“No heating, no hot food, no smoking. No drinking water, just ice to suck it up. The weather station is buried. There is a layer of ice 2.4 kilometres thick underneath. Above it and around it is more than a million square metres of emptiness, covered in snow, where no one lives. Buried under the ice cap on his 149th day of solitude. He is more alone than anyone on earth …” This is how Jeremy Scott described Easter Monday, 5 April 1931, to the British explorer Augustine Courtauld. At the age of 26, he spent it buried under the snow in the most uninhabited part of Greenland.
On the same day, Augustus, as everyone called him, wrote in his diary: “I have now been here alone for four months. There is no sign of salvation. All I have left is half a cup of kerosene and one or two candles. I have to lie in the dark almost all the time. There is no more chocolate and hardly any tobacco left (not even a handful). What a change from last Easter … what I would give to be alive … to be with you again, my dearest. But if it weren’t for you, to think of you when I lie in the dark and can’t …, life would be unbearable. I think about what you are doing … But I trust in God completely … Ah, that fateful day nine months ago! Why did I ever leave you!”
What really drove him to leave London on 6 July 1930 was not entirely clear to him even at the time, but when 24-year-old student Gino Watkins was assembling a team for an expedition to Greenland, he did not hesitate. Adventure had always appealed to him. He was just 10 years old when the First World War began in 1914. He watched the boys go to the battlefields with big eyes and wished, in his childish naivety, that he could go too. It was then that the desire to explore the new was born in him, even though he was the elder son of textile magnate Samuel Augustin Courtauld and had wealth and luxury laid in his cradle.
He learned that there is no comfort in exploration, and often no adventure, as early as 1925, when he set off to fish in the Arctic at the age of 21, and a year later, when he landed in East Greenland with the exploration team of the famous Scottish explorer James Wordie. Nothing killed the elusive spirit that drove him to new adventures, and at the age of 23 he set off for ten months to explore the southern Tuareg region of the Sahara, geographically and atropologically, in the south of the Tuareg Desert. There, diarrhoea nearly killed him, but that was probably not the reason he did not return to hot Africa to do more research, and the cold still attracted him, so much so that he was back in East Greenland a year later.
Is it possible to fly over the Arctic?
And so it was only natural that he became part of Gino Watkins’ 14-strong research team, not least because the expedition was generously funded by his wealthy father. But that was his only privilege, if any, as he was one of the few members of the expedition who had any experience of Arctic exploration.
“In his view, man had to earn his way, not inherit it. He deeply believed that one should not live in a remote bubble of a materialistic world, even if life was to be enjoyed,” his son Stephen later recalled. In life, “there must be room for side passages into which the soul can escape and express itself”, the man who graduated from Cambridge with a degree in geography and engineering later told his six children, two daughters and four sons.
Now he and the boys have gathered food supplies and loaded them on board the Quest, along with two planes to explore the area from the air. The 34-metre-long Quest became famous in 1921, when Sir Ernest Shackleton explored Antarctica for the last time on it, and finally died on it on 5 January 1922.
Now, on 6 July 1930, she set off for new adventures with a new team. The aim of the expedition was clear: could an air link be established between Europe and North America via the Arctic? The route would be much shorter than by sea and much safer, if only the weather was stable enough. But what is the weather like there? Nobody knew, because nobody stayed long enough to take the necessary measurements and collect enough data, so Gino Watkins and his boys decided to do it.
It was a promising start. They arrived on the island on 24 July and set up base 65 kilometres inland. Then five of them went north to set up a weather observatory at an altitude of around 2500 metres. In August, they arrived at their destination and set up an oval tent, about 210 kilometres north-west of the base, 2.7 metres high and 1.8 metres wide.
Two layers of windproof fabric were stretched across the frame to trap warm air in the void between them. The tent was dug into the snow and a snow perimeter was built over it to make it look like an igloo. This made it warmer and more resistant to wind gusts. They also built a 2.4 metre high snow wall around the tent.
