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TWO Childhood and Dartmouth
There was a time, and not so long ago either, when gentle people were so gentle that the males could not with the countenance of their families enter upon any profession other than the Army, the Navy, or the Church.
Gilbert Cannan, The Road to Come (1913)
TWO YEARS BEFORE the outbreak of the First World War, at just about the same time that Scott was refining the concept of gentility for a whole age, a Royal Naval officer confidently told an Admiralty committee, set up to explore the question of commissions from the lower deck, that it took three generations to make a gentleman.
If anyone was searching for a clue to the simultaneous social durability and decline of Britain as a great industrial power, they could do a lot worse than settle on that. For many a European the only surprise about the formula would have been that the process could be so rapid; but it has always been Britain’s genius and curse to dangle the hopes of gentility before an aspirant population, absorbing and anaesthetising the nation’s energies and talents into the comforting and inclusive orbit of respectability encompassed by that word ‘gentleman’.
There is a case, anyway, for arguing that only pedantry, snobbery or family romance could ask for a longer genealogical perspective, and certainly none is needed for Scott’s family. His early biographers liked to detect a likeness to the ‘great Sir Walter’ in his features, but for all the family traditions of Border raiders, Buccleuch connections and Jacobites hanged at York, the only family history that had any relevance to Scott himself begins with his grandfather, Robert.*
The son of a schoolteacher who had come to the West Country from France, where the family had gone after the ’ 45, Robert Scott was born in 1784, and after four years ‘in a subordinate capacity’ was promoted in 1806 to purser in the Royal Navy. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars he was serving – prophetically enough in the light of his grandson’s future career – in HMS Erebus, and within five years had amassed enough from prize money or graft to buy with his brother Edward a brewery in Plymouth for £4, 782. Robert Scott had married in 1816, and in the same year that the two brothers acquired the Hoegate Brewery took the lease from Sir John Aubyn on a house at Stoke Damerel on the outskirts of Devonport. The house was more a Regency cottage than anything grander when Robert bought it, but by the time he had finished adding to it, ‘Outlands’ had become the outward symbol of the Scotts’ ambitions, a country gentleman’s residence in miniature, complete with servants, outbuildings, shrubberies, paddocks, orchard, governesses, nurses, pets, peacock and stream.
In a small way Robert Scott was the nightmare of Jane Austen’s Sir Walter Elliot made flesh, the Napoleonic War carpetbagger come good. It is not clear how close an interest he ever took in his brewery, but while it was certainly enough to lead to quarrels with his brother, he had other ambitions for his children, sending four of his five sons into the army or navy, and leaving only the youngest, John Edward – Robert Falcon Scott’s father – to maintain an increasingly distasteful connection with trade.
If the brewery had ever made very much money, it had ceased to do so by the time of Robert’s death, and Scott’s father was left with the tastes of a gentleman and very little on which to support them. The death of Robert also led to a protracted family challenge over the ownership of Outlands, and in 1862 John played the only card available to a man spoiled for business and useless for much else, and married a Hannah Cuming, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a prominent figure in the Plymouth insurance and maritime world.
John and Hannah Scott had six children who survived infancy – Ettie, Rose, Robert Falcon (always known as ‘Con’), Grace, Archie and Katherine – and it is in their memories that this marriage and Outlands life most vividly survive. ‘Mr Scott girded against the enforced restriction of a business life which was uncongenial to his tastes,’ wrote George Seaver, the last biographical link, through Con’s sister Grace, with that generation of the Scott family, ‘and although he interested himself in local affairs in Devonport where he was magistrate and Chairman of the Conservative Association, these pursuits provided no adequate outlet for a man of his capability … Lack of means, lack of health, and lack of opportunity bred in him a baleful sense of inferiority, the result of inhibitions, which gave rise to the most explosive temper – by no means improved by the periodical visits of his brothers, who stirred his envy by their accounts of thrilling adventures in foreign fields.’
It is hard to know how just this is, or how much it reflects the resentment of a daughter who always had to take second place to her two brothers. The few surviving letters from Con’s early days certainly suggest an affectionate and easy-going relationship between father and son, but a letter written in a tent in Antarctica just before his death conjures up the John Scott of Grace’s memory. ‘The inherited vice from my side of the family is indolence,’ Scott warned his wife about their own son; ‘above all he must guard, and you must guard him against that. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know – had always an inclination to be idle. My father was idle and it brought much trouble.’
