From Ice Floes to Battlefields Page 26

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard met Johnston in 1923, when they were visiting Bodnant (where Bernard Freyberg and his new wife had recently spent their honeymoon), as members of a gardening club.1 Cherry-Garrard, the ‘Antarctic’ who was perhaps most damaged by his experiences and the loss of his friends Wilson and Bowers, had recently published his testament of friendship to them, a work which raised the bar for anyone writing about Antarctic travel.

  Harry Pennell, whom Cherry-Garrard so admired, had no children of his own, but his travels inspired descendants of his godson, Lewin Pennell, to visit and work in Antarctica.

  The Scott Polar Research Institute is one of the finest legacies Scott and his ‘Antarctics’ could have hoped for. More recently, Cheltenham’s Art Gallery and Museum has been renamed simply as ‘The Wilson’, in honour of Edward Wilson (whose collection it houses) and his father, who co-founded the town’s museum.

  Writing this book has convinced me (although I needed little persuasion) that life and death are matters of chance and coincidence. If Bernard Freyberg had, as he wished he had, joined Scott’s expedition, might the outcome of the expedition have been different? Might Scott and others have lived, or might Freyberg have died and so not fought with such distinction in the First World War? If Harry Pennell had not met Cecil Prowse in Lyttelton in 1912, perhaps Pennell would not have been on the Queen Mary on 31 May 1916. If William James had taken less of a dislike to Prowse, he might have been on the ship during the battle of Jutland. Or perhaps Pennell, like Terra Nova stoker Robert Brissenden, was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Alf Cheetham, who had survived so many crossings of the Southern Ocean, seems to have been unfortunate compared to others on the expedition who survived ‘near misses’: Teddy Evans (scurvy and sea-battles), William Lashly (crevasse falls and a fatally mined Queen Mary) and Tryggve Gran (several air accidents).

  Several expedition members died, through chance or choice, to save or stay with others: Oates, Bowers, Wilson and Henry Rennick. They join countless others who fell during the war whilst helping fallen or injured comrades.

  Anyone who visits Ypres and the Somme cannot, I believe, fail to be moved by the sight of the huge memorials with their lists of names and the graveyards with their rows of immaculate tombstones, interspersed by plants. When I visited Frederick ‘Sep’ Kelly’s grave near Beaucourt someone had placed a note on it saying ‘Your music will live forever.’ I hope Kelly would have been pleased.

  Thanks to Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission there are, as Rupert Brooke envisaged, corners of foreign fields that are forever England – or Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Belgium, France, Germany, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Australia, India, Barbados: the list goes on. But, pace Winston Churchill, the people of Ypres were right about their home: the wonderful In Flanders Field Museum (housed in the rebuilt Cloth Hall) is more of a legacy for a new generation than the rubble of people’s former homes would ever have been.

  A more ephemeral but visually stunning legacy of the war was ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, an installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper, which filled the moat of the Tower of London for several months during 2014. Some of the millions of people who visited the installation will have noticed, and maybe visited, the Merchant Navy Memorial, across the road from the Tower. Designed by Lutyens, it commemorates the 20,000 men whose names are listed on the memorial; those names include those of ‘Alf’ Cheetham and his young son William.

  Scott and his men lived through times of great change – they trained on sailing ships but lived to plan crossings of polar regions by aircraft. Pennell loved the dynamic buzz of London life, but also enjoyed the peace of Awliscombe and Oddington. His name appears on the war memorials in both villages as well as on the huge naval memorial on the seafront near Portsmouth. He, like three of his ‘afterguard’ on the deck of the Terra Nova on the morning of 1 April 1912, did not survive the war.

  This book has proved to be one of connections – the following ‘chain’ provides, I feel, an appropriate coda. Guests arriving by train for Pennell’s wedding on 15 April 1915 would have alighted at Adlestrop, the nearest station to Oddington. Less than a year before Pennell’s wedding, on Wednesday, 24 June 1914, a train made an unscheduled stop at the station. One of the passengers was Edward Thomas, a journalist who had recently begun to write poetry. The unexpected stop stayed in his mind:

  Yes. I remember Adlestrop

  The name, because one afternoon

  Of heat, the express-train drew up there

  Unwontedly. It was late June.

  The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

  No one left and no one came

  On the bare platform. What I saw

  Was Adlestrop – only the name

  And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

  And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

  No whit less still and lonely fair

  Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

  And for that minute a blackbird sang

  Close by, and round him, mistier,

  Farther and farther, all the birds

  Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire

  Thomas was on his way to Dymock, Gloucestershire, where he was due to meet Rupert Brooke and other writers and poets. On 9 April 1917 Edward Thomas died near Arras. Five days later, a few miles away, Brooke’s former messmate, Edward Nelson, left the battlefield and returned to England.

  We will never know whether Nelson read the poem or about Thomas’ death and made the connection. But anyone who has visited the site of Adlestrop station will have noticed that the surrounding hedgerows seem to be full of bird song – perhaps ‘all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ also sang on the day of Harry Pennell and Katie Hodson’s wedding.

  The threads of history seem endless and interwoven.

  Just over a century ago Murray Levick dropped a notebook containing lists of exposures he had used when taking photographs in Antarctica; in 2013 the notebook emerged from the ice, the lists of numbers still legible.2 In April 2015 the negatives and prints of photographs which ‘Birdie’ Bowers had taken on his way to the South Pole unexpectedly came to auction; they had not been seen for decades.3 The following weekend, as the centenary of the Gallipoli landings were being commemorated, earthquakes and avalanches in the Himalayas killed thousands, reminding us that nature can be as deadly as weapons of war.4

  I end this stream of loosely connected thoughts with an apology: I have no ready answers to the ‘big questions’ about the First World War. But from what I have gleaned about Scott’s ‘Antarctics’, each man did his best according to his abilities and circumstances, whether amongst the ice floes or on the battlefields. In a very different age from our own, they did their duty, fought for their country. They displayed ‘Courage’ – and, as J.M. Barrie would have expected of Scott’s men, greeted the unknown with cheer. They lived up to the epitaph Cherry-Garrard suggested for their own memorial to the South Pole party: ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’.

  Surely that is all we can expect of them.

  Notes

  1. Pearson, p. 224.

  2. New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust website, www.nzaht.org/AHT/Levicks-notebook.

  3. Lot 242 in auction of 18 April 2015 at Henry Armitage and Son, Devizes.

  4. The Gallipoli centenary commemorations took place on 24–25 April 2015; the earthquake which started the avalanches and wrought so much destruction began on 25 April 2015.

  Appendices

  Appendix A: Expedition Personnel

  Note: All naval officers are RN unless stated; all Petty Officers (‘PO’) are RN.

  Shore party officers and scientists

  Dr Edward Atkinson (RN), 1881–1929, surgeon/parasitologist (nicknames: Atch, Jane)

  Lieutenant Henry Bowers (Royal Indian Marine), 1883–1912 (Birdie)

  Lieutenant Victor Campbell (retired, Emergency List),
1875–1956 (The Wicked [First] Mate)

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1886–1959, assistant biologist (Cherry)

  Bernard Day, 1884–1952, motor engineer

  Frank Debenham, 1883–1965, geologist (Deb)

  Lieutenant Edward Evans, 1881–1957 (Teddy)

  Sub-Lieutenant Tryggve Gran (Royal Norwegian Navy), 1889–1980, ski expert (Trigger)

  Dr George Murray Levick (RN), 1877–1956, surgeon, scientist

  Cecil Meares, 1877–1937, in charge of dogs

  Edward Nelson, 1883–1923, marine biologist (Marie)

  Captain Lawrence Oates (army), 1880–1912 (Titus, Soldier)

  Herbert Ponting, 1870–1935, photographer (Ponko)

  Raymond Priestley, 1886–1974, geologist

  Captain Robert Scott, 1868–1912 (The Owner)

  George Simpson, 1878–1965, meteorologist (Sunny Jim)

