David Crane - Scott of the Antarctic - A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South

It was the first time that he had commanded anything bigger than a ship’s boat, and he could not have made a more disastrous start. On 12 August 1893 he headed for Falmouth as part of the torpedo flotilla, but the next day somehow succeeded in running Torpedo Boat 87 aground, suffering the humiliation of having himself towed back into dry dock at Keyham with ‘severe injury to propeller’.

It was an acute embarrassment for a young officer – ‘due care and attention does not appear to have been exercised’, Scott’s service record reads – but it was no more than that. In the official report on the incident he was ‘cautioned to be more attentive in future’, but Vernon ’s commander, George Egerton, would always remain one of Scott’s greatest admirers, and a First Class in his theory examination, and a First Class Certificate in his practical, certainly suggest that the incident led to no lasting damage to his prospects. *

It is just possible, though, that it cast a shadow over his first appointment as a qualified Torpedo Officer to the unglamorous Depot ship Vulcan . The appointment was not ‘considered good in the Vernon ’, but in the dogged way that would become typical of Scott, he was determined to make the best of his opportunities. His reasons for remaining with the ship, he wrote to his anxious father from Vulcan ,

are firstly that I look upon her as a latent success, as a splendid but undeveloped and misused experiment dependent on her present handling to establish her utility, a utility which in war time would be apparent and patent to all. For this reason I take a very great interest in her welfare and do as much as lays in my power to forward it. Secondly, and in consequence of my first reason, I have hopes of establishing a reputation for myself.

Thirdly, I am losing nothing; in fact gaining a very great deal in general service experience – In general service work, of which we do as much as most other ships, I have a stake and take a position far above that which I should have in other ships – In addition I keep watch at sea with the fleet, and as they generally put us in the fighting line, am precisely in the same position to gain experience as if on board a battleship …

To fall back on the torpedo work again at which I have worked exceedingly hard, I look upon this ship as the best practical experience that could possibly befall an officer; in fact I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises – but what is better, the Captain and Currey do likewise.

Even if I fail, the practical knowledge and experience will be invaluable. I am conscious that by self-advertisement I might make myself heard now, but the position is a delicate one, and I should be sorry to advocate anything in which I did not believe. Meanwhile things constantly annoy and irritate one – but as you see, I work for a larger than ordinary stake, and with this I will conclude adding, that the welfare of body if not of career remains good.

It would be another decade before Scott would be able to tick off the other three boxes on Gordon’s ‘authoritarian checklist’ – the RGS, Freemasonry, and Royal connections – but the inevitable process of institutionalisation had begun. ‘We are getting very well known in the fleet,’ he told his father in the same letter, sounding alarmingly like some embryo ‘Pompo’ Heneage; ‘no function takes place but that we come pretty well out of it, the athletic sports, the rifle meetings, the regattas, events which though very far from you are very near to us out here; fate has kept us before the public in all. But best of all we had a most triumphant inspection, the Admiral said publicly that he should report us as the most creditable to all concerned, and privately that we were the cleanest ship he’d inspected, an opinion fully endorsed by Levison and others who accompany him on these occasions, they adding that no ship could “touch us”.’

This was no momentary aberration either. ‘The ship is still very dirty,’ he complained to his mother of his new ship, the Empress of India , ‘but I think improving – a great improvement has been commented upon in my small share of the cleaning part and I feel if only we could get the commander to smarten up a bit we should get the ship all straight – but he is unfortunately lamentably slack.’ Just over a week later, virtue was rewarded when a ‘somewhat disastrous’ admiral’s inspection confirmed ‘that the only clean parts of the ship were the torpedo department – and also that at drills etc the torpedo department shone by a mere absence of doing wrong … Altogether I was pleased with my own show. I have some sixty men numbered whom I fell in at the beginning and told them things must be altered altogether.’

This thickening of the professional arteries, the slow but inexorable process of assimilation, might well have been inevitable, but by the time that Scott wrote this last letter, ‘choice’ had largely been removed. There had always been an assumption within the family that John Scott had been living off interest since his retirement, but in the autumn of 1894, while his son was still in Vulcan , it emerged that for the last twelve years he had been running down his capital and that they were virtually bankrupt. ‘On the 23rd October,’ Hannah Scott recorded with an almost preternatural calm, ‘a crushing blow came of heavy losses. At once we decided to let our house and hope that some occupation will come that will please my dear husband and bring him comfort in the loss of his old house. On November 12th our dear Rose commenced work at Nottingham Hospital, under three weeks after the loss. The others all anxious to be up and doing are only restrained by the occupation at home in getting things in order for letting the furnished house. From Con comes a fine manly reliable letter offering help … Truly sorrow has many compensations and with God’s help we shall yet if He wills it return to our old home.’

They only returned, in fact, to let Outlands permanently, and all it meant in terms of respectability, security and position was gone. It would be impossible to guess from the tone here what this must have meant to Hannah Scott, but for a woman of her age and gentle snobberies, it was as if she had gone to sleep in the cosy, familiar world of some West Country Cranford, and woke within the harsh landscape of a Gissing novel, staring at the prospects of rented rooms, poverty, ostracism, trade and working daughters.

But if there seemed nothing for Hannah Scott except humiliation, for the girls – poised on the brink of a new century with new expectations, aspirations, possibilities – there was at least the chance of a different and more expansive world. Within weeks Rose had begun a career in nursing that would take her to the Gold Coast, and the others soon followed her from home, the ebullient Ettie to a theatre school at Margate and briefly onto the stage with Irene Vanbrugh’s touring company, and Grace and, eventually, Kate into the dingier dressmaking business.

Of all the children it was probably Archie who suffered most, being forced to abandon the Royal Artillery for a post in Nigeria as secretary to the governor, but from the start it was Con who carried the emotional burden of the disaster. For a few months in 1895 the family rented a Devonshire farmhouse, and it was there, in Barrie’s account, that the metamorphosis from ‘Old Mooney’ to ‘head of the family’ was completed. ‘He never seems to have shown a gayer front than when the troubles fell,’ Barrie wrote in his inimitable mix of family lore and hagiography. ‘Not only must there be no “Old Mooney” in him, but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district; deputations called at the farm to beg for another, and once in these words, “Wull ’ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman be here along?”’