As Captain Scott lay freezing and starving to death on his return
journey from the South Pole, he wrote with a stub of pencil his
final words: ‘For God’s sake look after our people.’
Uppermost in his mind were the three women who would now be widows:
Kathleen, his own bohemian artist wife; Oriana, the devout wife of
the expedition’s chief scientist, Ted Wilson; and Lois, the Welsh
working-class wife of Petty Officer Edgar Evans. When the news came
that the men were dead, they became heroes, their story filling
column inches in newspapers across the world. Their widows were
thrust into the limelight, forced to grieve in public view, keeping
a stiff upper lip while the world praised their husbands’
sacrifice. These three women had little in common except that their
husbands had died together, but this shared experience was to shape
the rest of their lives. Each experienced their loss differently,
their treatment by the press and the public influenced by their
class and contemporary notions of both manliness and womanly
behaviour. Each had to rebuild their life, fiercely and loyally
defending their husbands’ legacies and protecting their
fatherless children in the face of financial hardship, public
criticism and intense press scrutiny. Widows of the Ice is not the
story of famous women but of forgotten wives, whose love and
support helped to shape one of the most iconic moments in British
history. They have drifted to the outer edges of the Antarctic
narrative, and bringing them back gives a new perspective to a
story we thought we already knew. It is a story of imperialistic
dreams, misogyny and classism, but also of enormous courage, high
ideals, duty – and, above all, love.
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