Two more igloos were then built, two storage rooms were built, and all three rooms were connected by tunnels in the shape of a cross. At the top of the cross was the main tent, with an igloo at each end, and the lower part of the cross was used to get out of the tent and into the open air.
A 5 cm diameter copper pipe was run through the top of the tent, allowing air to enter the room. They intended to cook on a stove, which would also have to heat and light the room, although they had an ample supply of candles with them.
According to the plan, there should always be two expedition members in the weather station. They would stay for six weeks, recording weather data, and then a replacement would arrive, bringing with them new food supplies.
When the first five members of the expedition set up camp, two stayed behind, while three returned to join the others, who explored the land on foot, viewed it from the sea by motorboat or kayak, and flew over it in the planes they had brought with them.
At first, everything went as planned. The first pair spent a good month in the observatory, the second pair arrived on 3 October and was due to be replaced by the third pair in mid-November. But then things got complicated.
To close the station or not?
The weather has deteriorated desperately. That very year, the winter storms started earlier and were much more violent than usual, although, to be honest, they didn’t know very well what the winters there had been like in previous years. The first storm they experienced back at the camp was so strong that the wind gauge showed a speed of 208 kilometres per hour, but after that it showed nothing. The wind broke it off and blew it away. From then on, storms were a constant. They blew two or three times a week all winter.
Nevertheless, six researchers, including August, set off on 27 October. They made slow progress on their heavy sledges, but covered only 24 kilometres in 15 days, when they should have covered 210.
In mid-November, they met Gino Watkins and Jeremy Scott, who were just returning from their expedition. Could they send the radio transmitting device back to camp because it was simply too heavy to drag behind them, asked Freddie Spencer Chapman, who was leading the six. It is true that a couple left out there in the middle of winter will not be able to communicate anything to anyone, but they simply cannot go on like that.
Gino Watkins gave him a free hand: he was to decide which equipment would go ahead and how many people would go with it, and also whether it might be wiser to close the weather station, given the weather conditions.
Now only three members of the expedition, Freddie Chapman, August Courtauld and Lawrence Rickard Wager, have continued their journey. They did not reach their destination until 3 December, 37 days after they had set off. They were exhausted, but that was not the worst of it. Because they had walked so much longer than they had planned, most of the food they would have needed to replenish the station had been eaten on the way.
They had no data on the Arctic winter, because they were the ones who should have collected it, and yet common sense told them that they would not be able to deliver new supplies until spring. But there was simply not enough food for two men. Even if he had stayed alone, he would have had to take great care to have enough by March, when they could have returned home.
But who would stay there, in the middle of the ice and the harsh winter, alone? Should the weather station be closed after all? No, August Courtauld was determined. So much energy had already been invested in collecting data that it would be a real shame to give up now. Besides, he didn’t get on well with some of the expedition members, and he was in no hurry to go back. “I calculated that I could have lasted five months on my own. Because my toes were frozen, I really didn’t want to go back. So I decided to stay alone and keep the station open.”
Not a soul anywhere alive
And so, on 6 December 1930, he said goodbye to his colleagues. There was not a soul around him anymore. He had six boxes of food, two bottles of lemon juice and a bottle of fish oil in his pantry. There should have been enough kerosene, but it turned out that two of the cans were leaking. His only luxuries were books, some tobacco and chocolate, which was part of the food parcels, although he later found out that much of it had been eaten on the way.
He began his long, lonely and icy winter. Every three hours, he would get dressed and crawl down the tunnel to the instruments behind the walls surrounding his tent. No matter how hard the wind blew, at 210 kilometres per hour or more, he kept taking notes and returning to his home.
But over time, this has become increasingly difficult. The opening to the tunnel was covered in snow, so he had to keep shovelling it out. It wasn’t easy. His fingers and toes were frozen. He could not keep warm in his tent because his sleeping bag was constantly damp. The only way he could get a little warmer was to curl up into a ball and press his fingers against his body or rub them against it.
