OTD in early British television: 30 March 1937
John Wyver writes: To the South Pole on the evening of Tuesday 30 March 1937 marked the 25th anniversary of the death of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions in the Antarctic. The half-hour studio programme brought together (as the billing announced) ‘Professor Debenham, Mr Cherry-Gerrard, Mr Wright and Captain Bruce’ along with relics of the ill-fated expedition. Towards the end of the broadcast extracts were shown of Herbert Ponting’s film With Captain Scott to the South Pole.
‘Professor Debenham’ was Frank Debenham, the first Professor of Georgraphy at Cambridge University and the founding director of the Scott Polar Research Institute. Apsley Cherry-Gerrard was a member of Scott’s ‘Terra Nova’ expedition and author of the mythologising 1922 best-seller The Worst Journey in the World.
‘Mr Wright’ must be Charles Seymour “Silas” Wright, a Canadian scientist who was part of the support team on the Antarctic expedition and later led the search party that discovered the bodies of Scott and his companions. (The link is to a 2012 Toronto Globe and Mail story with a great Herbert Ponting photo of Wright.)
And ‘Captain Bruce’ is presumably Wilfrid Montagu Bruce, who went with Scott to the Antarctic, as second officer on board the ‘Terra Nova’, but was not a member of the landing party. His sister Kathleen, a distinguished sculptor, had married Scott in 1908.
The film sequences taken by photographer Herbert Ponting were incorporated into the 1924 documentary The Great White Silence, which was restored in 2011 by the British Film Institute and released with a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner.
No recording or transcript of the broadcast exists but it must almost certainly have embraced and extended the heroic narrative of Scott’s expedition which in more recent times has been the focus of intense controversy. This 2012 Guardian article by Stephen Moss does a good job of detailing the debates.
Image: The ‘Terra Nova’ Expedition at the South Pole, photograph taken by Lieut. H. R. Bowers on 17 January 1912. The five are Bowers (seated, left), Wilson (seated, right), Oates (standing, left), Scott (standing, center) and Evans (standing, right). Printed from a negative recovered when the bodies were found; via Wikimedia.
I’m beginning to feel BBC TV programmes anticipated most of the things I’m still involved in! I doubt ZTGE GREAT WHITE SILENCE would have been available to Ally Pally then, but Ponting’s final sound version, 90 DEGREES SOUTH, released in 1933 would have been the likely source, with helpful commentary included. I released thus on BFI video in the 90s, and got Ponting into the DNB. I have a new essay about Ponting’s ‘monumentary’ forthcoming in a book about Polar exploration films from Greenwich Museums later this year. And see my ‘Heni Talks’ film online about the Scott statue by his widow in Wellington Place.