Sir vivian fuchs biography of abraham

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Despite a poor degree, he mixed with influential contacts in the Cambridge polar network who shaped his life and went on a geological field excursion to Greenland in 1929. After finishing Cambridge and getting a degree of Geology, he started his life of exploration. He went to Greenland in 1929, visited African lakes in 1930 and Lake Tirukana in 1934.

After a war, he left the army with the rank of Major and started his scientific work as a geologist with the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey.

Stewart SLESSOR showed Fuchs the ropes on his inaugural journey around the bases early in 1948. He was born on February 11, 1908.

Standing at more than 6ft, strong, austere and possessing thunderous eyebrows, Vivian Fuchs was a natural leader who had no need to coerce people to get his way.

They had three children: Hilary (b 1936, d 2002) Rosalind (1938–1945) and Peter (b 1940). Later, in the benign atmosphere of a Royal Geographical Society dinner, Fuchs maintained that "the great Antarctic row never existed at all". Clifford was naturally enthusiastic, and, to the extreme consternation of Fuchs, immediately wanted to organise it within FIDS.

This epic journey captured the imagination of the world and it is for this expedition that he is most particularly remembered. Fuchs was knighted for his remarkable achievement. Fuchs roundly rejected such an idea and declared his intention of carrying on as planned, if necessary without New Zealand help. Sir Edmund Hillary was to lead a New Zealand team to establish Scott Base on the Ross Sea, in their own sector of the Antarctic, where the journey was to end.

Along the way a substantial scientific programme had been accomplished, including seismic soundings and a gravity traverse.

On his return, Fuchs was knighted, qualified for a clasp to his Polar Medal of 1953, and became one of the very few explorers to whom the Royal Geographical Society has awarded a Special Gold Medal. Fuchs was educated at Brighton College and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences.

His interest in polar exploration was aroused by his tutor, Sir James Wordie, who had been with Shackleton on the abortive Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-16, when their ship, the Endurance, was wrecked in the Weddell Sea.

Fuchs was the geologist in a team which Wordie took to East Greenland in 1929.

Fuchs spent much of the next ten years in Africa. An explorer with instinctively big ideas, he was also a patient and painstaking master of detail, which ensured that the first surface crossing of the Antarctic, in 1957-58, was successfully concluded, despite something of a contretemps between Fuchs and Sir Edmund Hillary along the way.

Vivian Ernest Fuchs, known as "Bunny", was the son of Ernest Fuchs, who had emigrated from Germany as a child, become a successful farmer and married an Englishwoman, Violet Watson.

From London he swapped notes with Governor ARROWSMITH on the performance of each new Jaguar that he bought and he battled against administrative changes, notably the incorporation of the British Antarctic Survey (as FIDS had become on 1 February, 1962) into the bureaucracy of the Natural Environmental Research Council.

His men, he said, would "find their own way out".

At Stonington base Fuchs received the nickname Papa, an obvious recognition of the generational gap between him and many of his colleagues. Fuchs was commemorated on postage stamps issued by the British Antarctic Territory in 2000.

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