#lashly

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[punpkin-314-pi]

sally, clinging to ash and larry: sir, these are my emotional support emos

[worstjourney]

Before going down the road to Portsmouth and joining the Royal Navy, William Lashly worked on a farm near his idyllic home village of Hambledon in Hampshire.  Atkinson describes him as having found, since youth, a deep abiding joy in hard physical work, and his naval career spared him none of that: as stoker, his domain was the sweltering engine room, shifting coal into the furnace and maintaining the boilers, through polar and tropical seas alike.  Like Taff Evans and Tom Crean, he had been with Scott in Antarctica before, on the Discovery Expedition, and like them had gained a reputation of dependability and strength, attributes only enhanced by being a lifelong teetotaler and nonsmoker.  He was about as square as you could get.

Lashly and Crean, under the command of Teddy Evans, returned from assisting Scott and his party to the polar plateau – they were the last three men to see the Polar Party alive.  When laid low by scurvy in the later stages of their journey, Teddy ordered Lashly and Crean to leave him and save themselves, but they refused.  Crean famously walked 35 miles solo to Hut Point to fetch help; Lashly gets less attention for staying and tending Teddy at Corner Camp, which was equally risky as he didn’t know if help would arrive, or even if Crean would make it to Hut Point in the first place.  He did win an Albert Medal for it, though.

When his polar exploits were finished, Lashly retired from the navy, but re-enlisted almost immediately as a reserve and saw action in WWI.  He finally retired back to Hambledon, where he lived in a little house named after Minna Bluff, and when he died in 1940 was buried, as per his modest request, in an unmarked grave in the village churchyard.

There's a rather splendid and comprehensive website on Lashly here if you'd like to get to know him better.

Moreso than anyone else, I think, I've let his personality attributes nudge his physical appearance away from the strictly accurate.  He seems to have preferred to stay in the background, so I can't rely on screen time to establish who he is before his character comes into play: it will need to come through primarily in a visual impression.  After a lot of bashing away at it, I got something that’s somewhere on the way to progress, but I’m still not really happy with it ... going to let it steep for a bit and see if something better turns up once I’ve done so.

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Terra Nova crew after returning to Cardiff, 1913

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[punpkin-314-pi]

salarry but also lashly but also salash get what i mean

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