Archives and Modern Manuscripts Image of the Month: Peter Scott skating with a friend

Taken from one of the diaries of Kathleen Scott, our image this month, apposite for the season, shows Kathleen’s son Peter ice skating with a friend in Switzerland in 1923.

Kathleen was the youngest of eleven children born in 1878 to Lloyd Stewart Bruce, a clergyman, and his first wife Jane and attended the Slade School of Fine Art before enrolling at the Academie Colarossi in Paris where she took up sculpture.  She led a bohemian life in France, surrounded by notable admirers, including the sculptor Auguste Rodin who became her mentor.  In 1906 Kathleen returned to England and entered enthusiastically into London’s artistic and literary society.  She met Captain Robert Falcon Scott and they married in 1908 with their son, Peter, being born the following year.  Scott’s naval duties kept him from his family, and his tragic death in 1912, returning from the South Pole, would take him from them forever.  Kathleen created her most notable sculpture in his memory in 1915, a bronze statue of Scott which stands in Waterloo Place, London.  During the First World War she helped to establish an ambulance service in Northern France, worked in a munitions factory, and also provided reconstructions of the faces of war wounded for plastic surgery.  Her career as a sculptor would peak during the interwar years, producing busts of her many artistic, literary and political acquaintances, together with war memorials and idealised sculptures of young male nudes.  She staged several major solo exhibitions,  including at the Royal Academy, and also featured in the BBC’s first televised programme on sculpture in 1937.

Kathleen’s diaries are full of photographs, cuttings and ephemera which show the affection she had for Peter, and also for Wayland, the son she had with her second husband, the politician and journalist Hilton Young.

In his last message home before he died Robert Falcon Scott had urged his wife to make his son interested in natural history, it being better than sport.  In this Kathleen was a partial success.  Peter would go on to be a world famous naturalist and environmentalist of great consequence.  However, he also became an accomplished sportsman too, winning both an Olympic bronze medal for sailing and the British gliding championship.  He also excelled in ice skating, a passion he shared with his mother.

The diaries are part of the Kennet collection (https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/13377), whilst the Library also holds the papers of Sir Peter Scott (https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/repositories/2/resources/13397)

Photo credit: Raffaella Losito (Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory)