Antarctica: Deadly Allure

In 1944 Britain became the first country to build a permanent scientific base in Antarctica and the subsequent 40 years were characterised by small groups of men living in tiny remote huts, through long dark winters, with travel by dog sledge, and annual visits by relief boats if the sea ice allowed them near the bases and all this with scant radio communications. This period when the continent was still mostly uncharted and its secrets unknown could be called a ‘Golden Age’ of exploration following the ‘Heroic Age’ of Amundsen, Mawson, Scott, and Shackleton.

The author’s Antarctic adventure started in a bar in London with his impetuous decision to join the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) after graduating in engineering from Imperial College. He journeyed south through Montevideo with its tempting night life, the Falkland Islands where strangers are welcomed, and South Georgia with its outstanding scenery and legacy of whale slaughter.

In 1965 Roderick and his sledging partner were in their tent when they heard the stutter of an SOS on the wireless that announced the death of three companions in a terrible crevasse accident. For many years he put the shock, sorrow and anger behind him but with time felt that there should be a prominent monument to these young explorers. Attending a BAS Club reunion in 2002, he discovered that 28 men and one woman had died since Port Lockroy was set up in 1944 and all but one before 1982. This prompted him to set up the British Antarctic Monument Trust and £250,000 was raised to install a memorial in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, a monument outside the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge in 2011 and also in 2015 on the waterfront in Stanley, Falkland Islands.

This narrative reveals personal recollections of the author’s experiences in Antarctica in the ’60s at Halley Bay, the most southerly of British bases, where they lived like troglodytes 20ft to 40 ft beneath the snow, enduring 105 days of continuous night, and an expedition to the mountains by dog sledge and tractor where three of his companions lost their lives. It is also written in memory of all those who did not return and describes the Trust that was established to create permanent memorials to their pursuit of science to benefit us all.