Yet there was one sub-section of the population of Ireland to which the fullness of this caustic attitude was not extended. Spread among the primitive Celtic peasants, but separated from them by religion and caste, were the members of an imperial ruling class, who for centuries had been elevated above the common Irish by royal policy and social and economic privilege. These overlords were the members of the Protestant Ascendancy - the landowners of the country and the creators of Irish high society. Many were descendants of Englishmen and lowland Scots who had colonised the country on generous terms as part of the English government's effort to subdue local will and extinguish the Irish gentry. The preserve of these Anglo-Irish, The Pale as it came to be known, was in the green, fecund fields and hills of the territories surrounding Dublin. There, seven centuries earlier, the Anglo-Norman knights of Henry II had settled in fortified dwellings after invading and dominating the Irish, and there they established a broad, fertile enclave. Through the centuries, their heirs were joined by more members of the Ascendancy, whether English-born or English-descended.
To the west and southwest of Dublin, in the midst of The Pale, was County Kildare. A century and more ago, much of its economic and social existence revolved around an agrarian way of life. Here in 1872, on the banks of the River Griese, not far from the market town of Athy, Henry Shackleton moved with his new wife Henrietta into a large and commodious farmhouse, named Kilkea House. It was not a major move in a geographical sense - Henry's birthplace was less than five miles distant, and Henrietta's mother lived in nearby Carlow - but it was perhaps a surprising one in that Henry had seemed destined for more promising things. As a young man he had been sent to school in England, but illness had prevented him from obtaining a commission in the army. Instead he had attended Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with an Arts degree. When the Shackletons married, however, they decided on a life of farming, and they moved to Kilkea, some thirty miles from Dublin and due west of Wicklow.
Two years later, before sunrise on the morning of 15 February 1874, Ernest Henry Shackleton, the couple's second child and first son, was born in Kilkea House. Through the first year and a half of his life, the baby was, according to his mother, almost too good to live, never crying, and with blue eyes and golden hair that gave him an angelic beauty. That he was not a terror at an early age was as well for his parents, because, in the eight years they spent surrounded by the cultivated fields at Kilkea, they had six children, a brood that would eventually rise to ten.
Henry Shackleton's excursion into farming was made at the best of times and the worst of times. The year he initially leased the land from the Duke of Leinster, the plough reached its maximum extension over British soil. To be a farmer was hard, but in Britain it was more profitable than anywhere else in the world. However, in the mid-1870s Britain's leadership in farming crumbled, as an unprecedented agricultural depression descended on Europe. This was brought about principally by the flooding of European markets with American grain. This in turn was due to developments in farming machinery taking place at the same-time as a massive extension of railroads across the United States. Suddenly the boundless American prairies could not only be as efficiently farmed as the more densely populated areas of Europe, but prodigious amounts of grain could be transported at a fraction of the previous price.
The governments in Paris and Berlin - sensing economic disaster quickly imposed heavy duties on cereals to protect their farmers, but the Tories in London failed to do so. When the plummet in the price of wheat and barley was combined with a series of wet summers in the middle of the decade, and major outbreaks of rinderpest, liver-rot, and foot-and-mouth, British agriculture suffered a collapse from which it never recovered.
There were additional problems for the Irish farmer. In 1879 a long-turbulent agrarian situation exploded into the Land War, a campaign of protest that was transformed into a struggle against landlordism. A multitude of groups and individuals engaged in broad spectrums of behaviour, ranging from parliamentary debate and legal mass meetings, to intimidation, outrages against farm animals, and murder. Facing both the acute agricultural depression and the political uncertainties of farming, Henry Shackleton decided to make a career change. In 1880, at the age of thirty-three, he packed up his family and returned to Trinity College to read medicine.
For the next four years, Ernest and his expanding number of siblings lived in Dublin, whence the first stories come of the lad's developing personality. It is told that he had a fascination with funerals, and that he would follow the local processions. When asked once what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied, 'a gravedigger'.
Such sombre tales aside, it was also in Dublin that the mischievous twinkle in the eye and the impish delight in teasing and joking, which would later show themselves as regular parts of Shackleton's humour, first appeared. 'He loved playing practical jokes,' his younger sister Eleanor wrote. 'Once on April the first he got a number of his sisters out of bed at four a.m. to see the cat with four heads in the coal cellar.'
Shackleton also began to show a streak of independence that would mark his later life. His maternal grandmother played a great part in the family's home life, and she occasionally pasted together pages of the children's books. 'This was the censorship of ugliness,' Shackleton's sister Kathleen later said. 'Unpleasant sounding words, pictures that might frighten us were hidden from our impressionable little brains, and it was a point of honour with us not to try and look.' But young Ernest was more actively inquisitive than his siblings, and one day he and his sister Alice soaked some pages open. There they found the hidden word in all its horror - sow - and a picture of an exceptionally ugly porcine specimen. The next morning he triumphantly greeted his grandmother with the words, 'Good morning, Mrs Sow'.
