South with Scott: Christmas Day in Antarctica

On Christmas Day 1911 Admiral Lord Mountevans – then the naval officer Edward Evans – was at 8,000 feet in Antarctica, in one of two tiny green tents.

These were “the only objects that broke the monotony of the great white glittering waste that stretches from the Beardmore Glacier Head to the south pole. A light wind was blowing from the south and little whirls of fine snow, as fine as dust, would occasionally sweep round the tents and along the sides of the sledge-runners, streaming away almost like smoke to the northward,” he wrote in his 1921 memoir, South with Scott.

“Inside the tents breathing heavily were our eight sleeping figures – in these little canvas shelters soon after 4am the sleepers became restless and occasionally one would wake, glance at one’s watch and doze again.

“At exactly 5am our leader shouted: ‘Evans’, and both of us with that name replied: ‘Right-o, sir.’ Immediately all was bustle, we scrambled out of our sleeping bags, only the cook remaining in each tent. The others with frantic haste filled the aluminium cookers with the gritty snow that here lay hard and windswept.” It wasn’t a happy Christmas Day. Five of the party would never return.