QUOTES ABOUT AUGUST



“He had enormous courage, both the kind which recognizes danger and is prepared to meet it and also that different courage which knows no fear”

“To many, he gave the impression of being unique, of having eyes set beyond most men’s horizon where he saw possibilities outside the limits of ordinary life”

“A slight eccentric, peculiarly English, partly a man of his times, partly a man who outlived them.  By his own criteria, he was nothing “unusual”

“One of the most original and creative of our generation… a charming and welcoming smile – a strong face, but a kindly one with lively eyes..”

“August was a very handsome man with a lively dark-skinned face, black hair and eyebrows and expressive green eyes.  He was a romantic who would have been at home in the time of Queen Elizabeth I, charting unknown seas, for he was a brilliant navigator and it was from his point of view, a sort of tragedy that so little of the earth’s surface was left unexplored.

“This unusual man... I would say he was a man of great vision... A wonderful and very rare person .. A fascinatingly interesting character.. I think all of us who were at Cambridge realized that he was in every sense a very special person, quite different from the normal run and quite clearly marked to do something out of the ordinary.”

Though August was far from being eccentric, his portrait is a study of a slight oddity, peculiar in that he was peculiarly English; partly a typical man of his times, partly a man who didn’t quite belong to them or who outlived them, though he only died in middle age.  By his own lights, certainly, he was nothing very unusual.  It is those lights, the criteria of a man of his particular slot in English history and English society, that now seem extraordinary.

Perhaps nobody did know him well.  He had no lack of friends, yet seemed to cultivate independence.  All the more surprising – or all credit to the power of love – that he fused himself so totally in marriage.  “We are very much one person”, his widow said of their happiest years.
“The bravest man I have ever known... He wasn’t physically a strong man, but he had the heart of a lion... Outstanding courage – mental toughness, if you will ... He was courageous in mind and spirit and most certainly possessed great physical courage and endurance...My dear and most gallant friend.”

“I have always remembered his great charm... how charming, how exceedingly kind and how very English he was.. A great, courageous, original and charming man... gay, unconventional, brave and charming... quite unconscious of his charm.”

For most of his friends, he was the richest man they knew, but to look at, according to the wife of one of them, you would have never have guessed he had two farthings to rub together.  Others were more specific: his clothes were a shambles, his fingernails were clogged with tobacco ash, he missed trains, he lost things, he was none too fond of soap and water, he was other-wordly and casual and sloppy and careless.  Alone and snowed up on the Greenland ice cap, he couldn’t dig himself out of the tent because he had left the spade outside.  When he was in the navy his cabin, as someone said, was a “glorious mess of everything lying around everywhere – it only needed a few frozen fish to complete the effect of a floating igloo”.  On the contrary, someone else remembered it as empty and austere with a few of the comforts or private possessions most men needed.  But as a rich man there was another side, hardly glimpsed by friends unless they were in difficulties: “Sometimes we guessed but we were never told about the many fields in which his stealthy, almost surreptitious, generosity was given rein”.

“He had a rumbustious sense of humour and his anecdotes were often picaresque ... He really enjoyed being alone ... Very much the life and soul of the party... A doer rather than a talker... A natural rebel against social conventions... Full of humour, originality and humanity ... Unaware of class distinctions or ephemeral social values... August took rather a delight in saying things to shock people – or perhaps I should say that this was often his way to make a point... He treated the world with such derision”.
August was a strange mix of eccentricity and the conventional.  Conventional in his love of music, he loved Chopin, Bach and Beethoven, but I doubt if he would have listened even to Debussy.  He loved reading, but would have drawn the line at Ulysses or the works of Jean-Paul Sartre.  His eccentricity took the form of an almost total lack of regard for the orthodoxy of ordinary behaviour.
He had very good manners before women, never using a swear word in their company, but he thought nothing of going out for dinner with dirty fingernails. 
(Lady Mollie Bulter)

“He was warm, passionate, spirited, determined and philosophical.  He was a stickler for detail and had direct and intense views, expecting a certain degree of integrity in what people did, but was a good listener and took other people’s opinions on board.  He never discussed himself or enlightened people about his adventures and was very humbled and reserved. He felt man needed to earn his way rather than inherit and strongly believed that although life should be enjoyed one shouldn’t live in a cut-off bubble of materialistic wealth. “There must be room for side tunnels where the soul can escape and express itself.””
(Stephen Courtauld, son of August Courtauld)

His ability to adapt to circumstances – itself a kind of modesty – was one of the qualities most needed to bring him through, as important as self-discipline, emotional stability and courage… anticipation can be a killer.  And hope diminishes as the fact of abandonment grows.  In stories of survival Wilfred Noyce notes a common element, “a sense of self community”, as belief in the encouragement and co-operation of others that buoyed a man’s spirit.

So it was with August Courtauld.  Always to supplement his capacity for endurance, there was a feeling of belonging to the expedition, of community with friends, as if a thin connection ran back like a vein down the line of half-mile flags from the ice-cap station to the coast.  Knowing that the others were at the base and trusting them to come back for him as soon as they could, helped sustain him… “No man is an island, entire of itself” even in the middle of the Greenland ice-cap.  (Nicholas Wollaston “The Man on the Ice Cap”)