From Ice Floes to Battlefields Page 25

  After quoting Burns and praising Thomas Hardy (who was receiving his degree in absentia) Barrie chastised himself for the number of references he was making to those of his own calling. He then pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. He opened it carefully and began reading the letter which his friend Scott had written to him a decade previously from a tent on the Ross ice shelf: ‘We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot. Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write you a world of farewell. I want you to think well of me and my end.’

  Barrie paused to explain that Scott’s next few sentences were too private to be read out in public, then continued:22

  Goodbye – I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple pleasure which I had planned for the future in our long marches … We are in a desperate state – feet frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and our cheery conversation … Later …

  Barrie paused again. After explaining that Scott’s closing words were difficult to decipher, he continued: ‘We are very near the end … We did intend to finish ourselves when things proved like this, but we have decided to die naturally without.’

  Barrie invited his audience to imagine they were outside Scott’s tent, listening to the cheerful songs and conversation. The story of Scott reminded him of that of the young mountaineer who had died after falling down a glacier and whose body had been found years later by his friends, who were by then all old men. Scott and his companions would, like the dead mountaineer, be forever young. The songs and conversations from the tent showed that men of courage could also be light-hearted.

  Barrie then told his audience about a young Royal Naval Division officer who had, during the war, been dropped overboard off Gallipoli and swum for two hours in enemy waters. The young man in question had, he told them, regarded the episode as ‘a gay affair’ rather than a life-threatening exploit. When cheers for Freyberg had died down, Barrie recalled a light-hearted moment he had shared with Scott in Scotland when the latter had tried to rile Barrie by claiming that haggis was nothing but boiled bagpipes. Barrie reminded the students to spend time with friends as well as at lectures and to enjoy the rich heritage of their university. He urged them to be courageous and, in the words of Browning, to ‘greet the unseen with a cheer’ and to ‘fight on’ for the ‘old red gown’ they wore.

  Newspapers all over the country reported on the graduation ceremony and quoted from Barrie’s speech. Barrie gave permission for Scott’s letter (bar the personal passages) to be reproduced so that people could read the explorer’s courageous words for themselves.

  Fridtjof Nansen, whom Barrie had also quoted during his rectorial address, was becoming increasingly recognised as an international statesmen. During a wartime visit to the United States on behalf of his country, he had learned of and been impressed by President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points for Peace’. In 1919, when serving as a member of the Norwegian delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference, Nansen had become aware of the plight of prisoners and refugees displaced by the war. In his new role as High Commissioner for Refugees to the League of Nations, he worked tirelessly on their behalf, including through the introduction of the ‘Nansen Passport’ for stateless persons. Nansen was considered as being in line for a Nobel Prize.

  The Conference had decided that Svalbard, including Spitsbergen, should become part of Norway, but that Britain, the United States, Sweden, Japan and other treaty signatories, should retain rights to engage in coal mining and other commercial activities. It now seemed unlikely, however, that shares in the Northern Exploration Company would prove to be as profitable an investment as Ponting, George Wyatt and others had once hoped.

  Tryggve Gran had returned to Norway in 1921 and rejoined his country’s air force. His last years in Britain had not been particularly happy ones: he had joined one of the teams attempting to fly across the Atlantic, but had not been successful; he had damaged his already weakened left leg in a motorcycle accident and his glamorous actress wife had returned to the stage and filed for divorce.23

  At the end of summer 1922, Roald Amundsen announced that he would attempt to fly over the North Pole during 1923.24 When he had returned from his Antarctic triumph doubts were being expressed about both Cook’s and Peary’s claims to have reached the North Pole. During the war Amundsen raised funds for a new expedition by buying and selling ships at a profit. In July 1918 he left Tromsø, but soon became trapped in the ice. Since then he had made little progress, but was determined to attain his goal, either by ship or by air.

  In October 1922 the British Liberal–Conservative coalition government, which had lasted since the war, finally collapsed. When a general election was called for 15 November, Winston Churchill, who had held his Dundee seat for sixteen years, was in hospital recovering from an appendectomy. He finally arrived in Dundee on 11 November, Armistice Day, but could still not stand for long periods of time or address public meetings in his usual fluent manner. He came fourth behind Labour and Prohibitionist candidates and his own Liberal running mate and found himself without a parliamentary seat, a government post or a job.

  Churchill had suggested in 1919 that the ruins of Ypres should remain as a monument to the British and Allied soldiers who died defending the city and the channel ports.25 Others, including the citizens of Ypres, did not agree and in November 1919 Ypres was awarded both the British Military Cross and the French Croix de Guerre.

  But memorials and monuments were by now something of a national preoccupation. On 11 November 1920 the body of an unknown soldier had been buried in Westminster Abbey in the presence of the king, members of the government, a guard of honour of VCs (including Freyberg) and 100 women who had lost both husbands and sons in the war. The names of British and Allied war dead were being recorded on memorials and tombstones in graveyards near battlefields on the Western Front and other theatres of war. Memorials, designed by leading architects such as Edwin Lutyens, included one at Tyne Cot, near Ypres. When King George had visited it on 11 May 1922 he had been moved to say:

  We can truly say that the whole circuit of the Earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon Earth through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.

  Graveyards, whether beside memorials or annexed to local cemeteries, were set in gardens based on a designed by Lutyens’ friend and collaborator, garden designer Gertrude Jekyll.

  Memorials were also being planned in Britain for those who had ‘no grave but the sea’ or had died fighting on ships. The Admiralty commissioned three identical obelisks to be erected at Plymouth, Portsmouth and Chatham to serve both as memorials and landmarks for shipping.

  On 4 December 1922 Cherry-Garrard’s book, The Worst Journey in the World, was finally published. Reviews were generally favourable, particularly of Cherry’s description of the Cape Crozier journey and the hardships he, Wilson and Bowers had suffered. The Times (which regularly published Cherry’s letters on Antarctic expeditions and other matters) had recently announced that an exhibition of Wilson’s watercolours and drawings from the Discovery and Terra Nova expeditions would be taking place at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.26

  Teddy Evans had published two books: South with Scott was his short, personal account of the expedition; Keeping the Seas described his wartime naval exploits. Evans was currently serving in Hong Kong as captain of HMS Carlisle. He had recently been awarded a Board of Trade medal for gallantry after swimming from his ship to rescue passengers from SS Hong Moh, which had sunk after running aground in poor weather.

  Cecil Meares had recently returned from the Far East. After joining the RNAS he had undertaken a number of logistical, intelligence and administrative roles in London, France and Italy. In 1921 he had joined a civilian delegation of former air force officers who had travelled
to Japan to give guidance and instruction to the Japanese air force.27 The delegation was led by William Forbes-Sempill, a Scottish peer who had served in the RFC and RNAS; Thomas Orde-Lees of the Endurance expedition was the delegation’s parachute expert. Before leaving Japan, Meares had been presented with a sword and awarded the Third-Class Order of the Sacred Treasure.28

  On 13 December 1922 Victor Campbell retired from his second naval career and began considering where he might live. He had always like Newfoundland, which he had visited as a young sailor and which, although on a latitude with Norway, had a less extreme climate.29

  The enquiry into the circumstances of the RND’s Antwerp ‘affair’ had been somewhat inconclusive, given the scope for miscommunication there had been in the confusion surrounding the evacuation of the troops. On 6 June 1919 the Prince of Wales spoke at a final RND parade on Horse Guards Parade in London. He thanked those present for their service ‘whether on the slopes of Achi Baba, or on the Somme, or in the valley of the Ancre or, down to the very end, at the storming of the Hindenberg Line.’ The prince noted that few of the men his father had inspected in February 1915 at Blandford Camp were still alive. During the war 600 RND officers and almost 10,000 other ranks had died in battle, from injuries or from disease; over 30,000 others had also been wounded.

  Rupert Brooke, the RND’s most famous recruit had, while based at Blandford Camp, written two prophetic sonnets entitled The Dead:30

  Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!

  There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,

  But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.

  These laid the world away; poured out the red

  Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be

  Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,

  That men call age; and those who would have been.

  Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

  In the run up to Christmas 1922, Herbert Ponting’s The Great White South was advertised as being an ideal Christmas gift. At the Philharmonic Hall, where Ponting had shown his expedition films to tens of thousands of people, Climbing Mount Everest, a short film about a recent attempt to scale the world’s highest mountain, was attracting considerable interest.

  George Mallory, a leading member of the expedition, had been a contemporary of Cherry-Garrard at Winchester College. He was already determined to take part in the next attempt to claim the summit (sometimes called ‘The Third Pole’) for Britain, as was Noel Odell, a geologist with Arctic experience. Odell was keen to recruit for their team a young athlete he had met when climbing in Wales a few years previously.

  Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine, born in 1902, was too young to have served in the war but had somewhat surprised the War Office by submitting his designs for a gear which enabled machine guns to be fired from aircraft without damaging the propeller blades. A fine oarsman, he had taken part in a 1919 ‘Peace Regatta’ at Henley and rowed for Merton College, Oxford, and in the 1922 Boat Race. Irvine was now planning to join a ‘Merton College Arctic Expedition’ to Spitsbergen, which his friend and fellow student George Binney was organising. Binney, who had organised a similar trip in 1921, had already recruited Noel Odell as expedition geologist. He had also asked Tom Longstaff, who had taken part in Binney’s previous expedition and in the 1922 attempt on Everest, to act as expedition doctor; Longstaff’s late father, a wealthy businessman and friend of Clements Markham, had been a major funder of Scott’s Discovery expedition.31

  Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine and George Binney, with assistance from their experienced elders, seemed well-equipped and ready to ‘greet the unseen with a cheer’, as J.M. Barrie had suggested young people should be prepared to do in the new, post-war world.

  Notes

  1. The Times, 17 January 1922.

  2. Young, A Great Task of Happiness, chapter 16.

  3. The bust of Lloyd George is in the Imperial War Museum; the statue based on Arnold Lawrence is now outside the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

  4. The Times, 16 May 1922.

  5. It seems likely that the anonymous article in The Times of 17 January was a ‘trailer’ by Ponting for his article (22 January 1922) about his new film.

