How it all Began for One Fid (continued)
There were fifteen new BAS meteorologists that year. Fourteen of us had never done any meteorology, but we did have a ten-week “quickie” course. We had daily classes on how and what to note in the weather, we used meteorological instruments, and we had a regular ration of beer at lunchtime. Not having had the benefit of a university education I dutifully copied my colleagues bawdy songs such as “Eskimo Nell” and “Daniel In The Lion’s Den. At the end of the course, Kenn Back, with a classics degree, and I were at the tail end in marks. Kenn ended up spending more winters in the British Antarctic than anyone else.
Later that summer all the new personnel spent a week at Cambridge for lectures on the Antarctic. At one session Bill Sloman had to read the riot act due to an overindulgence of lunchtime drinking by the men.
At home my mother was resigned to the fact that her eldest was leaving. By then I had started a bit of a social life, and often didn’t tell her when I would arrive home. Years later my sister, Ann, reminded me that there was a lot of tension at our house at the time. She was preparing to go to a teacher college in South Wales, and never said anything at the time, but said I should have postponed my trip. My only concern was to leave home, and the Antarctic was my way of doing so. It was hard on my mother who had already lost her husband, but she said nothing. Perhaps she thought my being on an Antarctic base was safer than my plans to mountaineer in the Alps. Like most twenty-year old males I only considered my own needs.
On a Thursday in late September 1963, twenty-three men bound for the Antarctic met on a cold, damp Southampton dock. We were mostly young, on edge, and keen to be away from our families who had gathered around us.
Once we had stowed our luggage on board the RRS Shackleton and had sailed, we felt relieved and ready for anything. But the next day I wasn’t ready for much. I was on clean up duty, (gash), and was interrupted every half-hour by being sick over the side into the grey English Channel.
Further on I had noted in my diary that the Bay of Biscay was as calm as the proverbial millpond. As we churned south at ten knots the sun shone, a robin perched on the bridge, and I now paid attention to the rainbow colours in the bow spray and the sound of water slopping in the anchor hole.
The first few days were spent getting to know the ship’s personnel, especially the steward with whisky at six pennies a glass, and the other Fids on board. The general name for British Antarctic personnel was Fids. Before 1962 they had worked for the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey so the name carried on. A solid wooden nautical tool is also called a fid. There are no similarities. Most Fids were in their early twenties. BAS preferred mature men, but they were generally otherwise engaged. The impressionable young men had to do.
Four of us bound for Deception Island in the Antarctic got acquainted. Len Mole, red haired and sociable, was from north England. Charles Howie, tall, dark and intense, was from Rhodesia. Don Parnell was relaxed, medium-sized, and from Manchester. I was tallish, thin, from north of London, and working on my social skills. There was to be a complete change of personnel at the Deception Island base. The shipping season was long enough there either to work out any personnel bugs, or to send people home if necessary.
The warmer weather brought out shorts and our tans. We raced beer cans down the deck, wrote diaries, did gash duty, played Scrabble, watched birds and sunsets, and took pictures. My Second World War German Leica 111c was being greased for a cold climate, and would be sent on later. Some Fids waited to choose a camera from the large selection of Japanese SLR models available in Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands, which had little tax, unlike Britain. I had bought 36 rolls of 24 Ektachrome slide film with me, or was it 24 rolls of 36? It just did me for the two years.
We enjoyed the cook’s changing menu on the three-week voyage to Montevideo, Uruguay It included melons, asparagus, herring roe, Dover sole, turbot, pork cutlets, gammon, chicken supreme, beef curry, spaghetti Bolognese, and duckling. Hundreds of flying fish glided in front of our bow; some managed thirty feet before re-entering the sea. One veteran Fid supplemented his diet with flying fish when they terminated their flights on deck.
Our duties on board were not arduous. We washed the deck, had the occasional fire and boat drill, and on Sundays we cleaned up before the captain’s inspection; he was followed around by the first officer and an anxious looking steward.
