BRITAIN IN PICTURES - NUMBER 5

 #53 British Polar Explorers by Admiral Sir Edward Evans

 

I have become rather immersed in the adventure of polar exploration and its adventurers, so much so that British Polar Explorers has crowded out the other volumes that would have been its companion pieces in this episode of Britain in Pictures.  Whether the result is unnecessarily windy is for the reader to decide.

 

There wouldn’t be many occasions when, asking the stranger next to you what he does for a living, you would receive the reply “polar explorer”.  As a category, such people must have the scarcity value of mermaids, unicorns and ethical politicians.  This doesn’t mean that British Polar Explorers is shorter than other volumes in the series, rather that the coverage of each explorer is able to be more detailed.  Indeed, the author pledges, at the outset, not “to portray the achievements of more than half-a-dozen, or eight at the most”, so the gaze is intensive.

 

Given that Edward Evans was second-in-command of Captain Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition I wondered, in prospect, whether Evans’s book, published in 1943, might concern itself with South Pole explorers only. But not so.  It is a comprehensive survey of British polar exploration in both hemispheres; and reads somewhat like tales from a Boys’ Book of Adventure, the standard Christmas stocking fare of my childhood.  This is not to damn with faint praise.  Evans knew a fair amount of the polar exploration story at first hand; and, as we shall see when we arrive in the south with him, he tells it with considerable feeling.

 

It’s a little hard to get a sense of the geography of the northern end of the planet, the vast area that surrounds the figurative North Pole in all directions.  A couple of things to note.  First: Greenland, although an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, is physically much closer to Canada than to Denmark and Europe.  Greenland is the world’s largest island (so long as you don’t regard Australia as a contender) – 2.166 million square kilometres, versus mainland Australia’s 7.687 million square kilometres – but with a population of 56000 only.  But Greenland is not nearly so large as most map projections portray – one needs to consult a globe to see the land masses in proportion.  Second: the Arctic Circle is currently 66 degrees 33 minutes north of the equator [those puzzled by my use of the word “currently” are free to go seek], and what geographers know as the Arctic is the area between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole at 90 degrees.  That area is approximately 20 million square kilometres and, looking at the global map with one eye closed, I would guess that about half of the Arctic comprises the northern-most land bits of Russia,  Canada, Scandinavia, and Alaska, plus about 90% of Greenland.  The other half, the northern-most part, is icy sea, and the sheet of ice that covers the North Pole region.

 

In addition to providing some appreciation of the scale of the northern polar waters, a study of the globe reveals starkly the logic of airlines flying the polar route (the great circle) between Europe and the west coast of the U.S.A. – it’s a straight line over the top.  That same logic, in search of the shortest route to the Pacific, drove the earliest polar explorers.  It matters little whether driven by riches or romance, explorers and adventurers and their sponsors could smell the Orient, and could picture the fastest way of getting there from Europe as a route west across the top of Canada to Bering Strait (between Russia and Alaska), and out into the Pacific……..and all that impeded the way was the polar ice cap and the remorseless sea. The logic of the proposition, if not the good sense of it, emerges If you draw a line on the globe from the North Sea to Bering Strait – there’s no land in between.  Obviously no Arctic seafarer ever planned to sail straight across the North Pole, but a course between the permanent ice-cap and the northern land mass – the North-west Passage – was still a much shorter route than around either of the Capes.  But there remained the problem of the free-floating polar ice: a greater problem in a way than the obstruction of land - because the ice floe obstruction is capable of independent movement, and may require daily changes to navigational plans.  [Incidentally, I wondered whether the word “floe” comes from “flow”, or perhaps “float”. The English language has once again confounded me:  “floe” derives from the Old Norse word “flo” for “layer”.]

 

The earliest polar explorer profiled by Evans is Martin Frobisher (1535? – 1594), the seaman who gave credence to the idea of traversing the North-west Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Remember that it was only in consequence of Magellan’s circumnavigation in 1522 that Earth was finally “proved” to be a sphere, so Frobisher was an early tester of that proof.  His first polar voyage was in 1576, and resulted in the discovery of what we now know as Hudson Strait.  More importantly, Frobisher returned with a sample of black ore – which an Italian alchemist claimed contained gold.  A specious claim, but it triggered the financing of a second Frobisher expedition charged with the instruction to return with a ship-load of the stuff.  Frobisher took with him a band of miners and, although he was able to conduct further exploration – and to learn much of the Eskimo peoples – he was contract-bound to focus on the mining activities.  However the lessons he learnt in the Arctic seas were a warning for those who followed. In writing of the pack-ice he wrote: “The force of the yce was so great, and likewise rased the side of the ships, that it was pitiful to behold, and caused the hearts of many to faint.”

 

The story of Henry Hudson (1565? – 1611) is one of thwarted opportunity, and tragedy.  Hudson’s several journeys to the Arctic together amounted to a handbook of exploration. In 1607 he sailed for the North-west Passage, seeking the way through to the “far Cathay” of legend.  Hampered by ice and “thick weather” Hudson – said to be a bit of a rebel - extensively explored the Arctic region instead.  One of Hudson’s contemporaries describes Hudson’s virtues in an extended string of complimentary adjectives – seemingly more than were known to exist at the time!  Nevertheless, the voyage was deemed a failure by Hudson’s English sponsors (although his reporting of the vast numbers of whales he encountered likely gave impetus to the whaling industry that was to follow).

 

Undaunted, the English merchants sponsored a second expedition the following year: same head-office objective - to find the shortest possible route to China.  Again, the fierce cold and the impenetrable ice forced the abandonment of the voyage, although with the vast numbers of whales, walrus, Arctic fox, deer and wild fowl recorded by Hudson this second expedition was scientifically successful.

 

Not surprisingly the arms of the English merchants proved to be a little shorter than their pockets, and Hudson’s third voyage, in 1609, was undertaken for the Dutch East India Company.  Once more there were mixed results: the planned route was abandoned, but Hudson was able to reach Newfoundland, Delaware Bay, and what came to be known as the Hudson River.  Notably, this voyage facilitated the Dutch fur trade and later Dutch territorial claims, including the claiming of the area of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. 

 

While Hudson’s life as a seaman and adventurer had not been all plain sailing (ugh!) it was hardly an inevitable prelude to what was to follow.  Back in the English fold, with funding from the British East India Company and the Virginia Company, once again the North-west Passage beckoned.  But, as Evans speculates, Hudson must have had some serious defects of character, and was a careless judge of men.  Setting out in April 1610 Hudson spent much time exploring and mapping Hudson Bay, and then had to hole up for the winter.  By June 1611 his crew had mutinied. Not short of graphic evocation, Evans says that Hudson’s fourth voyage was marred  by “trouble, disloyalty, altercation, violence, mutiny, scurvy and death”.  The mutineers abandoned Hudson, his youthful son, and seven of the crew suffering with scurvy, in an open lifeboat.  They were never heard of again.  Only eight of the mutineers survived the return to England; and although they were arrested and tried no punishment was exacted, the possibility being that their knowledge of the sailing conditions and of the New World was too valuable to lose. It tells us something of our author, Admiral Sir Edward Evans, that his closing words on the mutiny are:  “What a story, what blackguard business, how unlike the seamen of our time!”  

 

I offer an unrelated footnote to the Henry Hudson story, and a warning against making threadbare connections.  I had assumed that Henry Hudson had given his name to the American automobile of late fame – without his consent, obviously.  So I checked the net, and found 1930s Hudson radiator emblems featuring two ancient sailing ships.  Case proven.  But no. The Hudson Motor Car Company, and its headline model, was named after its founder, Joseph L. Hudson, Detroit department store proprietor, who branched out into the promising new auto field in 1909.  I have been unable to find an explanation for the sailing ships pictured on the Hudson insignia, but assume they’re a nod to the namesake navigator.   Anyway, for what it’s worth, the 45-year production life of the Hudson car (from 1909 through 1954) was almost the same as the time spent on this planet by Henry Hudson.

 

The Hudson story was eclipsed by the Franklin story. As with the final chapter in the life of Hudson so too there is the Franklin mystery.  John Franklin (1786 – 1847) was a pretty distinguished dude, although that word didn’t exist until after Franklin had ceased to, and certainly not with the meaning I intend.  He was a high-ranking officer in the British Navy and Arctic explorer, and along the way served from 1836 to 1843 as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Tasmania as it was to become.

 

Franklin’s veins ran with seawater.  He had a trial voyage on a merchantman at age 12, and in 1800 joined the Royal Navy seeing service at age 14 in Nelson’s fleet in the Battle of Copenhagen.  Later, as a mid-shipman, he visited Australia in the HMS Investigator under Matthew Flinders. He served in the South China Sea, and in 1805 in the Battle of Trafalgar.  He was wounded in the War of 1812 against the United States.

 

Like Hudson, Franklin participated in four Arctic expeditions.  In 1818 he commanded one of the ships in a four-ship squadron deployed – guess what? – to find the North-west Passage.  But, after continuing travails the ship partnering Franklin’s Trent was so crushed in the ice that Trent had to escort her back to safety.  Franklin’s second expedition was also not glorious. The purpose of the so-called Coppermine expedition (from 1819 to 1822) was to map the northern areas from Hudson Bay to the Coppermine River in present-day Canada.  By the end of his three-and-a-half years’ journey Franklin had covered some 5000 miles.  And he had lost eleven of his twenty men – most to starvation, one possibly through murder; and there were rumours of cannibalism.  The survivors were said to have tried to eat shoe leather, and Franklin gained the nickname of “the man who ate his boots”.  Notwithstanding, Franklin remained in favour.  The Royal Navy reared them tough, although possibly not so tough as to prefer Churchill’s epithet of “rum, buggery and the lash” over a meal of stewed leather.  

