Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South

He was not united with his luggage again until Calais, and so had to miss Paris, but with the exception of his father all the Scotts that could be rounded up were waiting for him in London. For a family whose idea of excitement was the Plymouth Theatre pantomime the capital must have seemed about as remote as Esquimault, and for the next three days the Scotts gorged themselves on it, cramming in the Handel Festival and Ivanhoe at the English Opera – music a ‘trifle insipid’ – between exhaustive sweeps of the naval exhibition and – that symbol of everything the service still thought it was – Nelson’s Victory moored on the Thames.

Scott had been appointed to Sharpshooter for summer manoeuvres before he joined Vernon, but as she was conveniently anchored at Plymouth there was time first for Outlands. ‘When Con, at the age of nineteen, was wildly in the throes of his first love,’ Grace again recalled, in an elusive glimpse of a side of Scott’s life that has vanished without trace, ‘and longing to rush off to his charmer, who had a very short-tempered husband, Archie alone could speak to him and try to dissuade him from his project; Con at the time was very impressionable, and remained so. The sailor’s life and his romantic nature caused him to idealise women. He had his youthful loves and flirtations. His affections were easily caught though not easily held. He had a capacity for appearing wholly absorbed in the person he was talking to, while all the time he was really quite detached. This was misleading. As far as I know, he had two real loves only; one, a girlhood friend of ours who later married, but was always in the background of his affections, no matter who from time to time interested him for a while, and she remained so, I think, until he met his wife.’

This is a sister talking – and a younger sister, at that, who saw him only rarely – but if there was any other woman of whom Grace never knew, no name survives. Many years later Cherry-Garrard would write of Scott’s astonishing power to charm when he wanted to, and at least one married American woman, a Minnie Chase, a friend’s sister Scott met briefly in San Francisco on his way north to rejoin the Amphion, would happily have signed up to the proposition. ‘The night has a thousand eyes,’ she copied into the front of an address book she probably gave him,

And the day but one,

Yet the light of the bright world dies,

With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes,

And the heart but one;

Yet the light of a whole life dies,

When love is done.

Conventional enough stuff – the verses are by Charles Bourdillon and were well known at the time – and Scott was in San Francisco only a few days, but those days fixed themselves in Minnie Chase’s memory. ‘Do you remember Mrs Chase 24 years ago,’ Scott’s widow would write to her husband from California in 1913, ignorant that he had already been dead ten months. ‘She fell on my neck because of what a darling you were 24 years ago. She couldn’t believe that you’d remained unmarried so long – the more I think of it the more I wonder with her.’

At twenty-three Scott was slightly below average height, trim and broad-chested, with fair hair, blue, almost violet eyes, an odd, attractively ugly face not unlike Jacky Fisher’s, and a smile that went a long way to explaining the impact of his charm. ‘Well-built, and alert,’ one man who saw him lecturing a few years later described him. ‘Neither tall nor short, he yet conveyed the impression of vigorous quickness. Nine people out of ten, seeing him, would have said, “Naval Officer.”’ It was certainly a role he was well on his way to making his own. ‘Lieutenant Scott is a young officer of good promise,’ his last captain had written in forwarding on his application to Vernon, ‘and has patience and tact in the handling of men. He is quick and intelligent and from all I’ve seen of him I think likely to develop into a useful torpedo officer. I recommend him for the class which commences in October next.’

After his holiday at Outlands and nearly six weeks of manoeuvres in Sharpshooter, Scott took up his place in HMS Vernon, the navy’s Torpedo School Ship at Portsmouth. He would only have had to see a Lieutenant Philip Colomb – another great name in the Victorian navy – on the same list as himself to know what he was still up against, but if there was anywhere that might have symbolised a different navy, it was Vernon, an elegant and streamlined relic of the age of sail that had been laid up, dismasted and brutalised into shape to serve the service’s newest technical arm.

