With Scott in the Antarctic

by Isobel E Williams

  College rules in the 1890s remained inflexible. They were not seriously questioned – though Wilson was astonished to be disciplined for wearing a straw hat after dark only a few yards from the college gates.26 But he took to the life well, managing not to be overwhelmed. He wrote to his father in January 1893 concerning a late return from home to university; ‘No unpleasantness whatever arose between the tutor and myself, for I told him I had orders from a sister not to leave home before she returned’.27 However, his inability to lie had one unexpected result – he was ‘sent down’ (expelled) for a short time after an incident that illustrates well the rigidity of the system. Anglers had tried and failed to catch a trout in a pond outside the town. Wilson came to the conclusion that the most likely time for success would be in the very early morning. The College gates were closed at 10p.m. (there was a Gate Fine Book), but he escaped into the countryside, caught the trout and got back into college possibly climbing over the ‘Gate of Honour’ from Senate House Passage. Without thinking of any consequences he sent the fish as a gift to the Master of the College, a Doctor Ferrers. Dr Ferrers was pleased with the gift but suspicious. He asked, in his curious high-pitched squeaky voice, for details of how the catch had been made. ‘You were out of the College at three o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had leave no doubt?’

  ‘No.’

  Dr Ferrers sent him down in spite of appeals on his behalf.28

  The Victorian era was a time of civilised but intense curiosity. It would be quite common for an educated man to speak Latin, Greek and a modern language, and also to be able to talk with knowledge on, for example, arts, science and history. Even so, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Wilson took on too much; his enthusiasms and ranging curiosity covered many activities and topics, and prioritisation was not his forte. Although not keen on organised sport he nevertheless was a member of the second rugby team, a member of the College diving team and above all, the Boat Club. He was also a member of a seemingly excessive and probably non-productive number of societies, which must have taken much of his energies away from his considerable medical load. He was secretary of the ‘Fortnightly Society’ and presented a paper on the ‘Conquest of Mexico’. The discussion following was ‘the best in the term’ covering not only the morality of the conquest but also, somehow, the twelve tribes of Israel.29 He was a committee member of the ‘Caius Scientific and Art Society’. This society explored subjects in science, literature or art. Its rules were firm: members had to attend an agreed number of meetings and to be prepared to speak (he spoke on monasteries).30 In addition he was flattered to be asked to become a member of ‘The Shakespearean Society’, an exclusive society not confined to students of drama, but reserved for the leading sportsmen in the University, which in reality he was not. He co-founded an ‘Intellectual Sunday Evening’ group which met to smoke, drink coffee and discuss music, art and poetry and which cemented his love of Tennyson. In addition he supported the Caius Mission, a philanthropic mission based in Battersea, a (then) poor area of London, which helped and supported children from deprived backgrounds. He was a member of a boxing and fencing club which met weekly when they ‘cleared the furniture, put on masks and then fought each other with single sticks, getting whacked every two or three minutes and getting bruised for weeks’.31 His days would have been spent moving at speed from his medical lectures to discussion groups, rugby, swimming and charity work. On top of all this he walked, drew and, importantly, meditated daily. This is a daunting number of activities, even for a Victorian. But somehow or other in between other activities, he managed to do enough work to satisfy his tutors, because his Exhibition, which could have been withdrawn, was continued throughout his time at Cambridge.

  Drawing and painting remained integral. Wilson aimed to be able to draw so well that whatever the subject, it would look as if it might move, breathe or fly. Each subject had to be completely accurately drawn but it also had to show animation. On visits to London he visited all the places that he thought could stimulate or inform: the Zoo, The British Museum, The Natural History Museum, The National Gallery, Westminster Abbey. He also made copious drawings of the Cambridge wildlife. His method was to sketch in pencil and paint up later, a method he continued in the Antarctic. He worked and reworked his paintings and started to develop his method of colour notation, writing the colours that he saw on his pencil sketches and using this system as a colour shorthand and memory aid. This skill was to be gradually developed over the years to such an extent that he could reproduce his colour instructions months later, with astonishing accuracy. This ability almost became his ‘signature’ and was used with outstanding success in the Antarctic. But in Cambridge he was still learning. He was hard on himself: if he was not happy with a picture, it was thrown out, even if it looked attractive. The walls and floors of his rooms were littered with pencil and chalk drawings in addition to the skulls, bird’s feet and flowers, and his room was a centre of activity. He amused his friends by doing quick portraits of them in pencil or watercolour or he could draw quick silhouettes.

