With Scott in the Antarctic

by Isobel E Williams

  In November 1904 his Antarctic pictures, advertised as being by kind permission of Sir Clements Markham and Scott, were exhibited in the Bruton galleries in Bond Street, Mayfair, a very fashionable area of London. As well as Wilson’s paintings, nearly 200 of Skelton’s photographs, a model of Discovery’s sledging equipment and flags were on show. Burroughs Wellcome advertised that they had provided the medical equipment for the expedition and Burberry showed its lightweight tents and clothing. Orders could be placed for Scott’s book, which was to be ready in early Autumn 1905. Wilson’s contribution was impressive: eighty-eight watercolours of birds, 129 scenic watercolours, thirty-four pencil drawings and twenty-nine topographical sketches. The exhibition attracted an estimated 10,000 visitors and, as the opening coincided with a lecture by Scott in the Albert Hall, Wilson’s fame was assured. Visitors were anxious to see for themselves the actualité of the Antarctic and eager to buy copies of Wilson’s pictures (he thought that the Royal Geographical Society had the claim to the originals and many of the watercolours are still there). The paintings were described as reports of enduring value, showing throughout the personal joy of the author. Amongst the visitors was Sir Joseph Hooker (1817–1911), the grand old man of Kew, and the man who had suggested balloons for the Antarctic. He took great interest in Wilson’s work. By now nearly ninety, as a young man he had spent four years in the southern oceans as an assistant surgeon on Erebus, under Sir James Clark Ross’s command, and he showed Wilson pictures of that expedition. Age had not lessened his enthusiasm for the Antarctic and he wrote, in words that would have been intensely gratifying to Wilson:

  I made an effort to see the Antarctic sketches with my legs bandaged up to the knees (but not painful). They are marvellous in number, interest and execution. No naval expedition ever did the like. The heads and bodies of the birds by Dr Wilson are the perfection of ornithological drawing and colouring. They are absolutely alive.5

  The exhibition was an artistic success. The public was absorbed and particularly fascinated by the first drawings ever of emperor penguin chicks. Wilson’s pleasure in this interest was tempered by his agreeing to produce ‘upwards of forty’ copies of the drawings. Although each picture sold for twenty to thirty guineas,6 making a good commercial profit, the commission taken by the gallery left very little over for him and probably confirmed his distaste for commercial transactions.7 However he would have been delighted to know that the pleasure and interest in Discovery paintings continues. His watercolour, Emperor Penguin Rookery, Cape Crozier, was sold at Christies in London for more than £9,000 in 2003 and Last view of Mount Discovery was bought for over £5,000 at the same auction.

  He saw his family and friends less than he would have liked, but his friendship with Scott continued. When Scott went on his national speaking tour he stayed at Westal when lecturing in Cheltenham. He spent the evening with the Wilsons and no doubt praised their son highly. Jim, Wilson’s young brother, thought that Scott must get bored, having to talk continually about the Antarctic. Meanwhile, since Wilson and Oriana needed to be close to London, they rented accommodation in Bushey, a village close to north London. It had a rural environment which suited him better than London itself, but was close enough for him to work in the British Museum and on his expedition reports. Bushey had the added attraction that one of his sisters, Mrs Godfrey Rendall, lived there. In Bushey he worked on a picture for presentation to King Edward and in Bushey he narrowly escaped a premature end to his career: a wasp stung him on his temple. This caused an anaphylactic reaction, a serious allergic-type reaction that can lead to death. Within minutes of being stung he suffered generalised itching, wheezing and coughing and could hardly breathe, with pains in his chest and a racing pulse. He felt faint and became confused, probably related to low blood pressure and lowered oxygen levels. His father wrote that he would have died without prompt treatment.8 The immediate lifesaving treatment was (and still is) adrenaline and the man who saved his life was by chance Ernest Shackleton’s cousin, a Dr Shackleton, who practised in Bushey. Although he improved slowly, Wilson’s chest went on rattling and wheezing for hours and the white wheals on his bright red skin took days to resolve. He had a narrow escape.

