Tom Crean

Tom Crean grew up on a small farm near Annascaul in County Kerry, one of ten children, and left school to work in the fields. At fifteen he enlisted in the Royal Navy. In 1901 his ship was in New Zealand when a seaman on Scott's Discovery expedition deserted, and Crean volunteered to take his place. He spent the next two years in the Antarctic and came back a petty officer.

He returned with Scott on the Terra Nova in 1910 and was in the last support party sent back before the final push to the Pole. On the way home Lieutenant Evans collapsed with scurvy. With food nearly gone, Crean left Evans with one companion and walked 35 miles alone across the ice shelf, without a tent or a stove, in eighteen hours, reaching Hut Point just as a blizzard closed in. Evans lived, and Crean was given the Albert Medal. Months later he helped find the tent where Scott and his companions had died.

In 1914 he sailed with Shackleton on the Endurance. When the ship was crushed he was one of the six who sailed the lifeboat James Caird 800 miles to South Georgia, and one of the three who then crossed the island's unmapped mountains on foot to reach the whaling station.

He retired from the Navy in 1920, went home to Annascaul, opened the South Pole Inn and rarely spoke about any of it. He died of a burst appendix in 1938.