Rosie Stancer

Scott’s LOT

17^th January 2012 saw a lot of busy polar types going about their business. It was the Scott centenary. There were those arriving (just in the nick of time) at the South Pole (well done Worsley and your team of rugged men), others putting across their point more comfortably from a TV studio (Benedict Allen and Ann Daniels), and those paying homage at the natural history museum’s Scott exhibition.  I’m a party girl though and I high tailed off in my high heels to a centenary dinner in Cambridge at Corpus Christi. I DID go to the preceding lectures on the day at the Scott Polar Research Institute to work up an appetite for all things polar.

The talks were hearty fayre such as Professor Vaughan’s on environmental change – and I arrived in the middle of this (late for class!) just as he was naming a few of the recent large ice shelves named after explorers of that heroic era that had parted company with the continent. ….  including the Wordie ice shelf’.  So named after my husbands grandfather Sir James Wordie.  Hmmmm, there went the family heirloom then.

There was a talk from a Ms Jane Rumble, head of the Polar Regions Unit, FCO – which I always think has a shadowy side to it and so I imagined Ms Rumble as a sort of white spook, talking about the Antarctic treaty as a ‘legacy of Captain Scott’.  Scott, I imagine, would have spluttered into his expedition whisky had he seen the resultant dibs of the continent. All done apparently in the shared concern for protection of, so far, the only continent not to have been a stage for any war.  All very polite at the moment but just you wait til that Antarctic ice cap gives way to opening up to some of  her riches below, it’ll be, stuff the manners, as  all hell  breaks loose in the rush to rape and pillage her. Same too for up north, although it’s already begun with a childish Russian attempt to drop a flag on the sea bed (they should watch that Eddie Izzard “do you have a flag?” on Youtube.com)

I did ask how Antarctica got be like an apple pie all carved into unfair sizes – some fat to some countries, some thin to others and USA in the middle with the Norwegians somewhere on the petticoats.  Answer was as evasive as the polar drift.

The inimitable Sir Ran Fiennes gave a talk on ‘The challenge of the Poles’, which was more about that gritty issue of why explorers do what they do.  He concluded, after illustrating with a variety of responses from well and not so well known folk, with his characteristic masterly understatement that if you have to ask you either get a you-asked-for-it disingenuous answer from one of the less scrupulous polar glory merchants or, as you have to ask, you ain’t going to get it anyway. Too true.

Onto the Gala dinner in the dining hall of Corpus Christi College; (scooping the obligatory Cambridge parking fine ticket on the way, despite parking in a NCP car park, …grrr, haven’t I nobler matters on the mind to worry about?  Mind you, with the amount of sledge traffic on Antarctica this centenary year, it wouldn’t surprise me if some found parking tickets on their sledges parked at the Pole). The magnificent and imposing stained glass window, illuminated from within, led us in through the archways, over the cobbles and through the quad.  Each of the interlinking high-ceilinged chambers looked like a theatrical stage with their panelled walls, chaise longues and classical sofas, (set back waiting for a Lumley type to drape themselves along,) and led us on into the splendid candlelit dining hall.  HRH Prince Philip, Prince Albert of Monaco and lesser mortals such as myself were amongst the guests and I felt as pleased as can be to be a guest at Simon and Jeffa Murray’s table, they are a brilliant double act, both vying with one another in their glamorous and adventure-packed lives.  Later at the charity auction, and having noticed earlier that a book on explorers’ stories by Robin Hanbury Tennyson was one of the Lots on offer, I bid with gusto for it, the 2^nd lot of the Auction – and won.  Only that Lot transpired to be some other book by someone I didn’t know and hadn’t heard of – oops!  Time to go home – a bit poorer in pocket but richer in learning about our proud legacy in polar expedition from Scott and about Antarctica and her changing environment.

PS.  It took my expedition colleague and friend Char Harrison to remind me, of a polar anniversary of my own and the fact that three days before on the 14^th January 2004, I had arrived at the Pole on my solo Antarctic expedition after a journey of 43 days 11 hours and 20 minutes, on (over and through) the ice cap.  Not as long as some of those earlier expeditions but a speed record in fact, and still a lot of oil-infused porridge to get through.   My own wee ice achievements in the shadow of such polar giants as Scott are down to a dream born of ‘sitting on the shoulders of giants’ such as Scott, Shackleton and more recent figures such as Liv Arneson and Borge Ousland. So I raise my glass to them and raise it once again to an old adversary from Antarctica who did an ‘Amundsen’ on me and pipped me to the post, my very good friend Fiona Thorniwell. If I hadn’t been chasing your tail Fiona, I think I would have broken a different record – that of being the slowest ever expedition on ice.