30/08/2024
1891: BIRTH OF CARR
Air Marshal Sir Charles Roderick Carr KBE, CB, DFC, AFC, officer in the Royal Navy and then the Royal Air Force, was born in Feilding, New Zealand, on 31 August, 1891.
Carr served with the Royal Naval Air Services and then the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War. He was also involved in the British Relief Force in Russia in 1919, where he met Sir Ernest Shackleton and this led to Carr being appointed aviator of Shackleton’s final expedition aboard Quest. The craft, an Avro Baby modified as a seaplane with an 80-horsepower engine, was not collected from South Africa, however, and was not used during the expedition. Instead, Carr was engaged in a variety of activities, assisting with the scientific (meteorological, surveying and geological) work in particular.
On the way to South Georgia, Carr made some cupboards and shelves aboard the ship. Though his work, was ‘a bit rough and ready, [it] answered its purpose well, which was the main thing’, as Wild wrote. However, the puns started. ‘Hussey congratulated him on his new appointment as joiner, calling him thereafter ‘Roddy Carr-penter’, which I can assure my readers is the least of the atrocious puns which we endured from him. Always a cheery soul, his very presence was worth much to us on the trip, for it is the small jest which goes farthest and still sparkles when the more subtle wit has fallen flat.’
Carr suffered a few injuries throughout the expedition—his nose was broken by a blow from a heavy block and shackle on the deck of the ship and he later developed a nasty abscess of the face. Carr and others inflicted various injuries upon each other as they engaged in unruly wrestling matches in the snow while Quest was in the ice. Wild wrote that their sport ‘more resembled a free fight than anything’.
KBE: Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
CB: Companion of the Order of the Bath
DFC: Distinguished Flying Cross
AFC: Air Force Cross
John Stedman 😉
Image: NPG London
SOURCES
The Feilding Star, 25 February, 1916.
F. Wild, Shackleton’s Last Voyage (London, 1923), pp. 13, 38, 49, 105, 148.
D. Wright, ‘Shackleton’s Men in the Arctic: Polar Explorers and Arctic Warfare in North Russia 1918-1919’, The James Caird Society Journal No. 9 (2018), p. 78.
‘Air Marshal Sir Roderick Carr’, Air of Authority - A History of RAF Organisation: https://www.rafweb.org/Biographies/Carr_CR.htm.
‘Charles Roderick Carr’, Cenotaph record, Auckland Museum: https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph/record/C138285.
