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Love in the Antarctic? Bromance on the Terra Nova expedition.

The diary of Harry Pennell sheds some light on his relationship with Edward Atkinson.

Gaydar

26 Jul 2025 — 8 min read

The Terra Nova expedition of 1910 was led by Captain Scott - aiming to be the first to reach the geographic South Pole.

Two of the men that were part of the expedition were Harry Pennell and Edward Atkinson.

For our podcast, How To Date Men, we were joined by Allegra Rosenberg who shared her insights from the personal diary of Harry Pennell and what that reveals about his feelings for Atkinson and the relationship that they had.

In the conversation, we talk adventure, bromances, and the complexities of Edwardian sexuality.

Listen to the episode

What is it about the Antarctic exploration and the Terra Nova expedition specifically that interests you?

I've been a fan of Polar Exploration for about five years. It was sort of my pandemic hobby that then turned into something bigger. I sort of fell down the rabbit hole during lockdowns and I've just been enjoying the ride ever since.

I've always been a TV fan and I love shows with big ensemble cast with lots of different character relationships. Polar Exploration is just like that, basically. You have an expedition - which is the equivalent of like a show or a cast - and all these different people and all these different personalities trapped together for these long periods of time and all these different interesting relationships come out, as well as the relationships with people left behind and the families and stuff like that. So human nature is at the heart of why polar exploration is so interesting to me.

And also like the fact that they were doing this and it was so dangerous, right? They were sort of the astronauts of their time. So there's also that sense of adventure and peril against a backdrop of them all living together for years at a time.

Terra Nova in particular is a story that we don't really know in America - we don't hear about Captain Scott. Learning about Captain Scott's story, and the legend that grew up around him after he died - that was super fascinating.

As an expedition, the Terra Nova has the most complete or perfect narrative arc in the terms that it's sort of a perfect Shakespearean tragedy. It hits all the beats and it's just incredibly narratively satisfying in a way that very few other true historical stories are - it has a start, a middle and an ending and I never get sick of it basically.

This story also has romance, which we weren't perhaps expecting. Can you talk a little bit how you discovered the story of Harry Pennell?

I was researching the expedition. I had a couple of favourites and I wanted to see if anybody had written about these guys in their diaries. Pennell wasn't one of them. I didn't know that much about him, but I had read all the diaries that were available in book form and then I was just hunting for more.

It's not a TV show - if you want to watch the next episode, you have to find it yourself. That's one of the great things about historical research.

I was was looking for more documents to read and anything to add to my giant pile of PDFs.

I saw that this museum in New Zealand had put up the full diary, a full scan of a diary of an expedition member, which I hadn't read. I knew that Pennell hadn't been in the shore party - he was on the ship. So I was like, maybe there isn't that much interesting stuff in there about the people that I care about, but I'll read it anyway.

So at like 7 PM, I started reading and I did not stop until I had finished and it was like 3 AM, and I realised that I had discovered the most amazing love story.

It was like a novel where you're like, well, he keeps talking about Atkinson kind of a lot. He seems to really like him. Am I making this up? Like, am I going crazy? Is this right? And then there's a moment where they separate after the expedition in New Zealand and they're heading back home separately. And I'm like, well, are they ever going to see each other again? And then the minute they get back, not only do they see each other again, but Pennell's like, "I am in love with him" in his diary.

That's when I freaked out. I started texting my friends. I'm like, guys, I think I found something amazing. So it was an experience.

Of course, it's all from Pennell's perspective. But as soon as I finished reading, I reached out to some people and I was like, you know, where can I get the other side of the story?

Is this a one sided man-crush?

I was maybe the third or fourth person to read this diary in full. It had only been scanned recently. The people who had read it before, they'd had to go to New Zealand to read it. That was one of the reasons that it wasn't super out there.

The couple of people that had read it, they knew that he was in love with Atkinson, but they didn't put it in their books because it wasn't what they were looking for. I reached out to those people, who are like super Terra Nova experts, to ask - do you think this was one sided?

