Children captivated by Crean’s adventures

SINCE the publication of Michael Smith’s An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean – Antarctic Explorer in 2000, the Kerry man’s inspirational achievements during three expeditions to the Antarctic at the start of the last century have been belatedly recognised by the erection of a statue in Anascaul, a gripping stage play celebrating his life and, most significantly, by children in Irish schools learning about his exploits.

Such was the impact of reading Smith’s Tom Crean – Iceman on the pupils of St Paul’s School, Dooradoyle, they wrote to the author and persuaded him to speak about Crean at their school on Monday last. 
“I opened my post one day to find a pile of letters from over 20 children at St Paul’s,” said Michael Smith from his home in England. “Each one had written a personal letter to say how much they enjoyed Iceman.”
The author promised to visit the school on his next trip to Ireland. “I was amazed by their initiative in tracking me down and impressed by the lovely writing and fine drawings of Tom Crean,” he explains. 
The history of Crean’s extraordinary life lay dormant for almost 80 years until the arrival of Smith’s Unsung Hero. The author was completely unprepared for the book’s reception. 
“I didn’t anticipate the reaction, especially in Ireland, to the story,” he said. “I was gob smacked. I’m particularly gratified that Tom is on the school curriculum.”
If the biography had a profound change on a largely forgotten figure, it had a similarly transforming influence on its author. A business and political journalist for 30 years, Unsung Hero was Smith’s first book. In the interim he has published seven more on Polar history and now lectures extensively on the topic. 
“The subject has enduring fascination because these stories are so remarkable,” he said of the unwavering appetite for the age of Antarctic exploration.
“People show up in droves at these talks. I’m always amazed,” he added. “The questions are always different. One question I regularly get from children, though, is: ‘How did they go to the toilet?’ I say: ‘The same as you and me – only quicker’,” he laughs.
Early in 1912, during the doomed Terra Nova expedition, Crean and William Lashly saved the life of the critically ill Lieutenant Teddy Evans when they carried him by sledge for part of their treacherous 750 mile return journey to Hut Point, culminating in the Irishman’s dogged 35-mile solo run through harrowing conditions.
That heroism planted the seed that would ultimately flower in Smith’s work. The author had been “tinkering with the idea” of charting Crean’s extraordinary life but meeting Teddy Evans’s son, Broke, convinced Smith.
“Broke said to me, ‘You realise I’m only here because of Tom Crean’,” recalled the author. “That was history brought up to date. Here was a direct link with the past, the man in front of me wouldn’t have existed only for Tom Crean.”
Smith’s enthusiasm for his subject was tempered by the considerable problems involved in chronicling a man who left almost no written trace. In Tom Crean: An Illustrated Life, Smith notes that “Crean’s legacy to history was minimal” as he kept no diaries and only a few of his letters survive.
“These things posed challenges that were very significant and made it difficult,” explained Mr Smith. “There’s a gaping hole in his history. So I had to go in the other direction; I had to go to the source material in the archives to see what colleagues said about him. Their recollections and anecdotes hold a mirror up to his life.”
Crean is rightly celebrated for his Herculean physical feats during Terra Nova and on his third expedition, Endurance (1914 – 16), when the crew abandoned their ship – locked in the ice of the Wendell Sea – and eventually sailed in three small boats to the desolate Elephant Island.
In a dramatic finale, Crean and five companions, including Shackleton, journeyed 800 miles in the tiny James Caird to South Georgia, marched 40 miles across its uncharted, glaciered interior before reaching a whaling station and returning for the castaways on Elephant Island.
Despite the enormous perils of the James Caird voyage, Crean regularly sang songs at the tiller and the author suggests this epitomised his attitude which, more than anything else, contributed to his epic survival. 
“He was a big, tough Irish bloke but what he also had was incredible mental strength,” said Smith. “He could cope with whatever was thrown at him. When everyone else was struggling to live or die, he was still smiling, cracking jokes. He was imbued with a belief that they’d get out of it. He was never defeated.”
The Irishman’s incomparable story remained almost unknown, due to both his modesty and political necessity. Crean left the British navy and returned to Ireland in March 1920 when links to British-sponsored Polar expeditions would have been viewed suspiciously. 
As Smith discovered, Crean rarely spoke about his adventures, even to his family. “It was fascinating to speak to Tom’s eldest daughter, Mary,” he says. “I was asking her questions about Tom when she interrupted me and politely said: ‘You know more about my father than I do.’ He was a closed book.”
The photographs in Smith’s Tom Crean: An Illustrated Life, reissued this year to mark the centenary of the start of Scott’s fateful march to the South Pole, document the rhythm of life during an Antarctic expedition.
The most arresting images capture moments of exhaustion, vulnerability and heartbreak – the strain on men’s faces after hauling sledges equal to their bodyweight for 10 hours a day, Endurance marooned on ice in 1915 and Scott and his party at the South Pole haunted by the realisation that Amundsen had beaten them to it by weeks.
Superficially, it is ironic that Crean’s outstanding accomplishment was first brought to public attention by an English writer but Smith suggests that this perspective may have been an important element in the telling.
“Here I am, an Englishman and this story was under the noses of Kerry people for years,” he says. “But maybe it needed an outsider to take the story and frame it.”
Later, he refines this. “I said earlier I was an outsider but I’m only half an outsider, my mother was from Ballaghaderreen. In some ways, I’m better qualified than most of Trap’s team to play for Ireland.”

Tom Crean: An Illustrated Life is published by The Collins Press