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Robert Scott, as a crusading hero, sculpted by his widow Kathleen Bruce, at Christchurch New Zealand
Scott’s quest for the South Pole was partly about personal pride. It was partly about the British claim to South Atlantic territories. But there was something else – something less tangible. And it is this that makes the story historically worth telling. This was about a very toxic kind of Britishness.
As we see in our series on the North Pole, the late Victorian and Edwardian periods put a particular value on manliness, and especially virile achievement out of doors. For the Americans it was associated with the myth of the frontiersman.
But for the British it was about a kind of indomitable British male fortitude. The historian Michael Roper has called it a ‘stoic endurance … the forbearance of pain and the suppression of sentiment.’
Many – especially among the upper class and the military – believed that it was this British quality that had won what was then the world’s greatest Empire.
#108 Lop Ears and Jackass
Ep 1 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
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Scott risked not only his own life but that of all his men: from left Wilson, Bowers, Evans, Scott, Oates. Scott knew that his 'transport' problems would mean staying out for 144 days and returning from the pole in the blizzards of winter. He confided to his diary, ‘I don’t know whether it is possible for men to last out that time… I almost doubt it.’
Nearly half of the men Scott took ashore in Antarctica were serving in the British forces. And this is why his story matters. It would be said in 1919 that the defeat of the Germans in the First World War was ‘due… mainly to the wonderful spirit of the British race.’ And again, to the ‘force of character… and the spirit that never knows defeat.’
The significance of these two quotations is that they come from a famous ‘Final Despatch’ of Field Marshall Douglas Haig in March 1919, while Haig was the Commander-in-Chief of British forces in France. As we see in our series on the Somme and the trenches, Haig’s belief in the British spirit verged on a conviction that his men’s force of national character was stronger than German shells and bullets. It explains a lot about his bizarre conduct of the Western Front.
Understanding Scott’s expedition to the South Pole - and above all the striking ways in which it differed from the Norwegian Amundsen’s - casts a very revealing light on the culture that would drive British military commanders in the years before and during the First World War.
British stoicism, fortitude, forbearance and the suppression of sentiment seems to have been more important to these men than grasping the technicalities of modern warfare or learning about modern warfare from anyone else.
What happened to Scott in the Antarctic and what happened to the British army on the Somme are uncannily similar. In fact, as we shall see, they were actually in some ways linked. The story of Scott’s antarctic is worth telling because it significantly helps us understand the disaster of in the trenches.
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'If there's anything you think of doing at the cost of your life – do it' - Scott's wife Kathleen Bruce
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