Chapter Seventeen

THE BODY THE WORLD KNOWS AS WILKINS

*

The universe is not at all like man has described it in his books and scientific treatises. It is difficult to get away from a planet on which you are born because of the hold its energy particles have upon you. That is why I am glad I had the body the world knows as Wilkins returned to the fires, so that the ashes might more speedily be freed from any identification with me.

It was a source of profound satisfaction to have those ashes released at the North Pole, and to have it done by these new under-ice pioneers. They are going to realise my dreams. Dreams I find, which no single entity really completes in any life, but leaves for others to carry on.

Message supposedly received telepathically by Harold Sherman, August 19591

Throughout his life, Wilkins recorded everything. He described and expressed his opinions about everything he did. He wrote with insight, eloquence, and imagination. Wilkins’ diaries and correspondence from the Canadian Arctic Expedition show the enthusiastic photographer/cinematographer and reveal the emerging explorer. Fortunately, Wilkins’ diaries from this period escaped the fate that befell much of his material because, at the end of the expedition, he handed them over to the Canadian government. The government later gave them to Stefansson. After Wilkins’ death, Suzanne asked Stefansson to give them to her. Stefansson refused. Suzanne, who described Stefansson as ‘that horrid little man’, subsequently issued legal threats, but Stefansson stood his ground. Today, Wilkins’ diaries from his first expedition to the Arctic are preserved as part of the Stefansson Collection at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA.

The rest of Wilkins’ material did not fare so well.

In 1939, ten years after her marriage to Wilkins, Suzanne bought a farm in the small community of Montrose, Pennsylvania. It was a pretty farm, with a grand old two-storey weatherboard house that featured a large cellar. Suzanne named it Walhalla, to honour the small mining town in Victoria, Australia, where she was born. The land swept down from the hills, which were covered with snow in winter, past the house, to a lake. Beside the lake was a sod brick shed. Suzanne enjoyed her life as Lady Wilkins (although not strictly her right, she much preferred being called ‘Lady Suzanne’), and would attend as many social functions in New York as she could get herself invited to. Then, during socially quiet times, she dragged her cosmopolitan friends to her quaint farm in the hills of Pennsylvania. About the same time that she bought the farm, Suzanne found a lover in Winston Ross, a man ten years her junior.

Ross was a singer and actor whom Wilkins and Suzanne had met in a New York nightclub. Ross had limited career success, and details of Suzanne’s relationship with him would be irrelevant, were it not for the fact that it was he who oversaw the partial destruction of Wilkins’ legacy. [His brother, Lanny Ross, was a well-known singer and actor of the 1930s and 1940s.]

From the moment that Suzanne bought the farm at Montrose, Wilkins used it as a repository for his lifetime collection of writings, artefacts, records, films, and photographs. Every radiogram, report, medal, award, letter, diary, press clipping, or photograph — Wilkins collected and kept them all. For example, when Lady Scott invited him and Frank Hurley to dinner in London in December 1916, Wilkins kept the invitation. When he was issued a slip of paper authorising him to take photographs at the Western Front, he kept it. Even when his mother died in 1928, Wilkins wrote to his family in South Australia and asked for his letters to her to be returned. Many were. Like everything else, those letters found their way to the farm at Montrose, where they were stored, either in the damp cellar or in the shed beside the lake.

When he died, Wilkins willed all his possessions to Suzanne — not only his money, but his entire collection, along with copyright over all his film and photographs. It appears that Suzanne went through the material and destroyed all references to other women in Wilkins’ life. In particular, letters from 1919, when he met Lorna Maitland, until 1929, when he married Suzanne, were destroyed. It cannot be accurately ascertained what Suzanne got rid of, simply because it is not known what was there originally.*

[* Lorna Maitland never married. She died in London in 1972. In her last years, she was cared for by her sister’s children. She left no letters or indication that she had ever been engaged to Wilkins. Her great-nieces and nephews were unaware she had ever known the famous polar explorer. Among the few possessions she had at the time of her death were a series of her paintings and the French Legion of Honour medal she won during World War I.]

Also, after Wilkins’ death, Suzanne was soon trying to cash in on her husband’s name, offering to lend material she felt appropriate to potential biographers for a price. Following a number of disputes with authors and filmmakers, she locked the material away and guarded it jealously.

