With Scott in the Antarctic

by Isobel E Williams

  A quiet life was advised. This was routine advice for anyone who had been sent to a spa, but advice that Wilson would ignore. He was again determined to live each day to the full. He wrote to Oriana that to ‘save’ his health and strength until he was sixty was not an option. How did he know he would live that long? He thought it was much better to ‘wear a thing when its good and new, patching the odd corners as they wear out, instead of putting it away carefully year after year till at last the moths get in and its no good when at last you want to wear it’.66 But his experiences had changed him; his family found him more reserved and moody than previously. He spoke little of his plans and his mother, a trifle unrealistically, was sad that he would not confide in her. He was clearly hoping against hope for a future with Oriana. But long-term planning remained difficult: he was still occasionally coughing up blood, he had no occupation or income and he needed to complete his studies but was not well enough to return immediately to the hospital. He probably hoped that the situation might clarify itself one way or another in a further few months, so he accepted another invitation to Norway. Here his physical improvement continued. He was in the countryside continuously. He painted and recorded the sunsets with awe. How difficult it was to capture and retain the memory of such beauty. How he wished he had Turner’s mastery.

  Later in 1899, when back in London, his temperature and cough returned. But by now his thoughts, hopes and intentions had crystallised. His and Oriana’s commitment to each other had been tested enough. Procrastination was abandoned and on 19 October 1899, they became engaged. Fears about death, concerns about his career and the future were swept aside in a blaze of happiness.

  Before he became ill, Wilson had studied for nearly two and a half years at St George’s. He had covered most of the syllabus therefore, but he had been away for eighteen months and must have been very concerned about his ability not only to complete the course but also to revise all his previous work. He needed to study exceptionally hard to cover both these gaps and he had only two months to do it in. But better health and energy and his personal happiness gave him the determination to ‘go for it’. With Oriana’s help he moved to Stanmore, in the country and away from the smogs of London, and worked determinedly. In December 1899 he went to Cambridge for his examinations and was both delighted and surprised to pass.67

  As a monomaniac on Physic and the allied sciences I have been found not wanting. I am admitted into the comparatively select circle of amateur and other druggists. The prospect of immediate admission to the degree of M.B. is the Christmas present which I propose to proffer for your acceptance … Therefore let all now at home take me at my own valuation and realise that for a cheap and easy solution of the difficult problems of life they have a near relative and a dear friend in a ginger-headed copper-knob named Ted, M.B.68

  4

  Antarctic Recruit

  Although Wilson passed his Cambridge examinations in December 1899, it was some months before he was awarded the M.B. In addition to the clinical examinations, he had to complete his dissertation on ‘Yellow Atrophy of The Liver’, which included some cases supplied by his proud father. In Stanmore village he could roam on the common and draw, but he found the discipline of writing the dissertation hard. Also he missed being with Oriana. When it was finally completed, the dissertation had to be submitted to the examiners and agreed by them. His M.B. degree was formally conferred on 7 June 1900.1

  In these months, Wilson needed to earn money. He was conscious that at twenty-seven he was still dependent on his father for his day-to-day existence. He was never to be a man who ‘grew out’ of his family and his love and admiration of his father was lifelong. His father was, as Wilson well knew, still supporting three of his sisters and his young brother James at Westal2 and, as was common in Victorian households, helping other female relatives. So he was delighted when he was offered opportunities to earn money by drawing. He was asked to do illustrations for a publication, Land and Water,3 edited by a friend from Cambridge, the author C.E. Walker, and further welcome income was made certain when Dr Rolleston from St George’s arranged for him to do illustrations for The Lancet.4 Dr Phillip L. Sclater (1829–1913), the secretary of the Zoological Society, an old friend of his father’s and a man who would later have a pivotal influence on Wilson’s career, allowed him free access to the society library and zoological gardens where he could draw and paint.

  Wilson was a man who found it impossible to separate his artwork from its spiritual framework. For him the two were intimately intertwined. His drawings were an expression of his love for God. He explained this fusion to his father in a letter of 1899: ‘My little bird-pictures are just visible proofs of my love for them and attempts to praise God and bring others to love Him through his works and that’s why I love to give them away and hate to sell them. I can’t believe God has given me such an intense absorbing love for drawing unless it was to be used in some way’.5 He hated the business of actually selling the paintings. He would have preferred to give them away ‘so that people would know God through his works’.6 He wrote to Oriana in 1900:

  I tried a shop in Regent Street. A young man with well-pomaded7 curly hair and a very smart frock coat came to me. I asked if I might show some drawings; he said he would look at them, and turned over the leaves as you might a Whitaker’s Almanac,8 and said, ‘No use whatsoever for that sort of thing’ and walked away. I am not disappointed because it’s exactly what I expected, but I think it’s useless to repeat it.