  Lecturing and after-dinner speeches did not come naturally, though he agreed to talk to colleagues at St George’s, the Royal Geographical Society, the Cambridge Philosophical Society, the Royal Institution and schools. At St George’s, having been eulogised, he stood up, suffered stage fright and could not continue; very unpleasant, but he hoped it did not ‘live in others’ memory as long or as lively as in his own’.9 Early on he read his lectures from carefully-written (and rewritten) notes, but as he became more confident, and with repetition, he began to speak directly to his audience. He spoke with humour rather than didactically and he often made his audience laugh, always a successful ploy for a lecturer. On scurvy his message was clear: fresh meat was preferable to lime juice, that there was no associated anaemia or arthritis, but that muscular pains were common. He wrote that the taste for alcohol became less as the cold became more intense.10 When he was due to address the Society for the Protection of Birds, he warned his father that he was going to speak on a topic that outraged him: thousands of penguins were hunted into red-hot cauldrons and boiled down for oil extraction on Macquire Island. He thought this practice appalling and thought his audience would too. After his death, others, including his friend, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote about his experiences with Wilson in his book The Worst Journey in the World, took up the crusade. Eventually the practice was forbidden by Parliament.11

  In mid-December 1904, Wilson presented his Antarctic watercolour to the King, who in turn awarded him with a Silver Polar Medal, along with more than forty of his colleagues. He also met a number of people who would have been of interest to him and whose interest in him would have been gratifying. He met the well-known older artist, Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849–1914),12 who actually lived in Bushey and had opened the successful Herkomer Art School there in 1883: a man ‘with a big ascetic nose in the middle of a refined clean-shaven face’. Herkomer was probably at the height of his fame in 1905. In 1901 he had been asked to paint Queen Victoria as she lay on her deathbed, an unheard-of concession to a commoner (albeit one of German descent),13 and his friendship was gratifying. Herkomer was a portrait painter (he painted Ruskin), and a freelance artist for The Graphic magazine. Many of his pictures illustrated poverty: The Old Village Nurse, painted in 1892 and depicting the death of a child, shows a road in Bushey that Wilson would have known and he would have empathised with the content. Wilson also met John Macallan Swan (1847–1910), ‘the finest animal painter going – such a fine old chap with a colossal head and a mass of grizzled curly grey hair’,14 and the brilliant zoologist Sir Ray Lankester, (1847–1929), who advised him to make himself the foremost authority on seals.15

  He would have been happy also to re-meet the Duchess of Bedford who had been at school in Cheltenham and knew his sisters. The ‘Flying Duchess’ had been dissuaded from training as a nurse by her father but the interest remained and as Duchess she designed and went on to build a cottage hospital in the grounds of the Bedford’s ancestral home, Woburn Abbey, not far from Bushey. She discussed her plans with Wilson and gave him access to roam in the 3,000-acre estate. Wilson also met John and Hallam Murray of the publishing house ‘John Murray’. Their names would have been familiar. Their company had published – amongst other successes – the works of Charles Darwin and Jane Austen as well as Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. They had also published one of the first cookery books for housewives, Mrs Rundell’s Domestic Cookery. Byron had been delighted by the second John Murray’s pleased observation that both Harold and Cookery were much wanted. Wilson must have been pleased and flattered when the Murray brothers advised him to write and illustrate for publication. ‘[They] gave me to understand that they would be pleased if I came to them for an offer first’.16 Hallam Murray went with him to his Antarctic exhibitio
n. Wilson wrote: ‘I have rarely met such a charming man or one so courteous and full of help and sympathy. He told me of several faults that run through all my paintings – easily corrected, I am glad to say, now my attention has been drawn to them’.17

