When Roland Huntford, who has died aged 98, published his book Scott and Amundsen: The Race to the South Pole (1979), it ignited a firestorm of controversy. In Huntford’s words: “Scott had brought disaster on himself by his own incompetence, and thrown away the lives of his companions.”
While reviewers were impressed by his groundbreaking research, his conclusions collided with Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s image as a national hero. The explorer’s naturalist son, Peter, who had allowed Huntford access to his family papers, rejected the iconoclastic portrayal of his father and initiated legal action.
They ultimately agreed to a disclaimer in future editions stating that Huntford’s acknowledgement of the family “must under no circumstances be interpreted as approval of anything in the book”.
Cambridge academics including the historian Correlli Barnett, keeper of the archives at Churchill College, rallied in support of Huntford’s scholarship when critics tried to have him barred from the Scott Polar Research Institute and the University Library. In 1986 St Antony’s College, Oxford, awarded him the Alistair Horne fellowship, and in 1992 Wolfson College, Cambridge, named him a senior member. Huntford continued with what became his life’s work, a cycle of biographies chronicling the pioneering exploration of the polar regions.
The impetus for these books came out of Huntford’s work, from 1960, as Scandinavian correspondent for the Observer, covering winter sports and politics. In 1974 he profiled Tryggve Gran, then 86, who had been the Norwegian skiing expert on Scott’s 1910 British Antarctic Expedition. Scott’s quest to reach the south pole first for king and country was bested by Roald Amundsen, who raised the Norwegian flag there just over a month before, on 14 December 1911.
Prompted by his editor, Huntford delved into research for a book on the race for the pole, unearthing masses of letters, diaries, and documents in archives and private hands in several countries. “It was only when I started reading both Scott and Amundsen’s diaries that I became aware of the discrepancies,” he told the Guardian in 2008. The contenders were deeply mismatched: the Norwegians, veterans of Arctic travel and survival methods, and the British, natives of a temperate climate.
Huntford contended that better planning and training could have altered the odds. “We haven’t got much to tell in the way of privation or great struggle,” Amundsen wrote after completing his journey. “The whole thing went like a dream.” At the pole, Scott wrote: “Great God – this is an awful place.” He and four men died on the retreat. The poignant last words of Scott’s published diary told a tale of heroic sacrifice that resonated with the British public for generations.
The subject of Huntford’s second polar book, Shackleton (1985), came naturally. “At every other turn the shadow of Ernest Shackleton fell across my path,” he recounted. Of Shackleton’s four forays to the Antarctic, he was most celebrated for the “glorious failure” of his 1914 Endurance expedition, when his ship was crushed in pack ice and he improbably managed to save his crew. The book wove together Huntford’s characteristic rigorous research, psychological analysis and historical insight.
Next he turned to the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, Arctic explorer, neuroscientist, diplomat, and Nobel peace laureate. “Behind the polar explorers of our time, his figure looms,” Huntford wrote. “He was the mentor of them all.” He spent a dozen years writing Nansen: The Explorer As Hero (1997), hailed by the Sunday Telegraph as perfectly capturing “the blend of arrogance and innocence of its inspiring but infuriating hero”.
The picture anthologies The Amundsen Photographs (1987) and The Shackleton Voyages (2002) were followed by Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and Amundsen (2010). He translated works for the philosopher Arne Naess and the explorer Liv Arnesen.
A complement to Huntford’s polar cycle came in the story of a simple invention, older than the wheel, that had enabled those exploits: the ski. In Two Planks and a Passion: The Dramatic History of Skiing (2008), he traced its development from 6,000 year old artefacts to modern Olympic skiing. He added Russian to his proficiency in five other languages to research primary sources. The book echoed his first, a humorous guide to skiing entitled How to Get to the Bottom (1956).
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Roland was the son of Esther (nee Asherson) and Samuel Horwitch, a Lithuanian émigré farmer and military veteran. In 1946 Roland gained his BSc from the University of Cape Town. Then he went to London to study physics at what was then Imperial College, though was compelled to leave after two years (1947-49), followed by several years of intellectual vagabonding in Europe.
A fascination with Henrik Ibsen lured him to Norway in 1954. He relished backcountry ski touring and camping in the northern Scandinavian forests. After a stint at the UN High Commission for Refugees in Geneva, he joined the Observer and settled in Stockholm, where in 1966 he married Anita Roos.
In his 15 years as a journalist, he also wrote for the Spectator, documenting cold war unease in the Baltic states. His book The New Totalitarians (1971), was a critique of social democratic policy in Sweden that riled the government. He was finishing a historical novel about Columbus, The Sea of Darkness (1975), when the Gran interview set him on a new path.
The narrative verve of Huntford’s books inspired cinematic adaptations. The Last Place on Earth (1985) dramatised the story of Scott and Amundsen in a Central Independent Television series. Huntford advised the Channel 4 drama Shackleton (2002), starring Kenneth Branagh.
Huntford participated in many documentaries as well, including the IMAX format film Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure (2001) and Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance (2002), through which we first met.
Huntford lived in Cambridge and enjoyed Nordic skiing into his 80s. He was generous with scholars of polar exploration, scientists and expeditioners.
Anita died in 2025. He is survived by their sons, Anthony and Nicholas, and two grandchildren. A first marriage, to Edna, ended in divorce.
• Roland Huntford, biographer, historian and journalist, born 4 September 1927; died 23 January 2026
