“Stonington Castaway” John Tait 1940- 2003 – Obituary by Keith Holmes
John Tait often told us that, apart from five members of the “lost eleven” at Stonington nearly twenty years before, he was the only Fid to spend three consecutive winters in British Antarctic Territory. Like many of John’s stories, there was some exaggeration in this – but that is what made him such a good raconteur. Indeed, once he had drawn the attention of the audience, there was little to stop him drawing even deeper on his reserve of anecdotes, and the more laughs they produced the wilder the stories got.
John did in fact spend three continuous years down south, and appeared to enjoy every minute of it. After leaving school he had trained as Post Office Engineer, thereby gaining qualifications to get a job with BAS as a Diesel Electric Mechanic.
He wintered first at Base B on Deception Island in 1963. For his second year he was transferred to Base on Adelaide Island – John Cunningham’s overcrowded and lively “Black Adders” where 21 men wintered in quarters occupied by only twelve the previous year. Then, finally, he went to Base E on Stonington Island as a General Assistant.
At each base John had been drawn to the dogs; at Deception he had been the “dog Man”, at Adelaide he ran the base team called the Citizens, and at Stonington his cup overflowed with the happiness of driving his own team, the Komats.
Unlike the other GAs, John had not accumulated years of experience on snow and ice, and he was severely tested early in the season when, on April 29 th, 1965, camped with Surveyor Neil Marsden at the foot of the notorious Sodabread Slope, he was caught in a ferocious, but not untypical, storm that destroyed their tent. After two nights they had also lost the pup tent, their survival sacs, and all the boxes that had been placed on the valence of their shredded pyramid tent. On the third night, they sheltered, Neil by this time without a sleeping bag, about thirty feet down inside a nearby crevasse. The next day, they made a desperate run for base, but in appalling conditions which gave Neil several severely frost-bitten fingers.
John’s adventure continued after midwinter, when he and Jimmy Gardner set out with the other Stonington Surveyor, Tony Rider, to work on the northern extension of the Marguerite Bay triangulation schemes. After a couple of weeks they had reached the Lallemand Fjord, and, judging the sea-ice to be sound, they continued on to the former Base W on Detaille Island, which was still then maintained as a refuge. After two days there, however, yet another storm arose and took out the sea-ice. It was August 18th, and they were stuck.
In these circumstances, John’s mechanical skills, resourcefulness and good humour
came into play as they got the hut into working order and waited in vain for the ice to re-form. Tony noted, for example, on one occasion that John spent 18 hours trying to bake a cake. John was able to keep their radio working during this period, and on October 1st they were greatly cheered up when pilot Jules Brett overflew them in the single-engined Otter aircraft, but there way no way he could help them other than by dropping sacks of coal.
By the middle of October they had dug out the small fibreglass boat and John had got the Anzani outboard engine running. Their plan was to make for the Orford Cliff Refuge Hut at Johnston’s Point on the mainland. In this they faced the old conundrum of how to get three men, twenty four potentially fractious dogs, and all their kit safely across the water. Inevitably, the plan unravelled.
On December 8th, Tony became isolated on the mainland, with food, a sledge and half the dogs, but no radio, and thus no idea what had happened to John, the ferryman. Fortunately he had made it back to Detaille Island, but with so many problems with both the engine and the pack ice he wasn’t game to try it again. He and Jimmy, stranded on the island, worried terribly about Tony’s well being, especially knowing that there was a shotgun in the hut ! Fortunately the Shackleton relieved all three men six weeks later on January 23rd , 1966.
On returning home, John went into the business of hiring out cranes and other building equipment, and later into property development. These enterprises eventually provided him with a comfortable lifestyle in rural Chesterfield which in later years involved a great deal of hospitality and golf. John had always supported the Marguerite Bay Reunions and he played a major part in organising the 2000 event in Marguerite Bay itself. Here, on a small cruise ship with a captive and captivated audience, John was in his element and we were regaled hourly with the stories he had nurtured over the intervening years. We could have had no better guide when we revisited the bases on Adelaide and Deception Islands, and John himself could not have been happier when he found not only the electrical guitar he had made, still in the hut at Detaille Island, but also an old Komat sledge bag wedged in the boulders at Hope Bay.
Happily, many of the stories John told on the cruise were recorded by Chris Eldon Lee, a freelance broadcaster who has subsequently made several oral history recordings for BAS Archives. Chris’s programme was broadcast by the BBC at Christmas, 2001.
John’s retirement happiness was sadly shattered last year when his second wife Dee died after suffering cancer for several years. Tragically, he himself was found to have a form of leukaemia this year. He was undergoing his first session of chemotherapy, when, with his natural defences thus weakened, he caught pneumonia and died, on April 11th , 2003.
Keith Holmes – 2003