'Terra Nova' in the ice, from 'Scott's Last Expedition' (b/w photo) by Herbert Ponting / The Stapleton Collection

Geoffrey Dickinson was matte artist at Ealing Studios from 1947 to 1953: working on films like Scott of the Antarctic dir Charles Frend, 1948.

Aerial photograph of Third Ypres (1917) IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM FIRST WORLD WAR AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHS COLLECTION View of the muddy wasteland pitted by shell craters.

George Méliès, A Trip to the Moon, 1902

A single immense cannon at a tremendous distance said something. Something sulky. Aroused in its sleep and protesting. But it was not a signal to begin anything. Too heavy. Firing at something at a tremendous distance. At Paris, may be: or the North Pole: or the moon! They were capable of that, those fellows!

It would be a tremendous piece of frightfulness to hit the moon. Great gain in prestige. And useless. There was no knowing what they would not be up to, as long as it was stupid and useless. And, naturally boring... And it was a mistake to be boring. One went on fighting to get rid of those bores—as you would to get rid of a bore in a club.

Paul Nash, ‘We Are Making a New World’

Paul Nash, Totesmeer

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England

[given;Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

C.R.W. Nevinson, ‘Paths of Glory’ (1917), exhibited at Leicester Galleries, 1918.

Tyne Cot Cemetery, Passendale, Belgium

‘And so in the crippled space capsule, Captain Scott is on his way back to earth, the first Englishman to reach the moon, but his triumph will be over-shadowed by the memory of Astronaut Oates, a tiny receding figure waving forlornly from the featureless wastes of the lunar landscape.’

Frau im Mond, dir Fritz Lang, 1929

John Charles Dolman ‘A Very Gallant Gentleman’ (1913) [Laurence Oates]

‘probably the only important thing that has happened in the twentieth century….the real effects of the moon landing can only be described as a gigantic flop….the moon landing was the death knell of the future as a moral authority’ Extreme Metaphors, interviews with J.G.Ballard (2012), 23-4. 

George Méliès, Conquest of the Pole, 1912