The UK is awash with exhibitions, publications, television tie-ins and other spin-offs from three anniversaries: the 200th anniversary of Dickens’s birth and the centenary of two celebrated disasters, the sinking of the Titanic, when more than 1,500 passengers and crew died, and the British Antarctic expedition, from which none of the five explorers who struggled to the South Pole returned.
Add in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the third London Olympics and the urgent commemorative fever seems almost overwhelming.
I can’t remember such a combination of unrelated historical pegs being put to such frantic use by the cultural sector since the Millennium celebrations.
But is it something to worry about? Is this overkill with historical anniversaries stifling creativity and new ideas? Are there too many exhibitions and other media competing to cover the same subject from a different angle?
The answer to all these is clearly no. Dickens’s work contains a rich vein of historical and literary themes that makes him a gift to marketing. His characters link handily with Victorian studies in the curriculum and lend themselves to museum presentations in venues ranging from Portsmouth (birthplace) and Kent (lived there) to various parts of London (explored every alley).
Titanic exhibitions have been doing the rounds for years, but who can blame Belfast and Southampton for taking advantage of the continuing popular fascination with the upstairs/downstairs end of a symbolic event that has seen both cities preparing major related museums and exhibitions in the centenary year?
Uncertain hero
This review was originally to be of just one of the exhibitions commemorating Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final, fatal expedition in the so-called “heroic age of polar exploration”.
But as there are a series of others it seemed appropriate to look at them as a group. There has been considerable joint working and partnership between the various institutions involved, and the exhibitions are essentially complementary rather than rival bids for the limelight.
There is of course a significant backstory to the Scott expedition, which has been disputed for years. Was Scott of the Antarctic a national hero who achieved greater nobility than his successful Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen in reaching the South Pole second and making the ultimate sacrifice?
Or was he an amateur explorer whose stubborn character and incompetence condemned his men to death?
Is it the less well-known Ernest Shackleton whose leadership better deserves our admiration today or is his approach simply a closer fit with 21st-century sensibilities?
After the undermining of Scott’s iconic status by some revisionist writers in the 1970s and 1980s, more recent accounts have rehabilitated him while acknowledging his mistakes and misfortune.
Historians have moved on from arguments about one man’s character to wider issues about the course of Antarctic science and exploration in the heroic age.
These more complex matters are inevitably best considered in books, and there have been a number of excellent and accessible studies in recent years.
Museum displays and exhibitions can only be a taster, but because of what happened a century ago and the nature of the material that has survived those expeditions, when in some cases the people did not, even quite modest museum displays can be extraordinarily powerful when well presented.
Scott’s Last Expedition at the Natural History Museum is a collaboration between the London museum and two institutions in New Zealand, the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, and the Antarctic Heritage Trust.
The exhibition is designed, rather ingeniously, around the footprint of Scott’s remarkably small wooden base camp hut at Cape Evans, with the exact areas occupied by stores, equipment and each man’s bed and accommodation space marked out on the floor.
A large interactive display table in the centre occupies the place of the original that the men sat round to eat every day.
Antarctic preservation
This is where the famous photograph of Scott at the head of the table for his 43rd birthday meal was taken on 6 June 1911, four months before starting the final trek to the pole.
Because of the cold, dry conditions of Antarctica the original hut has survived in an astonishing condition of preservation and a video on the Antarctic Heritage Trust’s website shows Scott’s grandson, Falcon, visiting the sturdy wooden shed a century later.
Conserving this and other physical remains from the Scott and Shackleton expeditions in situ is the main purpose of the trust, still considered a controversial aim by some who see it as a pointless objective or even harmful to the environment.
There is something poignant about the survival of boxes and cases of everyday supplies, all of them clearly labelled, with brands such as Heinz and Colman’s appearing in the expedition’s record photographs like Edwardian product placement, which of course they were.
Scott had to find financial sponsorship for his expedition wherever he could, and the appeal posters he sent to public schools detailing how much it cost to sponsor a sledge, a husky or a pony have a contemporary ring.
Seeing the objects and materials that the party used, put in evocative context by Herbert Ponting’s photographs and movie film of the expedition, is magical.
Just up the road in South Kensington, the Royal Geographical Society has a display of photographs from the expedition as does the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace.
