However much of good I may write of Wilson, his many friends in England, those who served with him on the ship or in the hut, and most of all those who had the good fortune to sledge with him (for it is sledging which is far the greatest test) will all be dissatisfied, for I know that I cannot do justice to his value.  If you knew him you could not like him:  you simply had to love him.  Bill was of the salt of the earth.  If I were asked what quality it was before others that made him so useful, and so lovable, I think I should answer that it was because he never for one moment thought of himself.  In this respect also Bowers, of whom I will speak in a moment, was most extraordinary, and in passing may I be allowed to say that this is a most necessary characteristic of a good Antarctic traveller?  We had many such, officers and seamen, and the success of the expedition was in no small measure due to the general and unselfish way in which personal likes and dislikes, wishes or tastes were ungrudgingly subordinated to the common weal.  Wilson and Pennell set an example of expedition first and the rest nowhere which others followed ungrudgingly:  it pulled us through more than one difficulty which might have led to friction.

Wilson was a man of many parts.  He was Scott’s right-hand man, he was the expedition’s Chief of the Scientific Staff:  he was a doctor of St. George’s Hospital, and a zoologist specializing in vertebrates.  His published work on whales, penguins and seals contained in the Scientific Report of the Discovery Expedition is still the best available, and makes excellent reading even to the non-scientist.  On the outward journey of the Terra Nova he was still writing up his work for the Royal Commission on Grouse Disease, the published report of which he never lived to see.  But those who knew him best will probably remember Wilson by his water-colour paintings rather than by any other form of his many-sided work.

As a boy his father sent him away on rambling holidays, the only condition being that he should return with a certain number of drawings.  I have spoken of the drawings which he made when sledging or when otherwise engaged away from painting facilities, as at Hut Point.  He brought back to Winter Quarters a note-book filled with such sketches of outlines and colours:  of sunsets behind the Western Mountains:  of lights reflected in the freezing sea or in the glass houses of the ice foot:  of the steam clouds on Erebus by day and of the Aurora Australis by night.  Next door to Scott he rigged up for himself a table, consisting of two venesta cases on end supporting a large drawing-board some four feet square.  On this he set to work systematically to paint the effects which he had seen and noted.  He painted with his paper wet, and necessarily therefore, he worked quickly.  An admirer of Ruskin, he wished to paint what he saw as truly as possible.  If he failed to catch the effect he wished, he tore up the picture however beautiful the result he had obtained.  There is no doubt as to the faithfulness of his colouring:  the pictures recalled then and will still recall now in intimate detail the effects which we saw together.  As to the accuracy of his drawing it is sufficient to say that in the Discovery Expedition Scott wrote on his Southern Journey: