Loading

Shackleton's early life Shackleton’s Legacy and the Power of Early Antarctic Photography, Part I

Ernest Henry Shackleton born 15 February 1874, Ireland

His father had the lease of a 488-acre farm at Kilkea House, near Athy, County Kildare, Eire.

A fallen tree trunk on the lawn was a make-believe ship's cabin.

At Athy, the Shackleton Autumnal School and Museum now thrive.

Dr Henry Shackleton (1847-1920), his father

Fourth generation of an Anglo-Irish family in County Kildare, originally Quakers from Yorkshire. Abraham Shackleton (1696-1771) came to the Quaker settlement in Ballitore, founding in 1726 a famous highbrow boarding school. Pupils included Irish statesman, economist and philosopher, Edmund Burke.

Henry attended Wellington College in England, intending an army commission. Unfit, he returned to Ireland and to Trinity College, Dublin, graduating as Bachelor of Arts, Classical Prizeman, and Silver Medallist in 1868.

In the year of Ernest's birth, agricultural depression followed the Irish potato crop failure. Henry moved to Dublin to enrol again at Trinity College in 1880 to qualify in medicine.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again” was a family saying.

In 1884, when Ernest was ten, Henry settled as General Practitioner at Sydenham, a prosperous South-East London suburb below the Crystal Palace.

He was a believer in homeopathic medicine and a notable rose-gardener.

Image credit: Dr Henry Shackleton. Private collection

Henrietta Letitia Shackleton (1845-1926), his mother

(neé Gavan), ‘of good family’, from County Cork. Ernest was second of 10 children, and the elder of two sons.

Image credit: Henrietta Letitia Shackleton. Private collection

1884, Ernest now ten

The Avenue, Sydenham, 1871 by Camille Pissarro © Christie's Images/Bridgeman Images

Pissarro painted this South London vista down Lawrie Park Avenue, its backdrop the road up to the Crystal Palace, Westwood Hill, with Saint Bartholomew‘s Church. A few years later the Shackletons’ Aberdeen House (and surgery) was to be built at Pissarro‘s focal point across the road, next door to the church.

The large and gabled house, in yellow London stock-brick, survives, now called St. David's. Confusingly, Pissarro shows us a large red-brick house on its site which in fact was set back from the road, and is no longer there; Aberdeen House went up in front. In 1928 the London County Council marked it with a Blue Plaque.

Five minutes on the pavement where Pissarro set up his easel would take Ernest to the family house of his fiancée, Emily Dorman, daughter of a prosperous Sydenham solicitor.

The Drawing Room, Aberdeen House, 12 West Hill, Sydenham. Private collection

The Shackleton family was lively, cultivated, and unconventional; literary quotations animated the dinner table. The drawing room is comfortably genteel: Shackleton coat of arms carved on the mantelpiece (the family motto is Fortitudine vincimus: by endurance we conquer); a mezzotint of Gainsborough’s Morning Walk.

Ernest a precocious ‘Jack-in the-Box’: his parents put up with his constructing out of this window a switchback railway slide to the garden; he was often on the roof.

Shackleton at eleven

“Hands on” and “learning the ropes”, as we say.

Ernest Shackleton. Private Collection

Fir Lodge Preparatory School, Sydenham, c.1885

Ernest Shackleton at Fir Lodge Preparatory School © Mr Rhod McEwan

In the window, at apex of triangle; Ernest with bulldog chin and mischievous air. Below Ernest, Mrs Higgins (with hat), deaf Headmistress, famous for firmness and originality. Any boy who gave way to tears had to nurse a doll in front of the class.

The ten Shackleton children, c.1894

The ten Shackleton children. Private Collection

The importance of Ernest, again at the apex, accustomed to female attention; his sisters: inspiring and adoring. Eight sisters fostered his interest in literature and music. Frank, his more scholastic brother (but by the time of the Nimrod expedition seriously scapegrace), legs stretched on racoon rug. Kathleen (left, in light dress) later an artist (skilful at portraits) encouraged by Ernest, and a journalist; in Canada for much of her life. Eleanor (to right of Ernest) a nurse in London, then France during World War One, New York and Canada.