For the first month it was still going well, but on 4 January 1931 a particularly strong storm blew the tunnel so badly that it was no longer open, but it was still possible to crawl to the needles. He cut a hole in the top of one of them and made a new door to the world. He closed it with the box that had previously held his food.
“When it wasn’t blowing, it was surprisingly calm outside. The only thing you could hear was the blood pounding in your ears. Far away in the sky, the northern light flickered and glittered. At times it looked like a billowing curtain, at others like the glow of hidden headlights. Everything around was perfectly flat. The snow stretched like the sea in all directions across the horizon. There was no life on the glacial headland. I never saw a bird or even a fly.”
And the snow around him kept getting heavier and heavier. It was now so heavy that it reached the roof of his “house”, but he was still able to cope with the circumstances until, on 19 March, one of the storms dumped so much snow on the igloo that he could no longer open his door.
August has now made a hole in the second needle. He sealed this one with a box too, only it didn’t work anymore – three days later, the igloo was full of snow. He had left his shovel outside the night before, so he could have used it to help himself. He was trapped in his tent under a thick layer of snow.
Trapped in an ice tomb
His monitoring of the weather was over. He was in a bad mood: “One does not like to change one’s habits, and this weather monitoring has become a very attractive task … When I could no longer do my job, I naturally felt I was wasting my time,” he later wrote.
Now all he could do was sit in the tent and wait. Although the plan was to rescue him in March, he did not panic. “The more months that passed and the solution was still nowhere in sight, the more convinced I was that it would come. I had no doubts about it until I was snowed in, which was very reassuring. I won’t try to explain any of this, but the fact was – and it was quite clear to me at the time – that I may not really be able to help myself, but there is a force out there working in my favour, and I am not destined to leave my bones on the ice of Greenland.”
His forced captivity under the snow began. With nothing to do, he ate less and saved some food, although he had to save from the start. The only thing he could do about the fact that he lost 18 litres of kerosene out of the 118 litres he should have had, because of his captivity, was to use it only to melt snow for drinking water, and to eat most of his food raw.
He could no longer read, he could only lie in the dark. On 13 April 1931, he wrote in his diary: “Smoked my last pipe of tobacco today. There is little left to live for.” He revealed that the only light he had was at meals consisting of oatmeal, margarine and a mixture of dried meat and lard. “As a result, the house is very cold and is covered with grey ivy all the way up to the roof. There is hardly any kerosene or candles anymore.”
Seven days later, the situation was even worse: “Only one candle left, almost no kerosene. I lay in the dark all day, imagining the perfect cruise ship and the perfect meal. My left leg is cramping up, I hope it’s not scurvy.”
On 25 April, he shared with the Diary, “It’s been 6 months since we left the base and started living on ‘pull’ rations. I have been here 20 weeks. Everything is running out. I am using the last candle. Very little kerosene left, what I’m going to do with drinking water, I don’t know. 2 biscuits for 4 days. Officially I’m running out of food, but thank God I have reserves.” The reserves were margarine and a mixture of dried meat and lard. Instead of tobacco, he now smoked tea leaves.
May Day 1931: “There are no signs of a solution. I will soon have to think about walking if I can get out. No more biscuits and candles. Now I burn ski wax for light, but it mostly produces smoke. I have no more sugar, the last tin is outside. Food is officially gone, but I still have enough basic necessities, although I’m out of lemon juice.”
As he lay in his icy tomb, he was unaware that his friends were trying to save him. They flew over the area several times by plane, but could not find the station. Winds were strong, visibility was low and the pilot could only navigate by compass. He could not see the tops of the weather data recorders and the tattered national flag that had been stuck to the tent when the weather station was set up.