 

Franklin led two subsequent expeditions.  The 1823 to 1825 expedition was, by Franklin’s standards, uneventful, and preceded Franklin’s retirement from polar exploration for 20 years.  In the interim he was knighted, married again (having been a widower for three years), and presided for seven years in Van Diemen’s Land.  The 1845 Arctic expedition stemmed from the Admiralty’s desire to have the North-west Passage definitively charted.  Franklin was not the first choice of leader, but he willingly accepted the role.  He was too old, and too corpulent – there is a photograph of a podgy face under what looks like a cocked hat, in a uniform rather too snug to be comfortable.  But this undertaking was well equipped: two 370-ton vessels, and 140 officers and men.  The cruel winter weather was again the enemy, and the two ships were locked in the ice in September 1846, never to sail again.  Franklin died on 11 June 1847 from unknown causes.  By that time the expedition had lost nine officers and fifteen men.  The long wait continued, but with no sign of the ice breaking up.  On 22 April 1848 Crozier, the second-in-command of the remaining 105 souls, led the trek out. They all perished.  Their ships, HMS Erebus  and HMS Terror, were thought to have been consumed in the ice, and indeed they were – except that in 2014 and 2016 respectively Canadian divers found their wrecks “in almost pristine condition”. 

 

If the underlying motivation for northern polar exploration was trade, the drive for southern polar exploration most certainly was not.  In the south there were twin drivers, colonial expansion, and Errol Flynn-like adventurism.  The word derring-do is not misplaced.  I want to conclude with a profile of Captain Scott, but first need to pay tribute to two other heroes of the south, Shackleton and Mawson.

 

The ultimate test is to be weighed on the scales of posterity, and on that balance Ernest Shackleton (1874 – 1922) weighs heavy indeed.  He was an Antarctic obsessive, and gained fame for his bravery and endurance.  He should also have been famous for his ability (having no funds of his own) to charm financial support from wealthy benefactors.  Despite his robust appearance, heart trouble caused him to be invalided home from his first trip south in 1901, the Discovery expedition (although he had reached 82 degrees 17 minutes south in company with Captain Scott).  He remained determined to reach the South Pole, and in his 1907 to1909 attempt (the Nimrod expedition) got within 97 miles of his goal (at latitude 88 degrees 23 minutes south) before being forced back by the brutal conditions.   Otherwise the Nimrod expedition was very fruitful.  

 

The success of the Norwegian Amundsen in being, on 14 December 1911, the first to reach the South Pole did not daunt Shackleton’s ardour, and he organised and led two further Antarctic expeditions.  The first of these demonstrated the triumph of perseverance over adversity, the second demonstrated the inability to escape the reality of fate. 

 

The expedition that set out in Endurance in August 1914, the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, was formed for the purpose of transiting Antarctica, passing the South Pole on the way. In short, the plan was to dog-sled across the continent.  But in January 1915 the ship was trapped in ice.   Endurance had called at South Georgia island on its way to Antarctica, and South Georgia is a key player in the rest of the Shackleton story.  South Georgia is a British Territory almost 1000 miles (1600 kilometres) to the east of the Argentinian tip of South America, and some 800 miles (1300 kilometres) further east than the Falkland Islands.  It was discovered by James Cook in 1775 and, what else, claimed for Britain.  It was unpopulated at the time, and in later times was largely ignored, except by whalers.  It once had the dubious distinction of being the world’s largest whaling centre.  Its political history since Cook has been largely determined by apathy, but since 1985 it has been firmly back as a British Territory post the Falklands War.

 

It proved impossible to free Endurance from the ice, and the ship foundered; but not before the complement had long-since relocated to the floating ice surface. In April 1916 (yes, 21 months after departing London) Shackleton and his 27 men set out in three open boats for uninhabited Elephant Island 152 miles (245 kilometres) off the tip of Antarctica. They made it in seven days, but because of their remaining distance from the Cape Horn shipping lane, a passing rescue seemed unlikely.  So Shackleton and five of his men set out in their 22-foot whale boat for the whaling station of South Georgia, some 800 miles (1300 kilometres) away.  They succeeded, in 16 days, after a journey which Evans describes as “the finest boat journey on record”.  Whereupon Shackleton trekked to a whaling station to initiate the rescue.   Shackleton, courtesy of a Chilean ship, effected that rescue from Elephant Island on 25 August 1916.  Not a soul of Shackleton’s expedition had lost his life.  

 

The same was not the case with the 1921 expedition to circumnavigate the Antarctic.  Shackleton, short of funds, had burdened himself with a ship unsuitable for the task: too small at 125 tons for heavy seas, and too slow.  With a troublesome engine and leaking badly, she reached South Georgia where, on 5 January 1922, Shackleton died of a heart attack.  Fittingly, he was buried on the island.  On his final night, having expressed relief on arriving at South Georgia, his diary entry reads: “A wonderful evening.  In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay.”

 

Douglas Mawson (1882 - 1958) was born in England and came to Australia as an infant.  Evans describes Mawson as “a scientist, strong in character, in body and in mind.”  Moreover, “he typifies all that is best in the Australian” [clearly meant as a compliment, and not with tongue in cheek].  He was on Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907 to 1909), having been recruited from his position as lecturer in mineralogy at The University of Adelaide.  He made important scientific observations; and by sled he reached and marked the south magnetic pole………which was then at 72 degrees 25 minutes south and within the Antarctic Circle; today it is at approximately 64 degrees 7 minutes south, off the Antarctic coast, and outside the Circle (which is 66 degrees 30 minutes south).  The 1260 miles return journey took over three months.  

 

Evans writes rhapsodically of “the lure of little voices” that called Mawson after his return to “normal” duties and everyday life.  Like the pungent odours of the China Seas, like the Eucalyptus-laden breezes wafting off Australia, the call of the Antarctic is not to be ignored.  And hence the Australian Antarctic Expedition, led by Mawson in Aurora, from 1911 to 1914, overlapping with Scott’s Terra Nova expedition that had set out in 1910.  Evans lauds Mawson’s skills as a map-maker, and his achievements generally.  And notes, with admiration, that Mawson and his 17 men “faced generally worse weather conditions than any previous expeditions to the South Polar region” - blizzards where the wind speed frequently exceeded 100 miles per hour.  And the expedition had the pungent odour of tragedy too.  Mawson and two companions, Mertz and Ninnis, plus seventeen dogs and considerable equipment, took two sleds some 600 miles on a scientific journey.  Six dogs were lost, one falling into a crevasse, then Ninnis and his laden sled crashed through a snow bridge into a chasm and were lost too.  The tent and most of the food was gone, and Mawson, Mertz and the six surviving dogs began to race for their lives.  The Ninnis tragedy occurred on 14 December 1912, and by 7 January 1913 Mertz, badly frost-bitten and rapidly weakening, became delirious and started fitting.  He died that night.  Two days later Mawson was writing in his diary:  “There is little chance of my reaching human aid alive.”  He was 100 miles from base.  He was held up by a blizzard, then another, and his feet “were in a shocking condition”; but he came upon one of the food-drops, and sustenance.  He arrived back at base only to learn from the seven-man base team that Aurora had returned home, and that he would be spending another winter in Antarctica.  

 

Mawson led a further scientific expedition to Antarctica, in 1929, this time on Discovery.  Evans says of Mawson’s work “that it is credited most justly with having added more geographical and scientific discoveries than any previous Antarctic expedition.”

 

And now to introduce Scott, Robert Falcon Scott (1868 – 1912), the most famous polar explorer of all.  But before doing so I must comment at some length on the author of this book.  I have noted previously that the editors of the Britain in Pictures series chose well-credentialled authors, and none more so than Edward Evans (1880 – 1957) – full name:  Admiral Edward Ratcliffe Garth Russell Evans.  Not only was Evans a significant figure in Antarctic exploration but he was also a significant naval figure.  After training he had his first ship-board posting in 1897. He first encountered Scott when they served together on HMS Majestic (launched January 1895, sunk by German torpedo off Gallipoli May 1915). In 1902 Evans was seconded from the Navy as second officer of Morning, the back-up vessel for Scott’s Discovery expedition – Scott and Discovery were already in the Antarctic.  The two ships separately became trapped in the ice, but they met up in a sense because crew members were able to sled across the fifteen miles that separated them.  Morning broke free and was ordered back to New Zealand; and Evans was part of the relief convoy that returned in January 1904 to extricate Discovery.  This was accomplished by a team, led by Evans, who laid eight miles of explosives across the ice.  Evans returned to his naval career, but in 1909 his eyes again turned south.  Shackleton had gotten close to the Pole in 1908, and Evans reckoned on circumnavigating the Antarctic continent – with a journey to the Pole as a secondary objective! But Scott’s plans to return to Antarctica were gathering momentum, and when Evans heard of this he transferred support to the Scott effort.  In return, Evans was made captain of Terra Nova.  Evans’ subsequent involvement in the Scott Terra Nova expedition is a saga in itself.  He was in one of the three overland expedition groups, and was in the second group to return to base, turning back on 4 January 1912.  Evans recorded that he was accepting of Scott’s decision to exclude him from the final assault group, although one of his colleagues reported that he was “frightfully cut up”.  In the event, the return to base was itself a serious ordeal for Evans – snow blindness, exhaustion from having pulled a sled for more than 600 miles, and the onset of scurvy.  By 13 February 1912 Evans had to be dragged on a sled, and he ordered his two companions to abandon him.  They refused.  In later life Evans reflected that this was “the first and last time my orders as a naval officer were disobeyed”.  After rescue and return to base camp Evans, near to death, was bedridden for two months.  Back to England and then, months later, Evans commanding Terra Nova, was back in the Antarctic to rescue Scott, but alas too late.  Evans’ task was then to pack up the expedition, and to organise its departure for home.  Malevolent fate then decreed that Evans’ wife (a New Zealander) should become ill with peritonitis during the return trip to England.  After on-board surgery, she died on 18 April 1913 off Naples.  By the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Evans was back in naval service.  His distinguished service as captain of a destroyer earned for him a DSO.  In 1928 he was promoted to Rear Admiral commanding what was then the Australian navy.   KCB in 1935, promoted to Admiral in 1936, KGStJ in 1937.  Although retired he was recalled for service in 1939 – from which he transited to become the London Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence. In 1945 (subsequent to the publication of British Polar Explorers) Evans was elevated to the Peerage, as Baron Mountevans of Chelsea in the County of London.