The Vernon had begun its new life as a tender to HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school, but as the importance of the new weapon became obvious, Vernon broke away from Excellent to become an independent command in her own right. She was lucky enough to have Jacky Fisher for her first captain, and when he was followed in turn by another formidable naval legend and future First Sea Lord, ‘old ’ard ’art’ Wilson, who had hacked and brawled his way to a VC at the Battle of El Teb in 1884, the future of the school was assured.

By Wilson’s and Scott’s time, Vernon had grown in size and importance, with a motley collection of hulks, workshops and a flat iron gunboat with a horizontal funnel jutting out of her stern added to the original establishment. In some ways the unsanitary, rat-infested warren of vessels must have conjured up memories of Britannia and Hindostan for Scott, but the filth and bustle of nineteenth-century Portsmouth was about as far a cry from the quiet beauty of the Dart as Vernon was from anything in the navy Scott had known before.

It was an exciting time to be there, with the torpedo undergoing constant improvements since the first above-water-launched model had been slid into the sea off a mess table. The year before Scott arrived had seen the introduction and testing of a new eighteen-inch weapon with a greater range, speed and accuracy than anything tried before, and for the first time in his life he had the chance to develop – or discover in himself – the technical and scientific aptitude that would so strongly mark his future work.

Even in Vernon, however, the most modern and innovative of establishments, Scott found himself in a culture that paradoxically reinforced those centralising, controlling, anti-initiative tendencies that were the hallmarks of the nineteenth-century service. In his brilliant study of Britain’s pre-First World War navy, Andrew Gordon identified four key institutions – Vernon, the Royal Geographical Society, Royalty and Freemasonry – as comprising a kind of ‘checklist’ of naval ‘authoritarianism’, and what he says of Vernon holds a special resonance for anyone interested in Scott’s later record as an explorer in the unpredictable world of Antarctica. ‘The work of the Torpedo School took place on the frontiers of practical physics,’ he wrote, ‘the staff formed (at least in their own opinion) a naval science vanguard, and their leadership of their profession away from art and into science may have inclined them towards a highly regulated “Newton’s clock” view of the universe, in which the unpredictabilities concomitant with devolved authority had no place.’

If there was one other aspect of Vernon life that was regressive in its tendencies, it was a Raglanesque assumption that any future enemy must be French. During the summer of 1890 exercises around Portland and Plymouth had showed how dangerous boats issuing from creeks on the French coast could be, and over his two summers in Vernon, Scott was involved in similar manoeuvres to counter the threat.

It was the first time that he had commanded anything bigger than a ship’s boat, and he could not have made a more disastrous start. On 12 August 1893 he headed for Falmouth as part of the torpedo flotilla, but the next day somehow succeeded in running Torpedo Boat 87 aground, suffering the humiliation of having himself towed back into dry dock at Keyham with ‘severe injury to propeller’.

It was an acute embarrassment for a young officer – ‘due care and attention does not appear to have been exercised’, Scott’s service record reads – but it was no more than that. In the official report on the incident he was ‘cautioned to be more attentive in future’, but Vernon’s commander, George Egerton, would always remain one of Scott’s greatest admirers, and a First Class in his theory examination, and a First Class Certificate in his practical, certainly suggest that the incident led to no lasting damage to his prospects.*

It is just possible, though, that it cast a shadow over his first appointment as a qualified Torpedo Officer to the unglamorous Depot ship Vulcan. The appointment was not ‘considered good in the Vernon’, but in the dogged way that would become typical of Scott, he was determined to make the best of his opportunities. His reasons for remaining with the ship, he wrote to his anxious father from Vulcan,

are firstly that I look upon her as a latent success, as a splendid but undeveloped and misused experiment dependent on her present handling to establish her utility, a utility which in war time would be apparent and patent to all. For this reason I take a very great interest in her welfare and do as much as lays in my power to forward it. Secondly, and in consequence of my first reason, I have hopes of establishing a reputation for myself.