At the beginning of March, they tried to reach it by land, but the trio that set out encountered a storm that lasted for five days. They could not find the flags they had stuck in the ground to show them the way to the weather station, so they had to turn back.
August lay in the darkness, occasionally illuminated by the flame of the burner. “The silence outside was almost eerie. Nothing could be heard except the beating of my own heart and the blood in my veins.” But he didn’t lose his presence of mind, even though he wondered why he was here at all:
“It used to be thought that it was a lust for wealth, but that’s long gone and men are still vagabonding. Then they said they wanted adventure. There is very little adventure in sledging or sitting on the ice. Is it curiosity, a longing to look beyond the veil of mystery and desolate nature to remote places? Perhaps, but that is not all. Why do we leave all those we love, all our good friends, all our comforts, all our joys, in order to gather a little academic information about this strange old land of ours? What do we gain by doing so?”
Boundless trust
Even if he did not find a definitive answer to the questions, he was not the least bit discouraged. His faith in his comrades was boundless. “The more time passed, the more I felt complete trust. I knew that Gino would not let me down, even if he had to wait for better weather. It was becoming clear to me that I would not be left for dead.”
But now he was thinking in concrete terms that he would have to dig himself out of his snow coffin and walk to the camp. On the fifth of May, or five months after he had been left alone, his torch burned out. He no longer had kerosene and could no longer melt water. Food had also run out, but his comrades knew that August had enough food for a maximum of five months.
On 6 May, he wrote in his diary: “Yesterday was the most beautiful day of my life. After Monday, I kept thinking about what May 5th should be known for. I could not remember anyone’s birthday or any other event, so I decided that there would be a solution. Yesterday (5 May), the burner went out while I was boiling water for my morning meal. After this so-called meal of pemmican [a mixture of dried meat and lard] and margarine, I was lying in my sack. I had just decided to start walking back on 1 June, if I could get out, when suddenly there was a desperate thud, as if a bus had driven past, followed by confused shouting.
I almost jumped out of my skin – is my house finally falling apart? A second later I realised the truth: it was someone, a human voice, shouting through the vent. The moment was beautiful. I couldn’t think what to say. I shouted back a stuttering “hooray”. They shouted, ‘you’re good’. Yes, thank God, ‘I’m perfectly fit’. ‘Thank God’, they said. It was Gino and Fredie and they were as scared as I was.”
Gino Watkins started digging a hole through the roof. Through it shone “beautiful daylight. Gino’s voice said to me: ‘Put these on.’ He handed me a pair of sunglasses. How different the outside world was from the last time I had seen it! It was May and the light was blinding. I had not imagined it would be like this. They didn’t waste any time, they pulled me out straight away and I realised I was fine. My legs were a little weak …”
They closed the weather station and set off for camp the next day. “I rode all the way on a sledge and read The Count of Monte Cristo. The conditions were good and we completed the journey in five days. It took us six weeks to get there.”
But when he arrived safely on 11 May 1931, he heard news that would have made many happy, but which was infinitely unnecessary for him – a plane had flown from England to rescue him, even though he had made it clear before he left that he did not need to be rescued. But the news that he was trapped alone on an icy plateau in the middle of a bitter winter became such a sensation in Britain that his father relented and sent a plane to rescue him. It arrived just as he was on his way to camp, but at least it proved that it was possible to fly over this area.
When he found out what a media storm he had created, August immediately sent a telegram to his fiancée Mollie: “Fit as an orchestra … Ignore the hysterical rescue bullshit. Rescue carried out as part of normal programme. No danger.” He truly believed that he had not experienced anything unusual in the previous five months and that he had never been in danger.
Bored? Ah, where is it!