 

CVs don’t come much better; and it is interesting to note Scott’s 1912 diary entry that Evans is prone to “boyish enthusiasms”, and is “well-meaning, but terribly slow to learn”.  At the time Scott was 42, Evans 30.  Evans had a further 47 years to curb his boyish enthusiasms and smarten up his acumen.  Scott did not.  And writing in 1943, having had 20 years to reflect on Scott, Evans remained uncompromising in his loyalty and regard for his erstwhile leader.

 

Scott was a naval man, who by 1901 had reached the rank of Commander, commander of HMS Majestic, flag-ship of the Channel Fleet.  Hear Evans:  “Apart from being a brilliant naval officer, he had the keen brain of a first-class scientist, and the literary ability which has so often been denied to the British polar explorer.  Moreover, he had an exceptional way of appreciating any situation quickly and properly. Looking back over a period of forty years I would class him as one of the three cleverest men I have ever met.”  Scott led the 1901 National Antarctic expedition in Discovery.  Ernest Shackleton was part of that expedition as was Edgar Evans who more than a decade later accompanied Scott to the South Pole.  The 1901 expedition extended over two years, and included exploration, scientific work, and the Scott/Shackleton/Wilson abortive attempt to reach the Pole; and putrid weather.   Discovery became ice-locked and the expedition concluded with rescue attempts by Morning (unsuccessful) and Terra Nova (successful).  The expedition lasted a little over three years.  Edward Evans, our author, was on the Terra Nova rescue mission.

 

And he was also part of Scott’s second, and final, expedition south – he was appointed second-in-command, and captain of Terra Nova.  The expedition had provisions for two years, and spent many months, including the winter of 1911 camped at (what was thereafter to be named) Cape Evans. They undertook depot-laying trips in anticipation of a Pole assault, and conducted extensive scientific work.  The expedition was nominally under the purview of the Royal Geographic Society, and it is notable that the Society expressed the hope that the expedition would be “scientific primarily, with exploration and the Pole as secondary objects”.   Scott demurred, and stated that “the main objective was to reach the South Pole, and to secure for the British Empire the honour of this achievement”.  In the words of one observer, he was “bitten by the Pole mania”.  The Terra Nova had embarked from Cardiff in  June 1910, and passed through Melbourne in October 1910; and what with the trapping of the ship in the ice for twenty days, and the snotty Cape Evans weather, it was not until November 1911 that the 900-mile push to the Pole was ready to start.  In addition to Scott’s group of five – in the order Evans uses: Scott, Wilson, Captain Oates, Lieutenant Bowers and Petty Officer Edgar Evans – there was a substantial support team with dogs, ponies and motor sledges.  The support parties peeled off and returned to base in three stages, the last of them at 87 degrees 30 minutes, on 4 January 1912.  Well, not quite.  Edward Evans was one of the last three to turn back, and hence the last to see Scott and his colleagues alive.  His own words are worth quoting in full, I think:  “It was a disappointment to my party that we could not all go to the Pole – a great disappointment, but we had been brought up to treat misfortunes with a smile and successes with a cheer.  We took enough food to get us back to Latitude 87 degrees where we had established a depot.  We made a short march with Scott’s team to see that with their load increased by what we had brought along they could manage without unduly straining. They got along finely for three or four miles, then they halted and said, ‘Good-bye’. We shook hands all round, and we felt very moved, as we looked into their eyes, and at their smoke-begrimed, bearded faces.  There were cakes of ice on their beards, weather scars, split lips, and frostbite marks, but their rugged faces had become very dear to us, and it seems a few weeks rather than thirty years, since that memorable ’Good-bye’.”  Evans then spends several hundred words in painting the rigours of his own journey back to base, and describing (from Scott’s diary) Scott’s final triumph and travail, and concludes with words, unsurprising in sentiment:  “Scott was the pioneer of real sledge travelling in the Antarctic, a great scientific sailor explorer, whose achievements have placed him on the pinnacle of fame amongst explorers of all nations.”

 

The words that immediately follow are a sort of supporting act to the main performance.  It’s pretty clear that polar exploration is a dangerous business, and equally clear that everyone involved in it is a hero.  But not everyone has a prominent role or achieves recognition on history’s page. One such, who is little mentioned in accounts of southern polar exploration – and mentioned but briefly  by Evans - is Frank Hurley (1885 – 1962).  Hurley was an Australian, so strictly not British, although when born in Sydney in 1885 he was.  He was a photographer – and what an astonishing career and life is hidden behind those few words.  He was official photographer on Mawson’s Aurora journey, from 1911 to 1914.  Then likewise with Shackleton’s Endurance journey, 1914 to 1916.  He was back in the Antarctic with Mawson and Discovery 1929/30, and again 1930/31.  He served, and photographed, in the First World War (1917 through 1918), memorably in the Third Battle of Ypres.  He made documentary films, but his thousands of photographs are more accessible – held in a number of institutions, notably the National Library, Canberra.  Arguably Hurley’s most graphic photographs show the crushing of Shackleton’s Endurance and her sinking into the ice in 1915. Evans enthuses that Mawson “was extremely fortunate in his choice of Hurley as his camera artist”, and that Hurley was a man of genius. 

 

Afterword:

 

Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1886 – 1959) is a name likely unfamiliar to modern-day readers, but he was a significant figure in southern polar exploration, and interesting both as an explorer and author.  He was a member of the Terra Nova expedition, and accompanied Scott to Antarctica in 1910.  He was 24 at the time, and had no particular qualification – except, perhaps, persistence. He heard of Scott’s proposed expedition, and volunteered his services.  He was rejected, asked again, and (having not long since enjoyed a substantial inheritance) offered 1000 pounds as a sweetener.  Again he was rejected, but proffered the 1000 pounds regardless (equivalent to more than 100000 pounds today).  Scott was so impressed that a place was found for Cherry-Garrard, as assistant zoologist.  Immediately prior to Scott’s assault on the South Pole there was a side-bar scientific expedition in which Cherry-Garrard participated.  This was in July 1911, the southern winter.  Cherry-Garrard and his two companions (Wilson – the study leader - and Bowers, both of whom later accompanied Scott to the Pole) journeyed some 60 miles from base, pulling two sleds, to obtain unhatched Emperor penguin eggs, the end objective being to facilitate a study of the evolution from reptiles to birds.  It was mission accomplished, but at some cost. Conditions were appalling, so much so that Bernard Shaw, no less, later described it as “the worst journey in the world”.  This was the title Cherry-Garrard used for his account of the Terra Nova expedition, published in 1922.  In addition to his foray into penguin egg territory, Cherry-Garrard was then in the second of the three support teams for Scott’s dash to the Pole.  The expedition set out on 1 November 1911, and the Cherry-Garrard group, having established a supply depot, returned to base on 26 January 1912.  The rendezvous with the returning Scott was set for 1 March or thereabouts, and Cherry-Garrard and one colleague, and dog teams, were chosen for the meeting.  They waited at the appointed One Ton Depot until 10 March 1912 before returning to base “empty-handed” on 16 March.  Cherry-Garrard later asserted that the dogs were intended to expedite the quick return of the Scott party from One Ton Depot to base, and there was no thought that they were intended to be used for rescue.  But there was criticism of Cherry-Garrard for not waiting longer, or for not venturing from the Depot in Scott’s direction.  The sad fact is that Scott, and his two surviving teammates, died in their tent a mere 11 miles from the supplies stashed at One Ton Depot. The subsequent rescue attempt was abandoned because of the cold; but Cherry-Garrard was one of the party who on 12 November 1912 found the frozen bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers in their tent.  Oates and Edgar Evans had perished earlier and were not with Scott at the end.

 

Cherry-Garrard was damaged.  He was physically damaged from the Emperor penguin journey, where the cold was so intense that Cherry-Garrard’s unstoppable chattering shattered his teeth.  He was damaged mentally from the denouement of the Scott debacle.  The writing of his book, The Worst Journey in the World, was likely an exercise in catharsis. It was later chosen by Penguin Books, who had launched in 1935, to be their 100^th publication, in 1937 – 99^th and 100^th actually, since it was published in two volumes in Penguin’s cerise covers, signifying travel and adventure.  Some travel! Some adventure!

