JUST GOING OUT

Two very different kinds of resignation took place on the 16^th March.

On the 16^th March 1912, Lawrence Oates, an ill member of Robert Falcon Scott’s South Pole expedition, left the tent to die, saying: "I am just going outside and may be some time."

Scott wrote in his diary, "We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman".

On 16^th March 1976, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson surprised the nation by announcing his resignation as Prime Minister (taking effect on 5 April 1976). He claimed that he had always planned on resigning at the age of 60, and that he was physically and mentally exhausted. As early as the late 1960s, he had been telling intimates, like his doctor Sir Joseph Stone, that he did not intend to serve more than eight or nine years as Prime Minister. Roy Jenkins has suggested that Wilson may have been motivated partly by the distaste for politics felt by his loyal and long-suffering wife, Mary. Beyond this, by 1976 he might already have been aware of the first stages of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, which was to cause both his formerly excellent memory and his powers of concentration to fail dramatically.

Queen Elizabeth II came to dine at 10 Downing Street to mark his resignation, an honour she has bestowed on only one other Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.