“So much could have happened to him in the five months since we left him here. Even if he was in good shape and strong, apart from frostbite on his toes, and even if he could not have contracted any infectious disease on this lifeless ice cape, he could have contracted some physical ailment and died alone, in terrible pain. Or, while he was still able to go out and make scientific observations before the weather trapped him in his tent, he could have wandered too far (six steps would have been enough in an Arctic storm) and not have been able to find his way back, and would have quickly disappeared from exposure to the cold. Or later, when the tent was covered in snow – if the snow had blocked the ventilation pipe, he could have been poisoned by carbon monoxide from his cooker,” Jeremy Scot muses in his book about what could have happened to August.
There were indeed many dangers. It would have been enough for him to slip and break his leg or arm. His tent could have been destroyed by the wind or collapsed under the weight of the snow. It could have covered him so thickly that the rescue team would not have been able to find him. Or he could simply be crushed by loneliness. For five months he had not seen a living soul, for six weeks he was trapped under a thick layer of snow, for some time he could only lie in almost constant darkness.
A day or two after the solution, he wrote: “You really can’t be bored living a brand new life under such circumstances. My physical and mental condition, the weather, thoughts about the work of the expedition and what my friends back home were doing filled my mind completely. I never doubted for a moment that I would be rescued, even though it was clear to me that this could be delayed.” His faith in Gino Watkins was truly unwavering.
After five months, he was in such good condition that he quickly rebuilt his muscles and resumed his spring exploration. First, he got involved in a discussion about climbing a mountain that Gino Watkins had spotted the previous year when he was flying over the north-eastern fjord of Kangerdlugssuak. It turned out to be impregnable, so Gino, Percy Lemon and I took a motorboat and circumnavigated the northern part of Greenland, or almost 1000 kilometres. Then, finally, he returned home.
King George V rewarded him with the “Polar Medal”, such as that awarded to Ernest Shackleton, whose ship he sailed on. In January 1932, Augustus rewarded himself by marrying Mollie Montgomerie, three years his junior, a neighbour and friend of his sister Betty.
When she was 20 years old, he checked to see if she was the right match for his lifelong companion. He took her sailing off the coast of Scotland and she apparently passed the test, because in 1930, shortly before he set sail for Greenland, he asked her to marry him. During the long months when he lay alone in his damp sleeping bag, with only enough light on his igloo to read a line here and there or to write it in his diary, he thought about her.
“If wishes have any value, what I want most is to be given the following. First: to sit in an armchair in front of a blazing fire before dinner and listen to Mollie sing and play. Second: eight o’clock on a beautiful summer morning at sea, at the helm of a small boat, a refreshing breeze blowing, all sails up, with Mollie and the smell of breakfast wafting in to say good morning.”
But on their honeymoon, they didn’t just sail. They spent part of it in Sudan, which they crossed on camels, but most of their early married life was spent on the water off the coasts of Scotland and Norway. The only exception was a trip to the highest mountain in Greenland, which August simply had to climb, except that in 1935 he climbed it not with Gino Watson but with Mollie.
Gino was gone by then. In 1932, he set off on a new expedition to Greenland. As he was an excellent wildlife hunter, he would have had to feed the other three members of the expedition by hunting. In August 1932, his colleagues found his canoe on the Fjord. It was empty. All they knew was that he had gone seal hunting, but what happened next remained a mystery. Gino’s body was never found. He died aged 25.
Eccentric and conventional
August Courtauld continued to indulge in adventures, especially those at sea. He was a very special man, according to those who knew him. “He had a remarkable courage, the kind of courage that is aware of danger and is prepared to face it, and also a different kind of courage, the kind that knows no fear”, one of his friends described him.
“He was warm, passionate, inspired, determined and philosophical. He was very precise with extremely elaborate and passionate views. He expected people to do what they did upright, but he was also a good listener and took advice. He never talked about himself or told people about his adventures,” his son Stephen said of his father. It was his belief that he really lived a very ordinary life that meant he never became notorious, although the fact that he was a great individualist also contributed to this.
Most of his friends, on the other hand, thought he was slightly eccentric, though at the same time extremely English. He liked music, but only Chopin, Bach and Beethoven, and Debussy would have been too much for him, his friends said.