Thirdly, I am losing nothing; in fact gaining a very great deal in general service experience – In general service work, of which we do as much as most other ships, I have a stake and take a position far above that which I should have in other ships – In addition I keep watch at sea with the fleet, and as they generally put us in the fighting line, am precisely in the same position to gain experience as if on board a battleship …

To fall back on the torpedo work again at which I have worked exceedingly hard, I look upon this ship as the best practical experience that could possibly befall an officer; in fact I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises – but what is better, the Captain and Currey do likewise.

Even if I fail, the practical knowledge and experience will be invaluable. I am conscious that by self-advertisement I might make myself heard now, but the position is a delicate one, and I should be sorry to advocate anything in which I did not believe. Meanwhile things constantly annoy and irritate one – but as you see, I work for a larger than ordinary stake, and with this I will conclude adding, that the welfare of body if not of career remains good.

It would be another decade before Scott would be able to tick off the other three boxes on Gordon’s ‘authoritarian checklist’ – the RGS, Freemasonry, and Royal connections – but the inevitable process of institutionalisation had begun. ‘We are getting very well known in the fleet,’ he told his father in the same letter, sounding alarmingly like some embryo ‘Pompo’ Heneage; ‘no function takes place but that we come pretty well out of it, the athletic sports, the rifle meetings, the regattas, events which though very far from you are very near to us out here; fate has kept us before the public in all. But best of all we had a most triumphant inspection, the Admiral said publicly that he should report us as the most creditable to all concerned, and privately that we were the cleanest ship he’d inspected, an opinion fully endorsed by Levison and others who accompany him on these occasions, they adding that no ship could “touch us”.’

This was no momentary aberration either. ‘The ship is still very dirty,’ he complained to his mother of his new ship, the Empress of India, ‘but I think improving – a great improvement has been commented upon in my small share of the cleaning part and I feel if only we could get the commander to smarten up a bit we should get the ship all straight – but he is unfortunately lamentably slack.’ Just over a week later, virtue was rewarded when a ‘somewhat disastrous’ admiral’s inspection confirmed ‘that the only clean parts of the ship were the torpedo department – and also that at drills etc the torpedo department shone by a mere absence of doing wrong … Altogether I was pleased with my own show. I have some sixty men numbered whom I fell in at the beginning and told them things must be altered altogether.’

This thickening of the professional arteries, the slow but inexorable process of assimilation, might well have been inevitable, but by the time that Scott wrote this last letter, ‘choice’ had largely been removed. There had always been an assumption within the family that John Scott had been living off interest since his retirement, but in the autumn of 1894, while his son was still in Vulcan, it emerged that for the last twelve years he had been running down his capital and that they were virtually bankrupt. ‘On the 23rd October,’ Hannah Scott recorded with an almost preternatural calm, ‘a crushing blow came of heavy losses. At once we decided to let our house and hope that some occupation will come that will please my dear husband and bring him comfort in the loss of his old house. On November 12th our dear Rose commenced work at Nottingham Hospital, under three weeks after the loss. The others all anxious to be up and doing are only restrained by the occupation at home in getting things in order for letting the furnished house. From Con comes a fine manly reliable letter offering help … Truly sorrow has many compensations and with God’s help we shall yet if He wills it return to our old home.’

They only returned, in fact, to let Outlands permanently, and all it meant in terms of respectability, security and position was gone. It would be impossible to guess from the tone here what this must have meant to Hannah Scott, but for a woman of her age and gentle snobberies, it was as if she had gone to sleep in the cosy, familiar world of some West Country Cranford, and woke within the harsh landscape of a Gissing novel, staring at the prospects of rented rooms, poverty, ostracism, trade and working daughters.

But if there seemed nothing for Hannah Scott except humiliation, for the girls – poised on the brink of a new century with new expectations, aspirations, possibilities – there was at least the chance of a different and more expansive world. Within weeks Rose had begun a career in nursing that would take her to the Gold Coast, and the others soon followed her from home, the ebullient Ettie to a theatre school at Margate and briefly onto the stage with Irene Vanbrugh’s touring company, and Grace and, eventually, Kate into the dingier dressmaking business.

