In 1979, Roland Huntford published a book called, initially, Scott And Amundsen, which contrasted the expeditions and personalities of each. Others had tried to puncture the hero myth of Scott in the British imagination, but this was the book that really shattered it, and it remained shattered for decades, helped by Trevor Griffiths’ 1985 TV dramatisation The Last Place on Earth. Even the 2008 radio play that got me into the story has Huntford wafting over the more sensitive character portrayals. It’s impossible to overstate the effect that Huntford’s book had on the cultural memory of Scott and polar historiography generally.
It wasn’t created in a vacuum. 1979 was also the year Margaret Thatcher was elected, and the next year Reagan. The prevailing winds of neoliberalism – and Social Darwinism – were blowing strong, and continued for the next twenty years, if not forty. My generation was steeped in the belief that success and failure are purely the result of one’s own actions and willpower, or lack thereof. Huntford’s take on the South Pole story played directly into that, working backwards from Scott’s defeat and death to construct a narrative in which these were entirely his fault, if not his desire.
We’re allowed to have different takes on the evidence. That’s what the study of history is, by and large. Gradually, all the different takes overlap to give a blurry picture of what might actually have happened. What historians are not allowed to do is misrepresent the documents they quote, or present as historical fact their own surmises about what their subjects were thinking, and Scott And Amundsen is full of this. It also introduced some complete fabrications, which bounced around the polar history echo chamber for ages until someone bothered to look up where they came from. (If you want to fall down this rabbit hole, start with Karen May’s articles in Polar Record.)
British libel laws are strict – references to his skulduggery had to be oblique, and takedowns published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Ranulph Fiennes dedicated his Scott biography to “the families of the defamed dead” without saying who defamed them. If you know, you know. Roland Huntford died on 23 January. He was 98. He made his career on the fact that libel laws only apply to the living; now he is no longer under their protection himself. It will be interesting to see what might come out.
The silver lining on the Huntford cloud, I believe, is that we might not have our current wealth of published diaries without him. He reinvigorated interest in polar history, and expedition families may have been encouraged to set the record straight with the testimonies in their possession. Would this have happened without him offending everyone? I don’t know, maybe. Maybe it would have taken longer, or maybe the Heroic Age would have been allowed to slip into relative obscurity, and these records sold off or deposited in scattered archives. A little opposition does tend to focus efforts. I’m grateful for them, anyway. He had to con families into sharing the journals to do his research; I only had to order them online. Huntford’s book and its legacy directly inspired my ambition to tell the history to a new generation with all the facts in the right order, and to be fair to the men involved, in all their human complexity. So I suppose I should thank him, as should anyone who enjoys my annotations. But he’s also responsible for all the middle-aged men who’ve read the fattest book on the subject informing me that Scott was a hapless bumbler and that he didn’t take dogs, so I’m not going to thank him too loudly.
The Worst Journey in the World: Graphic Novel 