On January 17, 1912 Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole. However, Scott's British Antarctic Expedition was beaten to the geographic South Pole by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen.
A member of that ill-fated British Terra Nova Expedition was from Hertfordshire and is buried in Wheathampstead. Andrew Rylah, of the Codicote Local History Society, takes up the story.
The snow and bitingly cold weather last month reminded me of a somewhat forgotten local, Apsley George Benet Cherry-Garrard, who spent most of his life in Wheathampstead.
His renown stems from Scott’s tragic South Pole expedition of 1911, many thousands of miles away.
Apsley Cherry was born on January 2, 1886 in Bedford, his surname changing to Cherry-Garrard through his father’s inheritance of the Lamer Park estate near Wheathampstead, which Apsley in turn inherited in 1907.
Cherry-Garrard was always one for adventure, and a fortunate meeting with Robert Scott in 1907 led him to eagerly volunteer for Scott’s planned 1911 South Pole expedition.
Undeterred by an initial rejection, Cherry-Garrard applied again, this time promising £1,000 (around £120,000 today) towards expedition costs.
He was rejected again, but nevertheless donated the money, and Scott was eventually persuaded to take Cherry-Garrard on as Assistant Zoologist. Whilst others questioned Cherry-Garrard’s evident lack of polar experience, his hard work won them over.
The expedition arrived at its base camp at Cape Evans, Antarctica, on January 4, 1911 and started preparing for the trek to the South Pole.
As a sub-expedition, Cherry-Garrard and a couple of colleagues set off for Cape Crozier in July 1911 to get an unhatched emperor penguin egg. He hoped that examination of its embryo would help prove the evolutionary link between birds and reptiles, a largely discredited evidential method today.
In almost total darkness and with temperatures dropping to -60°C, they dragged their sledges across the ice. Some days they could only manage a couple of miles.
After 19 days, frozen and exhausted, they reached Cape Crozier and built an igloo. Unfortunately, a powerful blizzard ripped it apart, leaving the men in their sleeping bags sheltering under a drift of snow and singing songs to keep up their spirits.
The intense cold shattered most of Cherry-Garrard’s teeth through chattering. Barely alive, they dragged themselves back to Cape Evans. But they had brought back three intact penguin eggs, which are now archived in the Natural History Museum, London.
On November 1, 1911 Scott’s main party left base camp for the South Pole.
Cherry-Garrard was in a support team and his role included taking food supplies and dogs to an aptly named point, ‘One Ton Depot’.
The plan was for him to meet Scott’s party on their return journey back from the South Pole, and Cherry-Garrard and a colleague duly set off for the meeting point on February 26, 1912.
They waited for Scott in the desolate wilderness of One Ton Point for seven days, before turning back for the Cape Evans base camp on March 10.
Tragically, by that date Scott was just 55 miles from One Ton Point, but Cherry-Garrard couldn’t have known that. Ultimately, Scott would get to an agonisingly close 11 miles from safety before dying.
Should Cherry-Garrard have stayed at One Ton Point, or even gone out in search of Scott? But they had no idea where Scott might be in the frozen wasteland, or if he was still alive.
Cherry-Garrard arrived back in base camp seriously ill. However, returning without Scott’s party provoked immense anxiety amongst the wider support team, and various attempts were then made to find Scott, in vain.
On November 12, 1912, over a year after Scott had first left base camp, a team including Cherry-Garrard finally found the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers in their tent.
It was a painful end to the expedition, and it greatly affected Cherry-Garrard. For years, his thoughts churned over the dilemma of whether he could have saved Scott’s party.
Cherry-Garrard returned to the UK in February 1913. He converted the Lamer estate into a field hospital in World War One and used his Antarctica experience in various roles during the war. But it’s clear that he experienced lasting post-traumatic stress disorder.
Therapeutically, he recounted his poignant story of extreme human hardship in his frank 1922 book, ‘The Worst Journey in the World’, a title suggested by his friend George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright who lived at Shaw's Corner in Ayot St Lawrence.
However, he never fully recovered his health. Illness dogged him in later life, he spent many years bed-ridden, and suffered chronic dental problems as a result of the expedition.
Cherry-Garrard died on May 18, 1959 and rests in a family plot in the churchyard of St Helen’s Church in Wheathampstead.
Everyone is welcome at Codicote Local History Society’s monthly talks. For details, contact Nicholas Maddex (nkmaddex@btinternet.com) or check www.codicotelocalhistorysociety.co.uk. Explore your interest in history today!
References:
- Wikipedia – Apsley Cherry-Garrard
- ‘The Worst Journey in the World’.
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