I was reading a book about the Arctic last night, and a little piece of history fell into place. The book is The Magnetic North: Travels in the Arctic by Sara Wheeler. It is a fascinating read, and I don't understand why Amazon's reviewers only give it an aggregate four stars. I'd give it five myself. The historical figure in the book who suddenly rang a bell was Augustine Courtauld.
I wanted to get the book after hearing it serialised on R4. This can be a dodgy method of choosing books, in that some benefit from the abridgement that goes with becoming Book of the Week. I made the mistake of buying Tomas Graves' memoirs of his life as a musician in Majorca after hearing it read on R4, only to discover that the abbreviated version had told me as much as I wanted to know. The unabridged memoir seemed to include the names of every member of every band he had ever played with, and did go on rather. Maybe I was seduced by the fact that I am a huge fan of his father's poetry.
Anyway, Magnetic North is most certainly not a sad disappointment. Sara Wheeler made a series of journeys into the Arctic, visiting towns and staying on scientific bases north of the Arctic Circle. She writes of the Arctic landscape and traditional peoples, and how these are being affected by contact with mainstream modern culture and climate change. The book is elegant, lyrical and objective, and I warmly recommend it to anyone, and especially anybody whose romantic point of the compass is the north, as mine is. And if you are put off because journalism about tribal peoples and the melting icecaps can get all hand-wringing and shouty, don't worry, Sara Wheeler doesn't.
Augustine Courtauld, known as August to his friends, was a member of the textile dynasty. Incidentally, I discovered in another fascinating book, The Stones of London by Leo Hollis, that the Courtaulds were originally goldsmiths. In 1749 Samuel Courtauld married Louisa Perina Ogier, member of a London Hugenot silk weaving dynasty, and the family later moved into textiles, first in silk and then in the early twentieth century creating synthetic silk, in the form of rayon. August does not seem to have been interested in textiles. He joined an Arctic expedition, and in 1930 volunteered to remain alone on a Greenland icecap through the winter to monitor the weather: food supplies at the base were not enough for more than one person. The following May the rest of the expedition returned to look for him, at which point August had been alone for 140 days.
On returning to the site of their camp the rescue party at first could see nothing, and feared the worst, then spotted the top of a ventilation pipe in the snow. They dug Augustine Courtauld out, half starved, with a matted beard and stained with dirt and smoke. The instruments outside the tent showed that the temperature had dropped to -53 degrees Celsius. Sara Wheeler's account of his incarceration is moving, and I will quote it rather than paraphrase it.
Courtauld had read The Forsyte Saga, played chess against himself and planned a yachting tour with the help of Bartholemew's Touring Atlas. He had drawn up table plans for banquets, and menus, including the wine for each course and the vintages of the port and brandy to be served. He had sipped lemon juice to ward off scurvy, and planned where in Suffolk he was going to buy his house ('Fewest possible servants'). But he had thought he would be relieved in mid-March. He began to go very short indeed. His toenails fell out. He had barely any fuel left, and by Easter he was lying in darkness all the time. 'If it were not for having you to think about as I lie in the dark and can't sleep,' he wrote to his fiancee Mollie Montgomerie, 'life would be intolerable. I wonder what you are doing.' By mid-April he was smoking tea and eating uncooked pemmican. He could no longer heat the tent. He did not despair: quite the reverse. He wrote of 'the curious growing feeling of security that came to me as time passed...while powerless to help myself, some outer Force was in action on my side, and I was not fated to leave my bones on the Greenland ice cap'.
He didn't. He returned to England, married his Mollie, and bought his house. Which is where the historical fragment fell into place for me. I visited his house with my parents this June. Augustine Courtauld bought a house in Essex, not Suffolk as he had planned while stuck in the Arctic ice. It was Spencers at Great Yeldham, which is still in the ownership of the Courtauld family, and opens its gardens in the summer for the Red Cross. They are very well worth a visit. He and Mollie had six children, and I like to think that after his Arctic winter, the summer of his life was a happy one, with his family, his beautiful house, and his continued adventures in polar regions and sailing. Sadly, he died relatively young, being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1953 and dying in 1959, several months short of his 55th birthday. Mollie married again, to Conservative politician Rab Butler, and lived to 101.
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