Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'This', said José, 'is what travelling in a covered wagon across the United States must have been
like.'
After five hours, we reached a weatherhaven and a Scott tent.
'Is this it?' I asked.
'Yep,' said Too Tall, swinging nimbly out of the Tucker.
When I saw the tent, its flap still open, sunlit against the white prairies, an image flashed across
my mind, and after a moment I recognised it as J. C. Dollman's painting of Titus Oates staggering
off to die, arms outstretched and wearing a blue bobble hat. The lone tent in the background of the
picture was identical to the one I was looking at, except that Dollman painted something which
looked like a Land Rover parked outside. The painting was called 'A Very Gallant Gentleman',
and the previous summer I had gone to see it at the Cavalry Club in London's Piccadilly. The Pat-
ron of my expedition, Jeremy Lewis, came along in an attempt to expiate his guilt at fulfilling none
of the duties performed by more experienced Patrons such as the Duke of Edinburgh or the man-
ufacturers of Kendal's Mint Cake. Jeremy said he thought Oates was probably wearing a tweed
jacket under his parka with a copy of the
Symposium
in the pocket.
In its clumsy way the picture captures the most luminous moment in Antarctic history - when a
desperately weak Oates announced that he might be some time and, without putting on his boots,
crawled out of the tent. The episode has inculcated itself so effectively into the national psyche that
the phrase, 'the Captain Oates Defence' is now bandied around the financial press when a seni-
or figure leaves a troubled company to save his colleagues. At the time, Oates's deed unleashed
a good deal of excruciating sentiment disguised as art. I was especially taken by two stanzas of
'
Omen Pugnae
', a poem by Hugh Macnaghten, vice-provost of Eton College, Oates's school, pub-
lished in 1924.
So, on the day he died,
His birthday, one last gift was his to give
For him to perish that his friends might live
Was 'just to go outside'.
Just two and thirty years
But O! thy last farewell, a household word
And all that we have seen and we have heard,
There is no room for tears.
In the
Daily Telegraph
, on 8 April 1995, Beryl Bainbridge took a more robust approach, suggest-
ing that Andrew Lloyd Webber might like to stage a musical of Scott's expedition including a
number sung by Oates, 'I'm just stepping outside and may be some time'.
Oates was in charge of the ponies on the
Terra Nova
expedition. They were a bunch of old
crocks from Siberia and a disaster from the start. He had not selected them himself, and described
his charges and the dogs on board the ship as 'the most unsuitable scrap-heap crowd of unfit an-
imals'. Nicknamed Titus after the seventeenth-century intriguer, Lawrence Oates was the only ex-
pedition member from the army, and consequently he was also known as 'the Soldier'. He had
