Work began in earnest on the grouse project in the autumn of 1905. The red grouse is unique to the British Isles. It is a subspecies of the willow grouse, but while the willow grouse are sprinkled around the Arctic tundra, the red grouse thrive, in hundreds and thousands, on Scottish and northern English moors. Grouse shooting is an exciting field sport. The birds do not fly high, but skim the contours of the hills with an accuracy of cruise missiles, flying a few feet above the heather in order to outwit their main predator, the falcon. They can navigate the moors at sixty miles per hour or even faster with a following wind. On a shoot, the beaters launch them into the air by crying, whistling and banging.
Nowadays the heather is carefully managed to give the grouse food and shelter and the keepers protect them from predators. In the early 1900s the heather was managed with equal interest but with less success. Grouse disease had been an intermittent problem for years and causes varying between poor drainage of the moors, starvation of the birds, infection and damage by predators had been considered. The two previous field observers had reached conclusions that were strikingly at variance with each other, a result that could only add to the general uncertainty. Dr Thomas Spencer Cobbold (1828–86) concluded that the disease was entirely due to hundreds and thousands of tiny worms, Trichostrongylus perigracilis, in the grouse intestine. By contrast, Professor Edward Emanuel Klein (1844–1925) stated that the disease was due to an acute infectious pneumonia due to a bacillus that attacked healthy birds and killed them in their prime. Faced with these conflicting views, with hundreds of dead birds and a potentially catastrophic loss of income, Lord Lovat’s commission aimed to investigate which (if any) of the theories was correct, how birds actually became infected and what, practically, to do about it. The work was to take six years.
The pivotal part of Wilson’s work was the investigation of healthy birds. Much of this work was done in the observation area in Surrey, which had been granted a Home Office licence35 for grouse to be kept in captivity. His observations allowed Wilson to state categorically that variations in, for example, the birds’ plumage, that had been previously considered a marker of disease, were in fact normal and that plumage could vary in healthy cocks and hens at different times of the year and in different locations. Also the weights of the birds could vary significantly in health.36 In the final report Wilson wrote or contributed to chapters on the normal grouse, its life history, its plumage and its food, and the grouse in disease.
It was agreed that the first priority was to find the cause of the disease before a cure could be attempted. It was entirely unclear whether Dr Cobbold and Professor Klein could both be correct and that the two presentations (of acute pneumonia or emaciation) were actually forms of the same disease, or whether there were two (or more) distinct entities. The inquiry conclusion was that was that there was only one disease, due to the microscopic threadworm, Trichostrongylus. It was found that the threadworm crawls up the fronds of the heather, infests the dewdrops on the ends of the young shoots, which the grouse feed on and so infects the birds with the lingering symptoms of grouse disease by damaging the delicate lining of the gut and interfering with absorption. In relation to the Klein hypothesis, Wilson and his co-workers found no cases of ‘well’ birds dying suddenly, as might occur with pneumonia. They found however that the pneumonic changes seen by the professor were, in fact, post-mortem changes, similar to changes found in perfectly healthy birds some hours after death.37 No criticism was made of Klein’s work; the professor had made his observations when bacteriology was in its infancy,38 but the report clearly states that the conclusion that pneumonia was the cause of grouse disease was a misconception.39 The conclusion was backed by experimental evidence. Wilson was able to reproduce the disease at the observatory when he fed grouse with contaminated food.
The investigation was so authoritative because every dead grouse picked up on the moors in Scotland, Ireland and England was sent to Wilson, who dissected and examined them all. Already by 1906 there were daily deliveries. Wilson eventually dissected nearly 2,000 birds and made a skin of every one. He said that he continued to skin them in his sleep. In addition to dissection, the birds were weighed and measured, and the crop contents and intestines examined and analysed. He worked at home, in makeshift laboratories and in hotel rooms up and down the country, where unsurprisingly he was not popular. Even Westal became filled with grouse feathers.40 He often wrote his notes up on the train. The work gradually took over his and Oriana’s lives. She became his assistant, writing to his dictation, or reading to him, whilst he sketched and skinned. It is remarkable that, out of all this messy and confusing work, Wilson was able to come to such lucid, definite and unambiguous conclusions. Also that his wife – unexpectedly plunged into the morass of unfamiliar, repetitive and unpleasant work, accommodation in strange hotel rooms and frequent exhausting travel – seems to have taken to the work with interest and with no complaints or recrimination. Truly, a marriage of minds.
The work took so long because not only did the cause of the disease have to be established but also the mechanisms of infection had to be worked out. Life was a round of grouse-moor inspections, examination of the heather, dissecting grouse, looking at microscopic specimens, having interviews with colleagues on the Committee, correcting proofs and continuing his correspondence. In the summer of 1906 Wilson moved to Scotland to be close to his work. He often sat up all night on the moor to obtain a better understanding of the grouse and her chicks, or to collect early morning dew. He and Oriana continued without servants. ‘Servants seem to be everyone’s chief anxiety and we are spared much by having none’.41
As he was unravelling the scientific mystery, an unexpected letter arrived from Ernest Shackleton dated 12 February 1907. This announced Shackleton’s intention to lead his own expedition to the Antarctic and he invited Wilson to join him as second-in-command. Shackleton’s plans had been released to the press two days earlier; a flood of volunteers followed the announcement immediately, but Shackleton wanted Wilson. He suggested that if his own health stopped him from attempting a polar journey, Wilson should take this prize on. Wilson responded to this invitation with a regretful ‘no’. Oriana would have supported a return to the Antarctic, but he could not allow himself to abandon the grouse work at such an important stage. A flurry of letters between Shackleton, Wilson and members of the Grouse Inquiry Board followed Wilson’s disappointing reply and although Shackleton offered to help speed up the grouse work with secretarial assistance, his offer was turned down. Lord Lovat and other members of the Board by now thought that Wilson’s contribution was indispensable and Wilson was not about to abandon it.
My Lord … I write to say that I have refused the offer (of the expedition) and that I am quite prepared to stand by the Grouse. For many reasons of course I should like to have gone, but I feel it would be absurd and unfair to throw up the Grouse Inquiry work just when I have begun to get a grip of it. … Shackleton is of course a great friend of mine as we were together in the Discovery, and in refusing to go with him I told him it was a great disappointment. Under the circumstances I should be equally sorry now not to see the Grouse Inquiry through to the end.42
Shackleton thought the decision was almost as bitter a disappointment as he had felt when he had had to leave Discovery. He wrote to a senior member of the committee, ‘the loss is the Expedition’s and to me personally, that of a good friend and adviser’.43 He wrote to Wilson, ‘Heaven knows how I want you – but I admire you more than ever for your attitude. A man rarely writes out his heart but I would to you. If I reach the Pole I will still have a regret that you were not with me’.44 Almost until he left, Shackleton was asking for Wilson’s advice on any number of matters and hoping that he would change his mind.45
Scott remained a friend. He corresponded with Wilson regularly but he only heard of Shackleton’s sensational plans for an independent expedition on 12 February, days after they had been announced, and when he was sailing with the Atlant
ic Fleet on Albemarle.46 He had already written to the Royal Geographical Society seeking financial assistance for a further expedition and the news that Shackleton had already obtained sponsorship (from the shipbuilder William Beardmore, to be repaid on Shackleton’s return by writing a book, lecturing and selling articles) and was also approaching the Geographical Society for support, was a serious blow. He thought that Shackleton was trying to subvert his own plans for a return to the Antarctic. Discovery officers were aware that Scott wanted to return, but that his plans depended on naval support and pay. Scott was helping his mother and younger sisters financially; in addition he needed more sea experience before he could apply to go on half-pay and so have the time to pursue his Antarctic ambitions. He felt that Shackleton had cut into his life’s work and that Shackleton’s plans to aim for ‘his’ part of the Antarctic in McMurdo Sound were dishonourable. He felt it was ‘the natural right of his leadership to continue along the line which he had made’. Out with the Atlantic Fleet he wrote to Shackleton that his announcement ‘cut across my plans’ and that he was sure that only Shackleton’s entire ignorance of his plans could have ‘allowed him settle on the Discovery route without a word to me’. He was sure that ‘with a little discussion we can work in accord rather than in opposition’.47 Scott had not thought that Shackleton, who was now married and out of the Navy, would consider another Antarctic adventure and he thought he had the right of leadership to McMurdo Sound. He wrote that two expeditions could not go to the same spot within years of each other. He appealed to Wilson, a man ‘who commands our respect and who could not be otherwise than straight’,48 and said that he would suggest that Wilson communicated with Shackleton. So Wilson found himself, in addition to all his other duties, in the role of peacemaker between the two ambitious, determined men.
