A cold sort of comrade

Captain Lawrence Oates is hailed as a hero who sacrificed his life for his comrades on Scott's final South Pole expedition. However, there was more to Oates than his famous death, including a dark secret connecting him with Ireland, writes Michael Smith

Captain Oates was the "very gallant gentleman" who walked to his death in a raging blizzard, hoping to save his comrades on Scott's disastrous South Pole expedition. As he crawled on to the ice in -40 degrees, Oates achieved immortality with the famous parting remark: "I am just going outside and may be some time." But there was more to Oates than a famous death.

He was a reluctant hero, who was dominated by his overbearing mother and who clashed bitterly with Scott on the ill-fated expedition. He resigned in disgust on the eve of the polar march and, alone among the five who perished, Oates pointed an accusing finger at the bungling Scott.

He also died not realising that he was a father. A little girl, born in Ireland, was taken from her young mother and sent to an orphanage in the south of England, where she grew up not knowing her father's identity. Oates was unaware of the child, and the dark secret has remained untold for almost 100 years.

The secret was indeed dark, since the mother of the child was only 12 years of age. Her family, who came from Scotland, sent the pregnant girl to Ireland to have the child in secrecy, and her story has been a closely guarded secret until today.

By coincidence, Oates, a professional soldier, spent almost four years in Ireland at the turn of the 20th century, at the sprawling Curragh camp in Kildare, Dublin's Marlborough Barracks, and the military station at Ballincollig, Cork. These were the key years which shaped Oates and led him to make the fateful decision to enlist in Scott's expedition to the Antarctic.

The traditional view is that Oates was a member of Victorian England's "landed gentry", born into a life of wealth and privilege. He went from the grand manor house to Eton public school and on to a commission in an elite cavalry regiment, the Inniskilling Dragoons. He was recommended for the Victoria Cross, the highest award for bravery, during the Boer War.

But new research shows Oates became deeply disenchanted with army life while he was stationed in Ireland.

On the surface, Ireland suited Oates. He was rubbing shoulders with Kildare's like-minded gentry, hunting with hounds and racing his beloved horses. He won the Military Cup at Dundalk in 1904 and 1905, and in 1905 captured both the St Stephen's Plate at Leopardstown and the Grand Military Cup at Punchestown.

Racing and hunting offered only brief respite to the boredom of peacetime soldiering and, as Oates stared across the plains of Kildare or strode the parade ground, he became increasingly despondent. In 1910, his chance came when Captain Scott announced his plans to reach the South Pole.

Oates was so desperate to escape the army that he paid £1,000 from his own pocket to join Scott. Today, that £1,000 would be worth almost £50,000 (€80,000).

He was the venture's most unfortunate figure, and should never have gone to the Pole. He had a limp due to a war wound that left one leg two inches shorter than the other and he concealed his severely frostbitten and gangrenous feet on the march. As the only solider in a predominantly naval expedition, he was also an outsider.

New studies of Oates' diaries and letters present a stark contrast to the conventional tale of gallant failure by a harmonious group of plucky explorers. He offers a sardonic and disparaging judgment, which points to mismanagement and poor leadership by Scott.

Oates frequently clashed with the temperamental Scott and once wrote: "Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition."

He added: "He \ is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere . . ." His intense loathing of Scott even prompted Oates to heap praise on the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, who reached the Pole a month before Scott's party.

Oates concluded that Amundsen "must have had his head screwed on right" to use dog teams pulling sledges. It was "very different to our wretched man-hauling" of sledges, he observed.

Oates and Scott were ill-matched. Scott was a short-tempered, irrational and moody man, who rarely confided in colleagues. Oates was taciturn, clear-cut and intolerant. "Their natures jarred on one another," a fellow explorer recalled.

Despite his aristocratic background, Oates was popular with the ordinary men, such as petty officer Tom Crean, the Kerryman who formed an indestructible backbone on three polar expeditions with Scott and Shackleton. Oates and Crean, though from entirely different backgrounds, became friends, and Crean visited Oates's mother in London after the disaster. Crean, she declared, was a "magnificent character".

Oates was central to the expedition. An expert horseman, he was hired to manhandle a team of tough Manchurian and Siberian ponies, hauling supplies over the ice. But Scott dropped an astonishing blunder by sending a novice to buy the ponies.

Oates was horrified by the state of the "greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen" and said: "Scott's ignorance about marching with animals is colossal."

Oates, trying to make the best of a bad job, argued that the ponies should be driven into the ground and shot as they weakened to feed the men. But Scott was squeamish and rejected the idea - a decision which planted the seeds of disaster.

Scott ordered that a vital supply depot be placed 30 miles further north than originally intended. Oates warned Scott that he would regret not driving the ponies further south and building the depot 30 miles nearer the Pole. Scott replied: "Regret or not, my dear Oates, I have taken my decision as a Christian gentleman."

A year later, 30 miles was the difference between life and death as the starving, freezing explorers struggled back from the Pole in crippling weather. Oates died about 30 miles from the depot - at the spot where he had urged Scott to build it.

Even the myth of Oates's suicide can be questioned. It seems highly unlikely that his suicide was an attempt to save the other men in the tent - Scott, Wilson and Bowers. Nor did it save them.

Oates had reached a pinnacle of suffering by the time suicide beckoned. He could barely walk, his feet blackened and swollen by a merciless combination of frostbite and gangrene. He was starving and incoherent from the cold. The side-effects of scurvy had reopened his old war wound as a festering mess. Suicide would have seemed to offer a merciful relief from unbearable suffering.

Oates had plenty of earlier opportunities to leave the tent and speed up his colleagues' progress. He first disclosed the appalling state of his feet on March 2nd, and a few days later Scott wrote: "Oates is near the end."

He lingered painfully for another week and crawled to his death on March 17th, 1912.

The bleak fact is that Scott, Wilson and Bowers were beyond redemption when Oates crawled from the tent. Scott, too, sensed the end was near and wrote his first letter of farewell on the day Oates died. The letter included the telling words: "We have been to the Pole and we shall die like gentlemen." They struggled on, but died a slow death just 11 miles from the food depot.

Lawrence Oates, a cool-headed man of immense courage, was the only one of the party to decide when he was going to die. It was his 32nd birthday.

Michael Smith is the author of An Unsung Hero - Tom Crean. I Am Just Going Outside, by Michael Smith, is published by The Collins Press, Cork (www.collinspress.com), priced €30.