A First Rate Tragedy (5 page)

There were other mishaps. Scott cut himself quite badly while playing with his first penknife at the age of seven. Rather than make a fuss he plunged his injured hand into his pocket and wandered off as if nothing had happened. This story is often cited, in the way that ‘improving tales’ are attached to heroes in their youth, as early evidence of Scott’s heroic destiny and linked to the
tale of his uncle who, mauled by a tiger, with imperial sang-froid cauterized the wound himself. However, though a remarkable piece of self-control Scott’s behaviour was probably practical rather than heroic – if he had made a fuss the knife would have been taken away. Also, the sight of blood made him faint.

There are other insights into life at Outlands – the trips to the nearby parish church of St Mark’s with Scott wriggling about in his Eton suit and white collar; his departure every day to school in Stoke Damerel on his pony Beppo when he reached the age of eight and had outgrown his sisters’ governess; his affection for animals whether it was stout little Beppo, the family’s dogs or the peacock that shrieked and preened on the lawn. One day, as he jogged gently home from school he became distracted by a particular striking view. Dismounting to get a better vantage point he allowed Beppo to wander off. A small disconsolate figure came trudging up the drive with some serious explaining to do. He had, however, stopped to give Beppo’s description to every police station he passed, demonstrating that the dreamer had a strongly practical side as well.

Nevertheless young ‘Con’ began to cause his parents concern. His bouts of dreamy abstraction seemed if anything to grow and he appeared backward at school compared with his younger brother, the energetic and cheerful Archie. He was sent to board at Foster’s Naval Preparatory School at Stubbington House, Fareham, to prepare him for competing for a naval cadetship and in the holidays his father made sure that he crammed. What Scott thought of all this can only be guessed. What is known is that he carved his initials in one of the forms, made reasonable but not startling progress, was popular and – initial carving aside – reportedly one of the best-behaved boys the school had ever had.

On the eve of his thirteenth birthday Scott sat successfully for
the cadetship exam and on 15 July 1881 left Outlands for the harsh discipline of the naval training ship HMS
Britannia
moored in the River Dart. He quickly knuckled down, recognizing the need to conceal the sensitive, solitary side of his nature. There is photograph of him as a naval cadet – an earnest-featured young boy with hair neatly brushed under his cap gazing at the camera with the faintest suggestion of a smile. Crammed in with 150 other cadets he was subjected to a regime that demanded punctuality, precision and presence of mind. The penalties for those who were lax or failed to concentrate or conform were severe. He learned to sleep in a hammock and was initiated into the mysteries of seamanship, including navigation, astronomy, physics and geometry. There were physical challenges too. First-term boys were expected to climb to the foremast head and by the second term they had to exhibit their daring by climbing a dizzying 120 feet above deck.

Scott found the necessary reserves of concentration and did well, despite the tiresome discovery that, like Nelson and Captain Hornblower, he suffered from seasickness, something that would trouble him all his life. The family was delighted when he passed his exams and was duly rated a midshipman. He joined H.M.S.
Boadicea,
the flagship of the Cape Squadron, in August 1883.

Slight, delicate and reserved – before going to Stubbington House the family doctor had prophesied that he was too narrow-shouldered and -chested for the navy – life aboard the
Boadicea
with her company of nearly 450 was probably rather a strain. It was certainly a rigorous existence. The diet would have comprised such unappetizing items as salt beef, salt pork, pea soup, cabbage and potatoes, plus cocoa and hard biscuit.

As a midshipman most of Scott’s time was spent learning the operational duties of running a warship. He kept watch on the quarter deck, helped direct the men during drills and took
charge of parties of ratings ashore. He didn’t have a natural ability to command and in later life he would lack the easy assurance of his rival Shackleton. As a young officer it must have been hard for him to know how best to assert himself. The picture we have is of an anxious, eager young man masking shyness and uncertainty as best he could. The navy was not a place that tolerated weakness. Cool assurance and decisiveness were the necessities for a successful career and Scott had to conceal the introspective side of his character. Perhaps that is why as a young man he turned to writing a diary. It was a safety valve, allowing him to admit his doubts and fears without laying himself open to ridicule or sympathy, both of which he would have hated and which would have damaged his prospects. There was certainly neither time nor place for dreaming.