  In the same letter he expanded again on his feelings towards his drawings:

  My pictures are the realisation of little things that have been treasured up in my mind, little traits of character picked up crumb by crumb in the fields and by hedgerows, at last pieced together and put into the form of something living. The realisation of every happy day I have spent in the hills is in the picture of a stoat I chanced to see; in the snake’s, in that little head and one eye is all the fascinating quickness and supple gracefulness of all snakes I have known. The whole concentrated beauty of that glorious Norwegian forest at midnight is what I see in the picture of the sparrow-hawk’s nest.9

  Although, as expected, he did not sell many drawings on the fashionable market, support and appreciation did come, and from a welcome source. At the Annual Meeting and Dinner of the British Ornithological Union of 1900, Wilson’s confidence was boosted by meeting two very distinguished artists, Archibald Thorburn (1860–1935) and George Edward Lodge (1850–1944). Both of these older men were already eminent in a world in which Wilson increasingly wanted to shine; Thorburn went on to publish British Birds and British Mammals, and Lodge illustrated the popular Hudson’s Birds. Wilson was flattered by their kindness. They invited him to look at their work but more importantly, looked at his and gave valuable constructive criticism. Wilson’s confidence was increased when, to his delight, he was proposed as a member of this prestigious society – a real accolade.10 His self-assurance mounted when he was asked to look at plates of bird studies painted by an octogenarian, a Mr Hammond, who was known to be capriciously selective about who he allowed to see his work. An invitation to view was a compliment that Wilson appreciated. He wrote:

  Twenty volumes containing water-colour portraits of three hundred and sixty British Birds in their surroundings, the most perfect little pictures imaginable … It is altogether one of the best things I have seen in my life; I enjoyed it immensely, but goodness me, I feel as though I should never want to touch a pencil or brush again.11

  The pictures were his ideals of how birds should be represented and he felt he had much to improve, but although he was modest about his abilities, Wilson nevertheless had confidence that, as an acolyte of Ruskin, his strength lay not only in his technical abilities but also in his extensive background knowledge of his subjects. He certainly felt that his pictures were already worth more than the dreadful things he had seen exhibited, well reviewed and sold for eight and ten guineas. Paintings of animals had to be ‘ali
ve’ and he was robustly critical of much exhibited work. As he wrote to Oriana in 1900:

  I spent an hour at the water-colour exhibition at Piccadilly … dreadful stuffed birds! There were plenty of flowers, nicely done but then they merely want a faithful copyist – anyone can do that but WHY don’t they open their eyes to birds, which are so much more subtly beautiful than flowers? No one would think of painting preserved flowers – why on earth do they paint preserved birds?12

  His parents offered to pay for art tuition, but he worried about adding to his father’s financial burdens, and was no doubt conscious that he was not yet part of the structured career being undertaken by his fellow students from St George’s, and did not take up this offer.

  What should the next move be? Although Roland Huntford states in his book Scott and Amundsen that Wilson seemed uninterested in practising medicine13 this is not precisely true. At this stage Wilson absolutely accepted that when he was well enough to work, his future lay in some branch of medicine, but which branch? His early ambitions towards surgery or missionary work were impractical because he was still coughing up blood occasionally, suggesting that there was still some inflammation present. General practice, his father’s choice, did not appeal. The situation was complicated by the fact that he needed practical experience before entering any speciality. His friend from St George’s, John Fraser, did three house jobs (approximately eighteen months more work) before specialising.14 Wilson was all too aware of what was required. He wrote, to his father, in July 1900:

  I want, most sadly, say six months hospital work and say a month at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital,15 and until I have got that at least, I do not feel fit for ‘the cure of bodies’. But this is also true that so long as I have to draw a living from you I am perfectly willing to do anything you want me to. I should hate to think that I was trying to make things more easy for myself while I was making them harder for you.16

  As he pondered on his uncertain future and before he was actually granted his thesis, Wilson was completely surprised to hear from Dr Sclater, his friend in the Zoological Society, asking if he would consider applying to join the planned National Antarctic Expedition as doctor, naturalist and artist. The expedition was due to leave in July 1901 on the ship Discovery. Wilson’s father said the offer was ‘a bolt out of the blue’.17 It was certainly a most wonderful tailor-made opportunity; all Wilson’s talents and interests were included in the job description. He wrote in his diary that he accepted at once, as he said, ‘provisionally’,18 but in fact he appears to have hesitated, writing back that he felt unqualified for the post, probably frightened of hoping too much. On 1 June Dr Sclater wrote to him again, expressing views that he would scarcely be able to express as freely to a candidate today: ‘I am on the committee that makes the appointments and my opinion is that you would be a suitable person for the post’.19 With this encouragement Wilson’s courage hardened and he went, as suggested, to see a leading member of the biological sub-committee, Professor Edward Poulton (1856–1943), professor of zoology at Oxford University. The interview was successful. His uncle Sir Charles ‘advertised’ him in the Royal Geographical Society and helped him by arranging meetings with people who would be of help to him in his application. Sir Charles wrote a letter of support to Sir Clements Markham, the president of the Royal Geographical Society and ‘father’ of the British Antarctic attempts, also. Sir Clements suggested that Wilson should meet Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), the then virtually unknown expedition commander. The interview was arranged for 22 November.

