The grand-nephew of Edward Wilson, who perished with Scott on their way back from the South Pole 100 years ago, talks about the expedition's long-lost photographs and what it's like being part of a polar dynasty

An extended interview from the one published in issue 19 of BBC Knowledge Magazine

Why were the pictures lost and how were they found?
I have no idea why they were lost. I find it quite astonishing. I can tell you factually why they were lost but why they were forgotten I don’t really know. When the expedition came back from the Antarctic the photographs were all pooled, because the expedition had copyright over the images for the first two years, and ten of the hundred or so images taken by Captain Scott were used for period publications and magazines and that sort of thing at the time. When that process was finished all the photographs were returned to copyright-holders, and this was in the First World War so I guess there was some confusion about it, but instead of Scott’s photos going back to his family, which I would have thought would have happened, they returned them to Herbert Ponting, who was the expedition photographer. And I don’t honestly know the reason for that. The photographs were then in his care until he died in 1935, and he promised to give a lot of his photographs and the Scott photos and various others to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, but he never did it. Then when he died he left two conflicting wills, and his estate was declared insolvent so it was all a bit of a legal quagmire. There was a fire sale of the estate and the pictres were bought as part of a job lot with all of Ponting’s photographs by a photographic agency. And they more or less seem to have languished, forgotten, in the collections of the photographic agency until they were sold off in 2001.

It seems astonishing that such important historical documents could simply be forgotten…?

Yes, and I have no explanation for it, as it is so astonishing. The photographs illustrate Scott’s diaries so well. Often, you will read in Scott’s diary or the account of the trip to the Pole that they stopped to take angles down, make sketches, take photographs and so on, because the Pole journey – people forget, it was a scientific trip and they were taking down data a lot of the way. Suddenly, here are the photographs that illustrate those days when he was taking those photographs, so it brings the diary alive in a way in which I don’t think has ever happened before.

Do you think the disarray of the photographs is in any way indicative of how affairs would have been run on the expedition, or was that just how Ponting was?

Oh no, that was just how Ponting was. He was not a very good businessman. Remember, once Scott died and my great-uncle died, they were the driving force behind the expedition so there was a certain amount of disarray caused by that unexpected turn of events. Ponting had gentleman’s agreements with Scott rather than written contracts, and they all got into an awful mess after the expedition. Ponting and Evans, who assumed command after Scott’s death, had some terrible fallings-out and so on. But, you know, that was the way things were done in that time.

It’s difficult to separate out what was chaos from the aftermath of the tragedy on the expedition and what was caused by the First World War, because the two run into each other. At the point at which everyone’s going away, just got home, and a year later they’re all plunged into the war, the trenches and all that, and that just compounds the complication.

How did the war impact on how Scott was perceived, in your opinion?

Scott had diverse objectives for his expedition, of which my great-uncle phrased it that they wanted to make the Pole “merely an item in the results”. So it would be one among many other scientific achievments of the expedition. But Scott was always completely clear – the Pole was his promise to the country, if you like, and the science was his passion. He said to his team while he was talking about his plans for the Pole journey that it was in everybody’s interests that they did achieve the Pole, because if they didn’t then no matter how good their work was…he wasn’t even bothered about priority at the Pole, in fact there are a couple of places where he says, regardless of priority at the Pole, the scientific work of the expedition already makes it one of the most important ever to enter the polar regions, and he was quite right about that. But he was also extremely realistic that the achievment of the Pole was what was going to get them the recognition, because that was what the public was demanding. Otherwise it’ll be forgotten about for a while, but what we’re doing will still be important and we will know its value even if we get ignored by the general public. That’s incredibly prescient, and an extremely realistic assessment of the situation. It’s almost exactly what does happen, your work gets ignored because it is always swamped by this story about the Pole. But what he couldn’t have anticipated was the way in which that was to happen, because first of all his work got swamped by Amundsen’s agenda, and the race to the Pole is Amundsen’s agenda. Scott wanted to be there first, of course, but he made it very clear that he wasn’t going to race, because, he said, “It is not the sort of thing which one is out for”.

Did Amundsen’s journey have anything to do with science?

No. He was a straightforward adventurer. He did produce a couple of small scientific papers but they are pretty minor. It used to be said that Amundsen wouldn’t deign to pick up a geological specimen if he tripped over it on his skis, which actually isn’t quite fair because he did pick up a small specimen, but it was one specimen and the paper is 10 pages long or something.

Had Scott survived, would he have considered the adventure a failure because he didn’t get there first?