The Fids took turns steering the Shackleton. The only time I saw Captain Turnbull get excited was when we passed a headland off one of the Madeira Islands. I was steering south when the captain ordered a turn to 240 degrees. I forgot that the ship’s momentum would turn us through yet another sixty degrees. There was a “My God!” from the captain as we headed towards a line of rocks. He grabbed the steering wheel. There were some pointed comments by other Fids about the change in Shackleton‘s direction. The memory is still fresh. The red and green Shackleton, less than a thousand tons, carried supplies and people to the bases along the Antarctic Peninsula. The peninsula sticks out from the Antarctic like a hitchhiker’s thumb in the direction of South America. The ship had a bit of concrete in the bow in case of thin sea ice. RRS John Biscoe, slightly larger and stronger, took other Fids further south to Marguerite Bay.
We talked about where we were from and what we had done, which for most of us was little. A third of us were down for two years in the Antarctic. The British Antarctic Survey liked the experience and thriftiness of having two-year people. Other countries only went with one year.
We discussed what we knew about the Antarctic. The goal- orientated Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole first in 1911 from the Ross Sea, and sacrificed forty-one of his fifty-five huskies to do so. We admired Robert Falcon Scott for his scientific emphasis, but not for the fact Edgar Evans, Titus Oates, Bill Wilson, Birdie Bowers, and he, man-hauled their sledges to the South Pole, and died on the way back. The weather had been unusually severe, but if Scott had taken the polar expert Fridtjof Nansen’s advice and used dogs, he would have got his party back alive, though with little heroic status in Antarctic history.
The Fids admired Ernest Shackleton. In 1915 his ship, the Endurance, got crushed in the sea ice of the Weddell Sea. Shackleton’s party of twenty-eight drifted on ice floes, and landed on Elephant Island more than a year later. From there six men, including Ernest Shackleton, sailed across 800 miles of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia in a small open boat. Shackleton, Captain Frank Wolsey, and Tom Crean then traversed unexplored glaciers and mountains on South Georgia in early winter to reach a whaling station on the other side of the island. All of Shackleton’s men were rescued, though some did not survive the First World War.
Meanwhile on the Shackleton, we felt relaxed and hot; there was no air conditioning. We lazed in the sun, and slept out on the teak deck at night, as the temperature rose. I was still allowed to steer, although I got bored after thirty minutes. I read often, but not while steering. As we neared the equator the glistening flying fish increased in size, we got browner, and our bare feet hardened.
The heat produced great towering columns of dazzling white clouds that stood out against the blue sky. We would sail under a cloud, as it reared thousands of feet up, and for ten minutes we were soaked by rain. We were steam-dried on the other side. The ship’s smells were warm salt water on hot metal and burnt diesel oil. As incipient Antarctic “explorers” we grew the mandatory beards. Did they hide the pimples or produce them?
Two weeks after departing the UK, the Shackleton stopped for five hours in the middle of the Atlantic to repair an oil leak. Two sharks appeared at the aft end, as did most of the Fids. A beef-baited hook brought a young four-foot brown and white-bellied shark onto the deck. Eric the cook dispatched it. Twenty-six pounds of shark steak was served for supper; it tasted like rich beef. Biologists extracted the upper-toothed jaw, and four suckerfish were preserved from the outside of the shark. A discharge of ship’s oil scared off the companion shark and its striped pilot fish.
After crossing the Equator, and King Neptune’s Crossing-the-Line Ceremony that all new Fids had to endure, described by Mike Warr in great detail, and then:
The sun now shone in the north. I found the sunsets impressive as the golden-red sun slipped quickly beneath the sea. At night I dreamed about the phosphorescent spots jumping among the waters of the bow.
The jokes on board got corny, as were the remarks about women and beer. I had no details except a “me also?” written in my diary.
In the middle of October four young wandering albatrosses joined our ship, their white bodies and black six-foot wingspan dipping past the crests of the waves. Other southern birds like the pigeon-sized black and white stippled cape pigeons appeared, as did porpoises. On board people were busy writing letters before we reached port. The Antarctic was still remote even though Fids watched colour slides of penguins, huskies, seals, sunsets, and icebergs. The present voyage was all that mattered. It ended in cloud, and greener waters as we entered Rio de Plata. Black-backed gulls replaced the long-range sea birds. Islands lay on the starboard bow, and Uruguayan rock music boomed on the radio. We passed the resort town of Punta del Este, and dropped anchor at 10:30 at night one-mile offshore from a bright line of lights in Montevideo.