The Golden Thread: RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair

Author:Kassia St Clair [Clair, Kassia St]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2018-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

9 Layering in Extremis

Clothing to Conquer Everest and the South Pole

Of Fur and Burberry

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World,1 1922

‘The worst has happened,’ Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his notebook on Tuesday, 16 January 1912, ‘or nearly the worst.’ The day had started well: Scott and his four companions had managed a respectable 7½ miles through thick snow and temperatures 23.5°C below freezing. They had been hauling, skiing and dog-sledding in poor conditions for two and a half months and over 1,800 miles. They were frost-bitten and fatigued, drawn on only in the hopes of being the first men to reach the South Pole. On that day their goal was just a scant handful of miles away and it seemed as if the commendations of history were within their grasp. During the afternoon, however, their wearied footsteps brought them to a dreadful sight: ‘[A] black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp.’ The Norwegian team had reached the Pole before them, and the race was lost. ‘Great God!’ Scott wrote, ‘this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.’ They walked the final miles in the month-old footsteps of the victors. Ten weeks later all five men were dead.2

The very existence of Antarctica remained unproven until the late eighteenth century. The idea of a hypothetical southern continent, Terra Australis, had been posited in antiquity, and its imagined geographical features were sketched onto maps merely to balance the land mass of the northern hemisphere. In the age of empire, however, the idea of new expanses of land was too tempting not to be explored. An expedition led by James Cook sailed from Plymouth in the summer of 1772 in two ships named Resolution and Adventure. By 10 December he sighted his first ‘ice island’ – an iceberg – and on 17 January 1773 the Resolution became the first ship known to have plunged its bow through the Antarctic circle, a feat it would achieve twice more before returning home. Although the two ships had been kitted out with all the latest equipment to deal with extreme weather, the men aboard had not. As the ship moved further south it became so cold that the entire crew seemed in jeopardy. Around the time the first iceberg was seen Cook ‘caused the sleeves of their jackets (which were so short as to expose their arms) to be lengthened with [coarse woollen] baize; and had a cap made for each man of the same stuff, together with canvas’. Once the existence of a southerly land mass was established, its call – siren-like – sounded in the ears of ambitious explorers the world over.3

The fate

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