ONE

“He Never Discussed Anything Seriously”

AT THE AGE of eighteen, Gino Watkins nearly killed himself climbing in the Alps. The way he responded to that brush with death reveals the mercurial genius that would spring full-blown in Greenland five years later. And yet. . . . 

Gino’s father, the fourth successive Henry George Watkins, was a colonel in the Coldstream Guards, a member of the landed gentry who managed slowly to fritter away his fortune, and a keen outdoorsman. One day in 1914 as Gino, aged seven, watched his father and uncle play lawn tennis at the uncle’s country house, a footman interrupted the game with a telegram telling the colonel to report to the Allied front in France. Shortly thereafter, Gino sent a letter to the trenches: “My dear Father. How goes it. How many Germans have you killed lately. . . . I should love to join in the fighting. We go fishing in the lake. I hope you are having a very nice time.”

The Watkins family lived in a spacious house on Eaton Place in London’s upscale Belgravia district, complete with a beloved Nanny Dennis and several servants. (The nanny would stay in the household throughout Gino’s lifetime.) Holidays drew the Watkins clan to Dumbleton, the uncle’s pastoral estate in Worcestershire (“ponies to ride, a lake with boats”), and to grandmother’s Lilliput, on Poole Harbour near the south coast (“picnics on the sand, bathing in the sea, and shrimps with tea”). Yet Gino had been labeled since his birth in January 1907 as, in that classic Edwardian formula, “a delicate child.” His mother, née Jennie Monsell, was clearly disappointed in the scrawny infant she had just borne. “Well, Jennie,” her own mother offered, looking over her shoulder, “he’s got a neat little face.”

Because of his delicacy, Gino was held back from boarding school the first year. Yet from infancy on, he displayed a rebellious, even an anarchic, bent. “You couldn’t make him eat properly,” his mother swore. “He liked to sit at the table in front of the mirror so that he could watch himself making awful faces as he was eating. . . . And once when he was given his bread and butter in bed he squashed it up in his hand and threw it at the ceiling.”

After the births of a younger sister and brother, Gino became a tyrant. He forbade his siblings to play with other children, and terrorized them with tales of dead men under the drawing room carpet or condemned prisoners haunting the neighborhood. Gino himself was terrified by ghosts, and couldn’t sit through Peter Pan without hiding under his seat. Matters were not helped when his father came back from a trip to Russia with a live baby bear in a cage. Gino had been promised a teddy bear, but on first meeting, “Popoff” hurled himself against the cage’s netting. The terrified boy lurched backward, colliding with the wall behind him.

Fragile, fearful, or no, Gino was gifted with a wild imagination, and his father’s wanderlust seeped into his own spirit. He kept close tabs on the war, and after the Armistice, when Watkins père stayed on in France, Gino traveled solo to the continent to join him. Arriving in Boulogne two hours before his father could get there to meet him, he was happily chatting away in a sidewalk café when Daddy arrived.

With his father, Gino toured the ruined landscape of the Somme and the Aisne, at age eleven helping soldiers salvage valuables from the mud. The horror of the war only dimly pierced the “very nice time” he wrote his grandmother that he was having. “There are not any houses standing in the village here. I have seen a lot of broken-up towns. They are much worse than I thought they would be. . . . The other day Daddy and I went to a grotto. There were lots of caves and rocks there and a great many bombs and bullets and helmets and machine-gun bands lying about, it was a great pity all the caves were spoilt by shells.”

After the first year’s delay, Gino was enrolled in Bexhill Academy, a boarding school near Newcastle upon Tyne in the far north. During his four years there, he proved to be a mediocre student and showed little interest in sports, but left a mark for two odd achievements: he swam the length of a forty-foot pool underwater, and he built a crystal wireless set functional enough to pick up Morse code signals from ships in the English Channel.

After Bexhill, at age twelve, Gino applied to the Royal Navy (a common practice for schoolboys at the time). He passed the entrance interview but failed his exams. No doubt his father had dreamed of a military career for his son, but no path in life would have been more constraining to his antic spirit. Gino himself expressed no disappointment at failing to pursue the life of a midshipman.

