They did not even try to get to the depot. A blizzard pinned them in their tent. Wilson could not know if he or his letters would be found but he could hope. He wrote to the Smiths saying again that he had no fear of death, only sorrow for Oriana and his family and he said they would meet in the hereafter.90 He wrote to his parents that he had loved them and loved to think of them all. ‘My own time is fulfilled’.91 He wrote again to Oriana:
I leave this life in absolute faith and happy belief that if God wishes you to wait long without me it will be to some good purpose. All is for the best to those that love God and oh, my Ory, we have both loved Him with all our lives. All is well. … All the things I had hoped to do with you after the expedition are as nothing now, but there are greater things for us to do in the world to come. … One of my notes will surely reach you. … All is well.92
They lay together in their little tent, the Barrier blizzard howling around them. Here they slowly perished and here they lay for eight months. They had been due back early in 1912 and for weeks the party at Cape Evans continued to hope. Sometimes they were misled by a party of seals, sometimes by a mirage. Sometimes the sledge dogs would howl in greeting and the men would rush out, shouting to the cook to get things moving, whilst the national anthem was played on the gramophone. But when the winter began all hope was extinguished.
The search party set out in October. On 12 November, they saw the tip of the tent. It was some time before they could steel themselves to enter; Dr Atkinson went in first. Scott lay between Wilson and Bowers, his arm flung out over Wilson. One of the discovery party wrote:
Dr Wilson was sitting in a half reclining position with his back against the inside of the tent facing us as we entered. On his features were traces of a sweet smile and he looked exactly as if he were about to wake from a sound sleep. I had often seen the same look on his face in the morning as he awakened as he was of the most cheerful disposition. The look struck us to the heart and we all stood silent in the presence of death.93
The rescue party collapsed the tent and left it with its bodies inside. They built a cairn surmounted with a cross on the spot. Scott’s skis were planted in a small pile of frozen snow nearby. A twelve-foot cross was erected on Observation Hill, above Hut Point. This was made of an Australian hard wood, jarrah, and stands there today. The five names are inscribed on it and below is the last line of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.
Their relatives felt that the bodies should be left undisturbed ‘amid the eternal snows, the scene of their great achievement and beneath the cairn which the loving hearts and hands of their comrades have erected in their memory. Requiescant in pace’.94
Epilogue
Oriana was in New Zealand waiting for Wilson. By the time she got the terrible news she had been a widow for nearly a year. Her husband, never a seeker of personal fame, had become a public hero, a courageous explorer who had died at the height of his achievements, a man who had risked and finally given his life in the quest for knowledge about the earth’s last great frontier.
In 1912 British confidence was faltering. Old certainties were being challenged: Women’s Suffrage and the Irish Home Rule Bill had divided Parliament and the country. Winston Churchill was agitating for ships to be built in line with Germany. Titanic, the huge, new (and thought to be unsinkable) liner, had sunk on her maiden voyage, with the loss of 1,500 lives. The First World War was looming. The country needed reassurance and men to admire. In this setting, Antarctic exploration with its values of courage, cheerfulness, persistence, loyalty and self-sacrifice struck an inspiring note. Wilson was the personification of these values. His loyalty to Scott was absolute. His scientific and artistic output was huge; he was modest, supportive and tough.