Shackleton wrote to Wilson that he was sorry that he was having so much worry but that ‘this was the penalty of being considered capable in judgement’.49 Scott wanted Shackleton to change his plans, or at least to agree to avoid McMurdo Sound and ‘his’ base. In March Shackleton travelled to Westal to thrash out the problem. Wilson thought initially that he should simply leave the field open to Scott but failing this, he thought that Shackleton should definitely avoid the Discovery base. He wrote later that even if Shackleton succeeded in getting to the Pole ‘the gilt would be off the gingerbread’ if he had gone from McMurdo, ‘because of the insinuation which would almost certainly appear in the minds of a good many that you forestalled Scott who had a prior claim on the use of that base’.50 Once Wilson was sure of Scott’s plans, his high-minded loyalty made him feel that Shackleton was ‘intruding’ into Scott’s Antarctic. But Shackleton, having convinced him that he had had no idea of Scott’s plans, eventually departed with Wilson’s blessing, with the agreement that he would not use McMurdo Sound as his base.51
In fact, even if Wilson had felt able to leave the Grouse Inquiry in 1907, he probably would have refused to go with Shackleton once he was certain that there was a probability of Scott’s returning to the south. By the end of March1907, he had accepted Scott’s invitation to return with him to the Antarctic, on the proviso that he would not be available until the end of 1908.
Shackleton sailed off on Nimrod on 30 July 1907. Wilson wished him well, but his mind was not on the expedition. He had other more pressing concerns. He had lost his notes. He always took relevant papers to meetings and the loss of two years of dissection records (his father wrote that his suitcase was stolen) on a Glasgow railway station, was a major blow.52 He had kept rough notes but much of the work had to be repeated. The 1907 Grouse Committee meeting opened with the statement that the most important decision to make was that ‘Wilson must have a holiday’.53 Over the following months the Commission went on to decide on and to recommend stratagems for keeping the birds healthy. A regular cycle of burning bracken and undergrowth and cutting the heather back was advised. The numbers of birds in any particular area was matched with the amount of food available so as to reduce overcrowding and infection. The advice was practical and efficient and quickly adopted. The grouse industry was saved for an outlay of £4,366, an average of £727 a year.54 Red grouse are still carefully monitored along with the worm burden; the worms survive worst in dry cold conditions.55
Wilson and Oriana, along with Scott, were regular guests of the publisher (and now friend) Reginald Smith and his wife in their shooting bungalow in Scotland. Here he could relax and be brought up to date on Scott’s plans for a second expedition. It was here that in 1908 he met a young man, Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886–1959), whose future he was to dominate. Cherry-Garrard was Reginald Smith’s first cousin although thirty years his junior. When he met Wilson he was 22, the hugely wealthy owner of estates in Hertfordshire and Berkshire (his father had died less than a year previously in 1907), but a man uncertain of himself and without a definite sense of purpose. Two years after their first meeting he heard that Scott and Wilson were going south again and he was sure that this was the adventure he wanted. He wrote to Wilson to suggest that he volunteer. Wilson already liked him, and would anyway be biased in favour of a relative of Reginald Smith, but he knew that 8,000 had already applied and he was cautious about offering encouragement. When Cherry-Garrard wrote to Scott, he was turned down initially; he was young and had terrible eyesight. Wilson had suggested that Cherry-Garrard should subscribe as a volunteer and give £1,000 to help with expedition expenses56 and Cherry-Garrard impressed Scott by sending the money independently of his being accepted. Cherry-Garrard was not alone in donating money. Captain Laurence ‘Titus’ Oates (1880–1912), another wealthy young man, had already agreed to donate the same amount. Cherry-Garrard was eventually included as assistant zoologist after being interviewed by Scott although he almost failed his medical being only able to see people on the other side of the road ‘as vague blobs walking’.57 In a letter to Cherry-Garrard, Wilson wrote of Scott, ‘I know Scott intimately as you know. I have known him now for ten years and I believe in him so firmly that I am often sorry when he lays himself open to misunderstanding. I am sure that you will come to know him and believe in him as I do’.58 Cherry-Garrard felt much the same about Wilson; he absolutely believed in him. After the 1910–12 expedition he went on to feel a guilt and oppression about the death of the polar party, that coloured the remainder of his life. His book on some of his experiences in the Antarctic, The Worst Journey in the World,59 was written with help from Bernard Shaw. It is a book written without the usual constraints of the period and it touched the hearts and imagination of thousands of readers. On publication it was called ‘the most wonderful story in the world’.60 It has been voted the best travel book ever written.
Wilson continued his relentless itinerary. His grouse work was reaching a conclusion, although the report was not published until 1912, but other work continued. Some of his illustrations had been seen by publishers in Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, who were enthusiastic about his painting, saying that they had been advised that Millais61 could not have done better pictures. This appeared to be high praise, but Wilson wrote to his father that ‘this was humbug’62 and so it seemed to be; the comment had been made by the same Dr Eagle Clarke who had praised his British Birds before ditching him and the work, without pay.
When in Scotland he sometimes stayed in Lord Lovat’s shooting lodge. However busy, his religious convictions coloured and infiltrated his existence and on one of these stays he visited the monks in the nearby St Benedict’s Monastery. He wrote to Oriana:
Here we have no abiding place. I feel it more as I get older. … It is amazing and most puzzling when one tries to think what is the object of our short life on earth – a mere visit – and how desperately this must represent our effect on the little part of the world with which we come into contact. I get such a feeling of the absolute necessity to be at something always, and at every hour, day or night, before the end may come or I have done a decent portion of what I was expected to do; each minute is of value, thoug
h we often waste hours and hours, not because we want rest, nor because as sometimes it is a duty, but out of sheer want of application. … The more one does the more one wants to do. … I want to be able to feel and to make you feel, that when my end comes, that I couldn’t have done more – and then I shall die quite happy …63
A pertinent comment in view of his early death, and he continued to put his ideas into practice. When Seaman James William Dell of Discovery days could not work because of the infection in his arm and his family struggled to manage on the £26 a year (half the usual pay) awarded, Wilson busied himself getting further medical opinions for Dell and planned to get him treatment in a sanatorium or a London hospital rather than in the naval hospitals.64
He kept up regular contact with Scott. From August 1907 Scott was finally on half-pay for a few months and able to concentrate on Antarctic plans. He was also able to socialise for the first time in years and he met the sculptress, Kathleen Bruce. Scott saw in her ‘a passionate commitment to work, to life and to living’ that was a happy contrast to his own puritanical and duty-filled dedication’.65 The couple were engaged within months and married in the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace on 2 September 1908. When Wilson helped organise the wardroom wedding gift, clearly still ambivalent about Shackleton, he was uncertain as to whether he should include Shackleton on the donor list and decided that he should, if only for the sake of Emily Shackleton. Kathleen was to become a forceful advocate for the expedition. In relation to her work and the Antarctic expeditions, she made sculptures of her husband; a bust is in the Scott Polar Institute, a statue in Waterloo Place, London and the memorial image of Wilson that stands in the main street of Cheltenham. She also sculpted a nude ‘victory’ figure of T.E. Lawrence of Arabia’s brother, now behind a decorous hedge in the grounds of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
With Scott in the Antarctic Page 20