  T. Griffith Taylor, 1880–1963, senior geologist (Griff)

  Edward Wilson, 1872–1912, chief scientist, doctor, zoologist, artist (Uncle Bill, Ted to family)

  Charles Wright, 1887–1975, physicist (Silas)

  Terra Nova officers, scientists and senior crew

  Lieutenant Harry Pennell, 1882–1916, navigator/acting captain (Penelope)

  Lieutenant Henry Rennick, 1881–1914, surveyor/second-in-command to Pennell (Parny)

  Lieutenant Wilfred Bruce (RN reserve), 1874–1953, mercantile marine officer

  Francis Drake (RN retired), 1878–1936, paymaster/expedition secretary (Frankie)

  Dennis Lillie, 1884–1963, marine biologist

  Jim Dennistoun, 1883–1916, in charge of dogs (1911–12 voyage only)

  Alfred Cheetham RNR, 1857–1918, boatswain (Alf)

  William Williams, 1875–?, chief engine room artificer

  Shore party crew

  PO George Abbott, 1880–1923

  William Archer, 1871–1944, cook/steward (second season)

  PO Frank Browning, 1882–1930

  Thomas Clissold, 1886–1964, cook/steward (first season)

  PO Tom Crean, 1876–1938

  Able Seaman Harry Dickason, 1885–1944

  PO Edgar Evans, 1876–1912 (Taff)

  PO Robert Forde, 1877–1959

  Demitri Gerof, 1888–1932, dog driver

  Frederick Hooper, 1889–1955, steward

  PO Patrick Keohane, 1879–1950

  Chief Stoker William Lashly, 1867–1940

  Anton Omelchenko, 1883–1932, groom

  PO Thomas Williamson, 1877–1940 (second season only)

  Leading members of ship’s crew and others specifically mentioned

  PO Arthur Bailey

  Francis Davies, leading shipwright (Frankie, Chippy)

  PO (retired) William Heald

  PO (RNVR) John Mather

  PO Frederick Parsons

  Leading Seaman Albert Balson

  Leading Stoker Robert Brissenden

  Leading Stoker William Burton

  Able Seaman William Knowles

  Leading Stoker Edward McKenzie

  Engine Room Artificer William Horton

  Fireman Charles Lammas

  Able Seaman and Helmsman Mortimer McCarthy

  Other Terra Nova crew

  Joseph Leese, Able Seaman; Angus McDonald, Fireman; William McDonald, Able Seaman; Thomas McGillon, Fireman; Thomas McLeod, Able Seaman; William Neale, cook/steward; Robert Oliphant, Able Seaman; James (‘Scotty’) Paton, Able Seaman; James Skelton, Able Seaman (RNR); Bernard Stone, Leading Stoker;

  Charles Williams, Able Seaman (first season only)

  Others associated with the expedition

  Emily Bowers, mother of Henry Bowers

  Hilda Evans, wife of Teddy Evans

  Bertie John ‘B.J.’ Hodson, Central News Agency reporter

  Joseph Kinsey, New Zealand expedition agent

  Clements Markham, former president, Royal Geographical Society, supporter of Scott

  Violet Oates, mother of Lawrence Oates

  Kathleen Scott, wife of Captain Scott

  Ernest Shackleton, explorer, member of Scott’s Discovery expedition

  Reginald Smith, cousin of Cherry-Garrard, Scott’s publisher and friend of Scott and Wilson

  Oriana Wilson, wife of Edward Wilson

  George Wyatt, London expedition agent

  Appendix B: Summary Timeline, 1910–19

  This is not intended to be comprehensive, but to serve as a background guide for readers

  1910–1913

  June 1910: Terra Nova expedition leaves London

  January 1911: Terra Nova arrives in Antarctica

  February 1911: Terra Nova leaves Cape Evans, Antarctica, for New Zealand

  April–December 1911: Landing party lay depots; Antarctic winter; departure for South Pole

  December 1911: Amundsen reaches South Pole

  1912–13: Antarctic expeditions led by Douglas Mawson (Australia), Wilhelm Filchner (Germany) and Nobu Shirase (Japan)