Up at the Crystal Palace on Sydenham Hill

In Shackleton’s youth the many encyclopaedic permanent displays included the "Arctic" and "The Quest for Sir John Franklin, a map of the North Polar regions", and by 1881 a feature about Nordensköld’s North-East Passage. Stereographic prints were sold there by Negretti & Zambra: photographers, optical and scientific instrument makers.

Image credit: Polar display at Paxton’s Crystal Palace © Museum of London

Shackleton told an interviewer in 1909:

“I have always been interested in Polar Exploration. I can date my first interest in the subject to the time when I was about ten. So great was my interest that I had read almost everything about the North and South Polar explorations.”

‘Abandonment of the Resolute and Intrepid’, from The eventful voyage of H.M. Resolute to the Arctic Regions in search of Sir John Franklin and the missing crews of H.M. Ships Erebus and Terror, 1852-54, S0020061

"How I began": Shackleton’s school days

Shackleton joined Dulwich College in 1887 at the age of 13, for just three years. Later, speaking at Alleyn Club (alumni) dinners he gave credit to the playing fields and classrooms for his fortitude "amid the chilly, passionless, monotonous silences of Polar regions".

Fifteen days before leaving on the Endurance expedition, speaking at a Dulwich old boys’ dinner, he said his schooldays were not “unalloyed happiness”, but he had himself to blame. He recited names of his masters; he recalled “sacred memories” and the influence of A. H. Gilkes (now acknowledged as one of the most noble English headmasters in history) who coached him at cricket and spelled out to him “the things he ought not to do”. He was himself a “stormy petrel”.

Excelling at athletics, cricket and gymnastics, especially the trapeze, he was remembered by a friend as doing very little work; if there was a scrap, he was usually in it. With his brogue, he was nick-named Mike, taken up by the Shackletons at home.

Shackleton’s great friend and biographer, Hugh Robert Mill (1861-1950; offered the presidency by the Royal Geographical Society in 1933, declined, his eye-sight failing), said Ernest’s competitive Form Positions at Dulwich were "far south of the equator and sometimes near the pole". His Latin verses were recalled with mirth by friends. In his last academic year, however, he rose high in English History and Literature – second out of 18 boys. The previous year he was ninth out of 22 for Mathematics. His early reports read:

“He wants waking up, is rather listless; good abilities, might do well."

He broke bounds to climb on the steep roof above the Great Hall. Interviewed by The Captain: a Magazine for Boys and Old Boys he said how poor the Geography and Literature lessons were.

“English" consisted of "the dissection, the parsing, the analysing of certain passages from our great poets and prose writers … Teachers should be very careful not to spoil boys’ taste for poetry for all time by making it a task and an imposition”.
How I Began, headpiece to an article in The Captain: a Magazine for Boys and Old Boys, Dulwich College, 1909

A letter from his former Dulwich teacher, the Rev. Charles Lefroy (in Harold Begbie‘s Shackleton: a Memory, 1922), tells us that thirty years ago, he turned round from writing on the blackboard to find the boy was suddenly not to be seen. Under his desk Shackleton was observing with a piece of smoked glass the transit of Venus through a high skylight window.

“Not one schoolboy in a thousand would have thought of it”; it showed “an original scientific mind”.

As a myth the anecdote has some resonance, but is too good to be true: Venus made no transit across the Sun (nor did Mercury) while Shackleton was at Dulwich. Lefroy, who was there for four years in his thirties, might have muddled the pupil or the Transit; the boy possibly had smoked glass with him for another solar observation; or indeed Shackleton might have been playing up the teacher with an original class-room ‘rag,’ as in some Dulwich short story by P. G. Wodehouse, who also attended the school. The practical jokes Shackleton played on expeditions and with his children were notorious.

Dulwich had Arctic connections. A popular Governor, Admiral Bedford Pim, of the 1853 Franklin search, frequently addressed the boys. A College porter, John Bidgood, who stopped the boys’ fights with a long stick (nick-named ‘Punch’ for the stick, his frost-bitten nose and chin), had served with Pim as an Able Seaman; his grisly tales were thrilling. Memories of Shackleton’s school days would stay with him, for example, during a polar blizzard, hallucinating, he said, “… triangular jam tarts from the College Buttery ..." were “… flying out of reach ...”. (Louis Bernacchi, with him on Scott’s Discovery expedition, wrote that he “could make statements and tell stories that were true only in a poetic sense”, but that he was notably human, overflowing with kindness and generosity, affectionate and loyal to all his friends).

