the allegation that Oates had fathered a child with a girl who was only eleven at the time of conception. This allegation was, naturally, picked up by the media as fact. It is far, far from fact. There is no actual evidence for it whatsoever. It hinges entirely on the fact that a girl was told by her guardian (after many years) that her father was Captain Oates. How convenient - a heroic figure who couldn't answer back and deny it. If I was a woman who had no idea who my father was and had a little dream that he may be someone great, I'd like to hear he was Captain Oates too. It seems to me that this somehow became accepted in their family, and Michael Smith got hold of it and put it in his book and got more publicity because of it.

I kept turning the pages waiting for the actual evidence. Apparently, he looked a bit like some uncle of the family. That's it.

This is a man who (and this IS documented and attested to by those who knew him) showed absolutely no interest in women or sex at all for the rest of his life. This is a man who, according to everyone who knew him, behaved with the utmost decency to all he knew from any walk of life. There is no record of him or his family having anything to do with the woman or her family at any point in his life. She lived in Scotland. There is no record of him going to Scotland at this time. There is absolutely nothing to link them at any point. The person who told the girl he was her father was only her guardian. Her mother lived near to her but never mentioned anything of the sort.

Oates would have been eighteen at the time. This clearly, if it happened at all, which I believe it did not, was an incredibly brief relationship with no further contact - would it even be possible to recognise him as the same person 14 years later? And if the mother told the guardian that it was Oates (as who else would have done?), why didn't she tell the daughter herself? It just doesn't add up. It seems quite obvious that it was a nice story told to a girl who wanted a hero for a father. It is just a shame that this warming little family white lie couldn't have stayed within the family.