Ken Blaiklock
Old-school explorer who spent years in Antarctica and had an island and a glacier named after him
KEN BLAIKLOCK, who has died aged 92, led the first party to drive a dog team to the South Pole after Roald Amundsen in 1911; he also held the record for the longest cumulative time spent on Antarctica – some 14 years in total across the decades.
The highlight of his career was the Commonwealth Trans-antarctic Expedition of 1955–1958 led by Sir Vivian “Bunny” Fuchs. As leader of the advance party, Blaiklock came close to death on numerous occasions, and the phrase “We nearly lost Ken today” went on to feature in a number of books.
In 1956 Fuchs sailed back to London, leaving eight men to overwinter at Shackleton Base. Blaiklock and the others were left on the ice, with only their tents and a large packing crate for shelter.
They began to build the hut that would serve as the base for the expedition, but their task proved more difficult than they had envisaged – not only were there not enough of them, but the weather was even colder and windier than had been anticipated; when they had completed the skeleton of the hut a blizzard began that lasted for more than a week.
The men sheltered in their crate, in constant danger of being buried by the drift. When the wind finally subsided, the giant boxes of wall panels had disappeared under many feet of snow, while the bay ice had broken off, taking the remaining stores with it: much of their food and fuel, as well as a couple of huts and a tractor, had all vanished into the sea.
Blaiklock sent a typically cheerful message – “Everyone well, but hut incomplete due to inclement weather. Long johns forever”
– and undaunted, he and his team survived the winter, living in what had been the packaging for a snowcat tracked vehicle, eating seals – “an oily taste something between pork and beef ” – and penguin eggs.
Falling down a crevasse was a constant danger, and Blaicklock did so several times while out sledging. But he was less than pleased, on a trip to survey an uncharted mountain range, when one of his party went out for a pre-dinner ski-ing session and broke his leg. Returning to base would have put the expedition at risk so Blaiklock took two spare runners from a sledge and set the leg perfectly.
Kenneth Blaiklock was born on December 6 1927 at Palmers Green in north London, to Harry, an insurance clerk, and Nellie. He attended Horsham Grammar School, where he excelled; he was made to learn the piano, which he hated, and longed to go outside and play instead. He finally took his Grade 2 exam when he was aged about 80.
Leaving school at 17, he joined Ordnance Survey as part of his National Service, and was trained in surveying. In the months after the end of the Second World War he was posted to Germany, and while there he saw on a noticeboard: “Volunteer surveyors wanted for the Falklands Islands.”
He applied, but thought no more about it until a few months later, when he was summoned to London for an interview, at which he discovered that the job was actually in the “Falkland Island dependencies” – the administrative term for the British territories in Antarctica.
Conditions were, unsurprisingly, tough, but Blaiklock, having “learnt to live in the coldest sort of climate”, volunteered for a further year – after securing his parents’ permission, as he was still under 21. In his second year he and colleagues came upon a new island, which was eventually named “Blaiklock Island”, and when a permanent shelter was built there it was named “Blaiklock Hut”.
As a joke, he sent a telegram to the governor of the Falklands, whose jurisdiction covered the island, saying: “I was wondering whether I should charge you rent for putting a hut on my island.”
The governor, entering into the spirit of things, replied: “Oh yes. But of course you must remember you’ve got to pay capital gains tax and income tax, and we shall start charging you.”
As well as the hut and the island, Blaiklock also had a glacier named after him; in 1995 the hut was designated an Antarctic heritage site.
In 1951 he took part in a demonstration of sledging in the Festival of Britain, in the polar section of the Dome of Discovery.
“There was a very good background of icebergs and they had a wind machine, and the surface was obviously concrete, but on the top was sawdust with chalk and it looked very effective,” he recalled.
His second trip to Antarctica was in 1952-54 – when the party was fired on by an Argentine ship – and he then served briefly in the Norwegian sealing and expedition ship MV Norsel as a surveyor, helping to set up two bases on the Graham Land Peninsula in the northernmost part of the continent.
The Commonwealth Trans-antarctic Expedition followed, the first overland crossing of Antarctica, which was not replicated until 1981. On January 19 1958 they reached the South Pole – “an easy place to get to – wherever you start it’s always south!” – then carried on to Scott Base, which had been set up by Edmund Hillary.
Immediately he joined a Belgian expedition, which he later described as the most enjoyable of his career, aside from carrying out much useful research: “I’ve never eaten so well in my life – and there was a fair amount of alcohol around as well.”
His last full expedition was in 1965; from 1963 until 2003 Blaiklock worked in surveying for the oil industry, in countries including Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.
His Husky dogs left the Antarctic ice sheet for the last time in 1994, but for Blaiklock they were a much-loved part of his work and without them, he said, much of what he and his fellow explorers did in the 1950s and 1960s would have been impossible. He talked about the dogs often because they had made life bearable, he said.
Blaiklock received numerous honours, including being appointed OBE; he was awarded the Polar Medal with a rare three bars, the Cuthbert Peek award in 1957 by the Royal Geographical Society, the Chevalier de la Couronne medal by the Belgian government, and the W S Bruce Medal by the Scottish Geographical Society.
Ken Blaiklock married, in 1962, Elsie Elliott, whom he had met at the Young Conservatives. She died in 2018, and he is survived by their daughter, Catherine, founder of the Brexit Party, and by their son John, who became an Arctic mountaineer.