  While in Cambridge Wilson did not forget Cheltenham. He often returned. He was always conscious of the financial and emotional debt he owed, particularly to his father who in early 1894 paid for him to travel with a group of students to Belgium. Wilson made the most of this opportunity. He visited the cathedral at Antwerp, revelling in the wonderful golden light-effects and the beautiful music. He studied the paintings carefully and changed his mind about Rubens; Van Dyck, he now thought, ‘had a far more refined style’.32 Familial support was mutual. In August 1894, the family was devastated by the death of their youngest, petted and adored daughter, Gwladys, ‘the gleam of sunshine’ that had unexpectedly entered their lives in July 1889.33 Gwladys died when she was 5 years old after an illness lasting only four days. She died of intestinal obstruction in her own little cot, her mother and her sister Mary with her.34 The unfairness of the death, the lack of understanding as to why this should happen and the pain experienced by the family must have put Wilson’s religious convictions of the transitory nature of life on earth as a preparation for a more important existence, to the test. But he behaved with an ‘almost unnatural’ calmness, making a pencil sketch of his dead sister. The sketch became his parents’ most treasured possession.35 The year of 1894 continued to be dreadful. Later a fire a damaged Westal with all the attendant disruption and anxiety.

  By the end of the Easter term 1895 Wilson was definitely ready to leave Cambridge and face the world of the Big Smoke. Although the university has no record of him failing any examination, he obviously did fail Part 2 of the natural science Tripos and the second M.B. examination because his father writes that he had ‘passed seven out of the nine parts triumphantly and could have managed one of the last if he had left the other alone’.36 He almost certainly passed the second M.B. at a resit in the Autumn term of 1895.37 The setback did not affect his medical career in the slightest. He ended his time in Cambridge with a flourish, winning the university prize for diving. He had been a clever, though not an outstanding student. The years at Cambridge had been a success. He developed as an adult but more particularly as a Christian, becoming not just pious but progressing in self-control and in the mode of Christian Aestheticism.

  3

  Edward Wilson, M.B.

  In Wilson’s time Cambridge students could virtually choose their medical school. Wilson went on a tour of inspection; he rejected St Bartholomew’s Hospital because it was too big, St Mary’s was too small. He eventually chose his father’s medical school, St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner.1 St George’s was originally in the countryside, well outside London, but by Wilson’s time urban sprawl had extended to Hyde Park and the hospital was part of the metropolis, near to the park and Kensington Gardens and opposite Apsley House (the erstwhile home of the Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington)2 known as No.1 London, because it was the first house that travellers would
see after the Tollgates as they arrived from the country.3 In fact the hospital was in such a fashionable position that its entrepreneurial governors, who had to ensure a cash balance, were able to market the site for royal weddings, burials and coronations to some effect. In 1887 they collected £489 for ‘letting’ empty wards at five guineas each4 and accommodating any loyal subjects who wished to watch a thanksgiving procession commemorating Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837.5 By 1897 they had increased this figure to £5000 by selling seats to watch Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee Procession,6 which Wilson watched from the hospital, sketching her in her processional carriage. Now the site has been developed as the Lanesborough Hotel, a hotel offering expensive and glamorous facilities that would have surprised and amazed its 1890 incumbents.