The navy setback took a perverse toll, however. The Colonel had set his heart on Gino’s attending Eton, his own school, but the failed exams derailed Gino’s acceptance at that elite academy. Instead he would attend Lancing College, a second-rate public-school situated near the dreary south coast of West Sussex. The school was renowned for its grim Christian austerity and distrust of any education smacking of the progressive.

Very little testimony as to how Gino fared during his five and a half years at Lancing has trickled down, but Jamie Scott, who met Gino at Cambridge, got to know him better than anyone else, and later wrote his biography, insisted, “Lancing, with its stern, bracing life, gave him the health he lacked and made his body almost as strong as his will.”

A fellow student during his Lancing years was Evelyn Waugh (though there is no evidence the boys were friends), who left a searing portrait of school life in his mordant memoir, A Little Learning. Waugh had been slated to go up to Sherborne, but after his older brother Alec wrote a scandalous roman à clef about his own years at the school, Evelyn became persona non grata there. “Lancing was monastic, indeed, and mediaeval in the full sense of the English Gothic revival,” Waugh wrote. The school diet was appalling: “The food in Hall would have provoked mutiny in a mid-Victorian poor-house and it grew steadily worse.” Waugh might have taken a clue of what was to come from the first remarks he heard out of the mouths of boys returning for their second year: “O God. Same old House Room. Same old smell.”

Dress and behavior were rigidly codified: “Costume was entirely subfusc for the first two years; then coloured socks were permissible; in the Sixth Form coloured ties. For the first year hands must be kept from the trouser pockets, for the second year they could be inserted but with the jacket raised, not drawn back.” The yards themselves were strictly regulated: “Grass, in which the grounds abounded, was in general forbidden territory; every plot was the preserve of some privileged caste, the most sacred being the Lower Quad, where only school prefects might tread.”

Beatings with canes were carried out routinely, dispassionately, by everyone from the housemaster to upperclassmen, with only the meagerest explanation as to why they had been earned. In general, though “friendlessness was at first inevitable . . . , odium was personal and something quite new to me.”

Waugh survived Lancing by ducking his head, conforming, and saving his satiric wrath for adulthood. Gino Watkins, though, seems to have taken a different tack. On the thin testimony of a couple of classmates, he seems to have floated through on disdain and quixotic rebellion. Recalled fellow student Robert Lea: “We used to spend our time laughing at each other, laughing at the absurdities of our subjects and of those who taught us, always magnifying the slightest chance of a joke. Gino was continually laughing at all around him, especially at himself. . . . He never discussed anything seriously.”

According to Jamie Scott, who was a Cambridge blue in rugby and a strong cricketeer, at Lancing Gino “was no more serious at games.”

Football [soccer] was cold and pointless. He did not want to score a goal any more than he wanted to be kicked in the shins. “And,” he said, “you get so cold rushing through the air like this.” The only possible way to get amusement out of such a sport was by shouting, “Pass, pass!” until he got the ball and then kicking it into the dyke which ran beside the field. Cricket was a waste of pleasant weather.

Yet Gino found joy and accomplishment in swimming and cross-country running, representing Lancing in meets, and in learning to shoot a rifle in the school’s officers’ training corps. Even here, his rebellious streak prevailed, as when, on an away outing for a shooting match, he took his crew to a public house to get rowdy drunk. At Lancing Gino also discovered a passion for climbing the school buildings. “[S]ome of the things he did were almost too spectacular to watch,” Robert Lea testified. “I remember on another occasion he climbed round the Masters Tower, an incredibly difficult business; I have never heard of anyone else who tried it.”

During the Lancing years, on holidays Gino often joined his father for tramping and hunting excursions, one of the best a winter jaunt through southern Ireland. Uneasy feelings over Irish versus English rule were ironed into bonhomie, as the gamekeeper told Gino and his father, “It only cost four shillings to get drunk under the English and now it costs a pound—glory be to God, Sir, we’d loik the English back.” That evening in the inn, dancing sprang up. The worn-out father went to bed, only to be wakened by his seventeen-year-old son: “The ball’s broken out again and the band is drunk. It’s splendid fun—you must come.” During the Cambridge years, dancing became one of Gino’s great passions.

