Edward Adrian Wilson is perhaps the most famous native son of Cheltenham. Inthe early years of the 20th Century, he was one of the major influences andpersonalities of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration and has also beenrecognised as one of the top ranking ornithologists and naturalists in the UnitedKingdom during this period. He was also one of the last great scientific expeditionartists.Despite this, remarkably little has been published about him. His father wrote anunpublished biography of him shortly after his death. This was an importantsource for George Seaver, who published three volumes of biography on EdwardWilson in the 1930s and 40s, fortunately quoting extensively from his letters anddiaries. After the appearance of the first two volumes much of the source materialthat Seaver had used was destroyed, most of it on the instructions of Oriana,Edward Wilson's widow. There was nothing malicious in this: she simply thoughtthat she had done her public duty in allowing a biography to be published and didnot want strangers digging around in her private correspondence after her death.In the 1960s and 70s, through the Scott Polar Research Institute, the Antarcticexpedition diaries of Edward Wilson and a volume of his Antarctic bird pictureswere published. Several people tried to write new biographies in the 1970s and80s but all failed for the lack of new material: due to the subsequent events,George Seaver's books and the published diaries already contained much of thesource material about the life of Edward Wilson.As such this volume draws heavily on the work of Edward Wilson's father, on thepublished diaries, and on George Seaver. With Seaver in particular, however, hisuse of the historical sources available to him requires a word of caution: hefrequently used the narrative technique of rolling quotations from several letters ordiary entries into one quotation, passing them off as a single quotation from asingle document. Since he published no footnotes it is almost impossible toestablish where he has or has not done this, although his longer quotations, orquotations from complete letters, tend to be accurate. Unlike some commentatorsin subsequent generations, who often use quotation techniques to alter historicalfacts and to mis-represent what was said, with Seaver it is generally benign - hehas not, as far as we have discovered, changed the sense of meaning, or misrepresentedfacts external to the actual form of the quotation. It is, however,something of a disaster from the point of view of accurate scholarship given thatthe original manuscripts are often no longer available. We have done our best,where possible, to find the original sources but these are very scattered, wherethey still exist, and it is painstaking work. Occasionally, they can be recreatedthrough bringing together copied extracts - fortunately a habit in which many ofthe Wilson family indulged - such as in Edward Wilson's last letter to Oriana,reproduced towards the end of this book.In many ways, therefore, the following text should not be seen as a major newbiography of Edward Wilson but rather as a complement to the volumes ofGeorge Seaver. This is not to say that there is no new material in the book, thereshould be enough to interest polar scholars, though there may not be as much asthey had hoped. Where possible, we have also chosen to use previouslyunpublished illustrations from the vast collections of Edward Wilson's pictures.These, alone, should be enough to interest those in search of new material. Ouraim, however, is to meet the many hundreds of enquiries received about thisfamous son of Cheltenham and his life. Edward Wilson is one of the most askedafter aspects of the collections at the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums. Thiswork is intended to answer this demand from the public for something aboutEdward Wilson to be available to them in print, and to identify the 'Wilson sites' inand around Cheltenham, rather than to write an academic book. As such there areno footnotes but an annotated copy of the text will be placed in the collections ofthe Scott Polar Research Institute, the Cheltenham Public Library and theCheltenham Museum, so that those who may be interested in the historicalsources for this work will be able to find them.Finally, it seems impossible not to say a few words about the contemporarysituation as regards polar historical scholarship and biography, against which thisbook will inevitably be judged by some. We hope that this work is an exception tothe current fashion for cynicism. Some will doubtless find it an "old fashioned" or"non-critical" work as a result. For this we make no apology. Our aim isn't to pickfor faults like vultures at a carcass, nor to sit in judgement, but to help you to get toknow a remarkably complex man a little better - and maybe - just maybe - youwill find a little inspiration for your own life and times through the life and times ofEdward Adrian Wilson.