Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard

399 Pages·2002·3.62 MB·English

by  Sara Wheeler

Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
Introduction
1 - Ancestral Voices
2 - Lamer
3 - Untrodden Fields
4 - Winning All Hearts
5 - Out of the World
6 - Even with God
7 - It is the Tent
8 - Kipling in Real Life
9 - The War had Won
10 - The Most Wonderful Story in the World
11 - The Chaos which Threatens
12 - Danced with AC-G
13 - A Darker Continent
14 - A Winter Journey Indeed
Guide to Notes
Notes
Select Bibliography
Guide to Selected Antarcticans
Photo Insert
Illustrations
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Sara Wheeler
Copyright Page
To Angela Mathias and Hugh Turner, with affection
PRAISE FOR CHERRY
“One of the most haunting adventure tales of all time. . . . Wheeler’s retelling of
[this] famous ordeal is psychologically astute and deeply felt.”
—Outside
“[An] extraordinarily fine biography. . . . This is so much the stuff of great
biography that it comes as somewhat of a surprise that it had not been
undertaken before now. But perhaps Cherry was only waiting for an ideal
biographer to discover him.”
—The Boston Globe
“Beautifully written and deeply felt . . . Wheeler has perfect pitch for this
material. . . . She has produced a fully realized portrait of one of the 20th
century’s great tragic heroes.”
—The Globe and Mail (Toronto) “Beautiful . . . written with unfailing eloquence
and grace, and great admiration for its subject.”
—The Independent (London) “Wheeler accomplishes what only the best
biographies can. Drawing on her own experience in the Antarctic, she is able to
satisfy the reader’s curiosity of how it must have felt to be on that doomed
expedition.”
—The Times (London)
“A lively biography of the adventurer-author. . . . Keeps Cherry-Garrard’s story
humming along, novel-like, from his lord-of-the-manor childhood to his
friendship with neighbor George Bernard Shaw.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“This is Wheeler’s first biography and it is a wonderful match of author to
subject. . . . She brilliantly communicates the icy spell that holds her, and held
Cherry, in its frozen grip.”
—The Observer (London)
“This is a supple, chewy book, juggling many features. Vulnerability, ambition,
foolishness. It’s nuanced, bold, and three-dimensional. Ice-worthy. I pored over
and argued with it, and when I finished, felt replete.”
—Edward Hoagland,
author of Tigers & Ice
“At last, in Sara Wheeler’s compelling biography, the author of the finest polar
narrative ever written emerges from the shadow of his masterpiece. Cherry casts
a fascinating new light on Scott’s last expedition, the bravest and most tragic
journey in the annals of Antarctica.”
—David Roberts,
author of Great Exploration Hoaxes
“Wheeler’s incisive skill in describing the majesty and misery of polar
exploration reawakened the tingling of frostbite in my fingers as I turned the
pages. This is the closest an armchair explorer can get to experiencing the South
Pole in safety.”
—Richard Parry,
author of Trial by Ice
“It is clear that Sara Wheeler loves her subject, and her biography brilliantly
succeeds not only in bringing this modest man disarmingly to life but also in re-
creating the England of his time. . . . A formidable accomplishment.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
Introduction
Some years ago, marooned in a small tent close to one of the dynamic ice
streams on the west Antarctic ice sheet, I finished reading The Worst Journey in
the World as a blizzard closed in around our tiny camp. Over the next days I lay
in a lonely whiteout and thought about the man who wrote it. I admired his
elegant scepticism, the bitter brilliance of his prose and the nimble sleight of
hand with which he had transformed his story into a parable. Between the
graceful lines I saw, dimly, a vision of a certain kind of Englishness: quizzical
detachment, a finely tuned sense of irony, an infinite capacity for gloom
tempered with elegiac melancholy. Or that is what I thought I saw.
The story of Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole, and of
Titus Oates’ luminous exit from the tent, had been repeated many times. But
Cherry-Garrard’s story had never been told: there was no biography. It didn’t
seem right that the author of such a dazzling work should remain a mute and
shadowy figure. His book was not the disembodied account of an expedition: it
was an intimate reflection of the man behind the authorial mask. I wanted a
glimpse of that man.
The journey from that far-off day in the tent has been long and challenging. I
had never tackled a biography before. As the months progressed, and then the
years, I had to learn to explore the past in the way I had previously explored
places. Some parts of Cherry’s life were hard to get to, and involved a lot of
rough terrain. The amount of material I uncovered varied immensely: a glut of
primary material for the Antarctic period; a drought for great stretches of time.
For many months I heard little but the sound of trees crashing across my path.
Then a cache of letters would turn up, unread since some long-ago recipient
folded them back into their flimsy envelopes. A small thing sometimes casts a
long light.
