Roland Huntford

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Roland Huntford (* 1927 in Cape Town , South African Union as Roland Horwitch ) is a British polar historian , journalist and author . He gained international fame through his biographies on the polar explorers Roald Amundsen , Robert Falcon Scott , Fridtjof Nansen and Ernest Shackleton .

Life

Huntford was born in South Africa. His father was a soldier and a farmer ; his mother was a Ukrainian exile who fled to South Africa in the wake of the Russian Civil War . After the end of World War II Hunt Ford came to London to the Imperial College a physics degree to start. However, he finished this after two years without a degree. He traveled to Italy , studied Italian literature and lived in Florence for a few years . In the 1950s he returned to London, where he met a Danish, communist Befriended double agents . This made him familiar with Scandinavian literature in general and the work of Henrik Ibsen in particular. Huntford learned the Norwegian language and traveled to Norway , Sweden and Denmark . During this time he dealt intensively in theory and practice with Nordic skiing , about the history of which he later wrote a book. He earned his living doing translation work and short articles in local newspapers. In 1957 he accepted a position in the public relations department at the UN High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs in Geneva . A short time later, Huntford became the foreign correspondent for the newspaper The Observer for the whole of Scandinavia in the areas of politics and sport, an activity which he carried out for 15 years. During this time he also published a number of books, including the successful journalistic novella Sea of ​​Darkness .

From the mid-1970s, Huntford devoted himself entirely to his work as a book author. The trigger for this was the encounter with Tryggve Gran , the only Norwegian participant in the Terra Nova Expedition (1910–1913) to the Antarctic under Robert Falcon Scott . As a result of an interview with Gran for the Observer , the idea for a book about Scott and his Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen about the "conquest" of the geographic South Pole arose. Huntford and his family moved to the outskirts of Cambridge to gain access to the local university library and archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) for further research . The double biography Scott and Amundsen , later republished under the title The Last Place On Earth , appeared in 1979. The book became an international bestseller and at the same time a cause for controversial criticism. Huntford's sketched image of Amundsen was that of the rational, goal-oriented and well-prepared expedition leader, while he sketched Scott as a "heroic bungler" who had led himself and his comrades to their deaths through amateurish behavior and because of disastrous mistakes. Since then, this view has been widely adopted by other authors, but violently contradicted by others such as the polar explorer Ranulph Fiennes . The argument went so far that Huntford was denied access to both the university library and the SPRI in Cambridge by the action of the Scott family. This changed only after Hunt Ford to Senior Member of Wolfson College and Alistair Horne  Fellow of St Antony's College of University of Oxford had been appointed. In the next few years he devoted himself to biographies of Ernest Shackleton and Fridtjof Nansen , which also became standard works of polar history. Most recently he worked on a book about the Framuseum in Oslo and on a historical treatise on the Winter War (1939/40) between Finland and the Soviet Union .

Works (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Huntford: The Last Place on Earth , 1985, p. 527: “ heroic bungler ”.
  2. ↑ John Crace: Captain Scott: a second-rate hero? In: The Guardian , September 27, 2010 (accessed July 4, 2015).
personal data
SURNAME Huntford, Roland
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horwitch, Roland (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian, author and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Cape Town , South African Union