 

More than 100 years on, history seems undecided about the Terra Nova blip on its screen. The Cherry-Garrard account was well received in 1922, with Bernard Shaw (never one for understatement) acclaiming it as the greatest true adventure story ever written.  But Roland Huntford, a present-day writer who has a lifetime of writing about polar matters, describes The Worst Journey in the World as “an immature but persuasive, highly charged apologia”.  Of more moment is Huntford’s criticism of Scott.  Huntford lauds Amundsen’s success in Antarctica, but he damns Scott as an amateur whose inadequacies led to the deaths of him and his companions.  The access that Huntford had to Scott’s unedited diaries (and to Amundsen’s) resulted in the 2010 publication of The Race for the South Pole: Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen.  Huntford had earlier portrayed Amundsen as experienced in arctic conditions, and careful, while Scott ignored the lessons of previous polar expeditions: he failed to take enough dogs, and his people had insufficient experience in handling the dogs; his men were not competent skiers; he was unprepared for extreme conditions; he took five men on the push for the Pole when he’d arranged provisions for four only; and he was indecisive.  And his choice of man-hauling sleds rather than dog-hauling ones was…….fatal!  Huntford’s book was a bombshell with its analysis of the diaries and its step-by-step comparisons between Amundsen and Scott.  The overall conclusion was that Scott was an amateur and [here I am quoting from The Guardian review of the book] “a man given to blaming his colleagues for his own failings; a man who describes one of his dying colleagues as stupid; a man who, on realising he had missed out on being the first to the Pole, writes that he can still salvage his reputation if he can get the news to the outside world before Amundsen.”  And much more.

 

But the myth of Robert Falcon Scott is impossible to dispel.  The world knew of Amundsen’s success more than a year before Scott’s fate was known.  That success was well received, albeit a little grudgingly, during Amundsen’s 1912 lecture tour of the UK; but once Scott’s death was known Scott became the national hero and pseudo martyr.  Had Scott returned alive history would soon have slotted him into a minor role, but dead heroes are special in the British imagination.  The myth was reinforced in later years by the hagiographic 1948 film, Scott of the Antarctic, with its score by Vaughan-Williams, later adapted into his eighth symphony.   And others have come since Huntford to restore Scott’s image; but any debunking by Huntford will not substantially change the public’s perception of Scott.  As the newspaperman declaims at the conclusion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”.

 

Huntford would claim the final word: “It’s strange. Shackleton, who didn’t lose a man when the Endurance was crushed in the Antarctic ice, remains a footnote in the national psyche, where Scott still has an iconic status.  Only in Britain do we revere the man who died in failure above the survivor.  Elsewhere in the world, Scott is seen as rather second-rate – an incompetent loser who battled nature rather than tried to understand it.”   The jury of history will remain forever hung.

 

There’s a simple line in a little volume I picked up years ago – The Encyclopaedic Year Book 1912/1913. “January 1912:  Captain Scott within 150 miles of the Pole”.  Poignant to think that while the book was being printed Scott was arriving at the Pole, and as it was hitting the bookshops Scott, on his return journey, was dying of starvation, of the cold, and of disappointment.  And, perhaps, of incompetence? 

 

Gary Andrews

 

 

BRITAIN IN PICTURES - NUMBER 4

 

 

#52  Wild Life of Britain by F. Fraser Darling

 

F. (Frank) Fraser Darling (1903 to 1979), the author of Wild Life of Britain was, according to Wikipedia, an ecologist, ornithologist, farmer, conservationist, and author.  And if that wasn’t enough to make him internally riven, Wikipedia ungraciously informs us that he was the illegitimate son of Captain Frank Moss (whom he never met, and who was killed in action in 1917); and that his mother resisted the demands of her family that the baby be fostered.  Oh, he also ran away from school at age 15.  How any good can have come from such origins is a mystery that must have confounded the bluenoses of the times; and still today. And how Darling, with his wretched background, came to receive a knighthood (in 1970) is surely a mystery beyond explaining!

 

And, before we abandon the sardonic tone, know that among Darling’s many achievements – a clutch of honours and awards, and over 25 publications – surely the most testing for the credulous is the Fraser Darling Effect, to which he gave his name.  Listen carefully.  While studying herring gulls in1938 Darling noticed that gulls nesting at a distance from one another rarely raised their young past the fledgling stage – because, typically, there was huge loss to predators.  But where the gulls nested close together in colonies the predator loss was relatively much less.  Strength in numbers you might think.  Well, not exactly.  The “effect” of nesting in colonies, Darling observed, was for the breeding cycle to be synchronised throughout the colony (and moreover, accelerated), with resultant simultaneous hatching, in turn leading to fewer casualties to predation. Darling attributed the “effect” to the sexual stimulation of the hens living in close proximity.

 

The illustrations in this book are particularly worthwhile.  In each volume of the Britain in Pictures series the illustrations are numerous – as the series title would predicate – and of themselves they are informative and estimable, but sometimes we have a few that aren’t particularly apposite to the topic, and have been sourced so as best to fill the space allocated.  Not so here. They comprise an impressive collection of bird, fish, animal, insect and reptile drawings.

 

Darling starts his story with four paradoxes.  First, that although Britain is highly industrialised, and densely populated, it still contains “stretches of deep rural country, commons, fens and wastes untouched for a thousand years, and mountains and moors which are wild, remote and little trodden by man”.  The second paradox:  that although as a people the British are kind to animals “they hunt some of them with a fervour and ritual that is almost religious”.  The third:  that while the British are among the world’s most solicitous of domestic and domesticated animals they are mostly indifferent to the mistreatment of wild creatures.  And fourth: that despite its rural traditions Britain is an urban country – and increasingly so.  And yet another paradox:  that while the rural dweller is, by and large, little bothered by the wild life around him, it is the urban dweller “who has tried to awaken the national consciousness to the beauty of our countryside with its heritage of wild life”.  These paradoxes overlay the startling diversity of Britain’s natural history compared with any other part of Europe:  due, it seems to the tempering influence of the Gulf Stream – the result being a place of northern latitude with an Oceanic climate.  Thus Darling asserts:  “A Martian gazing on the face of Britain might well choose this country for a living museum.”

 

Darling undertakes a comprehensive whip-around of the entire country, describing the environment and habitat region by region, then the endemic fauna of each.  He spends a chapter on “the creatures”, a chapter brimming with statistics.  “It surprises many people to learn that we have seventy-five species and sub-species of native mammals, a number almost as great as a thousand years ago” - having exterminated in that thousand years only the wolf, the beaver, the wild boar, the brown bear, and the reindeer. Followers of the journalist and writer, George Monbiot will be aware of his mission to re-introduce the wolf back into the wild parts of Britain, and with that re-introduction to restore part of the former balance of nature – the process known as “rewilding”.  Monbiot’s writing is some of the sanest I know.  He’s not hard to find in a Google search – the following link should do it too:

 

https://www.monbiot.com/about/

 

Darling then gives an historic conspectus, and suggests that the proper approach should be an appraisal of the interaction between man and the rest, broadly the interaction of all creatures “inhabiting the same ground”.  Historically, this is the journey from man the hunter for the pot, through man the hunter for fun, to man the hunter for knowledge, and finally and hopefully – to man the conservator.  Man the hunter was intensely aware of the wild life around him – an awareness that was practical and, accordingly, hunter man did not destroy the wild life of his locale.  But once agriculture arrived man’s attitude turned from defensive to offensive – the deer that raids the crops is an enemy.  Interestingly, this inevitable change in attitude did not lead to an overall extermination mindset but rather to the parallel ritual of hunting.  The exclusive preserve of the large land-owners no doubt, but game hunting of necessity must have the flip-side of game preservation.  Hence red deer, hares, pheasants, grouse, salmon and trout, while reserved for the hunting pleasure of royalty and their nearer minions, were preserved for that same pleasure.

 

Darling has a long chapter on British naturalists, extending through the era of the observant amateur to the science-based present. He pauses to honour Charles Darwin as the greatest of the self-taught amateurs: one “almost uneducable” in his studies, one so interested in collecting stones and insects that his despairing father urged the Church as a career – a career that would provide him with the leisure time to pursue his love of natural history!  Darwin had a desultory time at Cambridge, then got the job and the break as naturalist on the five-year voyage of H.M.S. Beagle.  On the voyage Darwin had the time to range across diverse areas of study, was able to make thousands of observations, and was freed from the influences of others. The result?  Darwin “gave up the orthodox notion of species separately created, and crystallised the hitherto nebulous theory of evolution by stating the hypothesis of natural selection, the survival of the fittest, and modification in descent.”

 

Not surprisingly, Darling’s concluding chapter is a plea for the future – not starry eyed, but accepting of the practicalities.  There was, in 1943, plenty to be hopeful about. Natural history had become a scientific study, and yet the gifted amateur still played a valuable role. The Albert Schweitzer philosophy of ‘respect and reverence for life’ had become pretty well entrenched.  But Darling highlights the continuing need for the establishment of conservation sanctuaries (nothing new there: William the Conqueror had done it nearly nine hundred years earlier); and the continuing need for education and for vigilance, and the need for mindfulness of the opportunities for conservation.                                        

 

#87 Sporting Pictures of England by Guy Paget

 

What is it with “sporting pictures”?  Why do they need this book to shine the light on them?

 

Well, that’s the point.  They are rarely in the light, rarely on the walls of the public galleries and institutions, because typically they have been special commissions from individuals or organisations who have walls of their own, thank you; and who are private.

 

This point is forcefully, if unwittingly, made by the listing at the rear of Sporting Pictures of England of some 62 “notable” artists who have practised in the sporting pictures genre.  Sixty-two artists who have left behind pictures of horses, deer, salmon, dogs (alone or in hunting packs), and partridges (dead and alive) and who would mostly remain un-famous to this day without the application of the Guy Paget touch. Guy Paget is our author.

 

Major Guy Paget (1886 to 1952) was an “enthusiast and an expert”, and frequent contributor to The Field, and to Country Life etc. on these neglected artists.  He was the author of a number of books on Hunting (capital H, so do we presume fox-hunting?), and was the historian of the 7^th Northamptonshire Regiment.  He also wrote three biographies of important mediaeval women; and was a Conservative Member of Parliament for a short while in the 1920s.  As an example of the apple falling rather further from the tree than legend dictates, his son became a Labor M.P. and later a life peer.  How like the British – and unlike the Australians – to produce a lifelong Labor man named Reginald Thomas Guy Des Voeux Paget .Q.C., Baron Paget of Northampton.

 

As to the sporting pictures: well, I didn’t find much to detain me.  Guy Paget’s access to the works he describes was phenomenal, doubly so when considering that most of them are in private hands.  As a consequence of his diligence the overview is extensive and esoteric. But for this general reader the interest was minimal.  Is it strange that a picture of a dog with a partridge in its mouth does not fire the blood?  Or that a picture of the hounds breaking cover, presumably pursuing a fox that has similarly done so, does not stir the heart?

 

And yet, Paget does have some telling observations about the influences of “country life” on the nation:

   # During the eighteenth century the breeding of horses, dogs, cattle, sheep and pigs had taken the place of war and had become the ruling passion of the country gentleman.

   # With this went a love for country life, shooting, hunting, racing, gardening.

   # Without this passion, wealth and fashion might have been concentrated in London.

   # However, even the government of the country had to give way to it -  and the sittings of Parliament were regulated by the shooting and hunting seasons.

   # Accordingly, in England the real home of the ruling class is in the country, not in the capital.

 

Was it true in 1945; is it true today?

 

#78 Battlefields in Britain by C.V. Wedgewood

 

Dame (Cecily) Veronica Wedgewood (1910 to 1997) was a distinguished historian who specialised in English history of the 1600s, and – is this a Wikipedian put-down? – whose “biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works”.  Ouch!  Nevertheless, her peers regarded her as an outstanding historian and biographer; and her own life story is a catalogue of achievements and honours, including the Order of Merit.  Sadly, the well-used brain did not save her from Alzheimer’s disease, the affliction of her final years.

 

In contemplating in prospect Wedgewood’s book, Battlefields in Britain (published in 1944), I was reminded of a delightful CD of the New York chanteuse, Blossom Dearie, Et Tu Bruce, recorded at the piano in 1984 with an enthusiastic audience: a collection of “sophisticated songs” not in the popular repertoire.  At one stage, after an interjection from an audience member, Dearie responds coquettishly, “It’s my company.  I can do anything I like!”  Similarly, it’s my blog, and I choose at the outset to segue to Compton Mackenzie, and to a battlefield not in Britain. 

 

Mackenzie (1883 to 1972) was a remarkable figure: born in England but a committed Scot, novelist, and writer of some 50 works of history and essays and criticism and biography, and books for children.  He was founder of the magazine, The Gramophone, and an authority and contributor on serious music. He was prolific beyond words.

 

He was a British secret agent during the First World War, and spent much of the War in Greece.  He returned to Crete and Greece in 1958 as the author and presenter of a multi-part television series, The Glory That Was Greece.  One of the segments, and here we arrive at my point, was filmed at the scene of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE: Marathon the place from whence – as every schoolboy of my vintage used to know – the young Pheidippides ran the 26 miles to Athens to tell the inhabitants that the Athenian army had defeated the numerically superior Persians; and then dropped dead.  While exciting to schoolboys, the story is likely apocryphal.  Nonetheless, Pheidippides is immortally saluted in the 26-mile length of the marathon.

 

The Battle of Marathon is not a British battle, I know, but the memory of Compton Mackenzie standing in a bare piece of ground, pointing with his stick to conjure up a scene of more than two millennia ago, resonates with the whole of Wedgewood’s book – where none of the battles described by her occurred fewer than two hundred years since.  It takes some imagination; and this is what is generously provided by Wedgewood. 

 

Having steered so far off course I started to wonder whether the title of this volume might be a misnomer.  Why battlefields, and not battles?  Surely the author has to describe the battle, and surely the field of battle is merely part of the overall story.  Surely the battlefield can be the dominant feature of the story only if the physiography itself proved to be a determinant in the outcome.  So in approaching the story of each significant battle described by Wedgewood I have held foremost in my mind the panorama, the mise-en-scene.  How much did the outlook contribute to the outcome?

 

Happily for my thesis, in Wedgewood’s opening chapter, on the pre-Norman Conquest era, she makes this very point:  ‘…..who knows what really takes place in a battle. Certainly not the combatants: how then the historian?  Something more and less than knowledge is needed………the sense of the past, the imaginative mind which can think the scene again…….see the bend of the stream round the willow clump, this gentle dip, that bare hillock as the anxious soldier saw it, feel the sun or the mist of three centuries ago”.  Mindful of the landscapes of the past, Wedgewood notes that it is in the descriptions of battles that we find the best descriptions of these landscapes.  Having said that, she laments the paucity of extant information about the battles involving the Romans, the early Saxons, and so on – indeed some of the sites of early battles are no longer known.

 

As to the rest:  there’s too much for me to cover all of Wedgewood’s survey, and little point in précis that are so short as to be uninformative, so I’m going to skip the battles of the Wars of the Roses, that is the wars between the white rose Yorkists and the red rose Lancastrians – where, finally, at Bosworth on 22^nd August 1485, Richard Third lost his horse and his life, and Lancastrian Henry Seventh took the crown.  And I’m also going to skip the Civil War battles, where off and on over four years the Parliamentary forces of Cromwell overcame the forces of Charles First and triggered the downfall of the monarchy.

 

But it’s hard to pass over the Battle of Hastings, a battle recognised as a foundation stone of the English people.  The story goes back a little way.  The Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, reigned from 1042 to 1066.  He was childless, and in 1051 while his cousin William Duke of Normandy was on a visit to England, King Edward pledged to leave William the kingdom.  But, on Edward’s deathbed some fifteen years later, the King instead nominated as his successor his nephew, Harold Godwinson. The affronted William wasted no time. Edward died on 5^th January, 1066, and William’s forces landed in England on 13^th October, eleven miles from Hastings.  By the next day they had marched to a spot near Hastings, engaged King Harold’s forces, and won the victory.  Although the two armies were more or less of equal number, Harold was said to have been underprepared and his forces less experienced.  [There was also the factor that Harold and his army had just now arrived after a forced march from the north of England where he had engaged and defeated the King of Norway, an ally of Duke William, who acting in concert with the Duke thought he’d have a piece of England too.]  When, at one point, the Normans had been driven back Harold’s less-disciplined men broke formation and gave pursuit – to their cost.  But the battle lasted all day, and nobody can evaluate the ebbs and flows.  Of no little significance, however, is the fact that Harold perished on the battlefield courtesy of an arrow through the eye.  As to the terrain:  contrary to Westwood’s opening proposition, the terrain seems to have played little part in the outcome of the battle.  Instead, Westwood concludes:  “The truth about Hastings is in all respects odder and sadder than the romantic fictions which from the earliest times have crowded round it………it was an extraordinary fluke of history that one of these feeble little shafts  [the Norman arrows were short and light – the Saxons had no bowmen at all] whistled home to its deadly target just as King Harold flung back his head.  One second more, one second less, and it had glanced off his helmet, scarcely felt.”

 

One extraordinary legacy of the Battle of Hastings is the Bayeux Tapestry.  This group of 50 centimetre-tall embroideries (not, in fact, tapestries) portray the Battle of Hastings, and the relevant events of the two years prior.  They were apparently embroidered within a couple of years of the Battle, destined to hang in the soon-to-be-completed Bayeux cathedral. Some of the later sections are missing, but it is miraculous that so much has survived.  The panels, stitched together, are altogether some 70 metres (230 feet) long.  The tapestry is today housed in a circular purpose-built museum in Bayeux.  Incidentally, there is a 44-page blockbuster article in the August 1969 edition of National Geographic commemorating the 900^th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings; and commemorating the fact that the Geographic’s photographers had been the first to capture the whole tapestry on colour film.  The article, a blend of history and Bayeux travelogue, features the tapestry as narrow panels across the top of each page.  There is a short running commentary under each panel as the drama unfolds.

 

Wedgwood next deals with a group of skirmishes a couple of hundred years after Hastings.  During the intervening years the Norman invaders had integrated, and their occupancy of England had been “normalised” – although the Court language remained French.   But the primitive Welsh and Scots were causing grief.  There were Welsh wars from 1277 through 1295, then Falkirk in 1298 and Bannockburn in 1314.  Falkirk was the stage for the Scots rebel William Wallace (remember Mel Gibson bare kneed in tartan), and Bannockburn the stage for Robert the Bruce (remember the spider).  Wedgewood highlights the dilemma, not resolved in the years since Hastings: “by what means can foot soldiers armed with spears overcome cavalry and bowmen?  Only by evading and drawing the enemy into unknown and difficult country.”  Wedgewood also highlights the mechanical aspects of the warfare of the time. After Hastings the cavalry, both knights and horses, had become completely sheathed in armour – good for frontal attack, but not so mobile.  Although with formidable impact, the charge could be delivered only at a trot. And while there had been a universal adoption of the mechanical crossbow, including adoption by the Scots, England still retained the longbow.  However, the crossbow was prone to mechanical defects; the longbow, properly handled, was just as deadly, possibly more so – iron tipped arrows could pierce armour. 

 

Edward the First led his army in the defeat of the Wallace insurgency.  The English bowmen were triumphant, although the heavy-laden cavalry almost succumbed to the bog that Wallace’s men stood behind.  Edward the Second (the fourth son of Edward the First) had accompanied his father on the Falkirk campaign; and sixteen years later, against Robert the Bruce, he became one of history’s big-time losers.  Robert the Bruce had spent years in leading the Scottish cause, taking fortress after fortress, and recruiting supporters - and he just had to be stopped! So it was that the new King Edward amassed a 20000-strong army (including 3000 cavalry) on the field of Bannockburn – and lost decisively to Bruce’s 7000 foot soldiers.  The battle is described as “the only one in recorded mediaeval history in which infantry totally and overwhelmingly defeated cavalry”.  Wedgewood concludes that it is reassuring for today’s united Britain to know that “the most lamentable defeat which an English army ever suffered” was at the hands of the Scots. I don’t think so!  Wherein does that reassurance lie?

 

I’ll conclude with Culloden, another – later, some 430 years later – adventure of the pesky Scots.  In 1987 my wife, Annie, and I were touring through Britain, and with no particular agenda came to the site of the Battle of Culloden.  I knew a little of the story, about the merciless suppression by George the Second’s redcoats of the rebel forces of Bonnie Prince Charlie - the crushing of the so-called Jacobite Rebellion.  And the little I knew I had learned from the 1964 Peter Watkins film Culloden.  That film, a pioneer in the field of docudrama, had achieved some fame, and accolades galore, and had about it (as I remembered then, and think I remember today) a feeling of doom.  The Battle at Culloden, on 16 April 1746, was the last battle fought on British soil, and cost 1000 rebel lives on the day (for loss of 50 King’s men only), plus 1000 more in the subsequent bloodthirsty round-up.

 

So in 1987 I’d set the scene in my own mind; and, given the trail of numbered “highlights”, the total absence of other visitors, and the foggy soundless day, the field of Culloden was an eerie place indeed.  

 

I wrote these words before actually reading Battlefields in Britain.  When I turned to the final page of the book, to the final paragraph, I saw that the author, too, was mindful of the drama: “Culloden Moor, the scene of this last and final defeat of the Celtic north by the Anglo-Saxon, is a site as beautiful as it is tragic, with the desolate moor under a wild sky and the long graves of the clans buried in the places where they fell.”

 

Gary Andrews

 

 

 

 

BRITAIN IN PICTURES - NUMBER 3

 

 

#38   British Craftsmen by Thomas Hennell

 

Set the task of producing an extended essay on “British Craftsmen” you could simply provide potted biographies of a number of craftsmen over the years, or maybe only those alive at the time of writing; or you might focus on individual crafts – and give an historical perspective, or technical descriptions, or both.  In the event the author covers all of this, and then some. The blurb tells us that Thomas Hennell “describes not only the crafts themselves but the way of life of the craftsman and the effect that social changes have had on his conditions of work”.  

 

Hennell, according to Wikipedia, was “a British artist and illustrator who specialised in illustrations and essays on the subject of the British countryside.”  At the time he wrote British Craftsmenin 1943, Hennell was aged 40.  Two years later he was dead.  He had served as an official War Artist at home, in Iceland, in France (after D-Day), then later in Burma and in Singapore.  He was presumed killed by Indonesian Nationalist fighters in Java in November 1945.

 

In Hennell’s own words, his “intention has been to give the reader a vivid set of illustrations of the life and conditions of the craftsman rather than a text book exposition of the theory of handicrafts.” He proceeds through eleven sections, rather more capricious than in some obvious and orderly sequence:

 

         Crafts of Stone

         Some Crafts of Fire

         Wooden Roofs

         Country Wood-crafts

         British Timber

         Furniture

         Crafts of Iron

         Industrial Revolution and Decline of Crafts

         Some Modern Revivals: Morris and Co

         Weaving and Fabric-printing: Individual Craftsmen

         Pottery and The Omega Workshops. 

 

An eclectic group, and worth a delve, I thought. But, boy, was it hard going? Hennell floods us with so many anecdotes, so many names, so many achievements, alas the majority of them things of the past or crafts no longer practised.  Along the way the trail is a bric-a-brac of the past both remote and recent. Fascinating vignettes, but plaintive to read that such-and-such has died out, or at best might possibly have a revival.

 

We learn how to make flints.  We learn that freestone can be cut accurately and without waste using metal if suitably lubricated with sand and water – metal not necessarily toothed or sharp edged.  We learn that the structures of wooden church ceilings evolved over time to accommodate the ever-larger spans of grander buildings, and in the process were able to become more elaborate and decorative.  And ecclesiastic uses aside, Hennell notes the extensive range of uses to which wood, English wood, has been put – ships, barges, scaffolding, piers, and windmills; wagons and carts, farm tools, looms, spinning wheels, even water pipes; cradles, beds, beer vats and wine barrels.

 

In perhaps a surprising note for 1943 we are warned that the world is wasting its timber resources.  “We must learn through necessity to plan and economise such timber resources as we have, and their waste products, and to replace our ephemeral needs in some less wasteful way.”  Hennell laments this wastage in a second passage: “The woodman who had a whole idea of his job wasted nothing, except the root of the tree, which would not repay the trouble of excavating.  He knew each kind of tree and what it was good for: its right age and season for felling.  He put by the pieces of timber for the shipwright and the builder whose natural growth was suited to their needs; of posts and beams, straight planks, or crooked ‘knee timber’.  To-day the offals of the tree-carcase are burnt and wasted – but then, twigs were made into faggots for the baker and the bark was stripped for the tanner.”

 

Some further stern words:  While in France “a Post-Impressionist painter, Dufy, was producing designs of astonishing vigour and beauty for the silk-weavers of Lyon, in England habits of taste and the fallacious axioms of commerce have hindered us from appreciating good designers, and from introducing them, as the French have done, into our manufacturing firms.”

 

Hennell, in his section on individual craftsmen engaged in weaving and fabric-printing, talks of an enthusiast who “by visiting the last surviving spinners and weavers of Wales, Ireland and Scandinavia, acquired their several methods in spinning and weaving and in making vegetable dyes.” “This Miss Kendon of Uckfield, like Cecil Sharp in music, has collected folk traditions in her craft.” 

 

One reference to Cecil Sharp in 48 pages, and a passing one at that.  As implied by Hennell, the place of Sharp in music is significant.  I first heard Sharp referred to on a long playing record, Coronation Concert by Burl Ives, back in the mid 1950s.  Ives (1909 to 1995) was a folk singer and actor, indeed with an impressive film career including major roles in the film of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, in the film of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and in William Wyler’s The Big Country.  Ives collected numerous traditional and folk songs, and recorded many of them for the Library of Congress.  On stage at the Royal Festival Hall for the Coronation Concert in 1954 Ives, among a programme of mainly folk songs, paid tribute to Cecil Sharp, specifically for collecting the song, Henry Martin.

 

Sharp (1859 to 1924) was born in London and, after completing his formal education at Cambridge, migrated to Australia at age 23.  He chose to settle in Adelaide because – so the story goes! – it had the same name as the Beethoven song.  He then studied law, and for some five years was associate to the Chief Justice of South Australia. Sharp exercised his musical talents as assistant organist at St. Peter’s Cathedral, and conductor of the cathedral’s choral society. He returned to England in 1892 when age 33; and for some years was principal of the Hampstead Conservatoire of Music.  Sharp was driven to revive and record folk song and dance after seeing a Morris Dance performed in 1899.  The notebooks of his subsequent endeavours record over 1700 pieces.  From 1916 through 1918 Sharp travelled the United States recording forgotten tunes.

 

And coming back to Thomas Hennell for one final snippet; followed by a heartfelt burst of passion: “The roof of Westminster Hall [in the Parliamentary precinct], of length 238 feet and 68 feet wide in span, which was begun in 1394, is the largest and ‘the greatest triumph of mediaeval carpentry which England has ever possessed.’  [There won’t be any more.]  It was built of Sussex oak.  It is formed of thirteen roof-trusses, each with a pair of hammer-beams and hammer-posts, of which a single timber weighs three-and-a-half tons and must have required an oak of four feet diameter. It may not be fantastic to consider that, since oaks known to have been planted in Queen Elizabeth’s reign have sometimes attained this size, the tree can be said to survive much longer in a building than the time it has taken to grow to maturity.  And therefore it should be profitable for the State to plant oaks, and to discourage (instead of compelling!!) the cutting of oaks at sixty years or less. Wasteful felling of oak trees is a crime against the community which ought to be heavily penalised.”