Cherry was born in an age as remote as the South Pole: horse-drawn hansom
cabs, tribes of indoor servants, a squirearchy sitting comfy in their rural seats,
Gladstone and Salisbury battling it out. Yet he died only two years before I was
born, when Harold Macmillan was in Downing Street and John Osborne had
already written Look Back in Anger. He lived to see Sputnik, but his father was
born in the reign of William IV. His was a period of huge, unstoppable change.
Indeed, so much happened in his seventy-three years that I occasionally
wondered in exasperation if anything could possibly have taken place in the
world before 1886.
Much has been written about the Edwardian summer that bloomed before the
Great War, and about the irreversible changes that war brought to Britain. But for
Cherry it was the Antarctic that changed everything. After an upbringing of late-
Victorian privilege and a conventional, trussed-up progression through prep
school, Winchester and Oxford, he sailed down to the Antarctic at the age of
twenty-four. He was away from 1910 to 1913: a crucial period of British history.
He came back to a different country. But he was different, too. Like most of the
Antarctic veterans he went off to Flanders soon after, but it was his experience in
the south that shaped his ideas and determined his private mythology. It lay like
a bright, shining band between his youth and the rest of his life.
Meanwhile the legend of Scott quickly hardened. It symbolised a vanished
age: one in which Englishmen oiled the engines of imperialism with confidence
and quasi-religious zeal. Scott came to embody a set of old-fashioned ideals,
especially after the war had given those ideals a good pummelling. He became a
kind of Arthurian hero, a mystical Galahad of the snows. As inspirational fuel he
was tapped for decades: even after the Second World War crocodiles of
schoolboys were marched into cinemas to watch John Mills staggering through
fake snow at Ealing Studios. In our own less heroic age the expedition has begun
to emerge from the penumbra of proprieties that shrouded public events in those
distant days. But its chief chronicler has been left to languish in the historical
gloom.
Like many of his peers, before he reached middle age Cherry felt that he had
witnessed the collapse of a world that had been ordered and codified by a
familiar set of shared values (‘God in his Heaven,’ as his contemporary Siegfried
Sassoon put it, ‘and sausages for breakfast.’) He had seen the certainties of his
youth crumble, and acknowledged bleakly that the world ‘was losing its ancient
faiths without having much to put in their place’. Soon he was convinced that
moral rot had set in, and the conviction relentlessly stoked his personal vision of
Spenglerian decline. But through his work, and by dint of his creative impulse,
he tried to redeem his losses. I admired that.
It did not save him. Cherry was not a conventional man, and he had never
fitted in, even before the great social changes that so vexed him. He was
uncomfortable in his father’s shoes as head of several large estates, and he had
left his own religious faith behind in the nursery. He spent part of his adult life
lost in some terrible personal chaos that was infinitely more catastrophic than the
upheavals he observed sweeping through middle England. Everyone who has
written about Cherry has focused on his periods of debilitating depression, as if
those episodes condemned him. I found myself admiring him for not going
under. This, surely, was an example of what the human spirit can achieve.
Anxiety was one of Cherry’s defining characteristics: what could be more
human?
He was a mass of contradictions, like most of us, and I have struggled not to
gratify the biographer’s need to impose coherence. The truth is more
complicated than it seems in any biography. I was most interested in Cherry’s
inner life: the place where the documents stop. A biographer’s task is to
disengage the essence of a person from the interminable clutter of gas bills and
dentist’s appointments.
As for the documents: there are almost no published sources. Cherry’s Garrard
ancestors left boxes of lifeless material which are open to researchers at the
Hertfordshire county archives. The family solicitors also recently deposited
several boxes of legal documents there, as well as at the Berkshire Record
Office. It was interesting material, though largely unusable. Cherry’s Antarctic
archive, including his journal, resides at the Scott Polar Research Institute in
Cambridge, home of much of the unpublished material on the 1910–13
expedition. Most of Scott’s officers and some of his seamen left diaries, and their
accounts form a rich and sometimes dissonant fugue in many voices. For the
later years of Cherry’s life I was dependent on the memory, testimony and
diaries of his widow Angela Mathias, who has co-operated with this biography
far beyond the call of duty. Fragments popped up in other places. But many gaps
stubbornly refused to close, and there is a great deal I don’t know.
As I moved among the material that does exist, sifting and shaping and
selecting the fertile fact, I was not an impartial reporter. All biographers mirror at
some unfathomable level their own preoccupations and those of their age. But I