The news of the men’s deaths caused a national outpouring of grief. A memorial service was held in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral in the presence of King George V. More than 10,000 people, unable to get in to offer their respects, stood outside. Services were held throughout the country. The deaths gripped the national imagination and fixed the events in the national consciousness in a way that was probably not to be felt again until the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
The family was devastated; Wilson’s father wrote, ‘No words can express what our dear Ted meant to us all and to our dear, good Ory, vainly awaiting his return in New Zealand’.1 Oriana was on a train, making her way back to Christchurch, when she heard newspaper hawkers shouting the news of her husband’s death.2 She was looked after by friends until she could make her sorrowful journey home. She treasured Wilson’s last letter, stained by the icy film of his dying breath, until she herself died. The two had been tightly bound by their faith. The letters that he wrote to her when he knew his situation was hopeless must have both helped her and spared her from the anguish of gnawing resentment, but they could not assuage her suffering. After her return she lived for a time in Cheltenham with the Wilson family before returning to Bushey. She never remarried; she had lost a man who had cherished and needed her, a powerful combination. For the rest of her life she treasured the memory of the precious years she had shared with Wilson. When she was in Cheltenham many expedition members visited Westal; Debenham and Cherry-Garrard frequently. A statue of Wilson, carved by Kathleen Scott, was unveiled, with full civic pageantry, on the town’s promenade in July 1914. It remains there, overlooking the bustle of modern Cheltenham life.
Wilson would have felt that his life was fulfilled. His faith, the essence of his character, enabled him to put his life into his maker’s hands with confidence and serenity. Comments that he had not fulfilled his potential are wide of the mark.3 He believed in the importance of individual action in the scheme of things, the importance of putting others before himself. He always wanted to commit himself totally to anything he undertook and when he died he had done this. He was content, ‘All is well’.
How should he be remembered? For his paintings, his scientific work, his work on grouse, as well as for his character: his loyalty, his ability to ‘bind and bond’. As a child he was wilful and temperamental but gradually, under the imprint of his faith, all his energies became channelled into doing his best at whatever occupation he was at, doing everything, however small, as if for his maker.
His paintings and drawings are a rich and vibrant inheritance. As a follower of Ruskin his works accurately reflected their subjects; interpretative work was secondary. His drawings of the coastlines, mountains and interior of the Antarctic, made even when he was sledging in terrible conditions, were an important record. Complementing his journal, accurate and beautiful, they were the first documentation of the topography and geology of the interior of the unknown continent. They stimulated, and still stimulate, enthusiasm and appreciation. They are more than pictorial records; his love of nature, his faith and his painstaking determination to find the truth in everything are integral to his works. His drawings of birds and animals also ranked him amongst the great nature artists of his day.
His fascination with emperor penguins was an overriding scientific interest and he was pivotal in discovering facts about those extraordinary birds and one of the first to get to their breeding grounds to study their peculiar life cycle. Before Discovery it was thought impossible that any bird could survive, let alone breed, in the Antarctic winter. From 1903 this was known to be a scientific fact as were other new details about the birds: how the eggs were carried, descriptions of the chicks in their grey fluffy coats, details of their thick tufted feathering. Though his hope to find a link between bird and dinosaurs was based on a false premise, many years later, in the 1990s, the link was made.4 His winter journey was the earliest in a long line of investigations undertaken in a thirst for accurate knowledge on the subject.
After the Discovery expedition his work with birds continued with the Grouse Commission report, published when he had already left for the Antarctic on Terra Nova. He was credited with saving the red grouse. Wilson confirmed the parasit
e that caused grouse disease, charted its life cycle and was able to make suggestions for control, such as rotational burning of heather and limiting the number of birds to the food available, which contributed hugely to well-maintained moorland. His work took years and his self-discipline; attention to detail; and his careful, undramatic, patient observation and determination to push the project through reflected his strengths and his lifelong belief that the effort put into any project was of paramount importance. The fight against strongylosis continues; worms were at a low level in England and at a moderate level in Scotland in 2006.5
He has invisibly touched many fields of Antarctic science through his work as chief of scientific staff on the Terra Nova expedition. In addition there were the much-criticised geological specimens, collected and kept against all odds on the doomed return from the Pole. He was right to keep them. They were found to contain fossil specimens of a genus Glossopteris that has also been found in South America, Australia and India. It is an extinct seed plant, which dates back to the Palaeozoic Era of 245 million years ago. Glossopteris’ presence in Antarctica proved that the continent had once had a warm climate and provided a link to other continents in the southern hemisphere.
