Dancing on Ice

Dancing on Ice
By Jeremy Scott
Publisher: Old Street Publishing, 2008
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In 1930 Gino Watkins led a group of fourteen intrepid and largely inexperienced young men, including the author’s father,
on a year-long expedition to the Arctic.

Their stated aim was to find an air-route over the polar regions, charting the shortest distance between Europe and America and thus paving the way for passenger air travel. But the real motives were deeper and more complex. Too young to have fought in the war that had taken so heavy a toll on their parents’ generation, they found themselves unable to accept the comfortable, dull life that England seemed to offer. They thirsted for adventure, for risk, for the chance to prove their mettle. In the words of one of their group, they wanted to ‘do something big’.