Kathleen Bruce Scott

Born: 27 March 1878 at Carlton in Lindrick, Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire.

Died: 25 July 1947.

Kathleen Scott, Baroness Kennet, FRSBS, was a British sculptor. She was the wife of Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the mother of Sir Peter Scott, the painter and ornithologist. By her second marriage, she became Baroness Kennet.

Early life:

Born Edith Agnes Kathleen Bruce at Carlton in Lindrick, Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, she was the youngest of eleven children of Canon Lloyd Stuart Bruce (1829–1886) and Jane Skene (d. 1880).

She attended St George's School, Edinburgh then the Slade School of Fine Art, London from 1900 to 1902. She then enrolled at the Académie Colarossi in Paris from 1902 to 1906 and was befriended by Auguste Rodin. On her return to London, she became acquainted with George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm and J.M. Barrie.

Works:

Three of Scott's busts feature in the collection of London's National Portrait Gallery, and she is also the subject of thirteen photographic portraits there.

She sculpted a statue of her first husband, Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, of which there are two versions: a bronze statue erected in Waterloo Place, London, in 1915 and a replica in white marble located in Christchurch, New Zealand, put up in 1917. A plaque to Scott is on the exterior of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge with a statue of "Youth" (1920), for which the model was A.W. Lawrence, younger brother of T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia").

She also sculpted a statue of Edward Smith, captain of the Titanic, after his death. This is situated in Beacon Park, Lichfield, England.

Her statue at Oundle School entitled "Here Am I, Send Me" is erroneously held to be modelled on Peter Scott.

She also produced a small bronze of the Indian actor Sabu which is now missing, after a theft.

A memorial statue of Charles Rolls by Scott stands on the promenade in Dover.

Personal life:

She married the Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, R.N., on 2 September 1908, and a year later gave birth to their son Peter Scott, who became famous in broadcasting, ornithology, painting, conservation and sport. In 1910, she accompanied her husband to New Zealand to see him off on his journey to the South Pole. A biographer of the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen has suggested that, in her husband's absence, she began a brief affair with Nansen, the mentor of Scott's rival Amundsen. In February 1913, while sailing back to New Zealand to greet Scott on his return, she learned of his death in Antarctica in March 1912.

In 1922, she married the politician Edward Hilton Young. Her second son, Wayland Hilton Young (1923–2009) was a writer and politician. Her grandchildren include Emily Young, artist, and Louisa Young, writer.

She was a member of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers.

She was Eileen Gray’s close friend. As a friend and pupil of Auguste Rodin, etched in her memory was the day she went from being called chère élève (dear student) to chère collègue (dear colleague). Within months of graduating with the Colarossi’s highest honors, her sculptures were displayed by the Salon.

During a sitting, Kathleen Bruce’s Highland flamboyance and seductive beauty captivated Aleister Crowley. Characterized by some biographers as a misogynist because the frailties of her female friends exasperated her, Bruce was not the easy conquest Crowley had hoped. “She took delight in getting married men away from their wives,” Crowley wrote bitterly, and “initiated me into the torturing pleasures of algolagny on the spiritual plane.” Of their “sexless love,” Crowley remarked that she “made me wonder, in fact, if the secret of puritanism was not to heighten the intensity of love by putting obstacles in its way.” As it turns out, she was simply remaining chaste until she found Mr. Right: As she recalled her artist friends and potential lovers in Paris, “I kept my goal, my star, firmly fixed. None of these was the right, the perfect father for my son.” Crowley’s later poems “The Black Mass,” “The Adept,” and “The Vampire” recount his ambivalence toward her.

After she married Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Scott (1868–1912) in 1908, Crowley concluded he had always disliked her. Bruce bore her husband a son, Peter, in 1909; Scott and three others died tragically on his second Antarctic expedition, two months after reaching the South Pole.

Whatever Crowley’s feelings about her may have been, Kathleen Bruce nevertheless commanded much attention in his writings: His later books Why Jesus Wept and Rodin in Rime would bear dedications to Kathleen Bruce, as would his poems “The Muse” and “Song” and the short story “The Vitriol Thrower.” The namesake of “The Ordeal of Ira Pendragon” was based in part on her, as were the poems “Ovariotomy” and “The Gilt Mask” from Konx Om Pax. Poems V, VI, and VII from Clouds without Water were written by Crowley for Kathleen Bruce and her name even appears as an acrostic in the opening “Terzain”:

King of myself, I labour to espouse

An equal soul. Alas! how frail I find

The golden light within the gilded house.

Helpless and passionate, and weak of mind!

Lechers and lepers!—all as ivy cling,

Emasculate the healthy bole they haunt.

Eternity is pregnant; I shall sing

Now—by my power—a spirit grave and gaunt

Brilliant and selfish, hard and hot, to flaunt

Reared like a flame across the lampless west,

Until by love or laughter we enchaunt,

Compel ye to Kithairon’s thorny crest—

Evoe! Iacche! consummatum est.

Her new husband, explorer Robert Scott, was reportedly furious to find his wife’s name in this bizarre book.

Titles:

In 1913, she was granted the rank of a widow of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath. This meant that, for the purposes of establishing official precedence, she was treated as if she were the widow of such a knight. However, she was not entitled to be called Lady Scott merely by virtue of this, and it did not amount to Captain Scott being posthumously knighted.

When her second husband was created Baron Kennet on 15 July 1935, she gained the title Baroness Kennet.

Popular culture:

Scott was played by the actress Diana Churchill in the 1948 Ealing Studios film Scott of the Antarctic. John Mills played her husband.

circa 1910