Honouring Robert Falcon Scott's memory

Slimbridge was once the home to Robert Falcon Scott and still keeps his memory alive.

Family focus: Robert Falcon Scott's granddaughters Dafila (right) and Nicola at Slimbridge, their childhood home Photo: CHRISTOPHER JONES

The end of a dark, damp afternoon in the Gloucestershire countryside, and although the gathering flocks of geese, swans and ducks don’t know it, they owe their forthcoming evening meal to an explorer who died 99 years ago and 9,000 miles away.


The setting for this soggy feast is the Slimbridge Wildfowl Centre, which was founded 65 years ago this month by the naturalist Sir Peter Scott, but which still dishes out generous helpings of grain to whatever winged creatures are in the vicinity at 4pm each day.


As for the lost adventurer, it is Sir Peter’s father Captain Robert Falcon Scott who, in his last letter from the Antarctic, gave the following instruction to his wife, Kathleen, regarding the upbringing of their two-year-old son: “Make him interested in natural history.”


And didn’t she just. Not only did the young Peter Scott go on to found a network of nine centres across the British Isles, now known as the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (WWT), he became one of the earliest and loudest voices in the conservation movement, denouncing humankind’s failure to save animal species from extinction as “wicked irresponsibility”.


According to Sir Peter’s late wife, Philippa, the planting of these environmental seeds was a subtle process. “His mother was very clever,” she once said. “She made him a member of the Zoological Society of London, and he used to take his nanny in there for free, which he rather liked.” Having started with the nanny, Sir Peter then spent his entire life (he died in 1989) introducing the wonders of nature to the rest of humanity. Including, of course, his own children.


“We knew the names of all the different types of birds, and were always encouraged to show people around,” recalls Sir Peter’s eldest daughter Nicola, as she sits in the ceiling-high observation window built into the sitting room of the Scott family home.


“It’s all still much as it was when we lived here, except that the path the public used to walk along was closer to the house,” she recalls. “Often, people would be looking in through the big window with their binoculars, and we’d be looking back at them with our binoculars.”


Meanwhile, her younger half-sister Dafila (the ornithological name of the northern pintail) was busy as a child, making a visual record of all the Bewick’s swans that visited. “No two have the same colouring of face and beak,” Dafila says. “It was my job to record what each bird looked like, so we could identify them when they returned the next year.”


Pretty good training for the artist that she turned out to be. Meanwhile, her brother Falcon got some early practice for his later career as a builder and joiner by designing and constructing one of Slimbridge’s earliest birdwatching towers, still standing today.


“I think Falcon was still at school when he did the drawings for that tower,” recalls Nicola. “This was an exciting place to be brought up; there were always television cameras in the house, with great snakelike cables running through the living room.”


“And there were chameleons in that corner, weren’t there?” says Dafila, pointing to a part of the room beside her father’s old desk. “They were in a beautiful cage on top of a trolley, and would be wheeled out to enjoy the sunshine when it was warm weather.”


And the children’s father would be forever broadcasting to the world, be it on the natural history television show Look! or the perennially popular radio programme Nature Parliament. But the one subject Sir Peter never spoke about at home was his father’s Polar achievements.


“We were brought up never to mention the subject,” says Nicola. “It wasn’t that it upset Pa; it was more that he acknowledged the incredible things his father had done, but did not want in any way to capitalise on those achievements.”


“It was very important to my father,” adds Dafila, “that he did his own thing.”


But while unspoken, the Scott of the Antarctic legend has left its mark on all three children’s lives. “I think the important thing my grandfather’s story still does is to inspire people,” says Falcon Scott. “Everything he and his men did, they did properly, to the best of their ability, and I think that’s a lesson to us all. It’s something I’ve been brought up with all my life, but I have never found the story boring; in fact, I often think how amazing it is.


“People still know my grandfather’s name; he’s famous all over the world, and, as his descendants, I think we have a responsibility to uphold his reputation.”


A task that his sister Dafila took one stage further this year when she was sponsored by the Scott Polar Research Institute to travel out to Antarctica on the research ship HMS Scott and capture some of the wildlife and scenery on canvas. “I felt a responsibility to produce a body of work that would excite people about the Antarctic,” she says. “That said, I had a lot to live up to; Edward Wilson, who was the chief artist on my grandfather’s last expedition and who died alongside him, was a truly wonderful painter.”


The Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Centre in Gloucestershire is open daily from 9.30am to 5pm, adults £10.35, children (four-16) £5.60, including Gift Aid donation; 01453 891900, wwt.org.uk


The British Services Antarctic Expedition 2012 is holding a fund-raising dinner in the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, London, next Saturday, December 3. For further details, contact Captain Ivar Milligan on 01264 381072 or at ivar.milligan212@mod.uk
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/robert-falcon-scott/8912635/Honouring-Robert-Falcon-Scotts-memory.html