Thomas Orde-Lees

Thomas Orde-Lees

Thomas Hans Orde-Lees (born May 23, 1877 in Aachen ; † December 1, 1958 ) was a member of Sir Ernest Shackleton's endurance expedition from 1914 to 1917, a pioneer in the field of parachuting and one of the first people without of Japanese descent who climbed Mount Fuji during winter.

Early life

Thomas Hans Orde-Lees was officially born on May 23, 1877 while his parents were on vacation in Aachen in what was then Prussia . In fact, he was an illegitimate child of Thomas Orde Hastings Lees, the Chief Constable of Northampton and former barrister and Ada Mary Pattenden (1852-1932), the daughter of Reverend Canon George Edwin Pattenden, the director of the Boston Grammar School. Ada was sent to Thomas' brother's house in Aachen for the birth. The Lees family were very wealthy and lived in the home of the Chief Constable of Northampton with a considerable number of servants.

Thomas Sr.'s wife, Grace Lees (née Bateman) agreed to raise young Thomas as her own child. She was also the godmother of Ada's nephew Frederick Geoffrey Lees Johnson (1880–1951), which provided an excuse for regular meetings between Ada and Thomas Senior. Ada eventually married solicitor Arthur John Coleridge Mackarness in 1890. After the death of Thomas Senior in 1924, Grace moved to Arthur and Ada Mackerness in Petersfield. Thomas Junior stayed in contact with his biological mother until her death in 1932.

Orde-Lees was trained at Marlborough College, the Royal Navy Academy at Gosport (whose director was Ada's brother-in-law, Frederick George Johnson) and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst . He then joined the Royal Marines , where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Around 1900 he was transferred to China, where he was on duty during the Boxer Rebellion .

Endurance expedition

Around 1910, Orde-Lees applied for a place on Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition , but was turned down. When Shackleton was planning his endurance expedition , he decided to call in a representative from the Royal Navy to get political and military support for the expedition. As a skier and engine expert, Orde-Lees met the requirements exactly; he was released from military service after Shackleton had asked Winston Churchill for permission and was given permission to join the expedition as camp manager.

On board the ship, he turned out to be very unpopular with the rest of the crew - he had a gruff, condescending manner and was blatantly lazy. Even so, he was an efficient warehouse manager. As a passionate believer in physical fitness, he even took his bike with him on the trip; when the ship was trapped in the ice, he made regular trips on the ice. Shackleton ordered him not to leave the ship unaccompanied after he was lost in search of food and attacked by an angry leopard seal . His screams caused Frank Wild (second in the chain of command) to leave his tent and shoot the leopard seal. The leopard seal still had strength to get within ten meters of game until it managed to stop it with further shots.

As the Endurance was crushed by the pack ice , Shackleton took the three existing lifeboats and led the crew across the ice to the open water, where they used the boats to get to Elephant Island . Orde-Lees was assigned to the Dudley Docker under the command of Frank Worsley but failed to tackle the rest of the men when a storm threatened to sink the small boat. Notwithstanding Worsley's orders, he went to sleep in his sleeping bag instead of helping the others row. However, he immediately took on the arduous and tedious duty of scooping water when it looked like the boat was going to sink.

As soon as the boats landed on Elephant Island , Shackleton and five of the men in the James Caird set out for South Georgia to fetch help. The remaining men, including Orde-Lees, were forced to live for months in the two remaining boats, which they turned, reinforced with stones, and lit with oil lamps . They were finally saved on August 30, 1916. Orde-Lees was awarded the silver Polar Medal for his participation in the expedition .

Orde-Lees as a parachutist

Orde-Lees returned to England during the First World War . After serving on the Western Front in the Balloon Corps, he secured a place in the Royal Flying Corps with the support of Shackleton , where he became an avid advocate of skydiving . He even jumped from Tower Bridge to prove its effectiveness, eventually forming the Parachute Division under his command. After the war, he retired from officer service and moved to Japan to teach skydiving techniques in the Japanese Air Force.

Fuji

In Japan, Orde-Lees is mainly known for its winter ascents of Mount Fuji. After an unsuccessful attempt in January 1922, he and his climbing companion HS Crisp reached the summit of the iconic stratovolcano on February 12, 1922. After finishing his service as a parachute trainer, Orde-Lees continued to live in Tokyo . He worked intermittently as a correspondent for the Times , which led to a position at the British Embassy. After the death of his wife, he married Hisako Hoya, a Japanese woman. He spent nearly twenty years teaching English and doing the English news on Japanese radio.

New Zealand

When Japan entered World War II in 1942, Orde-Lees was allowed to leave Japan with his family as a foreigner and member of a hostile power. They then moved to Wellington , New Zealand . There he took on an unskilled job at the New Zealand Correspondence School, although rumor has it that he worked as a spy for the British government. After the end of the war, he became involved in writing a regular travel column in the Southern Cross Newspaper and helped organize the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition .

He died on December 1, 1958 after being admitted to a mental hospital with dementia . He was buried in the Karori Cemetery in Wellington, near Harry McNish , another former participant in the endurance expedition.

Web links

• The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition . American Museum of Natural History . 1999. Accessed December 9, 2006.
• Shackleton's Expedition: Diary of a Survivor . PBS. February 2002. Retrieved December 9, 2006.
• Thomas Hans Orde-Lees . Cool Antarctica. 2001. Retrieved December 9, 2006.
• Orde-Lee's team profile
• Orde-lees diary