Scott of the Antarctic: a true British hero?

The great prizes of exploration had captivated the public since the mid-19th century, with the search for the sources of the Nile. Explorers provided an expression of national greatness in an era of imperial rivalry. The young naval officer Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), had achieved fame after leading a first expedition to the Antarctic in the ship Discovery in 1901–04. He had set a new “farthest south” record, and the expedition made many important scientific discoveries. Scott was promoted to Captain on his return, and was even invited to Balmoral by Edward VII.

His second expedition – which aimed to be the first to reach the South Pole – had departed in the ship Terra Nova in 1910. The “camera-artist” Herbert Ponting accompanied the expedition, chronicling the crew’s adventures and the dramatic Antarctic landscape. Ponting’s pioneering film footage was exhibited throughout Britain in 1911-12, while his compelling photographs illustrated press reports of Scott’s progress.

But Scott lost the race for the South Pole, arriving on 17 January 1912, a month after the Norwegian expedition led by Roald Amundsen. After the disappointment of finding the Norwegian’s flag at the Pole, two members of Scott’s team (Edgar Evans and Captain Oates) died on the return leg, before Scott and his remaining comrades Henry Bowers and Dr Edward Wilson perished on the Great Ice Barrier.

Why, then, was the disaster celebrated in Britain, and around the world? The answer lies in Scott’s own words. A search party had found not only the bodies of Scott, Bowers and Wilson in November 1912, but also the letters and diaries which told their story.

In his last journal Scott had composed a “Message to the Public” – part apologia, part heroic testament, part plea for the bereaved. It claimed the tragedy was “not due to faulty organisation, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken”, turning defeat into noble sacrifice, a disaster redeemed by the exemplary conduct of the explorers in the face of death. The message gave voice to the heroic fantasies of Scott’s generation. A romantic language of sacrifice pervaded late-Victorian and Edwardian culture, lauding the endurance of hardship as the highest expression of manliness.

• Read Captain Scott’s message to the public

‘Plenty of pluck and spirit’

The humiliations of the South African (Boer) War (1899–1902), international competition, the physical deterioration of the masses and decadence of the governing classes, preoccupied Britons before 1914. Scott explicitly crafted his message as a retort to the prophets of national decline. Many commentators followed his lead. The founder of the Boy Scouts, Robert Baden-Powell, praised Scott for showing “there is plenty of pluck and spirit left in the British race after all”. Socialists, Irish nationalists and militant suffragettes also joined the chorus of praise. “There is, indeed, nothing to match the spirit of the militants”, wrote Christabel Pankhurst, “unless it be the spirit shown by Captain Scott and his brave companions”.

The story of 'Scott of the Antarctic' reverberated through the First World War, when sacrifice became commonplace. On 5 May 1916 the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith unveiled a memorial tablet in St Paul’s. Less than two months before the slaughter of the Somme, Asquith declared “there is no figure of our time who holds and will retain the same enduring place in the admiration and gratitude of his countrymen” as Scott. The death of the explorers on a scientific quest offered a powerful model of Britishness, of idealism and honour, to set against Prussian militarism and brutality.

Many believed Scott’s example had braced the nation for war. Nearly all the officers on his last expedition volunteered for service, and many were decorated for acts of bravery. Scott’s widow Kathleen received hundreds of letters from soldiers, testifying to the inspiration they had drawn from her late husband. Ponting’s films of the expedition were shown to over 100,000 officers and men of the British Army in France. The story of Captain Oates, who, crippled by frostbite, walked into the snow to try to help his friends get through, proved particularly compelling. The films projected an example of comradeship, of men doing their duty to the end, which was all too relevant on the Western Front.

Ponting’s efforts to create a commercial film hit after 1918 proved unsuccessful. He was hampered as he had shot almost no footage of the drama’s main action: the assault on the Pole. But accounts of the Antarctic disaster proliferated after the war, as words not pictures breathed new life into Scott’s story. Publisher John Murray’s cheap editions of Scott’s journals sold over 80,000 copies between 1923 and 1939, while biographies and memoirs kept the story in the public eye. The Antarctic disaster offered an epic of heroism for a generation tired of war. The establishment of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, with the balance of the memorial fund, emphasised the expedition’s scientific aspirations. In 1935 BBC producers argued over the most appropriate way to end their Armistice Day programming (on the anniversary of the ending of the First World War on 11 November 1918) so as to promote the idea of “peace and comradeship”. They agreed to broadcast a play about Scott.