On the one hand, as the son of a rich father, he was a typical representative of his time, but on the other, he was completely unaware of social differences. He was very effeminate towards women and never said a bad word in their company, “but at the same time he didn’t mind going to dinner with dirty fingernails.” I suppose nobody knew him completely, agreed those who shared his time, even if he had no shortage of friends.
Most of them didn’t know anyone richer than him, “but if you looked at him, you’d never guess he had anything under his thumb”. His clothes were tattered, his fingernails were dirty, he was late for trains, he lost things, he was always forgetting things, he was not very fond of soap and water, he was neglectful and indifferent, as if he were “from another planet”. When he sailed, his cabin was “a wonderful mess, everything was lying around and you only had to add a frozen fish to get the feeling of being in a floating igloo”.
Yet he was “the bravest man I have ever met … He was not physically strong, but he had the heart of a lion … Extraordinary courage – mental strength, if you like … He had courage of mind and spirit, and he certainly possessed extraordinary physical courage and stamina,” one friend praised him.
He himself was convinced that it was nothing special. He never drew attention to himself and never exposed himself. He was so modest that it was only when his friends got into trouble that they realised he was really rich. “Sometimes we suspected, but he never told us about the many areas in which his generosity reigned undetected, almost secretly.”
Even with his dark complexion, black hair and eyebrows, and green eyes, he was not tempted by the charms of women. He found the woman of his life in his wife Mollie. “We are one,” she said of their happy years. But they did not last forever. “They didn’t know how long it had been since August had left me,” Mollie commented on the criticism that was hurled at her when she married for the second time in October 1959.
Multiple sclerosis, too strong an opponent
Not that anyone would have resented her renewed happiness, it was just a little embarrassing that she entered into a new marriage only a few months after her first husband died on 3 March 1959. He had led a truly colourful life at that time. Having spent most of his time at sea, he had explored the northern coasts of Norway for military intelligence before the outbreak of the Second World War. Although the military top brass was strongly against it, he set up his own volunteer naval force during the war and used it to support the national forces in Norway.
After the war, he attempted to cross the Atlantic in his sailing ship, but bad weather prevented him from doing so. Nevertheless, he spent the winter of 1947 in Jamaica, at the villa of Ian Fleming, James Bond’s father, so that his son could recover from polio. Although his son felt the effects throughout his life, like his father he was a passionate sailor, only to find true happiness in a different address from his father – he became a priest. When he inherited £8 million from his father, converted into today’s value, he kept for himself only what he thought he would need, because clergy salaries are low, and gave away everything else.
He was one of six children born to August and Mollie before August was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1953 at the age of 49. The disease progressed rapidly, but even now he has not given up. He sailed and raced as long as he could, but when his body became too weak, he simply tied himself to the rudder. When his body really couldn’t take it anymore, he went to the Zeileis sanatorium in Austria and spent the last years of his life there.
Meanwhile, his wife has become close to their neighbour Richard Austen Rab Butler, a well-known British politician. He was married to August’s cousin Sydney, but she died of cancer in 1954. Mollie stood by Rab so firmly during his dying that Sydney reportedly told her sister-in-law before she died that they would marry one day, although they had not thought about their feelings for each other at the time.
After Syndey’s death, however, the two became extremely close, especially as multiple sclerosis increasingly took its toll on Auguste. “Much has been written about young love, but love in middle age is like a renaissance and is stronger than anything I have ever known. I endured the sufferings of my home life in those years only because of Rab’s support.”
They were really happy together. “I’ve never met anyone who was so much fun all the time. His company was like a fire in a bitter night, both burning and glowing at the same time. No wonder I was happy.”
Mollie has outlived both her husbands. August died in 1959 at the age of 54, Rab in 1982 at the age of 79, and she celebrated her 101st birthday in 2008 and said goodbye at the beginning of the next one.