Side by side in photographs, Scott’s parents certainly look an oddly suited pair, John Scott bearded, irresolute, almost characterless, his wife Hannah refined, intelligent, discriminating and kindly formidable. It seems unlikely that the Cuming family ever let John Scott forget that it was their money that had kept Outlands in the family, and it was Hannah who ruled, and her brand of genteel, slightly compromised, mid-Victorian Evangelicalism that set the moral tone of the household. ‘Whatever we have cause to bless ourselves for, comes from you,’ her devoted elder son would later write to her at a moment of family tragedy. ‘If ever children had cause to worship their mother, we feel we have, dear … you can never be a burden, but only the bond that keeps us closer together, – the fine example that will guide us all … What is left for you to do is to be the same sweet kind mother that you have always been, our guide and our friend.’
Not that there was anything gloomily oppressive about her influence – their Plymouth Brethren cousins thought the Outlands Scotts ‘damned’ – and the children grew up to a normal, uncomplicated life. ‘As children we were always very happy and ordinary and simple,’ Grace recalled in a bucolic memoir of their Outlands childhood, ‘and though we had a comfortable house and a nice biggish garden there was no money for travel or even simple excitements. As a matter of fact, we did not want them or think about them, for we were brought up a much quieter generation … Our great yearly treat to look forward to was a visit to the Pantomime at the Plymouth Theatre! Though the house was small for such a crowd – seventeen persons when the boys were at home – thanks to the garden, fields, and outhouses, during the day-time we could disperse. We had entire liberty within these bounds which excluded a blacksmith’s forge just outside the shrubbery gate, and a small general shop – good for boiled sweets. I may say that to get the sweets we had to climb a high gate, which was kept locked to keep us from temptation, and failed.’
Robert Falcon Scott was born into this modest Victorian idyll on 6 June 1868, and first ‘enters history’, as J.M. Barrie, his most influential and unscrupulous mythologiser, put it, ‘aged six, blue eyed, long haired, inexpressibly slight and in velveteen, being held out at arm’s length by a servant and dripping horribly, like a half drowned kitten. This is the earliest recollection of him of a sister, who was too young to join a children’s party on that fatal day. But Con, as he was always called, had intimated to her that from her window she would be able to see him taking a noble lead in the festivities in the garden, and she looked; and that is what she saw. He had been showing his guests how superbly he could jump the leat, and had fallen into it.’
This probably says more about the author of Peter Pan than it does about Scott, but if it is hard to see how a nation could swallow it, it does highlight the problem of everything to do with Scott’s youth. There is no reason to imagine that anyone would invent Barrie’s anecdotes for him, but they belong to the world of medieval apocrypha rather than biography, exemplary tales chosen to illustrate either latent greatness or the triumph of will over the sickly, dreamy, introspective, ‘pigeon-chested’, slovenly ‘Old Mooney’ of Barrie-inspired legend.
There is no evidence that Scott was any weaker-chested than many another child, or any ‘dreamier’, but the anecdotes flow with the same dire mix of saccharin charm and cautionary humour – the stream, the ‘ocean’ that only adults could call a pond, the holly tree, the dangers of the glass conservatory, the much-loved pony, Beppo, who would throw any other rider. ‘His first knife is a great event in the life of a boy,’ wrote Barrie, ‘and he is nearly always given it on condition that he keeps it shut. So it was with Con, and a few minutes after he had sworn not to open it he was begging for permission to use it on a tempting sapling. “Very well,” his father said grimly, “but remember, if you hurt yourself, don’t expect any sympathy from me.” The knife was opened, and to cut himself rather badly proved as easy as falling into the leat. The father, however, had not noticed, and the boy put his bleeding hand into his pocket and walked on unconcernedly. This is a good story of a child of seven who all his life suffered extreme nausea from the sight of blood; even in the Discovery days, to get accustomed to “seeing red” he had to force himself to watch Dr. Wilson skinning his specimens.’
For all of Barrie’s efforts to press it into significance, it is the utter normality of Scott’s childhood that is most striking. In later life he, Archie and his oldest sister Ettie would always form a kind of distinctive triumvirate within family councils, but as children they all mucked in together, left pretty much to their own devices by a father busy pottering about his gardens and a mother nursing her ailing parents. ‘Our tastes for sailing were very much encouraged by my uncle Harry, my mother’s brother,’ Grace remembered. ‘On holidays we, that is four girls and two brothers, had glorious days sailing about Plymouth Harbour in an eighteen foot boat with a big lug sail. We were taught to work the boat and had thrilling days out by the Mewstone (the parental limit seawards), or up one of the rivers, where we had been known to be stranded in the mud for hours on a falling tide. Considering our lives were so very sheltered then, so small and bounded, it seemed wonderful to have our sailing freedom.’