  Wilson signed the pupil register on 28 September 1895 and entered the hospital as a third year medical student after having more than completed his preclinical requirements. His father would have had to pay the medical school a fee for the full duration of his training, £85 as a single amount or £90 in instalments of £40, £30 and £20 to be paid at the start of each year.7 The hospital that he had joined offered excellent clinical teaching; its students had access to 350 beds. According to the hospital brochure of 1892–3, this ‘advantageous arrangement’ was ‘due to the cordial relations between the general body of Governors and the Medical Staff and to the gentlemanly bearing of the Pupils which allow the Authorities to offer such extensive privileges without apprehension’.8 Medical specialisation into, for example, surgery, obstetrics or clinical medicine, was already developed. No doctor could be expected to be an expert in everything and the hospital had ten Consulting Specialists in addition to Specialists and Assistant Specialists.9 There were also resident junior staff (a relatively new development): four house physicians and four house surgeons. The medical students in Wilson’s group would hope to progress to this exalted status. Their financial prospects were initially modest – the Resident Medical Officer, a doctor with perhaps two or three years’ experience would earn £150 each year.10 The importance of ‘gentlemanly behaviour’ was underpinned by the provision of a students’ club where there was a reading room, daily papers and food, said to be at ‘a moderate and fixed rate’.11 However, Wilson usually managed to find cheaper venues.

  Wilson did not live in the hospital. He lived in lodgings, first in Westbourne Grove in West London, moving later to cheaper accommodation in Delamere Crescent, Paddington. His move to London did not dent his determination to lead a frugal and simple life. In a letter to his father in 1895, he said that he had pleasure in living on as little as possible and having as little money in hand as possible. His lodgings cost eight shillings weekly, a tiny amount even then (the modern equivalent is less than fifty pence, approximately twenty pounds per year). Breakfast was just tea and toast with watercress. For the rest of the day he either ate in cheap restaurants, presumably costing less than the students’ club, where he would make friends with the waitress who would tell him when the meat was ‘off’, or exist on hot potatoes and coffee.12 He walked to and from the hospital. He would be conscious that apart from his keep, his father might have to pay separately for instruction over and above the basic fees in, for example, anatomical dissection, practical pharmacy, practical surgery, practical medicine and histology. The price for an individual course averaged £3 and the total cost could be considerable. Students had to attend lectures in medicine and surgery for at least six months as well as midwifery, pharmacy and pharmacology, and the life of a medical student was a continuous round of lectures, outpatients and ward work with patients, delivering babies or assisting in the operating theatre. It was also a life that demanded mental toughness; a student could not survive if he became too involved with his patients. He had to be able to look after, and at the end of the day walk away from, all types of diseases, dreadful infections (no antibiotics), cancer, blood disorders, post-operative complications and deaths. An overactive imagination was bad for the student’s sanity and could do him irreparable damage. However, Wilson seems to have thrived on clinical work, at least initially: ‘It is just ripping … the teaching is perfect and in time I shall have a good shot at the F.R.C.S. [the higher surgical examination]’.13 At this time he was determined to be a surgeon and he said he had learnt more useful anatomy in one week at St George’s than he did in all his years in Cambridge.14

  Excitement with work was not enough. Wilson was determined to improve in his artistic ability and to this end he read Ruskin. John Ruskin (1819–1900), born in the same year as Queen Victoria, was, by the late 1890s, England’s greatest art critic and social reformer. As a young man Ruskin had travelled widely with his parents and became absorbed by the beauties of the natural world. Ruskin championed the painter, J.W.M. Turner (1775–1851), being very familiar with his work since his wealthy father had purchased many of Turner’s watercolours, and his most important critical work was probably Modern Painters, which he began in defence of Turner. Ruskin held the view that Turner represented nature with an accuracy that made him unique and he believed that the world could and should be interpreted and reproduced through art.15 Ruskin’s precepts on art, written in The Stones of Venice in 1853, would influence Wilson for life. Essentially, Ruskin wrote that nature should be represented truthfully. This meant that accurate, factual representation should be the basis of artwork. To this, interpretative thought, although integral and important, was secondary. A picture must always be faithful to, and knowledgeable about, its subject.16 The ‘truth’ in drawing is essential.17 These precepts were clarion calls to Wilson who became a committed follower. He aimed particularly at the first rule of careful, accurate and informed representation of his subjects. Later in his artistic life he too became a passionate admirer of Turner and when he was in the Antarctic he produced evocative and beautiful paintings of the land and sky, but his forte remained accurate and informed works. In his art, as in everything in his life, his core belief was that effort, rather than outcome (successful or otherwise), was of the greatest importance and this belief led him to cram each day with activity. His uncle, Sir Charles, facilitated introductions that allowed him to draw in the London Zoo (and indirectly led to him being included in the Antarctic party of 1901) and he managed to go there most days to study and draw animals and birds. He also haunted the London parks and the Natural History Museum. He spent days on Wimbledon Common, ‘one of God’s ditches’, with his friend John Fraser.18 Here they could draw and continue with their debates and arguments on anything from medicine and art to theology and politics.

