A talk by Jeremy Holmes.
Outside the Royal Geographic Society in South Kensington is the statue of a man. Perhaps you’ve seen it? It is identified by just one word: Shackleton. Who was this man who needs so little introduction? Jeremy Holmes came to our u3a meeting on 2nd September to tell us.
Unlike explorers such as Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton is remembered not for the success of his expeditions but for his success in bringing his men safely home from a disastrous one.
Such was Shackleton’s charisma that, in January 2016, ex SAS officer, Henry Worsley tried to emulate his hero’s attempt to cross the Antarctic. Sadly, he died in the attempt. Worsley happened to be a descendant of Shackleton’s ship’s captain.
The ill-fated Antarctic expedition almost didn’t happen because the expedition was questioned when Germany declared war on Russia in August 1914. However, the First Lord of the Admiralty – one Winston Churchill – thought that a successful adventure might be good for the nation’s morale.
Despite a deliberately discouraging recruitment advertisement, 5,000 men applied to join the expedition. Frank Wild didn’t apply via the advert - he was already a close friend of Shackleton who appointed him as his second-in-command. Leonard Hussey was the expedition’s meteorological officer who also played the banjo. This instrument went with them throughout their coming ordeal. Frank Hurley was a photographer whose pictures are an enduring record. There were also 39 dogs and the crew’s cat “Mrs Chippy”. Their ship was the Endurance which was powered by both sail and steam but was not entirely suitable for the task ahead.
On the 5th of October 1914, the Endurance set sail for South Georgia and, from there, headed down into the Weddell Sea. By 18th January 1915, they were stuck in pack ice and, for the next ten months, the ship drifted helplessly South with the ice. It was during these months that Shackleton’s leadership skills must have been so important. There was no class distinction on the Endurance, only comradeship.
Finally, in October 1915, the Endurance was crushed by the ice and sank. The crew were stranded on the ice with what supplies they had managed to salvage and a thousand miles from the nearest help.
It is a measure of Shackleton’s care for his men that each morning he would rise early to prepare a mug of hot milk for each one of them. And it was a measure of the men’s care for each other that, when one of them spilt his milk, the others each contributed a little of theirs!
It was now decided to drag the lifeboats over the ice in search of open water. Only the most necessary supplies were loaded onto the boats and unfortunately this meant that the dogs and the cat had to be shot because they were eating too much food.
The boats were so heavy that, even with fifteen men dragging each one, progress was painfully slow – at best two miles a day. At one stage, they were stuck at a spot they named ‘Patience Camp’ for five months. Luckily their cook, Charlie Green, proved expert at cooking penguin.
On 9th April 1916, they managed to launch the lifeboats and reach Elephant Island where they used the upturned lifeboats as shelters. By now they were running short of ammunition (needed to shoot seals and penguins for meat), so Shackleton decided to take one of the lifeboats and try to reach South Georgia. It was 750 miles away across the treacherous Drake Passage. The carpenter, Chippy McNeish made some adaptations to the boat and Shackleton with McNeish and four others set off to face sixteen days of gale-force winds and fifty-foot waves. By some miracle they managed to reach South Georgia but the wrong side of the island. Between them and the whaling station were mountains 4,000 feet high and deadly precipices. The winter darkness made the journey even more dangerous. Three men, including Shackleton, scrabbled up the cliffs to be faced with a sheer drop down into total blackness. They took their lives in their hands and slid down on a mat of coiled rope at a mile a minute.
Once at the whaling station, Shackleton chartered a whaler and, on their fourth attempt to land, they reached Elephant Island to find all 22 crew members still alive. It was almost certainly Shackleton’s leadership and ‘all in it together’ philosophy that had saved them.
As a postscript: in March 2022, divers discovered the Endurance, amazingly well-preserved due to being so deep down in cold water that there were no living creatures there to attack its fabric.
Dinah Kennedy - 3 September 2025