The latter exhibition, The Heart of the Great Alone, includes Ponting’s photographs from the Scott expedition and Frank Hurley’s equally impressive work from the Shackleton expedition of 1914-15.
The Royal Collection has published a beautifully produced book by explorer David Hempleman-Adams, which accompanies the temporary show but is an important lasting legacy. The British Film Institute has also restored Ponting’s early silent film material, which is available on DVD.
Museum award shortlist
Finally, anyone inspired by the Scott centenary should visit the renamed Polar Museum, part of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, which has been expertly refurbished over the past two years.
It has new permanent displays as well as a temporary exhibition on Scott’s final trip. This is a model of how to breathe new life into a small, specialist museum with modest but very powerful displays.
The Polar Museum has rightly been shortlisted for the 2012 European Museum of the Year award, which will be announced in May.
I defy anyone not to be moved by the sight of Captain Oates’ sealskin sleeping bag, from which he struggled out to his tragic but futile self-sacrifice in the blizzard, remarking: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” His body was never found.
Scott recorded Oates’s final words in his surprisingly neat, pencilled journal, which has been lent to the Polar Museum by the British Library.
This was recovered from the tent months after Scott and the others had perished only a few miles further on and tells the moving tale in eloquent prose that makes it far more than a simple diary of events.
A final letter by Edward Wilson, the artist and naturalist of the party, has just been rediscovered in the institute’s archives and is displayed for the first time alongside Scott’s last letter to his wife Kathleen, which is addressed “to my widow”.
It so happened that I visited the Polar Museum 18 months ago on the very day that the first of the 33 miners trapped deep in a Chilean copper mine was raised to the surface as the world watched.
It made the lonely fate of Scott and his companions, who knew they were doomed and could not be rescued, all the more moving.
Oliver Green is the research fellow at the London Transport Museum
Scott’s Last Expedition, Natural History Museum, London
The Heart of the Great Alone
Polar Museum
Add in the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the third London Olympics and the urgent commemorative fever seems almost overwhelming.
I can’t remember such a combination of unrelated historical pegs being put to such frantic use by the cultural sector since the Millennium celebrations.
But is it something to worry about? Is this overkill with historical anniversaries stifling creativity and new ideas? Are there too many exhibitions and other media competing to cover the same subject from a different angle?
The answer to all these is clearly no. Dickens’s work contains a rich vein of historical and literary themes that makes him a gift to marketing. His characters link handily with Victorian studies in the curriculum and lend themselves to museum presentations in venues ranging from Portsmouth (birthplace) and Kent (lived there) to various parts of London (explored every alley).
Titanic exhibitions have been doing the rounds for years, but who can blame Belfast and Southampton for taking advantage of the continuing popular fascination with the upstairs/downstairs end of a symbolic event that has seen both cities preparing major related museums and exhibitions in the centenary year?
Uncertain hero
This review was originally to be of just one of the exhibitions commemorating Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s final, fatal expedition in the so-called “heroic age of polar exploration”.
But as there are a series of others it seemed appropriate to look at them as a group. There has been considerable joint working and partnership between the various institutions involved, and the exhibitions are essentially complementary rather than rival bids for the limelight.
There is of course a significant backstory to the Scott expedition, which has been disputed for years. Was Scott of the Antarctic a national hero who achieved greater nobility than his successful Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen in reaching the South Pole second and making the ultimate sacrifice?
Or was he an amateur explorer whose stubborn character and incompetence condemned his men to death?
Is it the less well-known Ernest Shackleton whose leadership better deserves our admiration today or is his approach simply a closer fit with 21st-century sensibilities?
After the undermining of Scott’s iconic status by some revisionist writers in the 1970s and 1980s, more recent accounts have rehabilitated him while acknowledging his mistakes and misfortune.
Historians have moved on from arguments about one man’s character to wider issues about the course of Antarctic science and exploration in the heroic age.
These more complex matters are inevitably best considered in books, and there have been a number of excellent and accessible studies in recent years.
Museum displays and exhibitions can only be a taster, but because of what happened a century ago and the nature of the material that has survived those expeditions, when in some cases the people did not, even quite modest museum displays can be extraordinarily powerful when well presented.