The wooden huts that he and his colleagues lived in are still there, frozen and silent legacies to the endurance and heroism of the early Antarctic explorers. An international Antarctic Treaty governs the continent. Wilson would have approved of the fact that the Antarctic wastes, of which he is now a permanent part, are protected to ensure peaceful scientific research and international cooperation.
Notes on Sources
Prologue
1 Scott, R.F. Scott’s Last Expedition. Vol.1. John Murray, London, 1935. p. 473.
2 Daily Mirror. 6 November 1913. p. 3.
3 Wilson, E.T. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his father. The Wilson Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1955, 550.36. p. 120.
4 Cherry-Garrard, A. The Worst Journey in the World. Picador, London, 2001. p. 207.
5 Wilson, E.A. Letters to Apsley Cherry-Garrard, 1909–1910, SPRI. MS. 841/10.
Chapter 1
1 Cheltenham Census 1871. Cheltenham Museum and Library.
2 Cheltenham Census 1881. Cheltenham Museum and Library.
3 Blake, S. Cheltenham: A pictorial history. Phillimore, Chichester, 1996. p. xi.
4 Ibid. p. xiii.
5 Ibid. p. xiii.
6 Ibid. p. xvii.
7 Ibid. p. xix.
8 Wilson, D.M. and Elder, D.B. Cheltenham in Antarctica: The Life of Edward Wilson. Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, 2000. p. 6.
9 The Wilson Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, 550.41.
10 Ida Wilson’s scrapbook. SPRI. MS. 715/5/BJ.
11 Munk’s Roll. The Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Compiled, Brown, G.H. 1955.
12 The Illustrated London News, March 1895.
13 Munk’s Roll. The Lives of the Fellows. Brown, 1955.
14 Annual Report of the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Cheltenham for the year 1894 by J.H. Garrett. M.D M.O.H.
15 Personal communication. Dr David M. Wilson.
16 Ida Wilson’s scrapbook.
17 Darwin, C. Origin of the Species by means of Natural Selection. John Murray, London, 1859.
18 Cadbury, D. The Dinosaur Hunters. Fourth Estate, London, 2001. p. 305.
19 Ibid. p. 305.
20 The Independent, 5 August 2005.
21 Wilson, E.A. On the nature of God compared with the luminiferous ether. Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, 550.178.
22 Wilson, M.A. The ABC Poultry Book. Cassell Petter Galpin, London, 1880. [Held by the Wellcome Trust Library, London].
23 Wilson, E.T. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, 550.36, p. 1.
24 Ibid. p. 2.
25 Cheltenham Census 1881. Cheltenham Museum and Library.
26 British Medical Journal Advertiser, 1884. The income for a Medical Practitioner of about twenty years’ experience in an area like Cheltenham would be approximately £900 net. Medical income varied widely according to experience and the area of work. Cheltenham would be a good area (though not as prestigious as London). In the 1880s the British Medical Journal Advertiser was offering practices from £400 per annum to more than £1,000, with one outstanding offer to work in Canada of £2,000.
27 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 5.
28 Ibid. p. 4.
29 Ibid.
30 Certified copy of entry of death. Jessica Frances Wilson, Cheltenham. HD013712.
31 Annual Report of the Sanitary Condition of the Borough of Cheltenham for the year 1894 by J.H. Garrett. M.D M.O.H.
32 Ibid.
33 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father, p. 12.
34 Ibid. p. 8.
35 Wilson and Elder. Cheltenham in Antarctica. p. 11.
36 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father, p. 14.
37 Ibid. p. 18.
38 Strachey, L. Eminent Victorians. The Folio Society, London, 1967. p. 179.
39 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. pp. 23, 29.
40 Ibid. p. 14.
41 Ibid. p. 31.
42 Gonville and Caius Library, Cambridge.
43 St George’s Hospital Medical School. Session 1892–3. St George’s Hospital Library. Tooting, London. The subjects were: English language, Latin and mathematics, and a paper of choice from French, German, Italian, any other foreign language, logic, botany, zoology or elementary chemistry.
