Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Shackleton, Scott separated the quarters of men and officers, and the difference is often deployed
to illustrate their contrasting styles of leadership. Wayland Young, Baron Kennet of the Dene and
Kathleen Scott's son by her second marriage, has set out a convincing defence of Scott's decision.
As far as the state of class divisions in the Navy was concerned, Young wrote that it was 'un-
changed for 1,000 years, so to complain about it now is no more interesting or original than to
complain about it in the army of Wellington, Marlborough, Henry V or Alfred the Great'.
They were extremely resourceful. Clissold, the cook, rigged up a device whereby a small metal
disc was placed on top of rising dough, and when it reached the right height it came into contact
with another piece of metal, and an electrical circuit rang a bell next to his bunk. The battered
topics included Kipling (of course), and a tiny edition of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
held togeth-
er with string, in the fly of which a spidery hand had inscribed Milton's 'When will the ship be
here/Come sing to me.' There is something disingenuous about Scott's hut, however, just as there
is about the myth. The mummified penguin lying open-beaked and akimbo next to a copy of the
Illustrated London News
had been placed there by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage people,
and Ponting's photographs show that Scott's desk is not the original (the replacement was brought
over from the Cape Royds hut). The historic huts were often plundered in the early days. Richard
Pape visited Cape Evans in 1959 with one of the American Operation Deep Freezes under Admir-
al Dufek. In his very bad topic,
Poles Apart
, he records quite candidly that he pocketed 'a glass
inkwell on which “R.F. Scott” had been painted, also a bottle of Indian ink marked “Wilson”'.
Still, I saw them everywhere. A gap in a row of cuphooks, the dented rubber of a Wellington
boot tossed aside, a carefully re-rolled bandage, the whiff of Ponting's developing fluid in his tiny
darkroom, a half-spent candle in a chipped candlestick - perhaps it was the whistling of the wind,
but I swear I could have turned round and seen them tramping back, spent dogs at their heels.
Later, the public manipulated the myth according to its own needs and ends. A crackpot society
called the Alliance of Honour, founded in 1903 and devoted to purity, had spawned flourishing
branches in 67 countries by the 1930s. The Alliance was vigorously opposed to masturbation, and
the following quotation is culled from its voluminous literature: 'We may safely assert that among
the heroes of that dreadful journey from the South Pole there were no victims of the vice which
the Alliance seeks to combat.'
Secondhand bookshops are rife with musty first editions of the diaries inscribed in a Sunday
School teacher's best copperplate, rewarding a child for good attendance. I found a 1941 bus ticket
pressed inside one of them. It was a tough time to be living in London, and perhaps the diaries
helped. During the Second World War the calls of the legend were legion, and they were often
voiced by cranks. In 1941 Kathleen received a letter from a woman in New York who said she
had borne Scott's illegitimate child when she was fifteen. A handwritten note on the envelope said,
'The lady is now dead.'
A few years after the war crocodiles of schoolchildren marched through provincial towns and
into cavernous cinemas to watch
Scott of the Antarctic
. John Mills had already played countless
war heroes, so he was a prepacked role model. By the mid-fifties, however, liberals at least were
suspicious of the myth and had lost faith in the concept of England. In Peter Vansittart's recent
topic of social and cultural commentary,
In the Fifties
, he recalls a game he devised during that
