2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

40 MEMOIR I Jesus College Annual Report 2012
Hut under construction
galvanised iron, was ready for use in mid May.
It was filled from the adjacent boiler and
emptied into a cavern of its own making in the
porous firn beneath the floor. One bathed
every ten days.
The duty of cook, each man in turn for a
week at a time, was the most exhausting job
of all. Two ‘gash hands’ could be called in for
an hour before the meal (filling the water tank
with snow blocks for example) and for an
hour afterwards, clearing away and washing
up. Feeding ten very hungry men, given a fixed
set of rations issued at the beginning of each
week, taxed ingenuity. If a meal was greeted
in silence, an exhausted cook’s heart sank, but
more often it was a race to get ‘seconds’. Huge
quantities of bread, baked daily, were
consumed. Once a week the carcasses in the
snow tunnel store provided a roast, but no
satisfactory vegetables. Potatoes had to be
reconstituted from dried powder and frozen
peas had not yet been invented.
The Royal Society approved the name for
the Base site – ‘Halley Bay’ to mark the
tercentenary of the birth of Sir Edmund
Halley, the Physical Secretary of the Royal
Society who proposed the first Cook
expedition, and in honour of the then 1955
Physical Secretary, the shelf on this coastline
was named the ‘Brunt Ice Shelf ’. This we
learnt by Morse code and a fickle short-wave
radio link with Port Stanley, Falkland Islands.
Personal telegrams cost 5d (=2p) per word,
but Press telegrams went for 1d per word. So
I would keep my family abreast of our
activities occasionally by writing pieces for the
Manchester Guardian. That contact had been
made because John Maddox (later editor of
Nature but at that time an editor on The
Guardian) had previously been my Tutor, in
Physics, at Manchester University.
We could also begin sending news of
scientific interest. Our meteorologist, David
Limbert, had been able to do rudimentary
observations from early on but now a
demanding routine of 3-hourly observations
started and, most notably, a 12 m
meteorological tower was built. The sun set
for the last time at the end of April so I began
operations with the auroral all-sky camera.
The Dobson spectrophotometer was to wait
until there was some daylight, in September.
The all-sky camera was of an appealingly
simple design. A regular Bolex 16mm ciné