Close as the children would always be, it was not within the circle of his siblings that Scott’s childhood was shaped, but by the dynamics of family ambitions that stretched back to his grandfather, Robert. In any sensible society – or European nation of his own day – a child of Scott’s type would have ended up as an engineer or scientist, but for a boy of his class in Victorian England the future was circumscribed by the deadening monopoly of the old professions, and at the age of eight, home and his sisters’ governess were exchanged for a day school at Damerel, from where, at eleven or twelve, he was packed off by his father to board at Stubbington House in Fareham, a naval crammer that prepared boys for the entrance exams to the training ship Britannia.
If Scott had any say in the choice it has gone unrecorded, but it would be hard to imagine a better berth for a training ship or for a child of any imagination than the River Dart. Sheltered by steep hills on either bank and protected from the sea by a sudden bend in the river, the Britannia lay moored just above the ancient port of Dartmouth, ideally positioned for the rough training ground of the open channel and the quiet waters of the river.
There can be few more beautiful ports anywhere, and if a boy from Plymouth needed no lesson in England’s maritime past, Dartmouth’s history was just as rich. The natural harbour had become too small to retain its old importance by Scott’s day, but even after its historic role in the old triangular trade of cod, salt and wine had been usurped by Liverpool, the town still preserved links with the New World and English naval life that stretched back through the Dutch and Civil Wars to Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Elizabeth’s reign.
The Britannia was a product of the mid-Victorian navy’s determination to control and standardise its officer intake. In the first half of the nineteenth century a boy’s education was dependent on the goodwill and interest of the individual ship’s captain, but in 1857 an Admiralty circular announced a new regime of training and examinations for all future officers that would include a period of time on a stationary ship before they were allowed to go to sea. The initial training ship had been established at Portsmouth, but Britannia had first been towed to her mooring on the Dart in September 1863, and in the following year, as numbers grew, was joined by a second vessel, the Hindostan. In 1869 the Britannia herself was replaced by a bigger ship, and it was this Britannia – the eighth of her name – that Scott knew, an old sailing vessel of over six thousand tons, with a draught of thirty-one feet and a length of 251 feet, a gangway linking her to the Hindostan and a fully rigged foremast to test the seamanship, agility and courage of her cadets.
And it was in this Britannia, too, for the next thirty years, until she was replaced by a shore-based college, that the navy trained its future leaders. At the time of the First World War there was scarcely a senior officer who had not passed through Dartmouth, not a man above the rank of lieutenant-commander who had not been moulded by the same ethos and training that produced the men who fought at Jutland or went south with Scott. ‘That training,’ the biographer of Earl Beatty – the navy’s most flamboyantly glamorous admiral since Nelson – wrote of Britannia in the mid-1880s, the years immediately after Scott was there, ‘was based on forcing cadets into a pre-conceived and rigid mould by the application of harsh, even inhuman discipline. Obedience to orders was the hallowed principle of the system, and woe betide any boy who was deemed to have transgressed that tenet. Any signs of originality or independence were seriously frowned on – if not actively suppressed; while intellectual accomplishments always came a bad second to athletics.’
In many ways, this makes it little different from any Victorian public school in its aspirations. From the days of Thomas Arnold the ambition of every public school was to produce a ‘brave, helpful, truth-telling’ English Christian gentleman, but whereas the Arnoldian ideal was to mould the men who would run the Empire or clear out slums, the aim of Britannia was to take the sons of these gentlemen and refine – or brutalise – them into the more specialist incarnation of the British naval officer.
This might have mattered less if the navy still recruited from a more inclusive social base, or if the curriculum in Scott’s day had been any wider, or had more strenuously faced up to the realities of the age of steam. When Britannia was first established twenty years before, the range of subjects was more or less typical of the wider educational world, but by 1883 this had shrunk back to a far more vocational training – Arithmetic and Algebra (to read across Scott’s Final Examination Results), Geometry, Trigonometry, Plain and Spherical, Practical Navigation, Theoretical Navigation, Charts, Instruments and Observations, French, Essay, Physics and Drawing.
In practice little attention was ever given to ‘Extra Subjects’, or, in fact, to study at all – in Scott’s term, or intake, only three cadets got so much as ‘Fair’ for ‘Attention paid to Study’ – and with no engineering workshop, no gunnery officer, no instruction in command and a heavy emphasis on seamanship, a Britannia training put a cadet firmly in the camp of the dinosaur. ‘I call the whole system of our naval education utterly faulty,’ the young Jellicoe – future First Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet at Jutland – writing under the nom de plume of ‘A Naval Nobody’, protested in Macmillan’s Magazine: ‘I say that we, the Navy’s youth, are in some professional matters most deplorably ignorant, and the day will come when we, England, will wake up to the fact with a start. It sounds impossible, inconceivable, that it is only a privileged few who are allowed to make a study of gunnery … only a privileged few who are initiated into the mysteries of torpedos; only a privileged few who are taught … surveying and navigation; not even a privileged few who are taught the science of steam; and yet all this is so!’
