
the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?

As St. Paul’s ringing challenge faded away, the sounds of a drum roll swelled, and the Dead March from Saul filled the cathedral. For all those present this was a moment of almost unbearable poignancy, but with that ceremonial genius that the imperial age had lately mastered, the most memorable and starkly simple was still to come.

As the Prayer of Committal was read, the names of the dead—Robert Falcon Scott, Lawrence Oates, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Edgar Evans—filled the “stricken silence” of the dimly lit church with their absence. “As we go down to the dust,” the choir sang, just as they had done to the same Kieff chant at the memorial service for those lost on the Titanic, “and weeping o’er the grave we make our song: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servants with Thy Saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.”

With a final hymn sung by the whole congregation, and a blessing from the Archbishop, the service was over. The National Anthem was sung  to the accompaniment of the Coldstreams’ band, and as the sound reached the streets outside the vast crowd of some ten thousand still waiting took it up. The King was escorted to the south door, and to the strains of Beethoven’s “Funeral March on the death of a hero,” the congregation slowly dispersed.

For all its simplicity and familiarity, it had in some ways been an odd service, combining as it did the raw immediacy of a funeral with the more celebratory distance of a memorial. It might have been only four days since the news from Oamaru reached England, but by that time Scott and his men had been dead for almost a year, their bodies lying frozen in the tent in which they had been found. “There is awe in the thought that it all happened a year ago,” the Daily Sketch had written on 11 February, shamelessly milking the idea for all the pathos it was worth. “When Amundsen came back in the spring of last year and Polar discussions were in all men’s mouths and newspapers—even then, the Englishmen, the goal accomplished, lay quiet in the snows. Through the months since . . . while wives and friends set forth for meetings and counted time, they lay oblivious. All was over for them long ago.”

For the families of the dead there could be nothing but bitterness in the thought, but for the nation as a whole it made the transition from grief to celebration that much easier. In its columns the Sketch might “quiver in unison” with the “lonely pathetic figure” of Scott’s wife “on the far Pacific,” but the lapse of time had an important psychological impact, subsuming the recent past into a longer historical narrative in a way that enabled the country to metamorphose the reality of that tent into an icy shrine, and Scott and his men into the quasi-legendary heroes they immediately became.

Above all else, however, it was a sense of absence rather than presence that contributed most profoundly to the mood of national mourning in a way that looked forward to the psychology of the Cenotaph and the Unknown Soldier rather than back to any precedent. During November of 1920 the hundreds of thousands who filed past the tomb of the Unknown Soldier could all superimpose their own image on the nameless and rankless corpse, and in a similar way the men and women who mourned Scott all had different ideas of precisely what they were mourning.

To some the meaning of the deaths of Scott and his men was religious, to others secular; to some they were the embodiment of Christian sacrifice or English chivalry, to others again of pacific courage or scientific dedication. “No more pathetic and tragic story has ever been unfolded,” The Times’s leader announced on the twelfth, just twenty-four hours after the country had begun to digest the news, “than that of the gallant band of Antarctic explorers whose unavailing heroism now fills the public mind with mingled grief and admiration . . . Nothing in the painful yet inspiring narrative is more touching than the fidelity with which CAPTAIN SCOTT and his comrades, fighting for their very lives with the remorseless forces of Nature, clung in ever increasing peril and weakness to the scientific records and geological specimens which it was the primary object of their expedition to secure. It is thus that they snatched victory out of the jaws of death . . . The admiralty regards them, and the Navy honours them, as ‘killed in action,’ and the civilized world will endorse the verdict.”

There was something, however, about the response to Scott’s death that differentiates it sharply from the mourning over the grave of the Unknown Soldier. There can be no doubting the reality of people’s grief when the news reached England, but it was a grief shot through with a sense of gratitude to the men who had restored to them their emotional birthright as Englishmen. “The keynote of this wonderful ‘In Memoriam,’ ” the Daily Sketch proudly wrote, “was at once its simplicity and its quiet exultation.” “To mourn!” it demanded, the day after the memorial service. “Yes, we had come to mourn—yet not with wailing and lamenting, but rather with a song of thankfulness for that these sons of our common country had died as they had lived, in the spirit which is the noblest heritage of Englishmen . . . Could Nelson, sleeping in the crypt below, hear those mighty trumps of a nation’s requiem, he would know that though the years roll on, yet, as long as England expects, there are heroes of her blood and race to answer truly to the call.”

The real value of their deaths, The Times insisted, “is moral and spiritual, and therefore in the truest sense national. It is a proof that in an age of depressing materialism men can still be found to face known hardship, heavy risk, and even death, in pursuit of an idea, and that the unconquerable will can carry them through, loyal to the last to the charge they have undertaken. That is the temper of men who build empires, and while it lives among us we shall be capable of maintaining the Empire that our fathers builded . . . So we owe honour and gratitude to Captain Scott and his companions for showing that the solid stuff of national character is still among us, and that men are still willing to be ‘killed in action’ for an idea.”

The news of Scott’s death would have struck a chord at any time, but what is easily ignored in all this is that it came at a moment when Britain was in urgent need of the kind of reassurance it seemed to offer. The horrors of the First World War have cast so seductive a glow over the age that immediately preceded it that it is easy to forget what it was really like, seeing it instead as a last Golden Age, a final swansong of patrician ease and self-confidence before the watershed of the Somme and Jutland destroyed its certainties for ever.

There is something about the iconography of the period, too—something about its ripeness of institutional expression, its imperial gravity, its command of ritual—that no amount of historical deconstruction can shake. This has nothing in any crude sense to do with the mere exercise of power, but from the rent rolls of its statesmen to the flickering cinematographic dumb-show of the old Queen’s Jubilee parade, the age before the Great War still projects an illusion of ceremonial and functional harmony that seems to paralyse dissent.

It was, after all, little more than a decade since a cabinet that boasted a marquess for Prime Minister, another at the War Office, a duke for Lord President, the son of a duke as Secretary of India, an earl, a viscount, three barons and a brace of baronets, seemed to hold out to Englishmen a promise of social and historic permanence. In the United States—the power of the future—and France—the historic enemy of the past—politics and social status had long parted company, but faced with a government that seemed to reconcile privilege and responsibility, heredity and power as effortlessly as Salisbury’s did, it is hard not to succumb to the illusion.

Yet if images of the King presiding at Cowes, of Balfour golfing at North Berwick, or Sir Edward Grey fly-fishing on the Itchen, seem to extend the shelf-life of the “Splendid” in Splendid Isolation long beyond its doctrinal usefulness, it certainly did not seem a Golden Age at the time. The Poet Laureate Alfred Austin’s idea of heaven might be to sit in an English garden and receive telegrams alternately announcing British victories by land and sea, but after the humiliations of the Boer War at the hands of a nation no bigger than “Flintshire and Denbighshire combined,” it was not just Kipling who could see the writing on the walls of Tyre.

There are certain moments in modern British history that have a psychological impact out of all proportion to their practical consequences, and the war in South Africa is one of these. In the past even such defeats as Majuba Hill could be transmuted into allegories of British heroism, but as Europe howled in moral outrage at British concentration camps, and British troops came invalided home in their thousands, the jubilant vision of Herbert Bismarck, the Anglophobe son of the “Iron Chancellor,” of a country “smothered in its own fat” seemed something more than Prussian wishful thinking.