After the war, Henry George Watkins Sr. lingered as often and as long as he could in France and Switzerland, hunting, hiking, and spending his fortune. The family, no longer able to afford Eaton Place, moved its ménage to Onslow Crescent, in a less toney London district. Tension with Jennie about raising the three children went mostly unspoken, even as it worked its harm. When he was home, she wrote her husband, “Gino is a darling, much quieter than he used to be,” and “I love the children to like home and each other best.”

Gino dearly loved his mother, Scott later remembered. But the life he yearned for lay far beyond London and Lancing. In the summer of 1923 Colonel Watkins brought the whole family, including Nanny Dennis, over to France for six weeks of rest and play out of Chamonix. At first the family sampled only the tame tourist excursions to the foot of the Mer de Glace, the Mauvais Pas, and the Glacier des Bossons. In the evenings sixteen-year-old Gino danced with the hotel gigolo, but soon he was slipping away unannounced, to be discovered by his father ensconced in the guides’ hut listening to their tales of derring-do and begging them for itineraries.

One day he told his father that the ascent of the Aiguille de l’M, the graceful tower that stares over Chamonix from the south, was an easy climb. A guide led the way, roped to Gino, who was roped to his father. Halfway up, the Colonel lost it. In his own account, he was stymied in “a thing called a pillar box out of which it had seemed impossible to move.” Gino, who had seconded the pitch without any trouble, called out, “Let yourself swing out on the rope, Daddy.” As the trembling, exhausted man, with a hearty pull from the guide, floundered onto the belay ledge, Gino chirped, “Oh, Daddy, I’m afraid you aren’t really enjoying yourself!”

Gino couldn’t get enough of this new sport, mountaineering. Yet in an odd way, that enthusiasm had nothing to do with exploring. As a compositional prodigy, Mozart had been steeped in, obsessed by, music since early childhood. By the age of twelve he had written eight symphonies and his first opera. But Watkins the exploratory prodigy emerged only at age twenty. Robert Lea, remembering Gino at Lancing laughing at everything, added, “He never spoke about his future work. Personally I doubt if he had any intention of exploring.” A couple of years later, Gino sat down with his father to discuss his career prospects. As the Colonel reported, “[T]hat night after dinner for the first time he expressed his love of the out-door life and his hope of an out-door profession. Farming, army life, Kenya and Canada were discussed, but exploration as a profession entered neither of our heads.”

Back at Lancing after Chamonix, Gino discovered a master named E. B. Gordon who was keen to learn climbing. The next spring the two drove up to the Lake District for a week based in the Wastwater Hotel in Wasdale Head. With another novice, they managed to get up climbs on the Great Gable and Scafell. According to Gordon, “Gino always led. He never did anything sensational for the sake of his reputation; he used to get very tired; he hated getting cold, but he never gave up anything which he had started.”

In the summer of 1925, after graduating from Lancing, Gino made his way back to Chamonix without his father. Gordon joined him briefly, but after the master left, Gino found other ropemates among the locals, including an ambitious young Frenchman determined to win his guide’s certificate. Among his deeds, Gino ticked off the Aiguille de l’M and the Grands Charmoz, the latter in deep snow. “None of the guides at the Montenvers will believe we did it,” he bragged in a letter home.

On the Charmoz, Gino suffered his first close calls. His account in the same letter mixes fear with thrill:

Coming down a great stone came bounding down a couloir in which we were: it just missed my head and flicked my arm. I thought it had broken it to begin with, as I could hardly move it, but it is much better now but very stiff. Coming down the glacier near the bottom where we were unroped, my leg went through into a crevasse, which was very frightening.

Near the end of summer, on the verge of returning to England, Gino extended his holiday when the Colonel came over to hunt chamois with his son in the Austrian Tirol. The local jaeger, or hunter, was joined by a mountain guide. For several days the foursome ranged the crags and cirques, and Gino killed his first chamois with a single shot.

Father and son dined on roast chamois that evening in the hut, and were off again early the next morning. The guide led up a steep couloir, bypassing snow-filled crevasses, on terrain tricky enough that, as the Colonel would report, “Often the man in front had to give a helping hand to the man behind him.”

