His formative years in the Navy show him to have been a hard working, obedient and accomplished sailor and by September 1899 he had made it to the rank of Petty Officer 2nd Class, and shortly afterwards he was assigned to Ringarooma, which was operating in Australian waters. Tom had no inkling as to how this assignment would eventually lead him on the road, to a life of adventure and heroism , on the vast frozen continent of Antarctica. Discovery In this to and fro game in the quest for Southern Glory, the next attempt to reach the Pole fell to Scott and the first person he confided in was Tom Crean. The Terra Nova expedition set sail in 1910 and aboard ship were a number of Polar veterans including Tom Crean and his friend Edgar Evans. Scott’s second in command was Lieutenant Teddy Evans and the name Evans would become one associated with Tom Crean for very different reasons. Antarctica cruise: We have seen whales – their spouts and breaches, their mournful wails – in abundance ] Their mission had now, inadvertently, become a fight for survival as the 28 man crew hauled provisions and 3 lifeboats across Antarctica. In their wake, the Endurance had succumbed to the vice-like grip of the ice and broken, she sank beneath to her icy grave witnessed at a distance by her crew.

Crean prepares for the trek to the South Pole with Captain Scott in 1911. (Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge) When a deadline for handover of the indemnity had passed, a detachment of 400 men from the naval force occupied the town without opposition. Martial Law was declared and it is likely that Crean was among their number. Fortunately, for a man who would later be renowned for saving lives, the stand-off ended peacefully after the money was handed over. Re-assigned to Wild Swan , Crean sailed north to the naval base of Esquimalt in Canada, home of the Pacific fleet.After an arduous, debilitating trek across shifting continental ice floes that scuppered their march for survival, an opportunity arose to man the lifeboats and head to the nearest destination, Elephant Island. Tom Crean’s penury is more easily dealt with than the complexities of political and social life in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s. Crean was one of ten children born to impoverished hill farmers outside the small Kerry village of Annascaul on the Dingle Peninsula. Education was rudimentary, and youngsters like Crean were of more value to the family working in the fields than studying mathematics or writing essays. Crean left school with little more than the ability to read and write, a significant fact that would contribute to his later profile. He was laid to rest in Ballinacourty cemetery, not far from his Gortacurraun birthplace, in a family tomb he’d built with his own hands. The inscription on the side of his tomb read From a young age Tim had been left fascinated by the heroic tales of Tom Crean, whose story he discovered while spending much of his time in his father’s birthplace near Castlemaine in County Kerry, Ireland.

His strong faith, it seems, had seen him through a host of perilous and historic journeys most ordinary humans could not have survived. In a sad twist of fate, when his own hour of need arrived, there was no one available with the life-saving skills he himself had displayed on many occasions.

Discovery

Born into poverty, the son of a tenant farmer, Crean anticipated further hardships but took comfort from the idea that friends who had made this same journey might be there to greet him when he began his training at Devonport on the south coast of England. He was in for a rude awakening. No such welcomes awaited him.

The visual design of the newly published biography is a radical departure from the self-published editions that preceded it and further information has been added to Tom Crean’s storyboard. After leaving New Zealand in November, Terra Nova was fortunate to survive a violent hurricane, as it voyaged southwards, but by January 1911 the men were on the ice. The biography titled ‘Crean: The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero’ takes us from Crean’s early life up to an account of how the campaign to honour Tom Crean, created by Tim Foley in 2010, celebrated a great victory in 2021, when a government-funded scientific vessel was named RV Tom Crean, in recognition of the great Kerryman.

The Endurance

Tom Crean had crammed more excitement and danger into a few years than most people could manage in a lifetime. But recognition eluded him and he drifted half-forgotten into obscurity for most of the following 80 years. The reasons why history has been unkind to Crean are twofold: first, the politics of post-independence Ireland; and second, what George Bernard Shaw described as the greatest of evils and worst of crimes—poverty.