Chapter 2
1 Certificate of registration for entry to medical course at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. SPRI. MS. 715/3/BJ.
2 Hodgkinson, R.G. (ed. A. Rook). ‘Cambridge and its Contribution to Medicine’, in Proceedings of the 7th British Conference on the History of Medicine. September 1968. Medical Education in Cambridge in the nineteenth century. 1971. p. 95.
3 Ibid. p. 80.
4 Ibid. p. 95.
5 Wilson, E.T. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. The Wilson Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, 550.36, p. 41.
6 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 46.
7 U.A. Graduati 25. Cambridge University Archives.
8 Seaver, G. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. John Murray, London, 1950. p. 22.
9 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 49.
10 Seaver. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. p. 24.
11 U.A. Graduati 25. Cambridge University Archives.
12 Students in Medicine. General Regulations. Cambridge University. 1883.
13 U.A. Graduati 25. Cambridge University Archives.
14 Wilson, D.M. and Elder, D.B. Cheltenham in Antarctica: The Life of Edward Wilson. Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, 2000. p. 24.
15 Ibid. p. 26.
16 Seaver. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. p. 101.
17 Biographical History of Gonville and Caius College. Vol.2 (1713–1897). Cambridge University Press. pp. 518–19, 526.
18 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 36.
19 A first-year student.
20 The Wilson Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1995, 550.107–122.
21 Wilson and Elder. Cheltenham in Antarctica. p. 29.
22 Seaver. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. p. 14.
23 The Caian. 1900–1. Vol. 10.
24 Seaver. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. p. 19.
25 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 40.
26 Wilson and Elder. Cheltenham in Antarctica. p. 25.
27 Seaver. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. p. 21.
28 Ibid. p. 21.
29 The Caian. 1892–3. Vol. 2.
30 The Caian. 1895–6. Vol. 5.
31 The Wilson Collection. pp. 107–22.
32 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 48.
33 Wilson, E.T. The life of Gwladys by her father. The Wilson Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1995
, 550.37.
34 Certified copy of entry of death. Gwladys Elizabeth Wilson, Cheltenham. HD013737.
35 Wilson. The life of Gwladys.
36 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his Father. p. 53.
37 U.A. Graduati 25. Cambridge University Archives.
Chapter 3
1 Wilson, E.T. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his father. The Wilson Collection, Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, 1955, 550.36. p. 47.
2 Prospectus for St George’s Hospital Medical School. Session 1892–3. St George’s University of London.
3 Ibid.
4 A guinea is one pound and one shilling.
5 Blomfield, J. St George’s Hospital 1733–1933. Published for St George’s Hospital by the Medici Society, London, 1933. p. 86.
6 Ibid. p. 89.
7 Prospectus for St George’s Hospital Medical School. Session 1892–3. p. 6.
8 Ibid. p. 5.
9 Ibid. p. 2.
10 Ibid. p. 6.
11 Ibid. p. 7.
12 Seaver, G. Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. John Murray, London, 1950. p. 26.
13 Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
14 Wilson. E. A. Wilson: Memoir by his father. p. 55.
15 Hilton, T. The Pre-Raphaelites. Thames and Hudson, London, 1979. p. 11.
16 Herbert, R.L. (ed.). The Art Criticism of John Ruskin. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1964. p. 30.
17 Ibid. p. 31.
18 Dr John Henry Pearson Fraser (1872–1949). His son was Wilson’s godson.
19 Wilson, D.M. and Elder, D.B. Cheltenham in Antarctica: The Life of Edward Wilson. Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, 2000. p. 37.
20 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his father. p. 58.
21 Seaver, G. The Faith of Edward Wilson of the Antarctic. John Murray, London, 1949. p. 12.
22 Wilson. E.A. Wilson: Memoir by his father. p. 56.
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