Exhibition provides valuable snapshot of time from fateful Polar expedition
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ON Saturday, The Wilson opens the new exhibition Treasures from the Archives.
The exhibition shows some of The Wilson’s most significant and important historical items.
Among them one of our special but rarely shown pieces, the pocket watch which belonged to the explorer Edward Adrian Wilson and was found on his body in the Antarctic.
The South Pole party led by Captain Scott was expected back at base hut in March 1912 and the plan was for a relief team to set off to meet them on the last stretch.
Apsley Cherry-garrard led this mission but failing to find any trace of the explorers and with the weather failing at the onset of winter, he turned back.
No one was able to venture forth on such a mission again until the Antarctic spring in November.
Surgeon Edward Atkinson, Cherrygarrard and others set off again, this time finding a tent with the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers a few miles short of the final food depot.
Atkinson had to read the diaries and letters the men had written to find out what had happened.
Why were Oates and Evans not there? Had they all reached the Pole? Was it bad weather, lack of food, ill health or all three that had overcome the expedition?
They found all the answers as the men were all rigorous diarists.
Evans had been buried some distance back, Oates had walked out into the blizzard and although Scott’s group had made the Pole, the Norwegians had got there first.
There was nothing more Atkinson could do than to bury the bodies, take all the paperwork for the expedition records and personal possessions for the men’s families and set off back to the hut with the sad, but expected news.
The watch has a handwritten note with it, penned by Cherry-garrard in 1935.
Oriana, Wilson’s widow, gave the watch to Wilson’s godson Hugh Fraser, and either she or, more likely, Hugh asked Cherry to record what he knew of it.
He wrote: “I am very glad that Hugh Fraser has this half chronometer watch, the history of which so far as I know, is as follows.
“In 1910 it was taken by Wilson, whose private property it was as an additional deck watch upon the Terra Nova.
“It was kept in the chronometer room upon the voyage and wound and rated by Pennell every morning with myself helping him.
“It was taken by Wilson upon the depot journey, but I cannot remember that we had any chronometer on the winter journey.
“It was taken by Wilson again on the polar journey, worn in a little pocket specially sewn onto his vest just under his belt on the left side.
“It has been to the South Pole and he was wearing it when he died in March 1912.
“When the Search Party found the tent in November 1912 Atkinson and I collected and took charge of everything in the tent.
“At Atkinson’s request I took this watch from the little pocket in Wilson’s vest and so it came back to England in 1913.”
The watch will be on display in the Open Archive from Saturday until the end of March, along with watercolours, and documents from the Wilson Family Collection, new items to the local history collections, cases showing some of our coins, fossils, and herbaria specimens and, of course, the very important arts and crafts collection archives.
In addition, there is an exhibition devoted to Ruskin, to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth.
This includes loans from the Cheltenham Ladies College and the Holst Birthplace Museum.