From hero to zero

The Ministry of Information’s manifesto for film propaganda singled out Scott in 1940 as a “national hero”, who should be used to promote “British life and character”. But, although numerous radio broadcasts retold Scott’s story during the Second World War, Ealing Studios did not release the film Scott of the Antarctic until 1948, with John Mills in the title role. The public, however, preoccupied with their own food shortages, did not flock to watch. Scott’s popularity began to wane through the 1950s. Lampooned by comedians Peter Cook and Monty Python, he seemed the embodiment of stiff-upper-lipped Englishness, increasingly out of step in an age which valued emotional expression above self-control. Howard Brenton’s Scott of the Antarctic presented the British explorers as upper-class fools in 1971, stumbling around Bradford Ice Rink on foot, while the Norwegians skated past. After over half a century in circulation, John Murray finally chose not to reprint Scott’s journals in 1978.

Scott was already out of fashion when Roland Huntford published his debunking biography, Scott and Amundsen, the following year. The British explorer had been criticised since 1913, when many commentators acknowledged the superiority of Amundsen’s methods. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a young member of Scott’s team, had revealed Scott’s sensitive, brooding personality in The Worst Journey in the World (1922), a characterisation confirmed in Reginald Pound’s 1966 biography Scott of the Antarctic, the first to be written with full access to Scott’s unexpurgated journals. All, however, had paid tribute to the explorer’s heroism in the face of death. Huntford, in contrast, presented an arrogant fool, who led his companions to their deaths. His Scott was a suitable hero for a nation in decline, an emblem of amateurism and incompetence. Although many were outraged, his seductive interpretation became the new orthodoxy, reinforced in 1985 through Central Television’s docu-drama, The Last Place on Earth.

Scott’s reputation suffered further with the resurgence of interest in the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton at the end of the 1990s. Shackleton’s 1914 expedition aimed for the first crossing of the Antarctic on foot but his ship Endurance was crushed by ice – a drama captured on film by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. Thanks to Shackleton’s determined leadership, his party survived their 19-month ordeal. Where Shackleton has been hailed as a model leader, dynamic and inspirational, Scott has been cast as his negative other, remote, capricious and indecisive. The principal complaint of many visitors to the National Maritime Museum’s “South: The Race to the Pole” exhibition in 2000–1 was that Scott had been portrayed too positively.

Scott’s return

Over the last five years, however, the revisionist cycle has begun to turn again. The award-winning polar scientist Susan Solomon persuasively argued in 2001 that the British team had been the victims of unusually bad weather on their return from the Pole, as Scott himself had claimed in his “Message to the Public”. Ranulph Fiennes harnessed the experience of a veteran polar traveller to mount a direct assault on Huntford’s interpretation in his 2003 book Captain Scott. And in 2005 David Crane drew on a wealth of previously unused sources, in the most balanced biography of Scott yet published (his account of Scott’s last journey is on page 18).

These recent works have helped rescue Scott’s reputation from the music-hall villainy of some popular accounts. The research of Susan Solomon and others on climate change in Antarctica follows directly in the footsteps of Scott’s pioneering meteorologist George Simpson. Scott must certainly shoulder his share of the blame for the Antarctic disaster. But the scientific legacy of his last expedition deserves acknowledgement and celebration.

Captain Scott’s message to the public

Written at the back of his sledging journal as he waited to die, Scott’s message laid the foundations of his legend, transforming disaster into heroic sacrifice. It concluded: “We are weak, writing is difficult, but, for my own sake, I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardship, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks – we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best till the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly provided for. Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale; but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.”

Max Jones is a writer, lecturer and historian. His book include The Last Great Quest and A History of British Heroes.

This article was first published in the August 2006 issue of BBC History Magazine