After the First World War, in which William served in the Royal Navy Reserve, the family moved to Cardiff where William worked for the Board of Trade. On his retirement in 1932 they returned to Hambledon where they lived in a house in West Street which he called Minna Bluff after a rocky outcrop on the route to the South Pole. In their hall he kept the sledge harness he and Tom Crean used to haul Lieutenant Evans to safety.

According to the recollections of villagers, William was a quiet and private person, but in his retirement he still continued to make "lantern slide” presentations of his Antarctic experiences.

Publishing his Terra Nova Fieldnotes

It was while William was in Hambledon that he entered into correspondence with the Irish engraver and university teacher Robert Gibbings concerning the use of his field notes from the Terra Nova expedition in a printing project for students. William exchanged letters with him in 1938 and 1939, often reflecting on the challenges of life as a polar explorer. He never seems to have regretted the hardship of being on the expeditions and retained his enthusiasm until the end of his life.

William died aged 72 on June 12th 1940 in the Royal Hospital Portsmouth, just four months after his wife Alice. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, scientist on Scott’s second expedition, had kept in touch with him over the years and wrote an appreciation for the Scott Polar Research Institute’s journal Polar Record, recalling how “behind that kindly smile, that half filled the engine-room hatch on the Terra Nova, there were bottled up great reserves of quiet energy.”

He concluded his tribute, “So perhaps he is now looking for a good whack of pemmican and still singing that cheery little ditty with which he used to end his day’s work on earth.”

William was buried, as he had requested, in an unmarked grave in the Hambledon village church graveyard. Perhaps he would have been surprised that many years later the village decided to remember his life and achievements by calling a new housing project ‘Lashly Meadow’.

Next: Life in the Royal Navy