George Murray Levick (3 July 1876 – 30 May 1956)[1] was a British Antarctic explorer,naval surgeon and founder of thePublic Schools Exploring Society.
Levick was born inNewcastle upon Tyne, the son of civil engineer George Levick and Jeannie Sowerby. His elder sister was the sculptorRuby Levick. He studied medicine atSt Bartholomew's Hospital and was commissioned a surgeon in theRoyal Navy in November 1902.[2] He was secretary of theRoyal Navy Rugby Union at its founding in 1907.
He was given leave of absence to accompanyRobert Falcon Scott as surgeon and zoologist on hisTerra Nova expedition. Levick photographed extensively throughout the expedition. Prevented by pack ice from embarking on theTerra Nova in February 1912, Levick and the other five members of the party (Victor L. A. Campbell,Raymond Priestley,George P. Abbott,Harry Dickason, andFrank V. Browning) were forced to overwinter onInexpressible Island in a crampedice cave.
Part of the Northern Party, Levick spent the austral summer of 1911–1912 atCape Adare in the midst of anAdélie penguin rookery. To date, this has been the only study of the Cape Adarerookery, the largest Adélie penguin colony in the world, and he has been the only one to spend an entirebreeding cycle there.[3] His observations of the courting, mating, and chick-rearing behaviours of these birds are recorded in his bookAntarctic Penguins.[4] A manuscript he wrote about the penguins' sexual habits, which includedsexual coercion,sex among males andsex with dead females, was deemed too indecent by the Keeper of Zoology at the British Museum of Natural History,Sir Sidney Harmer, and prevented from being published.[5]
Nearly 100 years later, the manuscript was rediscovered and published in the journalPolar Record in 2012.[6] The discovery significantly illuminates the behaviour of a species that is an indicator ofclimate change.[6] In 2013, Levick's photography notebook was found by a member of theAntarctic Heritage Trust. It was found outside Scott's 1911 Cape Evans base. The notebook contains Levick's pencil notes detailing the date, subjects and exposure details for the photographs he took while at Cape Adare. After conservation it was returned to Antarctica.[7] This notebook should not be confused with Levick's notebooks of his zoological records at Cape Adare, of which the first volume contains his revelations about the mating behaviour of the penguins.[5]
Apsley Cherry-Garrard described the difficulties endured by the party in the winter of 1912:
They ateblubber, cooked with blubber, had blubber lamps. Their clothes and gear were soaked with blubber, and the soot blackened them, their sleeping-bags, cookers, walls and roof, choked their throats and inflamed their eyes. Blubbery clothes are cold, and theirs were soon so torn as to afford little protection against the wind, and so stiff with blubber that they would stand up by themselves, in spite of frequent scrapings with knives and rubbings with penguin skins, and always there were underfoot the great granite boulders which made walking difficult even in daylight and calm weather. As Levick said, "the road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but it seemed probable that hell itself would be paved something after the style of Inexpressible Island."[8]
On his return, Levick served in theGrand Fleet and atGallipoli on boardHMS Bacchante during theFirst World War. He was specially promoted in 1915 to the rank of fleet surgeon for his services with the Antarctic Expedition. He married Edith Audrey Mayson Beeton, a granddaughter ofIsabella Beeton, on 16 November 1918.
After his retirement from the Royal Navy he pioneered the training of blind people in physiotherapy against much opposition. In 1932, he founded thePublic Schools Exploring Society, which took groups of schoolboys to Scandinavia and Canada, and remained its president until his death in June 1956.
In 1940, at the beginning ofWorld War II, he returned to the Royal Navy, at the age of 64, to take up a position, as a specialist in guerrilla warfare, at theCommando Special Training Centre atLochailort, on the west coast of Scotland. He taught fitness, diet and survival techniques, many of which were published in his 1944 training manualHardening of Commando Troops for Warfare.
He was one of the consultants forOperation Tracer; in the event thatGibraltar was taken by the Axis powers, a small party was to be sealed into a secret chamber, dubbedStay Behind Cave, in the Rock of Gibraltar to report enemy movements.
Levick died on 30 May 1956 at the age of 79. At the time of his death, Major D. Glyn Owen, chairman of the British Exploring Society wrote: "A truly great Englishman has passed from our midst, but the memory of his nobleness of character and our pride in his achievements cannot pass from us. Having been on Scott's last Antarctic expedition, Murray Levick was later to resolve that exploring facilities for youth should be created under as rigorous conditions as could be made available. With his usual untiring energy and purposefulness he turned this concept into reality when he founded the Public Schools Exploring Society in 1932, later to become the British Schools Exploring Society, drawing schoolboys of between 16 and 18½ years to partake in annual expeditions abroad into wild and trackless country."[9]
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