  January 1912: South Pole party reaches Pole

  February–March 1912: Terra Nova returns to Cape Evans; leaves for New Zealand

  January 1913: Terra Nova returns to Cape Evans

  February 1913: Terra Nova arrives in New Zealand

  June 1913: Terra Nova returns to Britain

  1914

  June: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary

  August: Britain declares war on Germany

  August: Shackleton’s Endurance expedition leaves for Antarctica

  August–December: British and Allied troops establish Western Front in Europe

  1915

  Allied attempts to reach Constantinople/Istanbul through Dardanelles

  Continuing fighting on Western and Eastern fronts

  Shackleton’s expedition in Antarctica

  1916

  Continuing fighting on both European fronts

  31 May–1 June: Battle of Jutland, the major naval engagement of the war

  November: Shackleton’s men begin returning from Antarctica

  1917

  Continuing fighting on Western Front

  March–December: Russian revolution, abdication of Tsar, outbreak of civil war between ‘Reds’ (Bolsheviks) and ‘Whites’

  April: The United States enters the war

  1918

  March: Russia signs peace treaty with Germany, with appendix relating to Spitsbergen

  January–November: Final offensives on Western Front

  November: Armistice signed on Western Front; surrender of German fleet

  1919

  January–June: Continued fighting in north Russia; Peace conference at Versailles, near Paris; final engagements in north Russia

  Appendix C: Other Information

  Terminology

  Icebergs: large chunks (which can be miles long) of ice which have broken off ice shelves or glacier tongues; when an iceberg breaks it is said to ‘calve’ and gradually disintegrate into ‘bergy bits’

  Ice shelf: a wide glacier tongue; in this book it (or the word ‘barrier’) refers to the 400-mile-wide Ross Ice Shelf linking Ross Island (including Cape Evans) to the Beardmore Glacier and Antarctic plateau

  Floe: smaller iceberg or ‘pancake’ of sea ice

  Pack-ice (‘the pack’): dense ice covering the ocean, formed from a mixture of sea ice and small floes which have become detached from the land (including glaciers)

  Small boat descriptions: A wide range of names are used for small boats used for off-shore or ship-to-shore transportation. The word ‘tender’ is a more generic term covering vessels of all sizes; others include skiff (lightly built, usually narrow), dinghy (usually with a sail, broader than a skiff) and pram (usually small).

  Measurements

  Measurements are those current at the time; detailed conversion tables can be found in diaries or online. Distances/speeds are in statute miles unless otherwise indicated. A knot (nautical or ‘geographical’ mile) equals about 1.15 statute miles/1.85 kilomet
res. Weights are shown in ounces (oz.), pounds (lbs), stones (1 stone = 14 lbs), etc. Temperatures: shown in degrees Fahrenheit (32°F = 0°C; 0°F = minus 18°C). Winds are shown in miles per hour (mph) or Beaufort scale ‘Forces’ e.g. Force 8 = strong gale, about 42 mph. Money is shown in pounds (£), shillings (s or /-) and pence (d); present-day equivalents can be obtained through published or web-based tables/calculators.

  Names

  Place names and spellings of the time are used: the most frequently used ones which have changed completely are Constantinople/Istanbul, Christiana/Oslo and Nyasaland/Malawi (and derivatives); those which vary slightly include Salonika/Thessaloniki and Spitzbergen/Spitsbergen.

  Abbreviations

  The following abbreviations are used in the text:

  RFC:

  Royal Flying Corps

  RN:

  Royal Navy

  RNAS:

  Royal Naval Air Service

  RND:

  Royal Naval Division

  The names of well-known military decorations, such as VC for Victoria Cross, have sometimes been abbreviated; others are described in full.

  Notes

  Documents cited are from archival and private sources in Britain and other parts of the world including those cited in the Acknowledgements section at the beginning of this book. Information on one major source appears below; information on sources relating to specific chapters appears above the notes for that chapter. Every effort has been made to trace and obtain permission from owners and/or copyright holders of documents or images; I apologise for any inadvertent omissions and will, if notified through my publishers, endeavour to incorporate additional acknowledgements in future editions.