C. S. Wright

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other persons named Charles Wright, see Charles Wright (disambiguation).

Sir Charles Seymour Wright, KCB, OBE, MC, MA (who went by C. S. "Silas" Wright) (1887 – 1 November 1975) was a Canadian member of Robert Falcon Scott's antarctic expedition of 1911-1913, the Terra Nova Expedition.

Born in Toronto and educated at Upper Canada College, he was an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and did research at the Cavendish Laboratory between 1908 and 1910.

Nicknamed ‘Silas’ (after Silas K Hocking, an American novelist). In November 1912, Wright, 25 years old at the time, was the member of the search party to find the tent containing the bodies of Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry Robertson Bowers, who perished on their return trek from the South Pole.

He married the sister of fellow Terra Nova expedition member Raymond Priestley.

After a distinguished career in the First World War, during which he gained the Military Cross and OBE, he became in turn Director of the Admiralty Research Laboratory and Director of Scientific Research at the Admiralty.

With the formation of the Royal Naval Scientific Service in 1946, he was appointed first chief of the service. He then returned to North America to continue his own research, working at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, the Defence Research Board of Canada's Pacific Naval Laboratory and the University of British Columbia.

Silas was knighted in 1946.