As far as Markham was concerned, Gregory had only himself to blame for his ‘misconception’, and two days later he circulated a memorandum among RGS members of the Joint Committee reminding them exactly where their loyalties lay. Dr Gregory had turned down a position analogous to that of Sir Wyville Thomson in Challenger, Markham explained with all his old economy of truth, demanding instead ‘that he should be Director of Science generally, that he should have executive control with regard to routes, the sole executive command of landing parties and of everything on land. This is impossible because Captain Scott has already been appointed by the two Presidents … to be Commander of the Expedition, involving executive control of everything connected with it, and undivided responsibility. It would be a breach of faith to take away from that position, and it would ruin the Expedition, for it would lead to the loss of Captain Scott’s services … A divided command is but another name for failure and disaster. Your President could not agree to the change, and, if it is made, would have to give up all responsibility and withdraw from all active concern in the Expedition.’
With rather more enemies about him than friends, one would have thought the threat of resignation a dangerous card for Markham to play, but the old ragtag alliance of professors, hydrographers, time servers, jobbers, incompetents and half-senile apostates was playing a still riskier one. As early as 27 January, Poulton had sounded out the expedition’s newly appointed second-in-command, Albert Armitage, suggesting to him that if they could force Scott into resignation, the position could be his. ‘How far,’ he concluded, with an Iago-like instinct for the weak spot of a merchant service man, ‘anything but the ambition of a few young naval officers is likely to be satisfied by this Expedition you may judge by this article in the PG [a piece on the coming expedition in the Pall Mall Gazette] … ’
‘It was a rotten letter from someone who might have known better,’ and Poulton probably knew it himself the moment he sent it. He had only written it in the first place because he believed Scott responsible for the piece of naval self-glorification in the Pall Mall, but by the time he realised his mistake it was too late to prevent his letter escaping into the public domain – ‘If a murderer were to write to you,’ Scott had asked Armitage with a nicely sophistical twist, ‘saying that he intended killing someone, and marked it “Confidential”, would you hold it so?’
If Poulton’s attempt to withdraw his bribe represents a certain restoration of decencies, however, it did not represent any weakening, and at a meeting of the Joint Committee a week later, the Gregory faction countered with a set of Instructions that would have given their man the final say in all the key questions touching the expedition. ‘My Dear Armitage,’ Scott wrote on the ninth, ‘Things are now in a condition from which I can see no way out but resignation.’
‘I called and found him very much depressed over the whole business,’ Armitage recalled. ‘He said that he would resign and that I had better take over, etc etc. I persuaded him to wait and talk the matter over the following day. Sir Clements, Scott and I had a pow-wow over it, and the two of us got Scott to stick to his guns.’
Other than Armitage’s account – and he always had a tendency to be the hero of his own narratives – there is no evidence that Scott thought of giving in, though Markham too noted the ‘visible effect’ the whole business was having on him. Even Markham himself was beginning to feel the strain, but after another bad-tempered committee meeting that saw him jeered out of the room, he bounced back with a series of manoeuvres and countercoups that restored the critical control of the ship’s future movements and overall control to Scott. ‘Scott came in the morning,’ Markham triumphantly noted in his diary for 7 May, ‘and told me that yesterday Goldie’s [Markham’s henchman] committee telegraphed … asking Gregory if he agreed. Gregory answered no, which the committee considered to be a resignation.’
The ‘Gregory question’ had been ‘a tale of dullness, intrigue … spite … malignity’ and ‘incompetence’ from the first, as Markham put it, but that did not stop it having its repercussions for Scott. It is impossible to say whether the science carried out by the expedition would have been any better or different if Gregory had been in charge, but the price of Markham’s victory was not just the continued hostility or scepticism of the RS towards all the expedition’s scientific results, but the grotesque association of Scott’s name with naval amateurism.
If there is any one certainty in all this, it is that the only man who emerged from the whole tawdry business with any credit is Scott. It was not his fault that the RS and the whole scientific establishment lacked the guts to stand up to Markham. He was not to blame, either, for that mix of arrogance and folie de grandeur that Gregory brought to all their negotiations. ‘It will be understood what an enormous weight of anxiety and worry was added … by this intolerable nuisance,’ Markham for once wrote without exaggeration. ‘It would have driven most men out of their senses. It had a visible effect on Scott: but he bore it with most wonderful prudence, tact, and patience.’
It was not just Markham who was impressed, and even Gregory and his circle could scarcely find a hard word for him personally. ‘I admire immensely Scott’s powers of organization,’ Gregory’s friend and scientific successor for the duration of the journey to South Africa, George Murray, wrote to Markham at the height of the controversy, ‘even among affairs that must have been unfamiliar to him. Moreover I am sure we will be all of us happy on board which means so much as regards getting the best work out of men.’ ‘I went to see Scott,’ recalled Armitage, ‘and dined with his mother and sister and him. I was charmed by him from the first … I will say at once that I never met a more delightful man than Scott to work with during our collaboration in our preparations of all matters in connection with the expedition.’
The relations between Scott and his second-in-command would deteriorate badly in the Antarctic, but there is an interesting illustration of just how close they were at this time. On 9 April Scott was initiated into Freemasonry at Drury Lane Lodge No. 2127, and in the following month ‘passed’ at an emergency meeting of the same Lodge, the first step on a ladder of Masonic enlightenment that saw him ‘raised’ at the St Alban’s Lodge No. 2597 in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1904 before finally resigning from Navy Lodge No. 2612 in 1906.
It is hard to imagine Scott attracted to the flummery of Freemasonry – difficult to hear him asking to have his Throat cut and his Tongue ripped from the Roof of his Mouth, and his Heart plucked from under his Left Breast before being staked out a Cable’s length from the Shore if he broke his vow of secrecy – but there can have been nothing in its more benevolent tenets that would have been at odds with his own principles. It is impossible to be sure what if any were Scott’s beliefs at this stage of his life, but for a naval officer Freemasonry would have been more of a career move than anything else, a gesture of belonging that knitted him more closely to a powerful, if largely invisible, service establishment. Albert Markham, George Egerton, Lord Charles Beresford, Francis Bridgeman, Pelham Aldridge, John Jellicoe – the list of senior naval officers Scott knew who had Masonic links is a lengthy one, but perhaps the most interesting name in this connection is that of his proposer, Albert Armitage. Only another Mason would be able to say with any certainty what if any obligations that relationship postulated, but if there is probably no cause for anti-Masonic hysteria here, it is at least worth bearing in mind in the light of the two men’s mutual conduct on the expedition.*
With only months to go, however, both Scott and Armitage had other things to think of, and after the best part of a year had been wasted, preparations were multiplying by the day. There were food and medical supplies to be worked out, applications to be sifted and interviews held, medicals and dental examinations to be arranged, and the myriad other tasks that poured into the two rooms that Scott and Longhurst shared in the Burlington Gardens University Building. ‘To Savile Row,’ the tireless Markham noted in his diary, ‘where Crease had prepared a feast of Pemmican and other samples of preserved meats, for Scott’; ‘with Scott to Savile Row, where we had a long consultation with Dr Koettlitz, respecting the provision