More illustrative of the man whom the boy became - and of his developing charm, persuasiveness and planning - was a story linking him to hidden treasure. One day he convinced a maid that there was a fortune buried in the rear garden. He induced her to dig for it with him, and, lo!, they found a ruby ring. That it belonged to his mother and had been planted there by Shackleton did not seem to detract from his success in either the enlistment of aid or in the actual finding of the gem. In fact, his interest in such a bonanza would last throughout his life. 'He found real excitement in discussing buried treasure,' photographer Frank Hurley later wrote. 'He often spoke of pirate treasure - of King John's treasure being lost in the Wash - of Caligula's lost treasure.'
The aggregate of these traits has led biographers to make generalisations about Shackleton. Much has been written of the supposed Irishness of his charm, sense of humour, verbal eloquence and love of poetry, all, according to that argument, ensuing logically from his ten formative years in Ireland. Significance has also been attributed to his Anglo-Irish lineage - Henry Shackleton was of Yorkshire Quaker stock, although his family had lived in Ireland for four generations and he had been raised in the Church of England. That north-of-England heritage has been ascribed as the cause of Shackleton's courage and combativeness. In reality, ethnic generalisations do little to explain his development. Although a detailed history of his family can elucidate his background, it cannot give unambiguous clarity about the man.
'Lord Kitchener was not a real Irishman, only an accidental one,' Augustine Birrell wrote about another famous Anglo-Irishman who in later life showed little interest in the place of his birth. In many senses, Shackleton was not dissimilar. After his father graduated from Trinity with his medical degree and moved his family across the Irish Sea, Shackleton did not live on the Emerald Isle again, sojourn there at length or, except when convenient or beneficial, claim it as part of his mental or emotional world. His attitudes as an adult were much like those of another Anglo-Irishman, Garnet Wolseley, who adopted the mentality of the dominant culture, becoming psychologically more of an Englishman than what was deridingly called an 'Outer Briton'. Such a transformation was demonstrated in Wolseley's account of the Indian Mutiny, when he and h
is troops were forced to bivouac in the open after marching into Cawnpore. They camped a short distance from where British women and children had been massacred and thrown into a well. 'Upon entering those blood-stained rooms, the heart seemed to stop,' he recorded, his words showing his self-image, 'a more sickening, a more maddening sight no Englishman has ever looked upon.'
However, when Henry Shackleton moved his family to Croydon in December 1884 to open a medical practice, his eldest son was not yet English by any description. For one thing, Ernest's brogue, which his parents had worked on eliminating while in Dublin, led to his schoolmates quickly giving him the nickname Mick, which in one variation or another he kept for the rest of his life - as indeed he did a hint of the accent. For another, his feistiness inclined him to use his fists when his Irish antecedents were mentioned negatively. But it was those very schools that helped shape Shackleton, leading him from becoming a 'professional Irishman' to being a wholehearted participant in 'the greatest club on Earth - the members of the British Empire'.
Pride in the Empire had been growing in the British populace throughout Shackleton's life. In the very month of his birth, three events took place that were not only of political or symbolic significance to the Empire, but in retrospect can be seen to have helped set the course of Shackleton's career. It was not that these occurrences augured specific developments that affected the explorer, but that they helped build the British imperial Zeitgeist.
Most closely related to Shackleton's future was that, on the day after his birth, HMS Challenger, on a four-year circumnavigation that effectively founded the modern science of oceanography, became the first steam vessel to cross the Antarctic Circle. This cruise marked the first major study of Antarctic waters in decades and helped lead to the acceptance in scientific circles of the far south as a legitimate region for research.
Second, eleven days before Shackleton's birth, Wolseley, now MajorGeneral Sir Garnet Wolseley, KCMG, CB - 'the very model of a modern major-general' according to W.S. Gilbert - had completed perhaps the most perfectly run campaign of all of the Victorian 'small wars'. In a lightning strike by the standards of the day, Wolseley's small army had stormed through the Gold Coast and sacked Kumasi, the capital of the kingdom of Ashanti, in order to stop the supposed aggression and rampant human sacrifice of the country's King Kofi Karikari. The total success of Wolseley's campaign set off bouts of popular excitement and dramatic displays of chauvinistic emotion.
Third, that same week, after more than five years in opposition, Disraeli and his Tories were swept to power in the general elections. When he accepted the seals of his new office from Queen Victoria, a period was launched in which an imperial ideology dominated not only Britain's official international outlook but a much deeper intellectual and social current. Disraeli's emphasis on imperialism was to be followed so closely by later Conservative-led cabinets - under the influence of Lord Randolph Churchill and Joseph Chamberlain - that even William Ewart Gladstone's final two Liberal governments were unable to halt Britain's inexorable march through Africa.
Disraeli's timing was impeccable. In the period between his first fall from power and his second, several developments further instilled in the British people a sense of imperial destiny and purpose. The passage of the Forster Education Act in the summer of 1870 saw the initiation of the conversion of the British into a literate, school-taught society. This did not happen at once, but the extension of basic education meant a broad new range of society was able to read the popular newspapers that were a major factor in the distribution of imperial ideology. Through the organs of the press, foreign as well as domestic news became available, and the public became more knowledgeable - and more opinionated - about their country's international prestige and position.
The British public learned, for example, that a man named Bell had invented an instrument by which one could speak to someone in a different room. They knew that the opening of the Suez Canal was bringing India geographically closer to the mother country. And they read that, just as the Empire suffered occasional military setbacks, so the expansion of the United States was threatened by a military defeat at a place with the unlikely name of the Little Big Horn. All in all, they could find out what they wanted to know, and most of that was about their Empire.
Meanwhile, in the same period in which British agriculture suffered so dramatically, the British manufacturing industry also was challenged by foreign competition. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Britain had dominated international markets. In the 1870s, however, the United States and Germany began manufacturing items they had previously obtained from the 'workshop of the world'. Soon these were being marketed worldwide, and foreign trade was presented to the British people as a Darwinian struggle for existence between manufacturing nations.
There were other factors involved in this new outward-looking vision. The same week that the Forster Education Act passed in Parliament, the Prussian war machine, which the previous decade had smashed Austria, began doing the same to France. Within a month of the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, more than 100,000 French troops were killed, wounded or captured at the Battle of Sedan. The victory of what became the German Empire was utterly complete and transferred to that power military dominance over the European continent. Moreover, the prompt mobilisation of 475,000 men under arms - more than four times as many as Britain had for service abroad throughout the world - demonstrated Britain's inability to determine events on the continent.
In future years, the British government's military planning, political negotiations and economic decisions would take these changing realities into account. But to the public, foreign challenges had been issued, and throughout British society, support of the Empire turned surmise into fact, patriotism into jingoist bellicosity, and ethnic superiority into outright racism.
Ernest Shackleton's formative years in Ireland were during this period. They were embellished by a succession of brilliant imperial victories marred by shocking setbacks, all of which initiated passionate appeals for heroic self-sacrifice, following the call of duty, and upholding the cause of empire.
As the greatest imperial tragedy of all slowly unfolded, and Wolseley's army moved south across the deserts of Egypt and the Sudan, the Shackletons resettled in Croydon. What an impression must have been made on young Ernest as, in January 1885, only a month after their relocation, Khartoum was lost to the forces of the Mahdi. All of England went into mourning at the loss of her greatest Christian soldier, General Charles Gordon. The outrage about the government's dithering prior to sending relief did not cease until Gladstone fell from power in June. That same month, after failing to start a successful practice in Croydon, Henry Shackleton moved his family to Sydenham.
Ernest's educational career now entered a new phase. A governess had previously taught him at home, but once settled in Sydenham he began to attend Fir Lodge Preparatory School, not far from their new house on West Hill.
'Shackleton was a big strong, well-made youngster, & being a little older had little to do with us smaller fry, but he was always friendly & good natured,' wrote one of his fellow pupils seventy years later. 'His father . . . was our family doctor for some time, & I remember being sent to him to be overhauled. In spite of his alarming beard he was very kind & gentle. Mrs Shackleton I never saw. I believe she was an invalid.'
Indeed, it was around this period, or shortly after the birth of Gladys, the youngest of the ten children, that Henrietta Shackleton came down with a debilitating illness that sapped her energy. She soon withdrew from many aspects of life and kept herself confined to a sick room, where she remained, more or less, for forty years. The Shackleton children were thereafter raised primarily by their father, who also ran his medical practice and grew roses that were renowned in the local area. Not that Ernest suffered from lack of a woman's influence - he had eight sisters, all of whom, according to one of them, Eleanor, 'adored him, in fact they believed everything for gospel that he said'.
One of the most important contributions Henry Shackleton made to his children was to pass on his love of language, and particularly poetry. From an early age they engaged in linguistic contests around the dinner table, such as one in which Dr Shackleton quoted a verse and the children had to identify the author or continue the poem. This led to Ernest developing a fine vocabulary and to poetry coming spontaneously to his mind later in life. 'I read poetry as a boy - and I've read poetry ever since,' he later stated. 'I am sure . . . that poetry is good for boys to read, and I think . . . teachers should be very careful not to spoil their taste for poetry by making it a task and an imposition.'
This telling comment indicates how Shackleton might have felt about his own teachers. He evidently found it difficult to maintain an interest in his studies, and, consequently, was rarely better than an average student. In 1887 he left Fir Lodge to be a day-boarder at Dulwich College, a solid Victorian public school that was within walking distance of his home. His behaviour changed little, however, according to the memory of one old friend, who later commented, 'from what I remember he did very little work, and if there was a scrap, he was usually in it.'
Although not on par with Eton or Harrow, Dulwich - founded in 1618 - was successful in its own goal of turning out imperial administrators and businessmen. Thus, it was a key part of the English public school system that was of pivotal importance in producing the domi- nant culture. In Shackleton's time, this meant developing little British imperialists. This was not a phenomenon restricted to the public schools, but ran through the entire educational system, affecting the working classes as well.
Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition Page 4