Ernest would play truant and lie about it the next day. In a small private wood with a pond at Sydenham, next to the railway, four schoolboys would skulk under a great tree and cook over an open fire, with fantasies about adventures; Ernest read them exploration stories. (Frank Hurley said Shackleton often spoke of buried pirate treasure). Their props anticipated his later camps: a revolver and cartridges, an airgun, a flute, a concertina, and the hull of a large model boat, whose rigging and flags they disputed. Food and cigarettes were stored; Shackleton would not touch the cooking sherry. All four grew up to follow the sea. Shackleton, conspicuously the youngest, was the leader.

Joining a temperance society, the ‘Band of Hope’, Ernest read the Bible and sang outside local pubs against alcohol.

He was, his wife said – as did his crew mates – "a boy all his life".

Henry Shackleton in 1890 agreed to give three months’ notice for Ernest to leave Dulwich early, just after his sixteenth birthday, to go to sea:

“It is quite true my father was very much against it.”

The family could not afford a Royal Naval College for officers, such as Scott attended, and he joined the Mercantile Marine. The platitudes of his final Dulwich report show he could shape up:

“… he has given much satisfaction in every way. There has been a marked improvement both in his work and in his behaviour.”

A legend is that in the boats during the Endurance men’s utmost ordeal to Elephant Island he sang the School Song, ‘Pueri Alleynienses’.

Dulwich College is now home to the actual Heroic Age life-boat, the James Caird whaler from the Endurance expedition, used by Shackleton and his crew of five for the open boat journey in April 1916. They sailed 800 miles (1,300 km) in 17 days to South Georgia, exposed to the worst seas in the world in winter, to save all the rest of the expedition marooned on Elephant Island in their lock-down of near starvation, despair and death. Dulwich College is also home to the James Caird Society.

Shackleton's Early Life is the first part of a series of online exhibitions drawing on content from the Society’s exhibition Shackleton’s Legacy and the Power of Early Antarctic Photography, on display in the Society’s Pavilion from 7 February to 4 May 2022.

Exhibition guest curated by Dr Jan Piggott, with supporting contributions from Alasdair MacLeod and Jools Cole. Digital exhibition created by Hania Sosnowska.

About the curator

Dr Jan Piggott, F.S.A. is the former Keeper of Archives, Dulwich College and formerly Head of English at the school. He has published works on W. B. Yeats, J. M. W. Turner, Victorian Architecture and P. G. Wodehouse. In 2000, Dr Piggott was the Curator of the Dulwich College exhibition Shackleton, the Antarctic and Endurance (2000), and edited the accompanying catalogue published that year.

A selection of the Society's images featured in this online exhibition can be purchased from the RGS Print Store.

For more information on how to access and use the Society's Collections please visit our website.

Text © Dr Jan Piggott

Images © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) unless stated otherwise

Credits and acknowledgements

The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) would like to thank the following organisations and individuals:

Exhibition curators: Meredith Hooper and Dr Jan Piggott

Physical exhibition designers: Sarner International Limited

Sponsored by:

The Shackleton Company | The James Caird Society | The Folio Society | South Georgia Association | Devon and Cornwall Polar Society

Supported by:

The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust | Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 | British Antarctic Territory | Government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands | Rolex (for its support for the Society's Picture Library and contribution towards conservation of its Collections) | The National Heritage Lottery Fund

The Hon. Alexandra Shackleton, FRGS | Mr Jan Chojecki | Dr Jan Faull | Mr John James | The late Mr Henry Worsley, FRGS

Associated Newspapers Limited | Bridgeman Images | British Antarctic Survey | The British Film Institute | The British Library | Buenos Aires Herald | Christie’s | The Daily Mirror | Dulwich College | Illustrated London News/Mary Evans | Museum of London | The Royal Albert Hall | Scott Polar Research Institute | State Library, New South Wales, Australia | State Library, Victoria, Australia | Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand | USGS, NASA, National Science Foundation