The thing is that these are super-repressed Edwardians. It's amazing in the first place that Pennell was open enough to write this sort of stuff down in his diary. Atkinson is much more typical of his generation, I would think - you really can't tell what he was thinking or how he was feeling.

To me, the reaction of Atkinson after Pennell's death clues you in to the fact that it was very much a mutual romantic friendship and they very much cared deeply for each other.

These Edwardians didn't have the same types of relationships that we have today. So yes, they loved each other very much. They cared deeply about each other. Other than that, I have no idea. They certainly lived together.

Does that speculation about Pennell and Atkinson have any real value in deepening our understanding of the Terra Nova exploration?

It absolutely does because it is proof positive of something that people who read a lot in this subject know already, which is that these expeditions were full of love and they were full of these deep friendships, often these deep romantic friendships.

Maybe if they were born 100 years later, who knows how they would have identified. But there were people who found their soulmates on this exhibition. I think that Pennell and Atkinson were some of them.

It's also interesting because with Pennell, you have someone that writes in his diary about his crushes going back 10 years. And his mother knows, his mother's always getting the updates about these latest boys. He's very open, but you don't get a sense that he was a bohemian or that he would have identified with the sexual freedom of the Bloomsbury group that was all happening at that time. He was very conservative. And so that in itself is enlightening because it shows you that it wasn't all the same thing. The sexual revolution was very limited to a tiny, tiny part of society that Pennell was not a participant in, and yet he was expressing this love for his friend in his diary. For students of this era, it's super, super interesting.

In your writing, you've highlighted the way that Pennell would describe his affection for not only Atkinson but other men as well. But when it got to the woman that he actually proposed to, she was shocked by the proposal and really got no mention in the diary beyond the fact that he was going to marry this woman?

She was the sister of his previous crush. She was probably the only eligible single woman that he knew well enough to know that he wouldn't mind. It's very Brideshead Revisited - marrying your boy-bestie's sister, it's a good trope. It happened all the time.

Pennell's wife grew to love him. I met his great nieces and they remember her as Aunt Katie and the word was that Pennell was very much the love of her life. But it's like, how could you not love him? I fell in love with him, too. He's such a wonderful guy.

The instinct is to wish that they were born later, but there was more of an openness allowed to them then, simply in the context of a close romantic friendship between men. They didn't have to deal with the assumptions that it was sexual because that simply wasn't even in the consciousness at the time. So they were able to live more comfortably in that ambiguity and in that closeness, which may have been more of what they wanted than having to be like we're just friends or we are in relationship.

You said that you fell in love with Penhall through reading his diaries. What was it about his writings that you connected with emotionally?

He's a fantastic writer. The way that he describes nature - the descriptions of birds, and he loved old churches. You get the sense also from the way that other people described him, that he was just the most warm, open, loving, competent, brave person - incredibly hardworking, incredibly devoted to his friends, and worthy of being given command of the ship, which he was and which he very much did proud.

He's very wholesome and he also is a little bit naive and a little bit innocent. There's a part at the end of this diary where he's like, I had to ask Atkinson to explain married sex to me. And you're like, honey.

But he had a kind of naive wisdom to him, which allows him to see the best in everybody. He's the kind of guy that you're like, where are these guys today? I hope they're around somewhere.

It's interesting because it's not a story where it's like they leave the Navy and they go off together forever. That would be remarkable. Whereas this is remarkable in its unremarkableness because it makes you think about all the other relationships that were like this, that were disrupted by the war, by having to get married, that didn't have somebody writing in his diary, you know, I am in love with him.

It was a type of relationship that would soon disappear - we don't have this anymore. It's important to document for that reason.

Are there any more secrets of the Terra Nova expedition to be revealed, or do we know everything that we're ever going to know about these men and their adventures?

There's always more. There's a lot of documents sitting out there, hiding in archives that need to get scanned.

It's a lens into human relationships at a really interesting time. This like pre-World War I time - everything is about to change. That's what really interests me.