Captain Oates

‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ With these words, on 17 March 1912, Captain Oates walked out to his death in an Antarctic blizzard and won a place for himself in history as ‘a very gallant gentleman’. His reputation for courage and endurance as one of the members of Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole is as powerful today as it was almost a century ago. Yet, as Sue Limb and Patrick Cordingley reveal in this new edition of their classic biography of the man, there is much more to Captain Oates’s life than his final famous act of self-sacrifice. Their work is, as Sir Ranulph Fiennes noted, a ‘fascinating character study of a quintessential British hero’. AUTHOR: Major General Patrick Cordingley was commissioned into the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, Captain Oates’s old Regiment, in 1965. In 1990 he commanded the 7th Armoured Brigade in the first Gulf War. In the 1980s he became fascinated by the career of Captain Oates. To learn more he travelled to the Antarctic and now lectures on Scott’s expeditions. He is the author of In the Eye of the Storm: Commanding the Desert Rats in the Gulf War.