Shackleton's Cabin

William

William

William

He gets a bit scared sometimes

William, this is William

William is our workshop mascot

He's been living on the pillar drill for the last 15 years,

so you can see he's slightly

dusty

William actually makes sure that we all go home with ten fingers

and two eyes

My real title is Object Conservator,

something I genuinely like

We all rot, we all change

We try to manage deterioration

That's really the real essence of it

Apply that and that actually strengthens timber then,

because at the moment it will just crumble under your chisel

We started in 1999

This was again a mad idea

Why would you do this at the edge of Europe, as far away

from your clients as you can ever be?

But we established ourselves as one of the leading workshops

in the country to preserve and conserve Irish heritage

So we've worked really on anything from Mary's kitchen chair

to the gates of Kilmainham Gaol here

The variety is rather large

You never know what's going to happen

That's the great thing

Isn't it? Yeah He agrees

We've noticed over the last ten or so years a huge interest

in Shackleton and his story

And on that basis, we've been turning towards creating a dedicated

Shackleton museum here in Athy

We have an opportunity now to acquire a very special artefact

The family over in Norway have sent us across some images they took

a number of years ago, and this appears to show

what they describe as Shackleton's cabin in the garden

of their property

It's actually the cabin in which Shackleton died

from Shackleton's last ship called the Quest

If this is the true cabin in which he died in,

it's like the Holy Grail of Antarctic artefacts

Yes

Now, the reason why Shackleton's so important to us here in Athy

is that he was born only seven miles from this museum in 1874,

in a place called Kilkea

He's often described as a British explorer, but actually

he was very much an Irish man

His family were here since the 1720s

If we could have the cabin which he actually breathed

his last breaths, it'd be extraordinary for us

Yeah, I'm speechless

Shackleton on his way out, fag in his hand, waving his hat,

big smile on his face He was 47

The Quest expedition, which was his last and his fourth

expedition, is not well known

So hopefully it will help people to understand

what the men went through

It's actually up in northern Norway, north of the Arctic Circle

So the logistics of getting it back to Ireland are going

to be extraordinarily challenging

What we're after is to find as many details as possible to make

absolutely sure that we're dealing with the original cabin

As with most subject matters, only when you start diving into it,

do you actually realise how deep it is

Sir Ernest Shackleton, explorer and poet,

died on an Antarctic voyage 5,000 miles from home

His ship, the Quest, drove on into the polar ice

On 5th January 1922, Shackleton died in Grytviken,

which is in South Georgia

Eventually, when the boat returned, as usual with all the expeditions,

they owed a bit of money

The boat had to be sold

The boat went back to Norway where it came from,

and on the shipyard they took this cabin off the deck

This is the shipyard where my grand grandfather helped

One of the men working in the shipyard said, "I'll have that,"

and used it as a garden shed for 90 years

And it was passed down in the family until eventually Ulf Bakke passed

it on to Athy

You're happy that the cabin is going to a good home?

Good

So it's quite a story

Are you going to be sorry to see the cabin go from your garden?

Yes, I will be crying

Yes, crying Oh, no

OK

The cabin in which Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton

died has been shipped to Ireland

It'll be restored in Galway before being taken to his birthplace

for permanent exhibition

Wow

It's great to have her finally here

And it all seems very healthy

Now we can start the work

So the other half, that half was occupied by Frank Wild,

his second in command, and then Shackleton was on this side

Everybody would expect him to die in a crevasse or being eaten

by strange animals, or drowning

But he just died in his bed

And pretty much the procedure with objects coming in

are very similar

So the first thing we do is to investigate, just by looking

I mean, just go in there and spend many hours in there

and to really look at every part

How is it constructed, make lots of sketches

A lot of our clients have a very deep and intimate connection

with their objects

I don't get personally connected

Sometimes you might get carried away

Luckily, I always try to hold myself back and just say,

"Listen, it's just a wooden box"

Especially on this subject matter, it's heavily romanticised

We spend many, many, many weeks in the research -

base everything I see and find on evidence

Two inches there

It's not often that I can actually stand inside an object

I'm really looking forward to thisjourney

The quest of the Quest

We were very lucky that we had a very good image of the interior

of Shackleton's cabin in the Scott Polar Research

Institute in Cambridge

This photo was definitely stage set for this purpose

I don't think his bed linen would be that immaculately white

So I think this must have been at the beginning of the journey,

or very early on

It's a rectangular space

The bunk on the left

And straight ahead, you have a little cabinet

with an elliptical mirror, and on the right-hand wall

is a bookcase

Shackleton was a keen reader and he encouraged all his crew

as well to read

Underneath it is a wash stand and there's another very small

little glass support, I would call it, next to his bed

So I know that the boards, the backboards, are 160mm,

so I can transfer those measurements and, in the end, measure everything

within the cabin and that will help us then to actually rebuild

these pieces to scale and make sure it looks pretty much identical

to the image

So let's make it 32 inches

Without that photograph, we wouldn't even have a journey, I think

It would be just a garden shed and I would not be involved

in inventing something that could have been in there

Now, the depth of it Erm

Often you find something and that gives you a lead

and you just keep on going

It's a bit like a crime scene investigation, you could call it

So as part of the research, we recently found this new source

Just by pure coincidence, I found this amazing blog which followed

the Quest expedition

Miraculously, some of these images appeared

that I had never seen before,

and cos there's only a very small amount of images available

John Quiller Rowett, the man who actually financed

the Quest expedition, visited the boat in Southampton

in the shipyard, and his visit was documented

with these photographs

Really interesting and very, very important documents

And to have them is just fantastic

I was so surprised that I contacted the man behind it

It's actually the grandson of John Quiller Rowett, Jan Chojecki

The fact that after 100 years this has now come to light

is very exciting

So your grandfather knew Shackleton from Dulwich College

They weren't in the same year

They were two years different

So Shackleton was two years senior to my grandfather

So they weren't best buddies, you know, that kind of thing

But they walked the same route to school

Rolling forward to 1920, which is when Shackleton

really had the urge to get away again

So he planned an expedition to the Arctic to go

in summer of 1921, Northern Hemisphere,

Come the beginning of May, he still hadn't

The funding, yeah

You know?

And really getting too late to go north in that summer

He approached my grandfather and said, "Can you help?"

My grandfather was, by that time, a wealthy, established businessman

in wine and spirits

June 2nd, there's a dinner at The Savoy, and on this menu card

penguins are drawn,

which says they're going south

Ah Because it's too late to go north

And obviously, he has sufficient funds as well,

because it was, I mean, a very large amount of money

Yeah The equivalent these days is about five million

And it was a big commitment

The late decision to cancel the Arctic,

go to the Antarctic, but also puts pressure on the timing

Because you've got to get ready in three months to go south

The Quest, which is by this time being fitted for the north,

has got to be refitted to go south

As you said, they were under enormous time pressure

to get this all together

And it's quite evident as well in the techniques they used,

how they jointed the materials

I don't think it ever got properly ocean tested