At the top of the couloir, the guide set off to traverse an eighteen-inch ledge above a high cliff. Gino followed, rifle and rucksack on his back, as his father and the jaeger dubiously crept across the exposed passageway.

To steady himself, Gino reached above his head and clasped a protruding rock. It came loose in his hand, and he fell backward off the cliff, plunging, bouncing, and scraping to a halt 150 feet below. A thin band of snow had snagged his body just above another precipice. Knocked out cold, Gino later said he had felt no pain during the fall.

On the ledge, the three men stood paralyzed, unable to spot Gino’s body below. Realizing the situation, Gino sent up a feeble cry, “I’m all right!”

During the fifteen minutes it took the guide and the jaeger to climb carefully down to the victim (leaving the Colonel marooned on the ledge), Gino assessed his injuries. He knew he was badly wounded, but he grew impatient. Spotting a chamois perched on an outcrop far above, he retrieved his rifle, braced himself in the snow, and fired. The shot missed.

The rescue down to the mountain hut took three hours. When the Colonel first saw his son, he was being carried on the guide’s back with the jaeger steadying them both. Blood was gushing freely from Gino’s head, and he later admitted he was “in excruciating pain.” There followed, across several days, a carry 3,700 feet down the valley with Gino immobilized on a stretcher made of two poles and a blanket; an overnight in the inn with a doctor wielding chloroform and sewing stitches; and a final trundle down to the highest village in a wheelbarrow.

Father and son would never again share a ramble in the outdoors. Three weeks later Gino went up to Cambridge. For the rest of his life, he parted his hair to the right side, to cover the scar on his left from the long fall in the Tirol.

* * *

At the age of twenty, Gino Watkins sounds like the kind of daredevil who learns little or nothing from his near misses. Indeed, he seems almost to revel in them. Of course most young men who take crazy risks think they’re immortal, but one wonders whether for Gino the accident in the Tirol served as some kind of release of the rage or joy of the anarchic baby who had wadded up bread and butter and thrown it at the ceiling. In Greenland three years later, Gino would unnerve his teammates by claiming that in climbing, “It was the thrill of being frightened that I most enjoyed.”

If so, that psychic bent looms as the antithesis of what you normally want in an expedition leader. In the makeup of great explorers such as Nansen, Amundsen, or Shackleton, for all their boldness, there is no germ of the daredevil or thrill-seeker.

At Trinity College, during the first months, Gino was forbidden by his doctor to open a book because of the concussion from his fall. Instead, he at once applied to join the Cambridge University Air Squadron, the first recruit for the first civil flying school established in Britain. At the end of his apprenticeship, belying the indifferent student he had been at Bexhill and Lancing, he won top marks in a field of ninety.

Flying in small planes partook for Gino of the vagabond freedom of climbing. Yet in his second year, he suffered another close call. On a training flight, as he practiced aerial photography and navigation from the copilot’s seat, the plane lost its engine. The pilot glided groundward, hoping for a soft landing, but struck the earth hard and flipped the plane upside down. Having not bothered to fix his seat belt, Gino was flung from the plane, while the pilot was suspended upside down in the cockpit. Running up, Gino cheerily inquired, “You all right, sir?” before freeing the man, then persuading him to pose for a photo atop the wreckage, like a great hunter with his kill.

One more thrill sought and found, one more devil dared?

Neglecting his studies through his first year at Cambridge, Gino escaped with flying and excursions up north to rock-climb. In the summer of 1926 Gino returned to Chamonix, hooked up again with the ambitious French climber angling to become a guide, and knocked off an impressive roster of some twenty guideless ascents and traverses, including the Aiguilles des Droites, Courtes, and Moine, the traverse of the Grépon, and a long traverse of Monte Rosa.

At Cambridge Gino further indulged his appetite for building climbing. There had long been a tradition at the university, with its crenellated and decorative Gothic and Renaissance architecture mingling with idiosyncrasies in Georgian brick, of illicit forays by undergraduates, usually at night. A decade after Watkins’s university tenure, a now-legendary guidebook called The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by one Whipplesnaith, sang the deeds of dozens of outlaw ascensionists, all of them nameless but well photographed, complete with precise route descriptions, friendly disputes over difficulty, and tips for avoiding arrest.

