As we walk deeper into the hut from the mens’ quarters, coming through the gap in the bulkhead, the view looks like this:
Today we’re going to look at the section to our left, or mapping the hut in nautical terms, starboard amidships. This is the area of the hut that was known as ‘The Tenements’ for how crowded and relatively sloppily built the bunks were. One very famous photo of The Tenements has all its residents in their places and shows this area at its most lived-in – it was October 1911, everyone had spent a winter in their little domains, and were about to set off on the journey for the Pole.
Clockwise from lower left: Apsley Cherry-Garrard, ‘Birdie’ Bowers, ‘Titus’ Oates, Cecil Meares, and ‘Atch’ Atkinson. Birdie and Titus would not see their bunks again after they left; Meares returned briefly but left with the ship in March 1912, which left only Cherry and Atch for the second winter.
This is The Tenements as they appeared in November 2019:
The first thing that struck me about seeing the Tenements in person was how small they were. Scale in Ponting’s photograph is thrown off partly by the framing, but mostly by everyone lying down aside from the shortest of the Tenements’ tenants, Birdie Bowers. To my surprise, I could easily see over the top bunks, and I am only 5’6”.
We’re going to start at the forward end, with Cherry and Birdie’s bunks. Cherry is the main character in my graphic adaptation of his book, and I’ll be drawing a lot from his point of view, so getting a really solid idea of his bunk area was a must.
Although the Tenements photo has everyone with their heads at the public end of their bunks, they probably slept the other way around, for such privacy and quiet as one could find with 25 men in a 50’x25’ room. While the Cape Evans hut feels like it’s full of stuff now, comparing the modern hut with the Tenements photo above, you’ll see just how much more stuff there was back in 1911!
Cherry was a great fan of Kipling, and brought his whole collection with him – these likely lived on the small shelf you can see against the hut wall. The bed is now covered with stray bits of clothing, and one of the socks has Cherry’s name sewn into it, so I assume the others have been identified as his too.
The ladder leads up to Bowers’ bunk, so let’s take a look at that …
This is the foot end, which he also used as a desk, as you can see in the Ponting photo. The boards blocking it off from the main hut weren’t there in October 1911, so they may have been added the second winter, but Scott’s men weren’t the only ones to have used this hut – a couple of years after they left, Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party moved in, and one of them may have moved into Bowers’ bunk and sought some extra privacy.
But the real treasure of Bowers’ bunk is at the other end …
It’s his hat! The actual Green Hat of legend – less green than I was expecting, but definitely the same one as in all his photos. I was so pleased that, of all things, it should still be here – that he didn’t take it on the Southern Journey, that the Ross Sea Party had let it be, and that it hadn’t been pilfered in the years of uncontrolled hut visits before the AHT took charge.
The photo below the hat, I suspect, originally belonged to Cherry. He had found a photo of the actress Marie Lohr in a magazine and wanted it for a pinup, but one of Ponting’s photographs was on the other side of the page. and Ponting thought that was the object of his affection. He offered to mount it nicely for Cherry, which would have meant gluing the lovely Miss Lohr to the mounting board, and with some flustered embarrassment Cherry’s intentions came out. I had some photos of Marie Lohr; none of them are the photo in the hut, but she looks to me like the same person. How it got from Cherry’s bunk to Birdie’s I don’t know – the AHT have been very careful about giving items to the correct people, so it must have been found there. Perhaps the member of the Ross Sea Party who took Birdie’s bunk liked the photo and moved it up there.
My trip here was, in large part, to get photos that were necessary to my storytelling but unlikely to be found anywhere else. The Cape Evans hut is extremely well documented, but there are angles which are important to the reality of living there which do not necessarily make glamourous shots for publication. One of these was the view from the Tenements to the rest of the hut, rather than into the Tenements. It happens also to give you a good sense of how crammed they were.
The structure on the other side is the geologists’ cubicle, which we will get to a couple of posts from now.
Immediately to our left here is Titus Oates’ bunk. He was in charge of the horses, so it’s piled high with horse stuff.
The fringe in the middle is, in effect, pony sunglasses – it was originally dyed brown and would have hung down over their eyes like hair, blocking out a large portion of the harsh sunlight and snow glare. Ponies can get snowblindness too!
Behind us, from where we are standing looking at Titus’ bunk here, is Meares’ bunk, and below that, Atkinson’s. Atkinson, who alone shared the Tenements with Cherry through the miserable second winter, was in command of the expedition at that point; as doctor as well, he had a very heavy job in keeping the bereaved and stir-crazy men on the right side of health, both physical and mental. As leader, he could have moved into Scott’s much more comfortable and private space – that he didn’t, and that the thought of such a thing didn’t even turn up in anyone’s journals, says a lot about him and all of them. He stuck it out in his Spartan cubbyhole, within view of his best friend’s now deserted place, and was there for everyone.
It was here that I spotted the thing that, of all the amazing things in the hut, nearly brought a tear to my eye.
If you look at the Ponting photo at the start of this post, you will see that the string once held a spoon! I don’t know if it belonged to Meares or Atch – in the photo the string doesn’t look long enough to reach either of them. I think of it as ‘Atch’s spoon’ but that may be just because it’s hanging by his face; Meares seemed more the type to be possessive about silverware. Wilson’s cartoon in the South Polar Times suggests there was once an entire cutlery set hanging here, but that may have been a comedic exaggeration.
People visiting the hut often say it feels like the people are still there, or that they could walk in the door at any moment. I wanted to feel that, but I have to confess my experience was quite the opposite: they were gone, very gone, and had been for a very long time. Finding the string there without the spoon summed that up that better than anything.
Our next stop is the stern of the hut – Scott’s cubicle, Ponting’s darkroom, and the lab. Before we go, let’s take one look back at the Tenements.