It was an education for an age of sail, designed for a profession that envisaged no scope for individual responsibility, and enforced with all the rigour of nineteenth-century naval discipline. From the moment that Scott woke, his day was regulated to the sound of bugle calls or drum rolls, to the barking of orders and the running of feet, as the cadets were marched from bath house to inspection deck, from inspection to Euclid, from Euclid to breakfast, and from their breakfast across the gangway to Hindostan and back to Britannia’s poop for another inspection, prayers – and all that before the day proper had even started. Even their swimming was controlled by bugle call, even the casual brutality of the discipline institutionalised by a system of numbers. For severe offences there was the cane and the captain, but for everything else, the Commander’s Punishments ranged from 1 to 7, with ‘No. 4’ – Scott’s most common penalty – including ‘an hour early in the morning, an hour out on the deck after evening prayers, extra drill and stopped pocket money’. ‘19 Oct, ’81,’ Scott’s charge sheet typically reads:
Entering an orchard whilst on Half holiday … March 11th 1882, Skylarking at Morning Study, [punishment] 1 days 3; Sept 18th Late for Muster, 1 days 4; Oct 3rd Not being into his place in the ranks when 2nd bugle sounded, 1 days 3; Oct 6th Talking in his Hammock after hours, 1 days 3; Oct 11th Being into Hindostan Contrary to regulations, 1 days 4; Oct 13th Going on the Middle deck in his night shirt, 1 days 4; Oct 15th; Creating a disturbance on sleeping deck, 1 days 4; Oct 16th Making a noise in his Hamk after hours, 1 days 3; Nov 5th Talking in his Hamk after hours, 1 days 3; Nov 9th Improperly dressed at Muster, 1 days 2; Nov 22nd Delaying to come out of the bath, 1 days 3 …
There were other infringements – most memorably, ‘Did as Cadet Captain allow some of the Cadets to humbug Mr Poynter Chief Capt. in the Sanctuary, and did also take part in annoying him’ – but there is not much here to alarm anyone who has ever been to a boarding school, and still less to suggest the delicate child of Barrie legend. From time to time the Britannia regime or some bullying scandal would make the national newspapers, but if it always tottered on the edge of bullying, it was probably no different from any other school in Victorian life or fiction.
There was a lighter side to Britannia life, too, and if there was little privacy, there was the band and dancing in the evenings, the playing fields, the tennis and racquets courts, the ship’s beagles, and Totnes and the freedom of the river on summer half-holidays. On these occasions the cadets would be given hampers of food and lemonade and ginger beer, and after rowing upstream past the Anchor Stone in the middle of the Dart where Raleigh had smoked his pipe, would swim and watch the salmon-netting before drifting back downstream in the evening, tying up among a small flotilla of boats behind the Totnes pleasure steamer while trippers threw them cakes.
There are no surviving letters of Scott’s from Britannia – nothing to suggest that he was there except the memorial in the chapel erected by his term – but for a fourteen-year-old grandson of a despised ship’s purser, anonymity itself was a victory.* It is no coincidence that the future Earl Beatty was a failure there, but if Scott’s aim was assimilation he could not have done it better, coming out of Britannia the average product of an average term in a system designed to produce the average – tenth of his term in his first exams, sixth at the end of his second and eighth in the third, with a numbing catalogue of ‘Satisfactories’ and ‘Very Satisfactories’ relieved only by a brace of ‘Fairs’ and one ‘Unsatisfactory’ in French.
His final examinations in July 1883 followed the same pattern. He scored a total of 1,457, coming sixth in Mathematics, ninth in Extra Subjects, thirteenth in seamanship, and seventh overall in a term of twenty-six. He passed out with First Class Certificates in Mathematics and Seamanship, and a Second in Extra Subjects. Of a possible year’s sea-time – to count against the time needed, in the slow grind of promotion, to qualify for his lieutenant’s exams – he was allowed eleven months. His ‘Attention Paid to Study’ was rated ‘Very Moderate’, his abilities ‘Very Good’, and his conduct ‘as noted on Cadet’s Certificate in Captain’s own writing’, also ‘Very Good’.
He would have looked at those before him in the list and those below and seen nothing either to fear or to hope. Four years before him there had been Jellicoe, the year behind him Beatty, but there were no stars in his term. There were any number of future admirals there, and fourteen out of the twenty-six would make the crucial step of post-captain, but there was no one except Scott himself whose name would ever reach the wider public. None of this, though, helped. Without money, without ‘interest’, without a naval pedigree, without a war to fight, he was ready for that gentlemanly anonymity the Outlands Scotts had been aiming at.
