Thursday, 18th March, 2010. Frederick Spencer Chapman.
Frederick Spencer Chapman, DSO & Bar, TD was born in London on May 10th, 1907. Orphaned after his mother died of blood poisoning, his father, Frank Spencer Chapman, a solicitor who was declared bankrupt and emigrated to Canada, was killed at the Battle of Ypres. Frederick was cared for by an elderly clergyman and his wife in the village of Cartmel, a rural vicarage surrounded by fells, falcons and ferrets, on the edge the Lake District. He was schooled at Sedbergh which had an exceptionally rugged regime, before studying at Cambridge.As a ski expert and ornithologist, Chapman joined to Gino Watkins’ 1930-31 British Arctic Air-Route Expedition and a subsequent Greenland Expedition in 1932–33 investigating possible air routes between Europe and America. These were his happiest years. He experienced cold of such intensity that he lost all his finger and toe nails. He spent twenty hours in a storm at sea in his kayak, fell into a deep crevasse, saving himself by holding onto the handles of his dog sled. He emerged from the Greenland expeditions, of very tough characters, to be amongst the toughest of men. He led a three man team across the desolate Greenland ice-cap. The first European to do this since Nansen, he was fluent in Inuit and was an able dog sledger and kayaker.
Early in 1936, he joined a Himalayan climbing expedition. In May 1937 he startled climbing circles by an successful assault on Mount Chomolhari in Tibet, reaching the summit with Sherpa Pasang Dawa Lama from Bhutan over the south-east spur.
In 1938 Spencer taught as a housemaster at Gordonstoun School where Prince Philip was one of his pupils. Commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders as a territorial lieutenant on 6 June 1939. In January 1940 he joined a ski battalion, the 5th Scots Guards that but for one company of regular guardsmen, was formed from a collection of a thousand skiers gathered by the War Office from every unit of the Army and all branches of civil life. In April 1940 he joined as an instructor, a mountain division that was being formed to fight in Norway and was to be trained in Haute Savoie under the command of Colonel Coats of the Scots Guards. On May 1940 he was posted to a parachute battalion officered by the nucleus of the ski battalion that was soon disbanded because, as he was told, there were no parachutes.
At the end of June, he was posted to the Special Training Centre, Lochailort, on the west coast of Scotland. Lochailort was the prototype of of the many commando and guerilla warfare school that soon sprang up in the Highlands. This school originated at Bill Stirling’s house in Scotland where Brian Mayfield and Jim Gavin were staying to recuperate from their injuries from a submarine raid on the Norwegian coast. There they decided to start a training centre for smash-and-grab raids on targets in enemy occupied territory, a sideline which after Dunkirk, seemed the only possible form of offensive warfare.
At Lochailort, among a staff of unorthodox army types, mountaineers, polar explorers, and two Shanghai Municipal Police inspectors, Spencer Chapman found a job after his own heart. After taking the commando course himself, he worked on the fieldcraft side with Lord Lovat, a cousin of Stirling, and later became Assistant Chief Instructor while David Stirling who later founded the Special Air Service, helped as well.
On October 1940 he left with August Calvert for the Antipodes to form and train Australian and New Zealand Independent Companies, founding a special warfare school on Wilson’s Promontory a peninsula inhabited by kangaroos, wallabies and emus, at the extreme south point of Victoria.
By the end on July 1941, he was posted to the no. 101 Special Training School, Singapore where his plan to train parties to stay behind in areas the Japanese might overrun was rejected by the British colonial governor as defeatist. After the Japanese invasion of Malaya, weeks before the fall of Singapore, Spencer Chapman left for the jungle where he remained until early 1945. His list of jungle diseases reads like a manual of tropical medicine: Namely, chronic malaria, dysentery, tick-typhus, scabies, blackwater fever, pneumonia and skin-ulcers from leech bites. Chapman who went barefooted for months on end, remained a thorn on Japanese logistics, accounting in a mere fortnight for the loss of no less that seven trains, fifteen bridges and forty motor vehicles and the killing of some hundreds of Japanese troops in a short period of time at the beginning of Japanese occupation. Since then, the Japanese deployed 2,000 men to search for what they believed was a squad of 200 Australian guerrillas.