  Another publisher, Reginald Smith (1857–1916) of Smith, Elder and Co, was to become a lifelong friend. Wilson first met Smith when he went with Scott to the Smith, Elder and Co offices to discuss the book of the expedition, which was to be published by the firm in October 1905. Smith was intelligent, thoughtful and highly principled and had a big enough private income for him to pursue ‘quality rather than profit in his professional life’.18 He headed the London firm of the Smith, Elder and Co publishing company, which vied with John Murray publishing for the distinction of their authors: Trollope, Browning and Thackeray were amongst these and Smith’s father-in-law had discovered Charlotte Brontë. He was a man who encouraged his authors and in turn inspired their admiration and gratitude; several dedicated their books to him.19 He and Wilson were both meditative men with tastes in common. They became good friends, a friendship that would endure for the remainder of Wilson’s life. Before Wilson’s final expedition, Smith gave him a watch on which he had engraved ‘From now onward till we return …’.20 Wilson, thanking him, wrote:

  not a single day will pass but I shall be reminded by the simple inscription on the back of the watch of the friend whose friendship has made all but the very highest principles in life, impossible. It is a very great thing to have a friend like that and we feel that to possess the friendship of yourself and Mrs Smith is to possess something that will outlast watches, and will be still going when the last of them has stopped.21

  They were to become particularly close over the Smith’s publication of what was to be Wilson’s magnum opus, his report on The Grouse in Health and Disease. When Wilson died, Smith wrote that to have known Wilson was a lifelong possession, as to have lost him was a lifelong regret.

  It is ironic that, in relation to his feelings for animals in the wild, his next big undertaking was related to field sports. It was however another unlooked-for opportunity for work in an area peculiarly suited to Wilson’s training, experience and interests. After he made a presentation to the British Ornithologists’ Union in March 1905, he was introduced to Lord Lovat (1871–1933),22 who was chairman of a commission investigating a disease that was decimating grouse on the moors. This was no small matter. Gross rent from grouse moors alone in the early 1900s was approximately £1 million a year in Scotland, and £270,000 in Wales and northern England. In addition, wages and earnings added a big direct and indirect boost to the economy.23 This was threatened by grouse disease, which had already been investigated by both eminent and considerably less eminent scientists and landowners. There was no generally-agreed policy for attacking the problem because there was no consensus as to the cause; the conclusions of the grouse inquiry (which took six years) were the springboard for accepted changes in moor management. At Lord Lovat’s invitation Wilson went to Carlisle in northern England to attend a meeting on the disease. He found the problem absorbingly interesting, a scientific thriller. He thought that ‘a nicer piece of work can hardly be imagined nor one I should prefer to take up’.24 He accepted the appointment of field observer to the inquiry in November 1905, for the remuneration of £150 plus travelling expenses.25 He was the third field observer; two respected scientists had previously investigated, but not solved the problem. As field observer he travelled widely; to Scotland, the Lake District and northern England and though it was originally thought that the work could be done in six months of each year, so leaving time for writing and painting, it was obvious almost immediately that full-time input was needed. Thoughts such as ‘he couldn’t imagine anything nicer’ became lost in a blur of dissection, microscopic work, travelling and writing. Typically he began with the basics and studied the feeding, moulting and other characteristics of the normal grouse before moving on to dissect hundreds of birds that had died of the disease. Apart from tramping the moors, and slowly gaining the active cooperation of the keepers who grew to respect his knowledge, he consulted with his colleagues and took part in experiments in the observation area, where bacteriology results were tested. His contribution to the final report is impossible to overemphasise. This report not only proved the cause of the disease conclusively, but also, with its practical advice on management, saved a sport estimated to add in total over £2 million to the economy.26

  The report was issued in 1911, long before Wilson’s fate was known, so that Lord Lovat’s comments on Wilson’s contribution can be taken at face value. Lord Lovat was almost fulsome in his praise of Wilson (designated in the report as M.B., F.Z.S., M.B.O.U.).27 He wrote that it was ‘difficult to speak highly enough of Dr Wilson’s services, for not only was he an indefatigable worker in the field, but his ornithological knowledge, his scientific training and his artistic skill, have been of the utmost value in every branch of the inquiry’. He went on to say that Wilson had ‘written or aided in writing ten out of the first fourteen chapters of the book and has not only fully illustrated his own contributions, but he had placed his artistic skill at the disposal of nearly all the other writers’. He concluded that ‘Dr Wilson’s personal qualities secured for him the willing assistance alike of Local Correspondents and Scientific Staff and went far to ensure whatever success the committee has achieved’.28