Suzanne became a sad sight in her declining years. She still insisted on wearing her expensive ball gowns, even while she walked the rustic streets of Montrose. Winston Ross continued to look after the woman whom he had once hoped would kick-start his acting career, but the visits to New York became less frequent as Suzanne slowly went blind. By the 1970s, Ross, having spent 30 years with an older woman, sought a younger one. He began a relationship with Marley Stevens, who had been married six times previously and had produced three children to three different husbands. While Suzanne was literally too blind to see what was going on, Ross began entertaining Stevens at the farmhouse. No doubt, he explained to his new partner what the papers and artefacts in the house were all about.

Suzanne died in 1975 and, in her will, left everything to Ross. This meant that he and Stevens were now in charge of the entire Wilkins Collection. They owned the farm and the Wilkins material, but had no income. Shortly after Suzanne’s death, Ross scrawled on the back of a photograph of her:

What a wasted life it seems. Does it matter? Does anything? I’m deluged with duty — should I bother? All rooms up hill and down dale are filled. Does posterity care? Junk sells at all yards and we have historical junk.2

A feature of Wilkins’ collection, not really touched upon until now, was his collection of letters and envelopes. He had partly funded his expeditions by carrying what philatelists call ‘covers’. Before one of his expeditions in Antarctica, for example, Wilkins would have special envelopes printed. Subscribers would pay one dollar, two dollars, or even more for a stamped envelope, which would then be cancelled at some remote place. Such covers were, and still are, prized among philatelists. Stashed at Montrose, when Suzanne died, was a philatelist’s mother-load. Wilkins had not only kept hundreds, if not thousands, of his expedition covers, but he had bundled them together with his general correspondence.

Around 1980, Ross was in New York and met a philatelist, Paul Rodzianko. Somehow the conversation got onto polar covers, and Ross mentioned that he had a cellar-full of letters from one of the greatest polar explorers of the 20th century. Ross invited Rodzianko to Montrose to have a look. Rodzianko was obviously impressed, because he called his friend, Dr David Larson, and revealed what he had found. Rodzianko and Larson sat down with Ross and Stevens, and told them about the goldmine on which they were sitting. They also informed them, quite rightly, that leaving the letters in the damp basement or shed would ruin them. Rodzianko later explained:

It was clear from the outset that neither of the custodians of the material had any idea of what anything was worth and in fact were keeping things in such a horrid state that all of it was gradually being destroyed by the conditions and their sloppiness.3

Rodzianko, Larson, Ross, and Stevens agreed to stage a spectacular philately show in New York, which they did in 1981. It was hugely successful, and Ross now saw a way to make money from the explorer’s stuff he had inherited.

The four ‘partners’ set up the Wilkins Memorial Foundation, and Ross thought the best way to capitalise on the collection was to replace the sod brick shed with a tin one and turn it into a ‘Wilkins Museum’. They did that too, although, not surprisingly, not many people drove to Montrose, Pennsylvania, to see it. Needing some quick cash to keep his museum afloat while he waited for the public to turn up, Ross sold the polar covers to Rodzianko and Larson. Rodzianko was primarily interested in the Arctic, and Larson in the Antarctic. They divided the collection accordingly, and it not only included the covers, but Wilkins’ letters inside. [Ross sold other material to interested visitors. Australian businessman and adventurer Dick Smith visited the farmhouse, and purchased Wilkins’ car and a polar sledge.]

The correspondence was remarkable: 15-page letters from Wilkins to his parents written from Banks Island when he wintered there with Stefansson; long letters to Suzanne written from the Nautilus submarine as it made its way north from Spitsbergen in 1931; and cramped letters, page after page, in his small handwriting, from the Wyatt Earp, or while he was flying north from Canada to look for lost Russian aviators. Ross never bothered to separate the correspondence from the covers, and simply handed some of it over to Rodzianko and Larson.

‘Neither of us was interested in World War I’, Larson explained recently. ‘We were interested in the polar material, so that’s mostly what we took.’ [During the 1990s, when Rodzianko divorced, he sold his collection of Wilkins’ covers and letters to Larson, who still retains them.]