On February 1942, Singapore fell and Chapman found himself stranded. He was wounded twice during his time in Malaya, once in the leg by a steel nut from a homemade cartridge and once in the arm. He was captured both by Japanese troops and by Chinese bandits and escaped from both. However much he suffered in the Malayan jungle -once he was seventeen days unconscious, another time he trekked bare foot for six days- he attributed his survival to the basic rule of expecting nothing and accepting the dangers and bounties of the jungle as of a natural course. Trained in cipher work, he chose to kept a diary written in Eastern Inuit. As his leisure behind enemy lines, even when close to death, Spencer Chapman still collected seeds for Kew Gardens and made field notes on birds, a proud British tradition that gave him considerable strength.
His book The Jungle is Neutral is a remarkable account of human bravery and resourcefulness in adversity. It still regarded as the foremost work in jungle warfare.
Frederich Spencer Chapman shot himself to death on 8 August 1971.
Chapman was amongst the first Europeans that taught themselves to be able kayak hunters: Proficient in traditional paddle, norsaq and hand rolls, Spencer Chapman along with John Rymill, undertook hunting to procure seal meat, blubber and skins for the expedition after Watkins’ death. He also wrote the official accounts of the expeditions which were published as Northern Lights (1932) and Watkins’ Last Expedition (1934). As a suggestive sample, here there are the first paragraphs of chapter Chapter XIII:
Chiefly about kayaking.August 17th. When Kidarsi was making something yesterday his knife slipped and he cut his hand right across the ball of the thumbs; Weedymena put three stitches in it and he kayaked all to-day, though holding the paddle must have hurt terribly. Sheer pain doesn’t seem to worry them much as they have any amount of fortitude.I saw a Meadow Pipit near the Base this morning and many Greenland Redpolls. A simply marvellous day, like yesterday. Enock steered the umiak, Kidarsi and I kayaked behind. Everyone was in a very holiday humour -even Emmanuelly, who is still far from well. A heavy swell outside the fjord. My kayak was very wobbly at first because I haven’t been out in it for several days and the skins are dry: this makes a surprising difference. It’s the first time I’ve tried a rough sea with full hunting-gear on, and I was rather unhappy at first.This is what I carry nowadays: on the extreme front a wide screen about 2 feet 6 inches by 14 inches with a flap of cloth hanging down to the water on each side of the bows; this form of screen is best for shotgun shooting, and it is on a pivot, so that in thick ice, or when the wind is troublesome, it can be pushed round with the end of the paddle till it lies in parallel to the kayak. The other form of screen, on a frame immediately in front of the kayak-stand, is preferable for rifle and harpoon technique, as it affords a better concealment while the harpoon is being lifted, and in calm weather the rifle can be steadied on the top of the screen while shooting Of hunting implements, besides a 16-bore shotgun in its seal-skin cover I carry a harpoon -of the standard type (the lighter ‘winged’ harpoon is rare at Angmagssalik)- and two long lances on the deck behind me; one throw stick fits all three. I have given up trying to learn how to use the bird-dart and bladder-dart, as it takes me all my time to throw my harpoon with accuracy. Then there is the harpoon-line and float, and of course the kayak-stand to hold the former. As well as this I carry a short lance a yard long, for actually kiling the seal, a number of wound plugs, an apparatus for towing the seal, and a bit of curved wood for forcing a space between the skin and the blubber of a seal preparatory to blowing it up for towing home. Being an optimist, I used to carry a spare hunting-line and float -deflated- on the back of my kayak, in case I harpooned a seal or narwhal too large to be upheld by a single float, but as I shall not be hunting alone that is superfluous. Inside the kayak I have my kayak coat -in case of stormy weather- my rifle, and sleeping bag.Watkins’ Last ExpeditionThe Vanguard LibraryLondon 1953
Posted on Friday, March 19, 2010 at 04:25AM
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[Ignacio Wenley Palacios]
in Books, Frederick Spencer Chapman, Greenland, Military
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[Ignacio Wenley Palacios]
in Books, Frederick Spencer Chapman, Greenland, Military
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