  6. The Times, 19 May and 16 June 1919.

  7. Cherry, The Worst Journey in the World, p. 188 and endnote.

  8. Lashly to Cherry-Garrard, 31 January 1920, SPRI/MS 873/2/12.

  9. Speak, Deb – Geographer, Scientist, Antarctic Explorer, chapters 3 and 4.

  10. The Regimental Role of Honour and War Record of the Artists’ Rifles (1922), available at https://archive.org/details/regimentalrollof00highiala; Sellers, Hood Battalion.

  11. Guly, ‘George Murray Levick’.

  12. Levick, Antarctic Penguins: A Study of their Social Habits was published in Britain and North America in 1914. A copy of Levick’s paper on the sexual habits of Adelies was rediscovered in the archives of the Natural History Museum in 2012 (following which it was displayed and republished). Levick’s photographic records notebook, which he appears to have dropped at Cape Evans during the expedition, emerged out of the ice in 2014. Both these events were the subject of extensive press coverage.

  13. The Times, 16 January 1923.

  14. Although Barrie had not yet visited St Andrews in his new role, one of his plays had recently been performed there. Haig, an avid golfer, was a regular visitor to the city in his capacity as captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club.

  15. Thanks to Rachel Hart, Muniments archivist and deputy head of Special Collections, Special Collections Division, University of St Andrews, for providing the starting-point for this section; additional information is from the public domain, including the website of the National Portrait Gallery.

  16. The team included H.G. Wells, Kipling (Barrie’s successor as rector of St Andrews), Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, Jerome K. Jerome, G.K. Chesterton and A.A. Milne.

  17. As women had only relatively recently been given the vote, J.M. Barrie checked with the principal whether the university awarded honorary degrees to women; the answer was affirmative so Ellen Terry obtained her honorary degree (Letter in University of St Andrews Special Collection).

  18. After the war Barrie sometimes hired Stanway House in the Cotswolds, which is owned by the members of the wider Wemyss family. Barrie paid for the pavilion at Stanway cricket ground, which was used by ‘his’ cricket team.

  19. Guthrie had, following the war, been commissioned to paint a group portrait of seventeen wartime political leaders and statesmen, including Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George, Grey, Balfour, Bonar Law and Kitchener and leading politicians from South Africa, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and India. In 1922 Guthrie was still working on the portrait sketches; he completed the painting in 1930, shortly before his death. The painting and companion portraits of leading navy and army officers (including Wemyss and Haig) by Sir John Stockdale Cope and John Singer Sargent hang in the National Portrait Gallery; Guthrie’s portrait sketches are in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

  20. Details of the day’s events were published in several newspapers; there is also a short film which includes some of the proceedings, including an amusing exchange between Barrie and Ellen Terry; see www.britishpathe.com/video/sir-james-barrie.

  21. The speech was published in whole or in part in several newspapers and by Hodder & Stoughton (J.M. Barrie, Courage, undated but presumed to be 1922).

  22. The unpublished sentences refer to an apparent cooling of relations between Scott and Barrie; the words were edited out of ‘official’ versions of the letter but published (apparently for the first time) in Andrew Birkin, J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys, London: Constable, 1979, pp. 209–10 .

  23. Flight, 21 October 1920; Cross & Cockade, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1993.

  24. Amundsen, My Life as an Explorer, chapters 4 and 5, and The Times (which reported regularly on Amundsen’s progress throughout 1922).

  25. Commonwealth Military Graves Commission: http:/
/www.cwgc.org.

  26. The Times, 24 October 1922. The exhibition ran from 5 March to 14 April 1923, and was opened by Sir William Rothenstein, Principal of the Royal College of Art. Rothenstein had, for the past ten years, regularly stayed near Stroud, Gloucestershire, about 15 miles from Wilson’s home town of Cheltenham.

  27. During the 1920s Sempill was suspected of passing information on the development of British aircraft to the Japanese, but he was not prosecuted (National Archives, KV2/871–4, released for public viewing in 2002); Meares’ own papers relating to the mission are in Fonds Cecil Meares, Vancouver (see www.archivescanada.ca). There is no suggestion that Meares, who returned to Britain before Sempill, was aware of what the latter was suspected of doing.

  28. Flight, 26 October 1922, p. 620.

  29. Campbell, Wicked Mate, p.13.

  30. Brooke’s poem was later used as the inscription on the RND memorial in London.

  31. The story of Mallory, Irvine and their companions is told in Davis, Into the Silence.

  Epilogue

  Where do stories and histories begin and end? This book spans the time from the beginning of the Terra Nova expedition to the end of the year of the tenth anniversary of the reaching of the South Pole and the deaths of the South Pole party.

  But the roots and offshoots of these stories continue …

  If Cecil Meares had not sat up overnight with his injured fellow-officer Major Lawrence Johnston in October 1914, perhaps we would not be able to enjoy Hidcote Garden, Johnston’s horticultural masterpiece and legacy in the Cotswolds.