An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor (26 page)

Two days later on 14 February, King George V attended a memorial service at St Paul’s Cathedral in London and an estimated crowd of 10,000 mourners stood quietly outside in the damp chilly winter air to pay their own personal respects.
Terra Nova
returned to England as plans were being made to commemorate the dead and to look after the surviving relatives. The Lord Mayor of London launched a special fund which raised £74,000 (today: £6,150,000), almost double
what the expedition itself had cost. Scott’s widow, Kathleen, was granted £8,500 (today: £700,000) and a £300 annual pension (today: over £25,000). In contrast, Lois Evans, mother of three small children and widow of Taff Evans, was given £1,250 (today: £100,000) and a pension of £48 a year (today: £4,000). Even in death the British class system prevailed.

Terra Nova
made its way back to Cardiff where, according to Teddy Evans, ‘the real friends of the expedition’ could be found. Kathleen Scott and her three-year-old son, Peter, came aboard on 14 June and there was a poignant moment for Tom Crean as he met the youngster.

The child grew up to become the naturalist and painter Sir Peter Scott and 70 years later he was still able to recall that distant day at Cardiff Docks. The highlight of the day, he remembered, was when the big muscular Crean took the awestruck little boy up to the crow’s nest of
Terra Nova
for a panoramic view of proceedings below.
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It left a permanent impression on the youngster.

Crean, too, showed that he had remembered the day and 22 years later in 1935 he wrote to Peter Scott, passing on some appreciative comments about his father and politely requesting a photograph of the young man. Scott thanked the Irishman for his kind comments and sent Crean a signed reproduction of a self-portrait of himself.
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Crean never forgot Scott, despite the obvious disappointment he felt at being excluded from the final polar party. While he might be excused for harbouring a sense of bitterness about the rejection, Crean never bore a grudge. Almost 60 years after Crean’s own death, his two daughters recalled that they had never heard their father speak a bad word against Scott and they remembered him talking only in fond terms of his dead leader.

Scott’s widow, Kathleen, also knew Crean and appears to have liked him. As early as August 1912, months before she knew that her husband had perished on the Barrier, Kathleen
had been touch with Francis Drake, the expedition’s secretary and paymaster. It had been decided – probably at the instigation of Teddy Evans – that Crean and Lashly should each be awarded a ‘bonus’ of £100 (today: £8,000) after saving Evans’ life. Kathleen was wholly supportive of the plan and she told Drake in a letter dated 10 August 1912:

The surviving members of the party congregated at the expedition’s offices in London’s Victoria Street on 26 July 1913, and marched the short distance to Buckingham Palace. The men were presented to King George and Prince Louis Battenberg and were decorated with their Antarctic medals. It was a proud moment, though inevitably touched with great sadness at the loss of their five colleagues.

Kathleen Scott stood alongside Mrs Wilson and Lois Evans. Bowers’ mother, Emily, collected her son’s medal and clasp and Mrs Caroline Oates, the devastated mother of the tragic hero, specifically asked Teddy Evans to collect the honours on behalf of her dead son. Each man was awarded the King’s Medal and the Polar Medal from the Royal Geographical Society.

Crean was awarded a silver clasp to go with his earlier Polar Medal. But there was a very special separate ceremony for Crean and Lashly, who were awarded the Albert Medal, the highest recognition for gallantry, for saving the life of Teddy Evans.

The Albert Medal, first issued in 1866 in memory of Queen Victoria’s husband, was a rare honour, awarded on very few occasions. Only 568 were issued in its 105-year history, the medal being withdrawn in 1971 and replaced by the George Cross.

The citation gave only a brief summary of the last supporting party’s ordeal and concluded with an almost casual description of Crean’s heroics on the solo walk across the Barrier to fetch help for the stricken Evans. It read:

Ponting, the photographer, was somewhat more fulsome in his praise and said Crean’s march had been ‘one of the finest feats in an adventure that is an epic of splendid episodes’.

There was also praise for Crean from polar experts who, perhaps more than most, appreciated the full scale of his achievements. Louis Bernacchi, who had been with Crean on
Discovery
, said the Irishman made ‘one of the greatest polar marches alone’ and Dr Hugh Mill, a close associate of many famous characters during the Heroic Age and a later biographer of Shackleton, was equally struck by his deeds. While Crean was sitting out the Antarctic winter at Cape Evans in May 1912, Mill had written about the Evans rescue in the
Geographic Journal
:

Teddy Evans, who was later to have a distinguished naval career and become Lord Mountevans, never forgot those who
had saved his life and he perpetuated their memory by ‘affectionately’ dedicating his book on the expedition,
South With Scott
, to Crean and Lashly. A little earlier, at a gathering of the Royal Geographical Society at London’s Albert Hall on 21 May 1913, Evans addressed the members and reserved a special appreciation for Crean and Lashly. Remembering their monumental struggle and life-saving feat, he concluded:

