and English. It was there that he developed his passion for adventure and, by the end of his university years, had already completed several overseas excursions including a climbing expedition in the Alps and a journey to Iceland to study plant and bird life. It was here that he met, and was inspired by, the great mountaineer Geoffrey Winthrop Young, and joined the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club (CUMC). Expeditions Chapman was attached as "ski expert and naturalist" to Gino Watkins' 1930–31 British Arctic Air Route Expedition. Expedition members included John Rymill and Augustine Courtauld. He also joined Watkins' subsequent fatal Greenland Expedition of 1932–33, which was led by Rymill after Watkins' death. Chapman experienced cold of such intensity that he lost all his finger and toe nails. He spent twenty hours in a storm at sea in his kayak and at one point fell into a deep crevasse, saving himself by holding onto the handles of his dog sled. He later led a three-man team across the desolate Greenland ice-cap. The first European to do this since Nansen, he became fluent in the Inuit language and was an able kayaker and dog sledger. Chapman, with the other expedition members, was awarded the Polar Medal, with the clasp Arctic 1930–1931, after the successful first expedition. In between the Greenland Expeditions he attempted what was to become the Bob Graham Round fell running challenge, and of climbing in the English Lake District Fells, his time of 25 hours was not however a record. Gino Watkins moulded an extraordinary esprit de corps in his expeditions, and the expedition members were a mixture of hard nuts, and rather fey Cambridge misfits. Many of the members would go on to do extraordinary things in the war. These members included Martin Lindsay, Augustine Courtauld and Chapman himself. Early in 1936, he joined a Himalayan climbing expedition. He was not only a keen mountaineer but studied the history of mountaineering, Dr Kellas being amongst his heroes. He enjoyed difficult climbs and met Basil Gould, the Political Officer for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Gould invited Spencer to be his private secretary on his political mission, from July 1936 to February 1937, to persuade the Panchen Lama to return from China and establish permanent British representation in Lhasa. Spencer struggled to learn Tibetan, learning it well enough to converse. He was involved in cypher work, kept a meteorological log,