Not at all.  I’m sure he’d have been very disappointed, and he’d have come home and carried on his career in the Royal Navy, and who knows what would have happened in the First World War? But, of course, he didn’t come home, so first of all his work is swamped by the myth of the race to the Pole, which gets cranked up by the press when Amundsen announces he is going to the South Pole.

Then the next thing that happens is that they die on the return from the Pole, so the real work, the scientific work, gets swamped by this huge myth about Scott of the Antarctic which is all about their heroism in facing death and their extraordinary records. I’m not detracting from that in any way, the story is one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of human exploration. But it does then mean that the real work of the expedition then gets lost in this other myth, if I can put it that way, which does get used in the First World War to inspire the troups and so forth, because everyone is having to stare death in the face. That gave a lot of people a lot of inspiration and a lot of courage. It inspired a generation, there’s no doubt about it, at a time when they needed ispiration so you can’t really fault that. It does mean that when you lose the idea of human progress and science as being unmitigated good, particularly after the Second World War and Hiroshima, and we enter our modern cynical era, that sort of story is – well, I personally think it still has validity but nobody wants to think about dying any more.

So then you get this huge anti-myth, which is actually based on a false premise, because you can only generate half the things that are said about Scott as part of the anti-myth if you accept that there was a race for the Pole. So that is why I call it an anti-myth, because it makes all sorts of wild claims about Scott that simply aren’t true. But they are generated on the basis of believing that there was this race of two teams started on a starting line and going to the South Pole. He would have had to have given up his scientific programme and so on if he was going to race and he wasn’t prepared to do that.

Have stories passed down your family about your illustrious great-uncle, Edward Wilson? How well is he embedded in your family history?

Hugely. My grandfather never really talked about it, I think he was just too traumatised by the whole thing, to be honest. My great aunt did, though, funnily enough, his widow; she talked to my father about it quite a lot. So stories such as they exist come down through the family. But we grew up with his paintings on the wall, and relics from the expedition, and they were just considered normal parts of the furniture. They’ve all gone to museums now. People sometimes stay, what was it like growing up, but it’s kind of hard for me to explain because it was just normal.

He was a hugely loved member of the family. You sometimes get in generations – there were 10 of them, I think, and he was by far the most popular of the siblings amongst the siblings, as it were – they all turned to him for advice and so on in much the  same way as people did on the expeditions. He was just that sort of a character. So they took it quite hard, I think.

The hardest thing for the family, I think, was all the publicity afterwards – and ever since. We had a reunion recently of the Scott and Amundsen families, and once we got over the difficulties of expeditions and races and all that sort of thing, we actually discovered that we had got more in common than you would think. We all were in a similar sort of position – children or grandchildren or whatever of people who were national heroes. You’re expected to kind of live up to that, and there are so many double standards. You’re not expected to push yourself and take advantage of it in any way, but on the other hand if you want to sell your family heirlooms and make some money, suddenly there is a furore and everyone claims them as national treasures and says you’re not allowed to sell them. You’re expected to sacrifice your well-being in all kinds of complicated ways. And then you have to put up with what everybody wants to say about your grandfather, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it because you can’t libel the dead. So people will publish the most outrageous lies, basically, and you can’t actually do anything about it. They’ve had to suffer that, because Amundsen is about as unpopular in Norway as Scott has been over here in the 70s and 80s, he’s going through a bad phase in Norway at the moment, and they are having much the same experience as we had 20 or 30 years ago. It was interesting.

Do you find that difficult?

It is hard, when you have got ancestors who are that well known you either live with it or you rebel against it. Some of my brothers and sisters or cousins won’t have  anything to do with it, they are just not connected with the polar world in any way  and don’t really want to acknowledge it or have anything to do with it. The other bits of the family have learnt to live with it and deal with the things that need to be dealt with.

Have you been on expeditions yourself, or do you have any drive to do so?

I have been to the Antarctic, many times, but always on cruise ships – I do it the comfortable way. I have been dog sledging in the Arctic and so I have done my cold weather camping and experience up there. But I have no desire whatsoever to haul a sledge to the South Pole or anything. I don’t see the point. It’s been done so many times, people keep coming up with hundreds of different ways to justify it, people wil be pogo-sticking backwards to the Pole next. It’s getting a bit silly, to be honest. I think in part it’s because we haven’t got anywhere useful for people to spend that sort of energy any more, whereas in the past we used to send them round the empire. These days, the Space Race is done by a small handful of people in a rather technical arena. We ought to be sending all these people out to Mars to do something useful, frankly. If they want to explore and do adventurous things, absolutely brilliant but let’s find them something useful to do instead of ever more silly records concocted to raise cash.