 

#129   The Turf by John Hislop

 

When I say that a particular topic in this series has wide general interest or, conversely, is of limited interest to the general reader, I am betraying a modicum of actual knowledge overlayed with a thick slab of personal taste and preference.  This is manifestly true when it comes to The Turf.  I am absolutely disinterested in horse racing – disinterested to the point of barely caring to listen to a broadcast of the Melbourne Cup.  I did, however, see the grey, Lord Fury, win the 1961 Melbourne Cup, so I’m not totally un-Australian.  But I have no knowledge of horse racing. That said, is this an opportunity to engage with the romance of the turf; alternatively, to cut my losses, and move on to the next book on the shelf?  My head tells me to cut my losses, but I’m intrigued to keep reading.

John Hislop (1911 to 1994) was the Observer’s racing correspondent, and in this small volume he covers a lot of territory. There are chapters on the history of racing, on training, on jockeys, and on steeplechasing.  He has a section on famous racehorses – all British bred, the earliest, Flying Childers, bred 1715. Hislop discusses the attributes and careers of a number of champion horses, including West Australian, “altogether a racehorse of the highest class” - bred in 1850, trained in Yorkshire, and in 1853 the first winner of the Triple Crown.  The Triple Crown comprises three races for 3-year olds:  the Two Thousand Guineas (1 mile), the Derby (1 1/2 miles) and the St. Leger (1 3/4 miles).

I was disappointed in Hislop’s chapter on breeding. I had expected an explanation of ‘thoroughbred” as a category of horse, how the breed came about, what distinguishes it from other strains of horse, why does there appear to be a skewing towards the genetic influence of the sire more so than the dam, how did “the industry” come to be regulated, how does the “stud book” work, who keeps the records, how come the rules and practices are international, is there an overarching regulatory authority, what sort of breaches can there be and how are they policed, what’s to stop a cart horse being raced against a thoroughbred.  Hislop tells us none of this; instead he enumerates successful breeding lines, beginning with this introduction:  “All our bloodstock traces to three original, imported sires, The Darley Arabian, The Godolphin Arabian and The Byerley Turk.” The Darley Arabian, foaled in 1700, was imported from Aleppo in 1704.  The Godolphin Arabian was imported from France in 1730.  The Byerley Turk, said to have been “pure Arabian”, was captured at the siege of Buda and brought into Britain in1689.  These horses were not necessarily champion racehorses but proved to be outstanding sires.  The long journey from three sires some three hundred years ago to 1948 would surely be much more interesting than lists of prominent thoroughbreds era by era – but perhaps that is the story of the journey.

 

Hislop also includes a chapter on racecourses, with brief notes on the characteristics of several:  Goodwood, situated on the Duke of Richmond’s estate, “is undoubtedly the most beautiful”; Doncaster in Yorkshire, home of the St. Leger; Newmarket in Suffolk (established in 1636), with more than a mile straight in its Rowley Mill course, home to the Two Thousand Guineas, the topography of the course little changed since Charles 2nd raced there.  And Epsom in Surrey, home of the Derby; and Ascot, a mere six miles from Windsor Castle.  “To say that there is no single meeting in the world comparable with Royal Ascot is no exaggeration.  Its setting of pine trees and the vivid emerald of its turf form a fine background to the scarlet and gold of the Royal procession as, headed by the famous Windsor greys, it glides up the course, as gay and imposing a spectacle as one could wish to see.”  Amen.

 

Of interest to Australian readers is the fact that – as of 1948 – there was no enclosure, and no admission charge, at Newmarket, Doncaster, Epsom or Ascot.

 

 I was minded to allow Hislop the following last words [not a strict quote]:  “The love of horses, in particular the racehorse (with his qualities of beauty, speed, courage and endurance), has been a national characteristic throughout our history……….it is sometimes termed ‘the Sport of Kings’, but it is equally the sport of the people…   …English racing is best summed up by the words:  ‘On and under the turf all men are equal’.”  

 

Wait on, you can’t exercise the “last word” privilege with a porky like that, cute though it sounds.  I happily accept that all men are equal under the turf, including the princes and the potentates, but equality of all men above the turf?  That particular piece of fancy was pinched by Hislop from Lord George Bentinck (1802 to 1848), parliamentarian, racehorse owner and “notorious gambler”; but Bentinck was not sufficiently well credentialled, I fear, nor sufficiently disinterested, to substantiate his assertion that all men are equal above the turf.

 

#50   British Soldiers by S.H.F. Johnston

 

With the old limerick surfacing in memory I am unable to take seriously anything redolent of the town of Aberystwyth.  Yet here it was that Major S.H.F. Johnston, author of British Soldiers, was history lecturer at University College of Wales.  But smile suppressed we must press on.  

 

Johnston became interested in military history while at Oxford, and notes that in this present book he does not give a history of the army so much as the story of the British soldier – hence the title.

British soldiers fought against the legions of Caesar, against the Normans, and in the Holy Land, but it was not until the Civil War that there was a standing army.  Until then, private armies and “free companies” were deployed for skirmishes and campaigns as required.  In 1645 Cromwell’s New Model Army was the first army recruited by the nation, by Parliament, ironically to fight against Charles 1^st, the sovereign. They were full-time professionals rather than part-time militia, with a professional officer corps whose members were expressly prohibited from serving in Parliament.  Notwithstanding the high purpose, for some years after 1645 more than half the infantry had been pressed into service.  In those early days of the New Model Army foot soldiers were armed either with a musket or a pike, two musketeers to one pikeman.  The sixteen-foot pike was regarded as the more honourable weapon.  The mounted troopers, all volunteers, were regarded as the aristocrats of the army, the cavalry generally having the decisive influence over the outcome. Johnston writes that the New Model Army although efficient was never popular with the people, it being regarded as “the army of a religious and political faction rather than as the army of the nation”.  After the end of the Commonwealth, and the restoration of the monarchy with the accession of Charles 2^nd, elements of the New Model Army merged with Charles’ exiled Royalist army into the standing army kept by Charles.  Therein lay the direct ancestor of today’s British Army.  

 

Johnstone continues his story much as a series of stepping stones of significant campaigns and illustrious commanders.  In the 280 years between the resumption of the monarchy to Johnstone writing in 1944 there was no shortage of the former and, arguably, no dearth of the latter either.  We can, in a way, dismiss the battles because – as with Jesus’ poor – they are always with us.  The cavalcade of battles and wars large and small that has tormented – or vice-versa - the British over the two-century-plus period is astonishing, unbelievable from today’s reasonably peaceful vantage point.  Are we more “civilized” today, or less vexatious?  Has diplomacy developed to a point where it is capable of standing between foolish words and warfare?  When applying these questions to the British situation I suspect another factor is relevant, and dominant.  The political globe of today is much more settled than in earlier times.  Throughout much of the period since Charles 2^nd there was continual struggle for territory in Europe (much of it resolved by 1900 – certainly insofar as the British were concerned), this paralleled by the colonial incursions into Africa and the Americas.  And India.  Much of the story of British soldiers concerns not the remedying of perceived wrongs at the hand of traditional enemies but the taking of foreign territory simply as colonial plunder.  British soldiers were not only instrumental in the conquest of the then-to-be-subjugated peoples of much of the red areas on the old world maps, but were then required to maintain the peace thereafter.  The collapse of the Empire, the return of self-rule to the countries of Egypt, India, South Africa et cetera, and the return home of the British soldiers, was not seen before Johnstone wrote in 1944, nor foreseen.

 

The colonial “wars”, campaigns to conquer or supress “the natives”, were interminable, and had a heavy cost.  The 3738-strong first detachment sent to Rangoon in the First Burmese War (1824 to 1827) suffered 166 killed in action, plus 3160 who died of malaria, cholera or scurvy.  The Second and Third Burmese wars, respectively in 1852 and 1885, eventually resulted in the full annexation of Burma.  The two Sikh Wars (1845/6 and 1848/9) brought the Punjab province finally into the British Empire.  The wars were actually fought by the army of the East India Company, although commanded by British Army generals, but the tale of the East India Company is a tale too murky to be told and, at this remove, to be believed.  And the East India Company was the perpetrator of the First Afghan War (1839 to 1842), although the British Government itself had the carriage of the Second (1878 to 1880) and the Third (1919) Afghan Wars – through which the Afghanis eventually gained their independence from the British Crown………without, one feels, gaining since then 100 years of uninterrupted joy.  And the South African War (the Boer War), the biggest of the colonial wars (1899 to 1902), saw for the first time the enlistment of non-U.K. troops to assist the mother country’s expansionist cause.

 

Pretty ignoble stuff, really, and it seems more comfortable to be contemplating a good old fashioned stoush between the English and the French.  In this regard I thought it might be interesting to compare the two great British commanders (and national heroes) who between them bestrode a couple of centuries – the Duke of Marlborough (1650 to 1722) and the Duke of Wellington (1769 to 1852).  [Marlborough, born John Churchill, was later to have a descendant Winston as famous as he.]  But, on reflection, there seemed to be no particular merit in recounting the glories of the great commanders when the real story of British soldiers – certainly for much of the time before Johnston was writing – was one of never ending privation.  

 

Hear this of Marlborough’s time: Campaigns were fought only in summer.  In winter the roads were impassable for large movements of arms; and, in any case, the winter months were needed for recruitment to re-stock the wasted ranks. Cajolery and bounties were necessary because the Recruiting Acts imposed conscription only on criminals, debtors and paupers.  It is said that one of Marlborough’s greatest feats was to train such recruits into an effective fighting force.  His troops were said to have regarded him as one of their own and, accordingly, nicknamed him Corporal John.