Gino’s building climbs, however, seem to have been performed solo, outside of any coterie of like-minded conspirators. And they reached beyond Cambridge. When a friend remarked on the inspiring sight of Salisbury Cathedral, 140 miles southwest of the university, Gino recounted his assault: “Yes, that’s just what I thought as soon as I saw it. . . . I slipped off in the dark. I started climbing the spire in gym shoes, and was going quite well when it started to rain and the stones became impossibly slippery. I had quite a job getting down.”

Gino’s passions for flying and climbing may have sprung from his wanderlust, but they did not point him toward exploration. The routes he tackled on Scafell or the Chamonix aiguilles were classic test pieces. Over Christmas 1926 Gino joined his Lancing friends Quintin Riley and the master E. B. Gordon at the ski resort of Arosa in eastern Switzerland. New to the game, Gino took to skiing as hungrily as he had to flying and climbing. By the fourth day of instruction, he was launched onto the expert slopes.

Three weeks later, on returning to Cambridge, he found the prospect of a second term so dreary that he made a snap decision. A friend greeted him outside Trinity: “Hallo, Watkins, you’ve been to Switzerland.”

“Yes, and I’m just going back.”

“But the term’s started: you can’t.”

“Why not?”

Gino recruited part of his family to join him for several weeks of winter sport and dancing in the Arosa inn. Not content with skiing, Gino also tried to master the luge. Speed itself was the drug. One evening he took a run when the slope was officially closed, and as he hurtled through the twilight at some thirty-five miles an hour, he collided head-on with a horse-drawn sleigh. As he careened off the luge, one shaft of it pierced his thigh. Laid up for two weeks with the serious wound, he hung out in the inn. “I must say he bears these things most wonderfully,” his father wrote home. “Luckily he doesn’t mind noise, as until we can get him upstairs he is between a telephone and a jazz band, which he likes.” Soon he was back on skis, perfecting the art of falling only on the side of his good leg.

During that outing at Arosa, Gino turned twenty. Within the year, Jamie Scott, his Cambridge classmate, would meet him, and Scott has left a vivid description of the man who would so change the course of his own life:

He wore a double-breasted blue suit and his fair hair, parted on the right side, swept smoothly back above a high unwrinkled forehead. His face was thin in flesh but not narrow, for the bones on either side ran straight down from the temples till they suddenly turned inwards and slightly toward the angle of his jaw. Looking at his mouth one noticed chiefly a line of very white teeth. His eyes as he bent over his papers were shaded by long lashes, like a girl’s, but when he looked up one saw, as one had expected from his fair coloration, that they were close and blue. They were lively eyes which mirrored his thoughts before his lips could frame them. . . . They were the only feature he could not control. . . . 

Perhaps the best photograph of Watkins in his early twenties captures him in a pinstriped three-piece suit with a neatly knotted tie closing a point collar. His left hand is tucked into his pants pocket, while his right, resting on crossed knees, holds a cigarette, even though Gino seldom smoked. He had developed the affectation of carrying a rolled umbrella everywhere, even on sunny days. Slight of build, he is evidently handsome and exudes confidence, though his pose projects the faint suggestion of a dandy.

Feckless student, flamboyant climber and skier, thrill-seeker, lover of dancing, jazz, and parties—this vignette seems irreconcilable with the man who would become one of the great Arctic explorers of the twentieth century. The single event that transformed Gino Watkins was the lecture by Raymond Priestley that he attended his first Cambridge year. We have only a vague idea what Priestley spoke about that evening, but no polar veteran had more extraordinary deeds under his belt.

Because of the intense antipathy that grew between Scott and Shackleton on Scott’s first quest for the South Pole (1901–04), only a single man signed on as a member both of Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907–09) and Scott’s fatal Terra Nova exploit (1910–13). That man was Raymond Priestley, and he remains more than a century later one of the most underappreciated of all the British explorers of Antarctica. (Priestley, in fact, asked Shackleton for permission to join Scott in 1910, but after grudgingly acquiescing, “the Boss” treated his former teammate as a traitor for the rest of his life.)