  In his early twenties Wilson had ginger hair, bright blue eyes and a freckled face. He had slender freckled hands, long fingers and a ready smile. He walked with a long, slightly stooping stride.19 His only interest in clothes was that he kept reasonably tidy. He would give away any money he had to anyone he thought deserved it more than him. His one financial weakness was smoking.

  Initially he worked at the hospital from ten until four. With other students he was good-humoured and friendly and his popularity increased when he began making quick sketches of the staff as well as his friends in lectures. He was always willing to lend out his excellent notes. He liked the clinical work and wrote, probably correctly, that his eyes were quicker to spot things than other students.20 But his ‘inner life’ continued and expanded. To an observer he seemed a relatively quiet, but otherwise typical medical student: he played rugby and continued to row, he argued concepts and he sketched. But behind this routine day-to-day existence he started to try to put the religious and aesthetic ideals that he had worked out in Cambridge, into practice. His father wrote that here he really worked out his ideas on how he should live his life and honed them to an extent that he became strong enough not to be thrown by criticism. Each morning before going to lectures or the wards he annotated and paraphrased the New Testament, completing most of the Testament when he was in London. The practice of annotating spiritual readings was to become a routine
that he continued throughout his life. He was not interested in originality; he was passionately interested in truth. He never altered the beliefs that he worked out at this time; they were part of his nature. He wrote, years later, ‘Once foundations are laid they should be built on, and the more they are built on the more they disappear from view’.21

  He was far from perfect and could still be arrogant. On one of his visits to Cheltenham, quite soon after he had started at St George’s, his mother accused him of being so absorbed by the art of medicine that he was losing sight of its basic precept, namely sympathy with his patients. She urged him to be more intuitive. Already Wilson had come to the conclusion that much of the illness that he was seeing in the hospital was self-inflicted (particularly by drink) and he had difficulty in showing compassion towards patients he considered hypocritical or self-pitying. Wilson and his mother also discussed and explored the concept of the ‘teaching power of sickness’. This suggestion – that some medical conditions can promote mental and spiritual fortitude, and conversely the lack of any experience of illness can result in a lack of fortitude – was to have a long-term influence on Wilson’s thinking. On his final journey in the Antarctic, when he was looking after his dying companion, Evans, he thought that Evans would have shown greater resistance if he had been ill before. Mary Agnes had been brought up at the height of evangelical preaching in Cheltenham and was deeply religious. She would not have understood any lack of compassion. Indeed, impatience with patients is unexpected in Wilson, though doctors nowadays dealing with repeat drink- and drug-related emergency admissions may identify with his feelings, but he was very young to clinical medicine and his aims for perfect control and humility were still an ideal. He wrote to his mother in November 1895, ‘I was glad to see you though I expect you found me unsympathetic as usual. … I expect my want of sympathy comes from my never having had an illness, which was not my own fault. … I shall get more openly compassionate as I see more illness, which isn’t brought about by obvious folly or sin …’22 Always the practical man, he acted on this resolve, making a deliberate visit to the local isolation hospital in Cheltenham in May 1896 when smallpox was raging. Here he observed every stage of the disease; digesting, reflecting and learning from what he had seen.23