 

Hear this of the later times between the wars:  “Bad conditions and inadequate pay meant that only the dregs of the population were willing to enlist, and discipline among such recruits could only be maintained by severe and brutal punishments.”  Parliament was unwilling to build barracks, and the men of a regiment were usually split into detachments and billeted in alehouses, often many miles apart.  Discipline suffered, and training was all but impossible. 

 

Hear this of Wellington’s time - bit of a turn-up, actually:  Although Wellington’s greatest character flaw was his scarcely veiled contempt for his men (Johnston attributes this to Wellington being a product of “the aloof Irish aristocracy of the Protestant Ascendancy” – I shall not pursue what that means), he nevertheless was considerate towards his troops “and sent them into battle as well-equipped and well-fed as he could”.  Yet he described them as “the scum of the Earth; English soldiers are fellows who have enlisted for drink.  That is the plain fact, they have all enlisted for drink.”  In return, while the men had respect for him, they did not love him.

 

Hear this of the time of the Crimean War (1853 to 1856; you know, just when the gold was panning out in Bendigo!):  Before the War It was said that the Government “spent on the army very little of its own time or of the nation’s money”.  So: undermanned, a collection of regiments with no experience of acting together, no organisation for supply or transport, no training for living in the field, and little if any musket training – at one battlefield the men were given training on their new muzzle-loading rifles, rifles that had arrived after they had.

 

We’ll leave it there.  The situation of the British soldier gradually improved – because of, or despite, the fact that between 1854 and 1904 there were 567 committees and Royal Commissions on army administration.  Yet as of 1904 pay was so low that officers continued to be partially dependent on subsidies from their families, and “other ranks were largely drawn from the lower levels of the artisan and agricultural labourer classes”. Having taken us through the first half of the 20^thCentury, with little relief from the soldier’s travails Johnston is obliged to finish on an upbeat note - remember it is 1944. “The British soldier is at his best and has performed his most memorable feats when he has been faced with his greatest odds……..his long story is full of actions when he has fought, often hopelessly, against superior numbers, without thought of retreat.”

 

 #47   British Engineers by Metius Chappell

 

The title suggests that the book will focus on famous and successful British engineers, and before I opened it I speculated whether it might in fact be skewed towards the achievements of British engineering – the achievements rather than the achievers.

 

Then came to mind the BBC series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, which aired in 2003; and I thought of the likely overlap.  The book of the series, however, reminds me that of the seven “wonders”, only three are British – the mammoth iron ship, Great Eastern; the lighthouse on the Inchcape Rock; and the sewerage system of London.  So, now to see how Metius Chappell includes these in his story, if at all, Chappell being the author – “a brilliant young Canadian writer”.  Furthermore, “he is a lecturer in economic history and has specialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great age of change and development, in which civil engineering, as we know it, first began to affect the everyday life of the people to any appreciable degree.”  A promising start:  the publisher promises and the writer starts.

To a degree that promise is not fulfilled.  We are taken through the broad sweep of centuries: miles of canals and aqueducts and improved waterways, miles of railway lines and cuttings and viaducts, scores of bridges and other bread and butter feats of civil engineering.  There’s so much to tell that the wonder of it, the pizzazz, is somehow lost in the detail.  However, Chappell presents his case through the steps of the engineers, and this is the route we must follow.

James Brindley (1716 to 1772) was the foremost engineer of the so-called “canal age”, the 60 years after 1760.  He was responsible for some 360 miles of canals.  Born in poverty, little formal education, apprenticed to a wheelwright, his mechanical aptitude led to him working for near twenty years as a millwright constructing machinery for flour mills.  Then, from 1759 and until his death at age 56 in 1772, he was the canal designer nonpareil, applying practical solutions to all problems that presented.  “The difficulties he encountered and overcame, without the advantage of the experience of others or any kind of knowledge of the theoretical basis of his subject, and the great scale of his works, entitle him to be regarded as the first, and in many ways the most remarkable of the British engineers.”

John Smeaton (1724 to 1792) gained fame as the designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse off Cornwall – the replacement for a wooden structure built 1709 which stood until being destroyed by fire in 1755; and which in turn had replaced the original tower, also a wooden structure, which had been built in 1700 and was swept away in a storm in 1703.  On-site work on Smeaton’s stone lighthouse could proceed only at low tide and in calm weather, and in summer.  Construction continued for three seasons.  Smeaton’s structure was innovative in that it combined granite blocks with concrete, and the blocks were cut to interlock.  It was tapered, “to give it the strength of an oak”.  Its height was 59 feet, its diameter 26 feet at the base tapering to 19 feet at the top.  It functioned for 118 years, from 1759 to 1866, until the wearing away of the underlying rock caused it to become unstable.  The replacement lighthouse was built nearby, and the Smeaton Tower, as it had become known, was dismantled and re-erected on shore as a public monument – except for the granite base, which was too strong to be shifted.  Smeaton’s career included harbour works, canals, bridges, and industrial machinery.  The 38-mile-long Forth and Clyde Canal climbed 156 feel, and had 39 locks.

 

Thomas Telford (1757 to 1834) and John Rennie (1761 to 1821) were the two engineering giants of their era.  Telford oversaw the construction of over 1000 miles of roads and some 1200 bridges.  His most famous achievement was the suspension bridge across the Menai Strait, between the island of Anglesea and the Welsh mainland.  Rennie was famous for his work on docks, harbours and canals; and, astride the Thames in London: Waterloo Bridge, Southwark Bridge, and (the new) London Bridge.

 

And then there were the railways.  And the engineers that facilitated them.  And the timing?  Just in time to dole out a large dose of one upmanship to the recently upgraded roads.  Before long the railways were able to out-compete the stage coaches for passengers, and outcompete the canal barges for freight.  By 1830 there was a reasonably good network of roads between all major centres, and 2200 miles of canals and 1800 navigable miles of other waterways.  But, canals and canal boats were typically narrow, and hence uneconomical.  Moreover, the typical speed was no more than three miles per hour – and could not be increased without serious damage to the banks. Enter steam.  Rails had long been used in collieries and other mine sites, but early attempts to marry rail transport with steam locomotion were unsuccessful. And steam propulsion had been tried on road vehicles - again without success, because the prototype vehicles were necessarily so heavy that they chewed up the roads.

 

George Stephenson (1781 to 1848) had no formal schooling, learning to read at night school only when eighteen.  Early on he worked at a coal mine where his father was responsible for the steam engines that powered the pumps and the whims.  Stephenson studied the mechanics of the steam engine, and at age 21 was appointed colliery engineman.  This he pursued for the next decade, all the while educating himself and experimenting with steam engines.  In 1814 he was able, finally, to gain support for the employment of a steam engine to haul colliery coal wagons.  As an independent engineer in his post-colliery years Stevenson undertook railway design and engine design and manufacture.  He oversaw the construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, from 1825, including the crossing of a peat bog, sixty-three bridges, and the seventy feet high Sankey Viaduct.  He then  gained wide fame, in 1829, by winning the competition for a locomotive to run on the Liverpool to Manchester line – The Rocket.   Although The Rocket was not the first steam locomotive, its design set the pattern for the steam locomotives of the next century and more.  

 

Finally, the unforgettably named Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  Although Brunel’s life (1806 to 1859) overlapped that of some of the engineers already discussed he is described by Chappell as a second generation engineer. This description fits in three ways. First, Brunel came along a little later than the other engineers profiled by Chappell.  Second, unlike nearly all his predecessors, Brunel was academically trained.  Third, he was the son of a successful engineer, Sir Marc Brunel.

 

Brunel the younger worked on the Thames Tunnel (with his father), and among Brunel’s other engineering achievements was the Great Western Railway.  But perhaps the stand-out one is the building of the ship, Great Eastern (initially named Leviathan).  The largest ship in the world when launched in 1858, Great Eastern was iron hulled, with hybrid propulsion – a screw propeller as well as paddles, both driven by steam, and sails flying from six masts.  It displaced 32,160 tons and had length of 692 feet.  It carried 4000 passengers, with crew in excess of 400.   Although it remained in service for more than forty years it was not very popular, and its huge holds were said to be never filled. Great Eastern ended its days laying the trans-Atlantic telephone cable. Brunel ended his days courtesy of a stroke, while Great Eastern was on her maiden voyage.

 

The history of engineering as a calling is fascinating, no less so when considering British engineering only.  And the stories that Chappell selects for us are interesting, arguably because most of the early protagonists he chooses are self-taught - engineers before a formal profession existed.  So much is crammed into Chappell’s 48 pages that we must forgive him for not including reference to London’s reticulated sewers.  But then, he bypasses the cathedrals too.   

 

Having immersed his reader in the past, the author concludes on a prescient note.   “It is interesting to speculate on the role of the engineers in the future progress of the nation.  New roads, aerodromes and electrified railways may well be the characteristic engineering works of the twentieth century, just as canals and steam railways were of the eighteenth and the nineteenth.  It may be, too, that the work of the engineer will tend to merge into that of the architect in the construction of the cities of the future. Whatever its form, however, the civilisation of the future will present the civil engineer with many problems which will be solved with the aid of increasing knowledge and yet more wonderful materials……the history of civil engineering cannot come to an end before the history of civilisation itself.”  Ponder that!

 

Gary Andrews