On Saturday April 13th, SCC hosted a presentation given by Mark Cottle MA who travelled up from Devon to give us an illustrated talk on 'Shackleton's Endurance Expedition captured on Camera', held at the Ashington Community Centre.,
Sadly our Chairlady Anne Nagle was struck down with a nasty complaint which made it impossible for her to be present, and so our Vice Chairman Paul Hayward stepped in to introduce and MC the evening making a fine job of it.
Mark grabbed everyone's attention from the start being a very polished speaker who knew his subject matter backwards.
This was the story of Ernest Shackleton's third Expedition to Antarctica which started in 1914 (you will recall that this was the year that WW1 kicked off) and finally finished in 1916, after some amazing feats of human endurance and courage.
Mark started by setting the scene reminding us of all the previous Polar attempts to explore the last unknown continent, Antarctica, starting in 1903 and including Captain Scotts disastrous expedition in 1912.
Shackleton set out from the South Georgia whaling settlement in his ship the ' Endurance' (a coal burning ship also equipped with sails) which got trapped in pack ice. Eventually they had to abandon her as she was slowly crushed until she finally sank. So everyone had to set up a base camp on the ice nearby. Then a small party set off in three of the ship's lifeboats back to South Georgia to get help and to rescue the rest of the members of the expedition. This is when the really dramatic part of the journey started.
Shackleton had taken two photographers and a painter with him on the expedition in order to record the events so that on their return home they could give shows to the public to recoup the costs of the trip.
We were shown remarkable images taken by Frank Hurley, a photo journalist from Australia, who was the main photographer using very heavy brass and wooden cameras weighing over 40 lbs!! recording the pictures onto glass plates.
As things went from bad to worse they had to dump over 400 plates to save weight (saving just 120 ) so that they could take food, which of course was more important. The final part of the trip was recorded using a folding Kodak camera and three rolls of film, and paintings done by the artist, presumably afterwards.
The images were amazing, some taken from up in Endurance's rigging with these very heavy cameras! They wer
e all Black and White images of course, and they really captured the very harsh weather conditions and the terrible terrain.
I am not going to recount the whole journey which Shackleton made to get help, because if you were really interested, you would have come to our show, and we do not yet have SCC iplayer! There are a number of books that have been written about this expedition if you are really interested.
More than a dozen members of the club (or staff as Paul called us!) came to set everything up, including Martin Tomes with about a ton of equipment for the sound system, which worked like a dream. Audrey commanded the teas and coffees team at half time with an able bunch of men, and Janet Brown, ably assisted by Di Walker, ran the raffle which made over £100, brilliant. Daisy and Jane manned (or womanned) the entrance to check our audience in and get the numbers for tea and coffee.
There were over 100 seats put out and there were only a very few unused. So praise must also go to our publicity lady Glenn and to Chairlady Anne who gave a lot of thought gathering the provisions, raffle tickets etc. required and generally making sure that nothing was forgotten, which gave us a completely trouble free evening. The hall suited the event perfectly being modern and spacious.
Everyone really enjoyed the lecture and our sincere thanks go to Mark for a really great and thoroughly entertaining evening.