Again he overcame the obstacles deep within himself and his captain recorded that he had served ‘with sobriety and to my entire satisfaction’. This view was shared by his next commander on the brig H.M.S.
Liberty
who described him as ‘zealous and painstaking’. On the battleship HMS
Monarch
, he was rated ‘promising’ and at the end of 1886, the year he joined HMS
Rover
of the training squadron, the verdict was ‘intelligent and capable’. All of this boded well for a solid if not a brilliant career. Yet Scott had to make his mark because he had few family connections to push him up the tree and little private income. An ambitious young man, he knew his career would have to be built on merit.

After the
Rover
– and his encounter with Sir Clements Markham – Scott studied at the Royal Naval College, passed his exams with ease and was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in 1888. As the year drew to its close he found himself en route to join the cruiser H.M.S.
Amphion
at Esquimault, British Columbia. The last leg of his journey turned into a nightmare but accounts of it show Scott at his very best. In San Francisco he boarded a tramp steamer
heading north to Alaska. A ferocious storm blew up which was to last for most of the voyage. Another Englishman, Sir Courtauld-Thompson, a fellow-passenger, later described what happened. The ship was packed with miners and their wives, many of whom were soon sick and terrified. Women lay with their children on the saloon floor, while the men turned to such drinking and quarrelling as the heaving, pitching ship would allow. The crew had other matters to attend to and the young Scott took charge.

Though at that time still only a boy, he practically took command of the passengers and was at once accepted by them as their Boss during the rest of the trip. With a small body of volunteers he . . . dressed the mothers, washed the children, fed the babies, swabbed down the floors and nursed the sick . . . On deck he settled the quarrels and established order either by his personality, or, if necessary, by his fists.

At the same time he apparently managed to be cheerful – a characteristic he valued in others during his Polar journeys: ‘. . . by day and night he worked for the common good, never sparing himself, and with his infectious smile gradually made us all feel the whole thing was jolly good fun.’
²

This account of a confident, competent young man is curiously at odds with an entry in his diary from around that time and may again reflect the improving light of hindsight. Scott wrote in his diary:

It is only given to us cold slowly wrought natures to feel this dreary deadly tightening at the heart, this slow sickness which holds one for weeks. How can I
bear it? I write of the future; of the hopes of being more worthy; but shall I ever be? Can I alone, poor weak wretch that I am bear up against it all? The daily round, the petty annoyance, the ill health, the sickness of heart . . . How, how can one fight against it all? No one will ever see these words, therefore I may freely write – ‘what does it all mean?’
³

Even allowing for the uncertainty that often afflicts people in young adulthood this is a bleak view. Scott was one of those people who was at his best in a crisis because it meant there was something to be done. He needed distractions from the uncertainties inherent in an agnostic like himself. ‘Sometimes it seems to me that hard work is the panacea for all ills, moral and physical,’ he would later write.
⁴
Periods of melancholic depression would dog him throughout his life.

Scott duly joined the
Amphion,
a second-class cruiser and in August 1889 was appointed full lieutenant. He was making very respectable progress in his career but years of watch-keeping, of interminable drills and exercises lay ahead before he could reasonably expect his own command. Scott weighed this up and found it unattractive, so he decided to specialize and applied for torpedo training. His captain described him as ‘a young officer of good promise who has tact and patience in the handling of men. He is quiet and intelligent and I think likely to develop into a useful torpedo officer’. With this helpful endorsement Scott entered the
Vernon
torpedo schoolship at Portsmouth in 1891.