  Along with the grouse work Wilson, perhaps inevitably, took on too much. Even his father reflected that he had taken on more than he could cope with.29 His defence would have been that the commitments were taken on when it was thought that the grouse work could be done in six months of the year. He would have been determined to continue financially independent; the social norms of the time demanded that a married man support his family, also he and Oriana might have children. So in addition to his own illustrations for the gallery, Scott’s and Armitage’s books and work on the National Antarctic Expedition’s report, he agreed to illustrate a new edition of Bell’s A History of British Mammals for a friend from Cambridge, Gerald Barrett-Hamilton (1871–1914). The work needed for this publication was prodigious: full-page colour plates, fifty-four black and white plates and more than 200 smaller sketches. So his agreement to do yet more coloured illustrations for the appropriately named Dr William Eagle Clarke (1853–1938), of the Natural History Department in Edinburgh, for a publication, British Birds, underlines his inability to prioritise.

  Of these two commissions the first number of British Mammals was not actually published until 1910, after which Wilson’s work appeared in many further editions. By the time the fourteenth was published in 1913, Wilson’s fate was known and the edition included an appreciation of Wilson by Barrett-Hamilton. Edition number fifteen, printed after Barrett-Hamilton himself had died, included a further appreciation by a mutual friend. ‘Wilson has gone. His long lean figure will no longer stalk down the galleries of the British Museum of Natural History. … But we, his fellow workers, will treasure his memory, proud that for a brief space he journeyed with us, lightening our labours with the truest good fellowship.’30 The commission for Dr Clarke’s British Birds was withdrawn after Wilson had finished many of the illustrations; Dr Clarke said that they were ‘not satisfactory’ and, more believably, that the work would not be finished on time. This was very galling to such a careful worker, particularly when Eagle Clarke had told Wilson that he was pleased with the work and Wilson had thought there ‘was no shadow of doubt about his appreciation’.31 Wilson’s efforts were not entirely wasted; some of the work was eventually reproduced in Sport in Wildest Britain in 1921. But Eagle Clarke had a valid point. Because of Wilson’s conflicting priorities, he often finished his commissions late and delivered them with long apologies.32 In addition to illustrating, his lectures continued. He remembered his old friends: the forty-pound profit for his lecture at Queen’s Gate Hall in South Kensington, London – advertised in a way that must have shaken him: five shillings for a reserv
ed seat, half-a-crown for an unreserved seat – went to the Caius Mission.33

  Wilson and Oriana stayed in Bushey for five years. In summer 1905, they moved to a small house, near to the almshouses. The house, formerly ‘Tynecote’ now ‘Bourne Hall Cottage’, is still there and was represented in an embroidery made by the Bushey Museum as part of the millennium celebrations. In ‘Tynecote’ the young couple put their theory of not allowing the less privileged class to give up precious time to look after the privileged minority, in this case the Wilsons. He wrote to one of his aunts:

  How we wish you would come and see us and have a look at our cosy home. We are down at six every morning. O. does all the cooking and house cleaning, and I do the kitchen grate and light the fire and do the flue. I don’t smoke and I don’t drink and I have to swear horribly to prevent myself becoming a little angel and flying away.34

  This gesture, although altruistic, could be considered naive and simplistic. There were no children, he and Oriana were young and well and, presumably, the liberated servants had to earn their wages from less enlightened employers. The decision could cause little change in wealth distribution; this would take years. But he was absolutely sincere in his vision of equal opportunity, though the tension between his ideals and his middle-class identity was demonstrated when he went to join his family in Ireland for a month’s holiday; an impossibility for most workers. In Ireland he painted some of his best landscapes of the beautiful scenery around Killarney.