Of all the children it was probably Archie who suffered most, being forced to abandon the Royal Artillery for a post in Nigeria as secretary to the governor, but from the start it was Con who carried the emotional burden of the disaster. For a few months in 1895 the family rented a Devonshire farmhouse, and it was there, in Barrie’s account, that the metamorphosis from ‘Old Mooney’ to ‘head of the family’ was completed. ‘He never seems to have shown a gayer front than when the troubles fell,’ Barrie wrote in his inimitable mix of family lore and hagiography. ‘Not only must there be no “Old Mooney” in him, but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district; deputations called at the farm to beg for another, and once in these words, “Wull ’ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman be here along?”’

If there is again as much Barrie as Scott in this, the family collapse does provide the first real insight into the qualities that distinguished the mature man. In his later years he could talk about ‘duty’ and ‘patriotism’ with the best of them, but whether it was to ship, colleagues, service or country, Scott’s sense of loyalty and duty was always rooted in real obligations, affections, ties and responsibilities. And at the heart of this nexus of relations was his family, and above all his mother. There is a species of family feeling that is little more than an enlarged and clannish selfishness, but as with his ambition there was nothing narrow or ‘laager-like’ in Scott’s devotion, only a generous and unpossessive openness to their sorrows, happiness and opportunities.

In her memoir of her brother Con, Grace described his facility for appearing to be absorbed in the person he was talking to, but his letters to his family reveal a much profounder and more genuine empathy than that remark suggests. It is one of those aspects of personality that is always going to elude definition, but there seems to have always been something almost Keatsian in Scott’s capacity for submerging his own identity and ‘absorbing’ himself – Grace’s word – in the fragile, anxious interior lives of a mother, brother or sister.

As his subsequent career in the Antarctic – and in particular his response to human or animal suffering – would underline, the barriers between ‘self’ and ‘other’ would never be very firmly established for Scott, and never was this more true than when his family needed him. There was nothing he actually ‘did’ for them during their troubles that Archie or Ettie did not match, but in terms of understanding and explaining, and interpreting one to another, he was central to their recovery.

With his mother, in particular, he needed all his tact and sympathy to nudge and cajole her into accepting the different world the Scotts found themselves in with financial failure. Some time towards the end of 1895 or 1896 John Scott secured a job as manager of a Somerset brewery, and while it brought a house and some financial stability, the descent back into trade left Hannah Scott more rawly exposed than ever to the indignities of her position. There can have been no escaping it, either, because even the transition from the rich Devon landscape to the mean, straggling village of Holcombe offered a Hardyesque mirror to their fortunes. Under the fields around the old perpendicular church of St Andrew’s lay buried the ancient pre-plague village, but it was the great mass of the Holcombe Brewery that dominated the new village, with its miserably ugly church, its Wesleyan chapel, its vestiges of the old coal industry and its brewery employees, defining the physical and social perimeters of the Scott family’s decline.

There had been nothing in the bourgeois, provincial, Godfearing, servant-padded world in which Hannah Scott had lived the first sixty years of her life to prepare her for this, and nothing her son would not do to protect her from it. In his memoir of Scott, Barrie spoke feelingly of his hardships at this time, but whatever the humiliations of tarnished braid or a threadbare uniform for a naval officer of Scott’s stamp, he felt the family’s poverty more keenly for his mother than himself. ‘I hate to think that you did not go and see her before she left,’ he wrote to her at Holcombe after Ettie had left for the stage. ‘I hate to think I had not the forethought of writing to urge you to go – that you should have studied economy in such a matter makes me feel very bitter – Promise you won’t do it again – but you really shan’t, for when she comes back I am determined you shall go and see her act and shall yourself see the life and some of your many unknown admirers (who have seen your picture only). I can’t forgive my own want of forethought in not writing about it … I have another great fear about you dear, which is that you don’t get any society. – I do hope people will come & call – you don’t speak of any as yet. I rather feel that people round you are not inclined that way and that you are having rather a slow time – But I suppose time only can correct this and the gradual appreciation of how nice you really are.’