He enjoyed life on this old wooden hulk and was intrigued by the possibilities of the torpedo. This was not a new weapon but it was only with the development of the self-propelled torpedo that the navy had begun to take it seriously. In the past decade the navy
had built up a fleet of over 200 torpedo boats. Scott now learned about torpedoes and also about all the electrical and mechanical equipment of a warship, except that concerned with propulsion. He was also close to his home and family again. Archie had been commissioned into the Royal Artillery and the two brothers were able to take leave together. They played tennis and golf, rode and took their sisters sailing. Scott was working hard too and was able to write to his father that ‘I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises . . .’
⁵

However, he went home to Outlands for Christmas in 1894 to hear disastrous news. His father had sold the brewery some years earlier and had been living off the proceeds, but the money had either been spent or invested badly and the family was ruined. Scott put thoughts of his own career aside to help his sixty-three-year-old father pick up the pieces. Archie played his part as well, abandoning his career as a Royal Artillery Officer and signing up with a Hausa regiment in Nigeria, where the pay was better and the expenses less. Scott, who had never been extravagant, now had to make his meagre lieutenant’s pay stretch even further.

Making the best of it, he applied for a transfer to HMS
Defiance,
the second of the navy’s two torpedo training ships based at Devonport so he could be even nearer to his family. Outlands was let to a linen draper, and John Scott found a job managing a brewery in Somerset. Although the practical arrangements were soon made it must have been a wrench to part from the family home. Scott visited it in later years and never lost his affection for the old place, carving his initials in a tree. Yet at the same time, this was an opportunity for his family to break out of their confined little world. Three weeks after the crash Rose became a nurse. Ettie, good-looking and vivacious and a star of the local
amateur theatricals, decided to go on the stage, joining a touring company whose leading lady was Irene Vanbrugh. Scott, whose artistic side was strongly attracted to the theatre, urged her on, soothing his mother’s fears that it was not quite respectable.

Once his family was safely settled Scott applied for a seagoing ship. In 1896 he was appointed torpedo lieutenant of the battleship H.M.S.
Empress of India
and it was now at Vigo that he again met Markham after an interval of nine years. The impression he had made on the older man was confirmed, not that Scott was aware of Markham’s close interest. In 1897 he transferred to the battleship H.M.S.
Majestic
. The
Majestic
was only two years old, had cost nearly one million pounds and her armament included four of the new twelve-pounder guns. She was also the flagship of the Channel Fleet and Scott’s last naval post before Markham put him on the long, ultimately fatal road south.

It was also his last posting before family tragedy struck. Just four months after Scott had joined the
Majestic
his father died of heart disease and dropsy, leaving barely over £1,500. Scott and Archie each made arrangements with speed and generosity. Archie was able to contribute £200 a year from his Hausa Force pay. Scott’s whole salary was little more than that but he managed to find £70 a year towards his mother’s upkeep. She moved to London with her daughters Grace and Rose who had set up as dressmakers, taking rooms over a milliner’s shop in Chelsea and even more daringly, given their conventional middle-class backgrounds, going to Paris to study the fashions. Again Scott applauded their move and wrote to his mother that ‘I honestly think we shall some day be grateful to fortune for lifting us out of the “sleepy hollow” of the old Plymouth life’.
⁶
His feelings for Hannah verged on veneration – ‘If ever children had cause to worship their mother . . .’ he once wrote to her.
⁷

But the sacrifices he now made for her debarred him from any social pleasures. He had to think carefully about buying even a glass of sherry – or accepting one, given that he could not repay the hospitality. Taking a woman out to dinner was impossible, which must have been galling for a man who had his share of youthful infatuations and liked pretty and intelligent women. It was all he could do to keep his uniform looking reasonably spruce. His friend J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, was later to suggest that the gold braid on his uniform grew tarnished and that he probably had to darn his socks. Certainly the sheer dreariness of having to worry about money all the time was something that never left him. The dreamer, the enthusiast and the idealist had to take second place to the pragmatist. Doubts had to be put aside, insoluble philosophical questions avoided and uncertainties mastered. And there was more sadness ahead. In 1898 Archie came home on leave ‘so absolutely full of life’ as Scott wrote to their mother.
⁸
A month later he went to Hythe to play golf, contracted typhoid and was dead. An even greater burden now fell on Scott, though Ettie had married William Ellison-Macartney, MP for South Antrim, who generously offered to contribute to Hannah’s upkeep.