For about two years, the relationship between the four partners of the Wilkins Memorial Foundation was amicable. Rodzianko, Larson, Ross, and Stevens incorporated the foundation, and Stevens was hired as an employee to administer it. Rodzianko and Larson displayed their covers at philatelic shows, while Ross and Stevens waited for the crowds to come to Montrose.

But after two years, it dawned on Ross and Stevens that a museum to an Australian explorer in the backwoods of Pennsylvania might not be the income-earner they had first envisaged. Seeing that Rodzianko and Larson were earning more from displaying the covers, Ross first asked for, and then demanded, the letters back. That’s when things turned ugly. Rodzianko and Larson claimed they had paid for them, and refused to hand them over. Ross argued that they had stolen items from the farmhouse. Ross and Stevens engaged a lawyer and, through a court in Pennsylvania, sued for the return of the Wilkins covers, which included the correspondence, along with any other material that they had ‘sold’. Rodzianko and Larson reacted by hiring a lawyer to stall the action in Pennsylvania for as long as possible, while they each counter-sued Ross and Stevens from different states.

The whole mess got very expensive very quickly. Ross and Stevens were legally defending themselves on two separate fronts, while they were pouring money into a legal action in Pennsylvania that was being stalled. Ross and Stevens soon ran up a huge debt, and were forced to surrender. An agreement was reached in the court in Pennsylvania: Rodzianko and Larson got to keep their material, and Ross could recoup his crippling legal fees by selling his collection to an appropriate institution.

The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, Ohio, had established the Byrd Polar Research Center (BPRC) in 1960, to collect and collate data from polar research. Attached to the BPRC, operated jointly with the university library, was an archival program. That program was already collecting the papers of one of America’s greatest polar explorers, Admiral Richard Byrd, so acquiring the collection of another polar explorer — a contemporary of Byrd — seemed a good fit. Ross sold his collection to OSU in 1985 for $125,000.

Library staff and students from OSU drove to the farmhouse in Montrose, and collected material in a truck. The enormous size of the collection, along with the fact that boxes were haphazardly stored in the farmhouse, in the shed, and even in a nearby Baptist church, meant that the OSU staff did not collect everything. A large amount of material was overlooked.

Ross died in November 1996 and, in his will, left everything he owned to Stevens. The mother-of-three now owned the farmhouse in Pennsylvania and the remaining Wilkins material.

Stevens died in 1998, and, as a result of a family dispute shortly before her death, ignored two of her children in her will, and left everything to her youngest son. [I have purposely not named the son of Marley Stevens who inherited the farmhouse.] Stevens’ oldest son, Michael (who had been legally adopted by Winston Ross) was excluded from the will. Michael Ross lived in Michigan, and knew that there was still Wilkins material in the farmhouse. He also knew that his younger half-brother had no interest in Wilkins or in preserving any of the historic material. Concerned that it would be sold or destroyed, Michael drove to Pennsylvania and secretly took some of the material. Unable to carry all of it, he simply filled the back seat and trunk of his car with boxes, and drove back to Michigan. The remaining material stayed at the farm.

Stevens’ youngest son arrived in Pennsylvania shortly after Michael Ross had departed, and immediately put the property and its contents up for auction. Before the auction of the building and the land, the contents of the house — which included Wilkins’ furniture, clothing, and remaining records and artefacts — were auctioned in job lots. The advertising flyer produced for the sale boasted:

This auction is full of many surprises. Uncovering new treasures every day. This is the former residence of Sir Hubert and Lady Wilkins and this home has many unusual and historical items.4

In fact, there were so many antiques, works of art, books, and other ‘surprises’ that two auctions were run concurrently throughout Sunday 25 October 1998. An assistant working for the auctioneers explained that it was impossible to go through all the boxes and separate the items:

Oh yeah. I remember that sale. That was a big one. We sold it for a few dollars a box. It was stuff the kids could play with, like old books. And little trinkets. People love that junk. Heaps of stuff I’d never seen before.

When asked about the fate of the unsold boxes of papers or manuscripts, the assistant shrugged and replied, ‘Weren’t no value in that stuff. At the end of the day it was thrown away.’5

Safely home in Michigan, Michael Ross stored 15 boxes in an Amish barn, and never looked inside them until I arrived in September 2014.