For all Scott’s chivalry, there was nothing emasculating in his devotion to his mother, and while she always remained at the centre of his loyalties, that never stopped him fighting his sisters’ corners when they needed him. ‘Dear Mother,’ he wrote in the same letter to Holcombe, ‘I am afraid that you must be grieving over Ettie’s absence very much, but think dear what it means to her. What prospects of independence and the pleasure of really living, working & doing.’

‘My Own Dearest Mother,’ he wrote in the same vein, this time of Kate and Grace’s new lives as working women, ‘You cannot think how delightful it was to find you all in such good health and spirits. The prospect for the future seems brighter than it has been for years and above all things I rejoice to see that you are beginning to appreciate that by this honest hard work the girls are anything but sufferers. The difference in them since they have been about, meeting all manner of people and relying on themselves, is so very plain to me. Just the same sort of difference that Ettie felt and valued so much. They have gained in a hundred points, not to mention appearance and smartness. I honestly think we shall some day be grateful to fortune for lifting us out of the “sleepy hollow” of the old Plymouth life. Personally, I cannot express the difference I see in the girls since their London experiences.’

For a few brief months in the mid-1890s it must have seemed that he was right, and home on leave at Christmas 1896, the two brothers took up where they had left off in their rented farm. A ‘mixed entertainment and fine farce called Chiselling’ was put on for the brewery’s workers and customers, the local paper reported. ‘Lt A Scott RA. Lt R Scott RN and the Misses K and M. Scott of Holcombe House [were] extremely funny … continuous roars of laughter.’

It was no more than a last, poignant codicil to the family’s collapse, though, and within twelve months both John Scott and his younger son, ‘Arch’, were dead. It seems somehow appropriate that the last public glimpse of John Scott is of him being pushed in a wheelchair to his daughter Ettie’s wedding, but while his death from heart disease cannot have been a complete shock, or even blow, to his family, nothing had prepared them for Arch’s.

‘I am longing to see old Arch,’ Scott had written in the summer of 1897, ‘and tell him how hopeful I think it all,’ and the following year he got his wish. Arch, home on leave from Lagos, joined him, with the use of the admiral’s spare cabin, for a cruise off the Irish coast in Scott’s ship to thrash out the details of the family’s finances. ‘My dearest girl,’ he wrote to his sister Ettie, ‘Arch has been staying with me for the last few days, he is in great form & looking very well – we have of course talked matters out & I think arrived at a clear understanding as regards the situation.’ ‘Isn’t Arch just splendid,’ he wrote to his mother on 15 October. ‘He is so absolutely full of life and enjoyment and at the same time so keen on his job. I expect he has told you about his hope of becoming a commissioner. He seems to have done most excellent work and shown tact and energy in an extraordinary degree. Dear old chap, he deserves to be a success – Commissioner, Consul, and Governor is the future for him I feel sure.’

Within a month, Arch was dead. He had gone to Hythe to play golf, and went down with typhoid. Just what the news meant to Scott can be felt in his letter to Ettie. ‘My dearest Girl, It is good to hear there was no pain and it is easy to understand that he died like a man. All his life, wherever he went, people felt the better for his coming. I don’t think he ever did an unkind thing and no form of meanness was in him. It is a strange chance that has taken him who perhaps of us all found the keenest pleasure in life, who was always content and never grumbled. Of course, now we know he never ought to have gone to West Africa. After watching him carefully, I saw that despite his health he was not strong and I meant to have a long talk with you on the subject. Too late – doesn’t it always seem the ending of our wretched little mortal plans? Good God, it is past all understanding. He and you and I were very close together, weren’t we? I know what your loss is, knowing my own.’

To his mother, however, none of the bewilderment or anger was ever allowed to surface. ‘My Own Dearest Mother,’ he wrote to her from Gibraltar,