Page 249 - The Secret Museum

THIS BIG, FLUFFY SUIT BELONGED to Sir Wally Herbert – the first man officially to

walk to the North Pole. Behind it, on the other side of the display case, is a miniature
version, a tiny girl’s snowsuit that belonged to Wally Herbert’s daughter, Kari, who
lived with her parents in an Inuit family for several years when she was young. The
snowsuits are the only artefacts belonging to Wally and Kari Herbert on display.
Wally’s photographs, maps, drawings and the wooden sledge that took him and his
crew, with their supplies, to the North Pole, pulled by 15 dogs, are in the vault of the

museum. The museum would love to exhibit the sledge. ‘It’s one of our treasures,’
Kay tells me, ‘but we just don’t have the space.’

The sledge lives, wrapped in plastic, on a shelf in Museum Store A, which
contains piles of polar kit: binoculars, scissors, tools for measuring sunshine, a bag
of arrows made by Arctic tribesman – even a pair of string underpants (no one is
quite sure where they came from). It is on a bottom shelf because it takes six strong
men to lift it. On Wally’s expedition to the North Pole, it would have been piled high
with provisions, attached to a pack of dogs and pulled across the snow and ice.

Sometimes one of the team would catch a lift on it – standing on it like you would
catch a lift on a trolley in an airport or supermarket – and ride northwards.

Wally Herbert became a polar explorer because of what happened one rainy day
when he was 20 years old: ‘I was sitting in a bus; my raincoat was soaking wet. [The
bus] lurched and a newspaper fell off the luggage rack smack into my lap.’ The
newspaper landed open at a page that had an advert for team members to join an
expedition to Antarctica.

The word ‘expedition’ touched the romantic in him. He got a place on the trip …
and then on another one, then another. Over the 50 years he worked in the polar
regions, where he travelled over 37,000 kilometres, mapping vast swathes of the

snowy waste and painting the scenery.

The most famous of these travels is his North Pole adventure, in which he led his
team, with this sledge, on the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by its longest
axis from Canada, to Svalbard and to the North Pole, via the alarmingly named Pole
of Inaccessibility.

It was a 15-month journey of around 6,000 kilometres, which has never been
repeated. In the winter of 1966–67, in preparation for the expedition, he and two
team mates lived with the Inuit in Greenland for four months then travelled 2,414
kilometres by dog sledge to Canada. At the end of Wally’s stay, the Inuit group he

lived with pinned a map to the door of his hut, marked with all the places Wally was
most likely to die.

Wally planned it all perfectly, including delivery of pipe tobacco all along the
route. However, he liked to be led by intuition and would sometimes set off in a
direction in the morning based on the dreams he had had the previous night. He took
lots of photographs and drew maps en route. Reaching the North Pole was a
remarkable achievement. Sir Ranulph Fiennes described him as ‘the greatest polar