On the Nimrod expedition, Priestley was the key man enlisted with the thankless job of laying depots along the Beardmore Glacier to support Shackleton’s final thrust, which met defeat only 112 miles short of the South Pole. Three years later, Priestley was in charge of Scott’s six-man Northern Party, exploring Victoria Land west of the team’s base while Scott and his four doomed companions pushed through to the pole. When the expedition ship was blocked by ice from picking up Priestley’s team after its eight-week stint, the men dug a cramped snow cave into a drift and wintered over for seven months, barely subsisting on seal and penguin. As soon as spring came in October 1912, the men, crippled by enteritis, hobbled for five weeks, dragging their sledges along the coast, and barely made it back to the base at Cape Evans.

That magnificent survival feat was utterly eclipsed by the slowly unfolding tragedy of Scott’s polar party, as they weakened and perished on their desperate trek back from the pole. In Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s masterly The Worst Journey in the World, the Northern Party’s epic goes all but unmentioned. In 1914 Priestley wrote his own account, in a vivid memoir called Antarctic Adventure. The book is virtually unread today.

The talk that Gino and Quintin Riley attended that evening in 1925 was titled “Man in the Polar Regions.” After Shackleton’s catastrophic failure and survival tour de force on the Endurance expedition from 1914 to 1917, Antarctic exploration had lapsed into a limbo for more than a decade. No doubt Priestley’s talk was full of hints instead for great discoveries to be made in the Arctic. Gino was not shy about approaching the veteran, and Priestley, taking a liking to the young man, introduced him to James Wordie, a tutor at St. John’s College in Cambridge. Wordie had been one of the twenty-two men left on Elephant Island after the sinking of the Endurance, while Shackleton, Frank Worsley, and four others performed the now-legendary open-boat journey and traverse of South Georgia Island that saved the whole team.

Despite that harrowing ordeal, Wordie was still keen on exploring the polar regions a decade later. Gino learned, in fact, that the tutor was leading a small team to probe the east coast of Greenland in the summer of 1926, only months away. Unfortunately, the roster for that exploit (which included August Courtauld) was full; but Wordie promised Gino a berth on a kindred expedition slated for 1927.

At once Gino started training for that grand campaign, making long runs around the quads and through the streets of Cambridge, devising a rigorous exercise program, and sleeping with an open window and only a light sheet covering him on the coldest nights to toughen himself up for the Arctic. All the climbing in the Lakes and the Alps, the manic nighttime ascents of university buildings, even the full-bore skiing holidays, became part of his training. Meanwhile, he devoured the rich literature of Arctic exploration dating all the way back to the first European attempts to force the Northwest Passage, starting with John Cabot in 1497.

And he reformed his slacker’s approach to studying. According to Jamie Scott, at the end of his freshman year, as exams loomed, Gino hired a “crammer” to fill his head with all the knowledge from the books in a certain course that Gino had never opened all term. As Gino sat nonchalantly in the back of the room, paying only half-attention, imagining that he could somehow absorb the learning by osmosis, the crammer exploded: “I’ve got no time for you, Watkins. I’m far too busy with people who have some chance of passing this exam.”

Scott: “The effect was dynamite. He walked back to his room and took out the books which he had bought but never opened. He had only a fortnight in which to do a year’s work, but he had found his inspiration.” Gino passed the course with first-class marks.

From his truant flight to Switzerland to perfect his skiing, Gino returned to Cambridge in the spring of 1927, excited to join the expedition to Greenland the coming summer. But James Wordie had bad news. For various reasons, finances among them, the veteran explorer had been unable to pull the trip together. He would have to postpone the expedition, he darkly confessed, for at least a year, maybe two, maybe even longer.

At age twenty, with no expedition experience of his own more daring than a couple of trips to tourist-thronged Chamonix, almost any budding explorer would have bitten his knuckles and accepted fate. Gino chose a different course.

Jamie Scott, writing in 1935 after sharing two major expeditions with his best friend, glides past the extraordinary challenge Gino set for himself in the spring of 1927 as if it were merely par for the Watkins course: “Gino’s reaction was original, but natural enough to himself. He wanted to visit the Arctic: there was nobody to take him: therefore he would lead an expedition of his own.”