MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
BAS farewell to Antarctic veteran mariner.
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) has finally said goodbye to its veteran Antarctic captain, Stewart Lawrence, after a series of farewell parties marking his 33 annual voyages to the Antarctic, and 42 years at sea.
The Director of BAS, Professor Chris Rapley, presented 59-year-old Captain Lawrence with a framed map (picture) at the BAS summer barbecue where his many colleagues and friends wished him well in his retirement in his new home in Cornwall. Sadly his wife Sue, from whom he was parted for several months each year, died only four months before his retirement.
Captain Lawrence's yearning for a seafarers' life was awakened when he was five years old living in the same street in Grimsby as a Cunard liner captain. He began studying at HMS Conway Sea School when only 13 and spent his seventeenth birthday as a seagoing cadet with Canadian Pacific Steamships, gaining his first experience of freezing winter ice in Canada's Great Lakes.
Call of the Antarctic He was about to join the Royal National Lifeboat Institution whose head, Admiral Egg Irving, urged him instead to sail to the Antarctic as the Admiral had done with the former director of BAS, Sir Vivian Fuchs.
Stewart Lawrence sailed first on two voyages on the John Biscoe, then joined the Bransfeld, and found himself commanding the vessel when the captain fell ill and the chief officer broke his ankle. He assumed permanent command of the Bransfield in 1974 and remained with her for most of his career. He took the ship every year to the most southerly BAS station, Halley, repeatedly facing the challenge of the frozen Weddell Sea.
Only days before the 1982 Argentine invasion, he hosted a reception aboard at Port Stanley, attended by Argentine LADE staff. He sailed on March 31, and learned of the invasion from Patrick Watts' broadcasts when midway between the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego. He was able to alert BAS headquarters back in Britain so they could inform the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Alcohol quelled invasion mutiny! He faced the threat of a mutiny by some of his crew whose reaction to the invasion was to advocate sailing back to the Falklands and sinking the Bransfield in the approach to Stanley Harbour. He quelled the mutiny by plying them with alcohol until they were too drunk to carry out their plan.
He was awarded the Polar Medal in 1983 and the MBE in 1998, and also has a Meteorological Office Award.
He took command of the newest BAS vessel, RRS Ernest Shackleton, in 1999, leaving her for the last time in April when he enjoyed a party with his Falklands friends in Stanley appropriately on the anniversary of the Argentine invasion, April 2nd.
He vows to return to the Falklands because, he says, he has had such a marvellous experience and the Falklands are a fine place.
Harold Briley, London
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