Murray Levick was an Antarctic explorer, naval doctor and founder of the British Schools Exploring Society.  

Together with five fellow-explorers from Captain Scott’s doomed 1910-13 expedition he survived the seven-month ordeal of a pitch-dark Antarctic winter huddled in a cramped ice cave, surviving on a diet of meat and blubber and a unique brand of resilience and comradeship.  Levick's record of the conditions that the group endured tells a tale of heroism and courage in appalling circumstances.  In later life he gained distinction both as an expert in survival techniques and as a pioneer of treatments for disabled people.  

Born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1876, Levick joined the Royal Navy in 1910 after a short medical career.  It was as a member of the six-strong Northern Party that he took part in Captain Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition for which he had been recruited as medical officer and zoologist.  The group spent the summer of 1911–1912 at Cape Adare in the midst of an Adélie Penguin rookery.  Levick's observations of the birds were later published in his 1914 book Antarctic Penguins.  

Prevented by pack ice from embarking on the SS Terra Nova in February 1912, Levick and the other five members of the party (Victor Campbell, Raymond Priestley, George Abbott, Harry Dickason, and Frank Browning) were forced to overwinter, surviving in terrible conditions with just a few weeks of supplies supplemented by seal meat.  The cramped situation in their ice cave, measuring only 12 ft by 9 ft, meant that they were unable to stand upright. Outside the cave, "it seemed probable that hell itself would be paved something after the style of Inexpressible Island," wrote Levick.  

The constant darkness of Antarctic winter, hurricanes, bouts of frostbite and sickness and the lack of certainty that they would be rescued added to the psychological pressure on the six.  "You cannot watch one of your naval superiors vomiting, shitting himself and wetting his sleeping bag, and hold him in quite the same awe and esteem," Levick observed.  

He himself gained the admiration of the other group members, being described as "a tower of strength" by fellow-survivor Raymond Priestley.  "He did little doctoring in the strict sense of the word, but it was a godsend that we had a doctor in the party since George Murray Levick was that doctor," wrote Priestley, author of the book Antarctic Adventure who went on to be knighted in 1949 and become Chancellor of Birmingham University.  

The sun finally appeared with the end of the Austral winter.  "It was like living again after being dead for six months," wrote Levick.  On 30 September the group was finally able to walk and ski the 230 miles to Cape Evans and the Terra Nova, only to learn the tragic news of the death of all five members of Scott’s Polar Party. 

During World War I Levick served in the Grand Fleet in the North Sea and at Gallipoli. 

On his retirement from the Royal Navy he pursued his medical career, specialising in the treatment of disabled people. He was appointed as electrologist (medical officer in charge of the Electrical Department) at St Thomas's Hospital, London and also worked at the Victoria Hospital for Children.  

In 1919 he was approached by the Royal National Institute for the Blind with a view to the possibility of teaching blind people techniques of massage with electrical treatment.  The pioneering work that he undertook in training the visually impaired in physiotherapy met with much opposition, but eventually blind students were admitted to the examinations of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, and Levick was appointed Vice-President of the Association of Certificated Blind Masseurs.  Members included soldiers blinded in the war and trained in massage at St. Dunstan's, and civilian masseurs and masseuses trained under the auspices of the National Institute for the Blind. 

The plight of disabled children from deprived backgrounds was another area in which Murray Levick was involved.  The Hermitage Craft School for Crippled Children in East Sussex had been founded by Dame Grace Kimmins in 1903 to care for children born "crippled" (as it was termed then) as a result of poverty-related diseases and deformities.  Levick was its Medical Director from 1922 to 1950, taking a special interest in heliotherapy or the use of artificial sunlight.  By 1936 the Chailey Heritage School as it is known today had both a boys' school and a girls' school three miles away, both equipped with operating theatres and medical facilities where education and treatment could be practised together.   