  Meanwhile Wilson, having obtained his degree, finally started medical work proper. According to A.E. Shipley, a fellow Cambridge graduate and Wilson’s future co-author of a huge report on Grouse disease, Wilson was offered a two-year appointment at St George’s but was advised not to take it up. Certainly if he had taken up a hospital appointment he would not have been able to consider Antarctic exploration.20 Instead he went to the local hospital at Cheltenham in September 1900, first as a locum and then as Junior House Surgeon. He gave anaesthetics and performed minor surgery. This experience was to be of good use to him in the Antarctic but he found the work hard and stressful. Not only did he work for days and nights at a stretch without much backup, but he was also single-handed with responsibilities for seriously ill patients. However he was clearly not destined for hospital medicine. Only three weeks after starting as House Surgeon, he pricked his finger whilst working in the post-mortem room. The finger became infected and swollen, the infection quickly spreading to glands in the upper arm, which filled with pus and made the arm too painful to use. He wrote that:

  I found my temperature to be 103°F while I was hunting for the head of a tapeworm in a small boy’s excreta. Having found it and identified it under the microscope I went to bed, and then came the worst week of illness and pain it has ever been granted to me to experience.21

  Antibiotics were unknown in 1900 and he needed regular morphine to control the pain. The glands in the armpit had to be lanced under ether anaesthetic. A drain was left in his armpit to release the infection. Wilson had to resign from the post. This was his sole hospital experience.

  Whilst awaiting developments over the Antarctic project, Wilson’s spiritual and moral development did not falter. 1900 was a year full of incident for Britain. The Boer War (1899–1902) between Dutch settlers in South Africa and the British was not going as anticipated. The British, far from crushing those impudent Boer insurgents as anticipated, had suffered a series of defeats and 3,000 had died by the time Ladysmith22 was relieved. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who had already lost his only son in the war, became Supreme Commander of the British forces and in March, Wilson’s older brother Bernard sailed off to South Africa to fight.23 Bernard’s descriptions of life at the front are horribly vivid. He wrote to his family about being caught in bombardments of bullets flying from every direction and the difficulties of running across open ground in a hail of those bullets carrying his rifle, 100 rounds of ammunition, his haversack, bayonet, revolver, field glasses and water-bottle; the awfulness of the infections, sickness and wounds that decimated his unit24 in which typhoid probably wreaked as much havoc as the bullets. By 1900 many young men had enlisted as a patriotic duty. But others had simply seen the war as an opportunity to get away from the repetitive drudgery of lives spent working fifty-five hours a week and with no hope of a better future. Some of these men had hardly travelled from their villages and had never been on a train, let alone a ship to Europe. They went off excitedly with their friends looking for adventure and hoping to return as heroes. For many of these, as was to happen in the First World War, the casualties, realities and horrors of the battlefield quickly shattered their ideals. Some however, including Winston Spencer Churchill, never seemed to tire of the thrill of the campaign. Churchill, who had been determined to get to South Africa, managed to get appointed as principle war correspondent for the Morning Post. He wrote with undiminished enthusiasm about his experiences in My Early Years.25 Reports such as Churchill’s did much to keep up public support, but Wilson remained impervious to patriotic fervour. Wilson was a pacifist; a brave and unpopular position when the majority of citizens thought that support for the war was every British man’s patriotic duty. He was upheld by his religious convictions and convinced of God’s providence and God’s purpose, ‘only man is vile’. He was particularly moved by a widely-reported battle between the British forces (which included a Canadian regiment that suffered its worst losses of a single day for the entire war) and the Boers, commanded by General Piet Cronje. This battle, on the banks of the Modder River, was bloody and destructive and resulted in the surrender of nearly 10 per cent of the Boer army. Such military success appalled Wilson. No jingoistic, xenophobic rejoicing for him. He wrote:

  Now I know what the duties of a soldier are in war, I would rather shoot myself than anyone else by a long, long way. I simply could not do it. The very thought of it now is a ghastly nightmare to me, chiefly the result of
a very realistic account of our sinful – though as things are, necessary – cruelty over that bombardment of Cronje in the Modder. It made me cry like a baby and I threw away the paper in perfect disgust. A nation should be judged on exactly the same grounds as an individual. As a nation we have the vilest of sins, which everyone extols as the glory of Imperialism. One day, all this part of our history will be looked upon in its proper light.26