Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
period to test the objectivity of his intellectual chums. He would read out a passage from Scott's
diaries, including 'We are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to
the end . . .' Assuming that Vansittart was being ironic, the audience tittered. Later he amended the
reading to make it sound as if it had come from the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944, or from Mao Tsetung,
and on those occasions his friends applauded respectfully.
Shibboleths were mocked. Scott became a cliché. In the Monty Python television sketch 'Scott
of the Sahara', the captain fights a 25-foot electric penguin. Similarly, Scott appears as an astro-
naut in Tom Stoppard's play
Jumpers
, written in 1972. The first Englishman to reach the moon,
Scott's triumph is overshadowed by the plight of his only colleague Astronaut Oates. Scott kicks
Oates to the ground at the foot of the spacecraft ladder and pulls it in behind him with the words,
'I am going up now, I may be some time.'
Historical revisionism is as unavoidable as the grave: it pursues leading figures of any age long
after their work on earth is done. In the 1970s, when imperialism was widely reviled, Roland Hunt-
ford published his joint biography
Scott and Amundsen
(called
The Last Place on Earth
in the
States), a passionate topic which sought to demolish the Scott myth, suggesting not only that Scott
was mortal, but that he was an unpleasant character and a poor leader. According to Huntford, he
used science only as an excuse to participate in the race, unlike Amundsen 'who did not stoop to
use science as an agent of prestige'. Nobody had criticised Scott before, and Huntford did so com-
prehensively. Many felt inclined to agree with him, while the keepers of the flame would have had
him sent to the Tower. The topic whipped up a blizzard of angry protests, vitriolic reviews and
a furious exchange of correspondence and 'statements' in national newspapers, including lengthy
debate provoked by Huntford's assertion that Kathleen Scott had sex with Nansen while her hus-
band was slogging up a glacier and was worried about becoming pregnant. The central argument
was over how she recorded the arrival of her periods in her diary. How disappointing it had to
come to that.
Wayland Young wrote an article refuting Huntford's criticism of Scott for
Encounter
magazine
in May 1980. He demonstrates the weakness of portions of Huntford's scholarship. Others had
pressed Huntford on the same points raised by Young, and in October 1979 the biographer was
obliged to admit on national television that his description of Scott staring at Oates in the tent at
the end to try to force him to his death was based on
intuition
. In short, he got carried away by his
own argument. Prejudice is not necessarily fatal in a biography, however, and Huntford's book is
intelligent, gripping, full of insight and elegantly written. I enjoyed it as much as any polar topic I
have read, and a good deal more than most of them. It is a pity that Huntford was quite so obsessed
with the destruction of the legend, for if he had reined in his prejudices he could have produced a
masterpiece.
A similar controversy raged in the Norwegian press after a book was published portraying
Amundsen as a bounder and Scott a man worthy of beatification. Kåre Holt's
The Race
, published
in English in 1974, was admittedly a novel; it was nonetheless a useful counterweight to Hunt-
ford's topic. Bob Headland, archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute, told me that he likes to
keep the two volumes next to one another on the shelf, 'preferably with a layer of asbestos between
them'.
