Page 251 - The Secret Museum

we’re up to’ explained Heather Lane, Librarian and Keeper of Collections at the

SPRI. The day I visited they were getting ready for an exhibition of Scott’s
granddaughter’s paintings, created in Antarctica when she was the artist-in-residence
aboard HMS Scott.

Down in storage there is a pair of skis worn on Scott’s Discovery Expedition;
they are on a shelf just above Wally Herbert’s sledge. Before his death in 2007,
Wally Herbert was known to visit the SPRI, and it was he who donated his North
Pole sledge to the museum. ‘He probably had it in the garage at home and wondered
what to do with it, and so gave it to us,’ said Kay. ‘We also have a lot of his furs,

radio equipment and photographs from the expedition.’ They just don’t have the room
in their museum to display very many things.

As we walked back upstairs into the museum, I was told how the SPRI works. The
museum is just one part of it. The institute is devoted to the polar regions and so is
filled with polar books, ethnographic objects made by native people, animal
specimens, thousands of photographs and a lot of data collected by the earliest
explorers up to the most recent. ‘The early data is a baseline and still informs
expeditions now,’ Heather explained. ‘We have over 250,000 maps useful for

planning expeditions. You name a polar explorer, they’ll have been here.’

Heather showed me a big, brass ship’s bell from Scott’s vessel Terra Nova. It is
kept on a small wooden stool, halfway up the stairs that lead from the museum floor
up to the curators’ offices. Each day, at 10.30 a.m. and 4 p.m., the bell is rung
according to ship time. In the morning it is rung five times, and in the afternoon eight
– just as it would have been rung by Scott and his team on the Terra Nova.

In the SPRI, the bells are a signal to everyone that it is teatime – a chance for
whoever is in the institute – researchers, scientists, writers, curators – to get together
for a nice cup of tea. Heather said, ‘If you watch Herbert Ponting’s film about Terra

Nova called The Great White Silence, you can hear the ship’s bell being rung. None
of us can watch it without thinking of teatime; it’s a Pavlovian response.’

I wasn’t there during either teatime, but I didn’t leave empty-handed – a curator
gave me some rhubarb he had grown in his garden. I took it to my grandparents’
house in Norfolk to eat with them. My grandpa had a copy of Scott’s diaries, and a
copy of Herbert Ponting’s film, so we settled down to watch it.

The bell ringing is the first sound you hear in the film. It reminded me of the SPRI
and its hidden treasures. It also made me want to put the kettle on, but I didn’t want to
miss the film.