Levick's Antarctic experience had contributed to his intense interest in physical fitness and the art of survival.  In 1932 he founded the British Public Schools Exploring Society - today known as BSES Expeditions - of which he remained President until his death in June 1956.  The work of the society was to take young men on expeditions to remote and unknown parts of the world.  Not all of them were prepared to accept his leadership.  In what was evidently a conflict between two strong characters the 18-year-old Roald Dahl, a former pupil at Repton School who had been engaged as the official photographer during a trip to Newfoundland in 1934, is reported to have led a mutiny against Levick.   

Notwithstanding such a personality clash, Levick's reputation as a leading figure in youth training remained undiminished, as described in a book published the following year.  "The modern young man, he thinks, is in danger of becoming soft amid the luxuries of modern civilisation and is losing his appreciation of keen physical endeavour, of fighting for his existence on terms of equality with the rest of Nature," wrote the author Dennis Clarke.  

At the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 he was recruited by the Naval Intelligence Division, promoted to the rank of Surgeon Commander and became involved in schemes of training for commandos.  He was credited with introducing string vests as part of survival clothing in trials at the Commando Training Centre at Lochailort, NW Scotland, as well as experiments to test the effect of desalination on the human body.  His lectures to them were published by the War Office in 1942 as Some Notes on the Hardening of Men for Warfare.  

No less important for survival in a hostile environment is the matter of diet.  In Antarctica Levick had tried the experiment of living for a week on seal meat and nothing else.  The notes that he now made in wartime formed the basis of a memorandum published by the Naval Intelligence Division "for the use of agents and escapees who may find themselves at large on the Continent without food."  The document, entitled Living off the Land, stressed the need for a radical approach in order to survive.  "Men should be impressed with the importance of forgetting old prejudices when they are faced with the necessity of eating anything they can get hold of," was the advice regarding animal foods, including rats and mice, all birds, frogs, snails, dogs and cats, grass snakes, lizards, hedgehogs, eels and horse meat.  

The issue of wild vegetables is presented as "a more serious subject" because of the importance of recognising the chief edible plants as opposed to those in which "food material is enclosed in cellulose, which our digestion cannot dissolve."  Detailed advice follows on the methods of preparing stinging nettles, clover, bracken fern, sow thistle, dandelion, arrowhead, mushrooms, corn, hips and haws, and - surprisingly - yew berries, described as "wholesome food" although the foliage is recognised as poisonous.  

Shortly after the fall of France, when it was feared that Gibraltar might be taken by the enemy, the 64-year-old Surgeon Commander Levick was involved in a secret plan drawn up by the Director of Naval Intelligence in London.  It was proposed that six men should be walled up within the Rock of Gibraltar to stay there for seven years if necessary.  As an expert in survival techniques Levick was tasked with advising the men on how to exist in such conditions.  

Sufficient supplies would be provided to last them for seven years and Levick’s job was to advise on matters including psychology, exercise, diet - including the use of alcohol and tobacco - recreation, clothing, ventilation, sanitation and how to deal with the possibility of dead bodies “by embalming and cementing up”.  Construction work on the tunnels within the Rock was conducted in secret.  All the workers involved were immediately posted back to England after completion of the project for fear they might reveal the existence of the plan. 

Murray Levick settled in retirement in Inner Ting Tong (formally in East Budleigh Parish) and died at the age of 79 on 30 May 1956.  Mount Levick (2,390 m) on the north-west side of the Tourmaline Plateau in the Deep Freeze Range of Antarctica commemorates his achievement.  

The story of the Northern Party in Antarctica has been the subject of a play and two books: 

Antarctica, by David Young. Performed in October 2001 at the Savoy Theatre, London.  

Katherine Lambert, Hell with a capital H: a new Polar Hero. Publisher: Pimlico, 2002 

Meredith Hooper, The Longest Winter: Scott's Other Heroes. Publisher: John Murray Publishers Ltd, 2010 

Compiled and written by Michael Downes © 2011 

An exhibition based on the life and achievements of Murray Levick took place at Fairlynch Museum in Budleigh Salterton  in 2011. 

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