Hero of their times

Press, 12 July 1984, Page 8

Hero of their times

SUE LIMB, in the “Observer,” on the curious life of Captain Oates

Tm just going outside: I may be some time.” Captain Oates’s laconic exit line earned him a place in history. He walked out of Scott’s tent and disappeared on the journey back from the Pole in 1912, because he was too weak to go on and was delaying the others. His gallantry won him, posthumously, the Polar Medal. This medal is to be sold at Sotheby’s. Captain Oates’s exemplary death was seized on with rapture by a British Establishment eager to inspire the recruits of 1914 with a little self-sacrificing zeal. But Oates would have loathed such an apotheosis. He was a loner, almost an anti-hero: famous for his dishevelled appearance and 'brusque manners. En route to Antarctica, Scott’s Expedition paused to be feted at a smart hotel in New Zealand. Oates was mistaken for a gate-crasher and was turfed out. Lady Scott did not take to Oates, and the feeling was mutual. He was something of a misogynist. A favourite Expedition chant was “Who avoided

female society?” “I” said Captain Oates, “because I prefer goats.” He died a bachelor at 32, probably still a virgin, and certainly still dominated by his mother, a terrifying Victorian matriarch. Widowed in 1896, she had elevated her sixteen-year-old son into his father's place of adored consort. Oates’s response to the suffocation of the drawing room was to escape with the army to South Africa, Egypt, and India, and then with Scott to the Antarctic. Oates’s last message to his mother was that she was the only woman he had ever loved, though he spent little time with her even when on leave. There is evidence that he once fancied a young woman, a family acquaintance, but her aunt vetoed the affair before it had a chance to start. He carried a photograph of the girl with him for years after she had been married off to somebody else. His celibacy suited the army, however. Officers were not encouraged to marry before they reached the rank of major.

Some defied the convention, but not Oates. He was too shy and inaccessible. And he loathed the marriage market. “The girls are touted round in the most barefaced way,” he reported to his mother, with a distaste which must have given her some satisfaction. His brief career illustrates the curious pattern of life for an Edwardian army officer.

A lord of the manor, an amateur naturalist, and a big-game hunter, he excelled at mucking in with the lads and was adored by Other Ranks in military and civilian life.

His bravery in the Boer War earned him the nickname “No Surrender Oates.”

A peacetime life, however, that was often solitary, fretful and frustrating led to such boredom with army routine that he predicted in his letters home that he would soon go berserk or turn to drink.

The British Army did not occupy the time of their officers with the strenuous education in ballistics, strategy and engineering of their German counterparts. But it encouraged them to travel.

Scott’s Expedition was a great opportunity for Oates. He seized it with the enthusiasm of a sportsman, revelling in the feats of physical endurance and the novelty of hard work, though Scott’s emotional rhetoric set his teeth on edge. When his last moments came, he rose to the challenge and defined how an English gentleman should die.

Sue Limb is co-author with Patrick Cordingley of "Captain Oates, Soldier and Explorer." (Batsford, £12.50.)