The Terrors,’65-’66 – Dave Matthews
The Terrors were a team well known for their huge journeys up and down the east coast between Bases “D” and “E” with Noel Downham running them tirelessly on their mammoth depot runs from the defunct Hope Bay. That is basically how they clocked up their remarkable mileages. David “Soopsey” Vaughan took them over after I arrived at Stonington in 1965 and, after various options for the year were chewed over, the decision was made that he and I should move to the old station at Horseshoe for the autumn where I could do some land based geology and learn how to handle the dogs. More a case of them learning how to handle me, for such a well-disciplined team, and we got on well.
With little or no sea ice before midwinter, there was no serious sledging possible, but it was a great time for getting to know the team, taking them out on my geological work day by day singly or in small groups. The best run was up the large snow slopes on Mount Searle.
Once the sea ice formed in early July, and a return trip to Stonington had been safely (just) achieved, sledging throughout northern Marguerite Bay began in earnest and the Terrors were able to earn their keep and show their capacity for hard work on mainly excellent surfaces. The exception to the latter hit us when carrying out a recce for an escape route from unreliable ice to attain the mainland plateau via Blind Bay and Finsterwalder Glacier. Here the Terrors showed their true mettle, with deep soft, crevasses, avalanches, lengthy lie ups, dodgy sea ice etc, etc. It was not high mileage sledging such as they had been used to when bashing up and down the Larsen, but it clocked up a good few hundred high quality miles all the same, culminating in a return to Stonington along the plateau via Slessor Peak to the north, and then home via the Northeast Glacier with its particular but well known perils.
My second summer with the Terrors, by now a really good unit, was less ambitious but still involved quite a few miles slogging around the sea ice of northern Marguerite Bay. Some new blood in the shape of Dwarfy and Cleve was introduced into the team. Coll (the white idiot!) was retired while Mac and Bryn retired at the end of the season after clocking up their record breaking 14,400 miles each. George Macleod took over the team and I headed back to UK on the Biscoe together with Mac who was to be given an honourable retirement rather than a bullet, being returned to UK for breeding new blood into the Husky Club of Great Britain as it then was, as well as for studies into his arthritis at the vet school in Cambridge..
This was all sanctioned by the Director who was on board Biscoe visiting Stonington and by other authorities in the Falklands, perhaps with a faint trace of sentimentality, but I had the job of looking after and safeguarding the old dog for the long voyage home (nearly 3 months). This ended my part in the saga, but while the Terrors carried on to the bitter end and Bryn was retired down south, Mac, although the plan to breed from him in the UK failed, had a good few years in the Scottish Highlands where he thrived.
Dave Matthews, Geologist, Stonington 1965 & 1966