There was another personal tribute and heartfelt thanks from Evans’ parents who, after learning about the Crean–Lashly rescue and the death of the five-man Polar party, were fully aware of just how close they were to losing their son to the Antarctic. Mere words are often inadequate to express the gratitude which any parent feels when someone saves the life of their child and the Evans were brief and to the point. Frank Evans and his wife, Eliza, each sent Crean and Lashly a signed photograph of themselves with a simple inscription which needed no further elaboration to convey the sincerity of the message. Eliza’s inscription to Tom Crean reads:

Crean also arrived back to civilisation to receive a warm letter from Oriana Wilson, wife of Dr Wilson, thanking the Irishman for his role in the party which eventually found her husband’s body alongside Scott and Bowers on the Barrier. Mrs Wilson, writing from Christchurch, New Zealand, only two weeks after learning about her husband’s tragic death, told Crean:

After the medals ceremony at Buckingham Palace, the men walked back to nearby Caxton Hall for a farewell drink and the final partings. In the slightly austere central London setting, Scott’s Last Expedition was quietly disbanded.

Crean, meanwhile, had been promoted to the rank of Chief Petty Officer in recognition of his extraordinary exploits in the Antarctic, his promotion dating back to 9 September 1910, when the
Terra Nova
had been ploughing her way across the oceans to New Zealand. It was a welcome gesture and meant a useful bonus from almost three years of back-pay.

However, there was one final piece of irony before the expedition drew to a close in the summer of 1913. According to Crean’s official military record, the Irishman was listed as having died in the Antarctic on 17 February 1912, the day before he set out on his remarkable march to save Evans. The irony is that 17 February was the day that Crean’s friend, Edgar ‘Taff’ Evans died at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier.

C
rean, now 36 and a veteran of two famous voyages of exploration to Antarctica, formally returned to the Royal Navy on 6 October 1913 and was assigned to the familiar barracks at Chatham.
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He had been away from the navy for three and a half years.

For the second time in nine years, Crean now faced the job of reintegrating himself into the routine of naval life, a difficult task after the adventurous and high-profile years in the Antarctic. He had spent six of the previous eleven years on journeys to the south. Chatham, with its stiff formality and navy drill, must have seemed unutterably dull compared with life on the edge on the Barrier.

It was probably the unappetising prospect of a return to the pedestrian naval routine which at this point prompted Crean to take a momentous decision. After precisely twenty years in the Royal Navy, Crean now prepared to make his exit.

At the age of 36, he knew his formal naval career was approaching an end and it appears that the obvious alternative of a life in the merchant service held little attraction. Instead, his thoughts were of returning to his Irish homeland and settling down.

Shortly after returning from Scott’s last expedition in the summer of 1913, Crean returned to his native Kerry and bought a public house in his home town of Anascaul. The old
pub, with its decrepit thatched roof, was run down and hardly a thriving concern. As an investment it was a dubious prospect. But Crean, looking beyond his time in the naval ranks, wanted the pub premises primarily for its liquor licence. He was planning ahead.

It seems likely that Crean’s ambition of retiring from the navy and opening a pub had been fostered during his time in the South. Taff Evans had been planning a similar move. It is thought that Evans, who had the responsibility of three small children, had set his sights on returning to his native south Wales where he would open a pub and perhaps enjoy something of a local celebrity status. He had also acquired first-hand experience of the pub trade. His wife, Lois, was the daughter of a pub landlord in Rhosili at the tip of the Gower Peninsula, near Swansea.

It is reasonable to assume that Evans helped influence Crean’s decision to enter the pub trade, particularly as the pair had ample time to talk over their dwindling longer-term prospects in the navy during the many long days and nights together at Cape Evans.

But, unknown to Crean, momentous plans were being put together which would delay the Irishman’s proposed smooth passage into the licensed trade. While Crean was weighing up his investment in the old thatched pub at Anascaul and settling back into naval routine, events elsewhere were beckoning him back to Antarctica.

A new expedition, the most ambitious ever contemplated, was being planned by his old
Discovery
colleague, the now famous Sir Ernest Shackleton. Although he did not know it at the time, Shackleton’s bold plan would take Crean back to the South for the most remarkable story of all in the Heroic Age of polar exploration.

Shackleton in 1913 was a man without a mission. Amundsen had reached the South Pole and the lasting glory of the era had gone to Scott for the heroic and tragic failure of his last expedition. Shackleton’s own achievement – the ‘furthest
south’ of 1909, when he struggled to within 97 miles of the Pole – was largely forgotten by the general public which was now consumed with the Scott tragedy. But the lure of the South was too great for Shackleton to ignore and in response, he came up with the ultimate challenge, what he called the ‘last great journey on earth’.

Shackleton’s hugely ambitious plan, which began to take shape in mid-1913, was to walk 1,800 miles (3,000 km) across the Antarctic Continent from coast to coast. It was a task which no one had accomplished before and was a massive undertaking, even for someone with the imagination and flamboyance of Shackleton.