Apsley Cherry-Garrard

English · 1886 to 1959

Born Apsley George Benet Cherry on January 2, 1886, in Bedford, England, into the family of a decorated army officer, he later added Garrard to his name when his father inherited estates in Hertfordshire. He grew up at Lamer Park, was educated at Winchester, and read classics and modern history at Christ Church, Oxford, where he rowed. Wealthy, shy, and severely myopic, he secured a place on Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova expedition partly by donating a thousand pounds to its funds, then proved himself the youngest member of the shore party. In the Antarctic winter of 1911 he joined Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers on a journey to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs, five weeks of darkness and temperatures near minus seventy-seven, an ordeal that became the spine of his book. He was among the search party that found the bodies of Scott, Wilson, and Bowers in their tent the following spring. The guilt of having turned back at One Ton Depot, days before Scott died nearby, haunted him for the rest of his life. The Worst Journey in the World (1922), written with the help of George Bernard Shaw, who lived nearby, opens with the line that polar exploration is the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time devised. It has rarely been out of print. He suffered from depression and clinical anxiety for decades, served briefly in the First World War, and married Angela Turner in 1939, when he was fifty-three. He died on May 18, 1959, in London, at the age of seventy-three.