| Main Performers | Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton,
Rt. Hon. the Earl of Athlone - speakers |
| Set List | Film screening - 'Sir Ernest Shackleton's Expedition' with narration (Sir Ernest Shackleton) |
| Performance Notes | The Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition of 19141917 is considered to be the last major expedition of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Conceived by Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent. After Roald Amundsen's South Pole expedition in 1911, this crossing remained, in Shackleton's words, the "one great main object of Antarctic journeyings". Shackleton's expedition failed to accomplish this objective, but became recognized instead as an epic feat of endurance.
Shackleton's ship, the Endurance was packed in by ice, and was eventually crushed and sank. After months spent in makeshift camps as the ice continued its northwards drift, the party took to the lifeboats to reach the inhospitable, uninhabited Elephant Island. Shackleton and five others then made an 800-mile (1,300 km) open-boat journey in the James Caird to reach South Georgia. From there, Shackleton was eventually able to mount a rescue of the men waiting on Elephant Island and bring them home without loss of life. The remarkably-preserved wreck of Endurance was discovered on the seafloor in 2022.
The pictures shown were taken by Captain Frank Hurley, photographer to the Expedition.
On the stage of the Hall was the 23 foot long whaling boat, the James Caird, in which Sir Ernest sailed from Elephant Isle to search for help 500 miles south of Cape Horn to South Georgia during the Antarctic winter of 1916. The James Caird lifeboat was brought back from the Antarctic to England in 1919 and put on display in department store Selfridges, the Middlesex Hospital gardens and at the Royal Albert Hall for this event, where it was mounted on a lorry outside the East Box entrance (Door 3). Medical students rattled money boxes outside by the boat for the Middlesex Hospital. The boat was presented to Dulwich College, South London, in 1922, where it is still on display.
"The film of Sir Ernest Shackleton's last expedition to the Antarctic, which is to be shown at the Albert Hall on Friday Afternoon, in aid of the funds of the Middlesex Hospital, has not the same poignant note which made Mr Ponting's pictures of Mr Scott's expedition for ever memorable, but it is not without it's tragic side. Directly the members of the party were rescued from their perilous plight most of them volunteered for active service, and on the screen one sees men who subsequently gave their lives for their country - one killed with his gun in the Channel, another drowned while mine-sweeping."
(The Times, 17 December 1919) |
| Related Archival Material | Handbill (RAHE/6/1919/12) |