Scott’s Last Expedition at the Natural History Museum is a collaboration between the London museum and two institutions in New Zealand, the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, and the Antarctic Heritage Trust.
The exhibition is designed, rather ingeniously, around the footprint of Scott’s remarkably small wooden base camp hut at Cape Evans, with the exact areas occupied by stores, equipment and each man’s bed and accommodation space marked out on the floor.
A large interactive display table in the centre occupies the place of the original that the men sat round to eat every day.
Antarctic preservation
This is where the famous photograph of Scott at the head of the table for his 43rd birthday meal was taken on 6 June 1911, four months before starting the final trek to the pole.
Because of the cold, dry conditions of Antarctica the original hut has survived in an astonishing condition of preservation and a video on the Antarctic Heritage Trust’s website shows Scott’s grandson, Falcon, visiting the sturdy wooden shed a century later.
Conserving this and other physical remains from the Scott and Shackleton expeditions in situ is the main purpose of the trust, still considered a controversial aim by some who see it as a pointless objective or even harmful to the environment.
There is something poignant about the survival of boxes and cases of everyday supplies, all of them clearly labelled, with brands such as Heinz and Colman’s appearing in the expedition’s record photographs like Edwardian product placement, which of course they were.
Scott had to find financial sponsorship for his expedition wherever he could, and the appeal posters he sent to public schools detailing how much it cost to sponsor a sledge, a husky or a pony have a contemporary ring.
Seeing the objects and materials that the party used, put in evocative context by Herbert Ponting’s photographs and movie film of the expedition, is magical.
Just up the road in South Kensington, the Royal Geographical Society has a display of photographs from the expedition as does the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace.
The latter exhibition, The Heart of the Great Alone, includes Ponting’s photographs from the Scott expedition and Frank Hurley’s equally impressive work from the Shackleton expedition of 1914-15.
The Royal Collection has published a beautifully produced book by explorer David Hempleman-Adams, which accompanies the temporary show but is an important lasting legacy. The British Film Institute has also restored Ponting’s early silent film material, which is available on DVD.
Museum award shortlist
Finally, anyone inspired by the Scott centenary should visit the renamed Polar Museum, part of the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, which has been expertly refurbished over the past two years.
It has new permanent displays as well as a temporary exhibition on Scott’s final trip. This is a model of how to breathe new life into a small, specialist museum with modest but very powerful displays.
The Polar Museum has rightly been shortlisted for the 2012 European Museum of the Year award, which will be announced in May.
I defy anyone not to be moved by the sight of Captain Oates’ sealskin sleeping bag, from which he struggled out to his tragic but futile self-sacrifice in the blizzard, remarking: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” His body was never found.
Scott recorded Oates’s final words in his surprisingly neat, pencilled journal, which has been lent to the Polar Museum by the British Library.
This was recovered from the tent months after Scott and the others had perished only a few miles further on and tells the moving tale in eloquent prose that makes it far more than a simple diary of events.
A final letter by Edward Wilson, the artist and naturalist of the party, has just been rediscovered in the institute’s archives and is displayed for the first time alongside Scott’s last letter to his wife Kathleen, which is addressed “to my widow”.
It so happened that I visited the Polar Museum 18 months ago on the very day that the first of the 33 miners trapped deep in a Chilean copper mine was raised to the surface as the world watched.
It made the lonely fate of Scott and his companions, who knew they were doomed and could not be rescued, all the more moving.
Oliver Green is the research fellow at the London Transport Museum
Project data
Scott’s Last Expedition, Natural History Museum, London
- Cost undisclosed
- Main funder Developed by NHM in partnership with Canterbury Museum and NZ AHT
- Sponsor Catlin Group
- Interpretation and content Elin Simonsson
- Exhibition design Land Design Studio
- Lighting Land Design Studio; Andy Grant
- AV Hardware Electrosonic
- Projections New Angle
- Films and audio NHM
- Display cases Meyvaert
- Exhibition ends 2 September
The Heart of the Great Alone
- Cost undisclosed
- Main funder Royal Collection
- Curators Sophie Gordon; Emma Stuart
- Exhibition ends 15 April
Polar Museum
- Cost £1.75m
- Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund; Garfield Weston Foundation; Foyle Foundation
- Curator Heather Lane
- Project manager RD Smith
- Exhibition design Blue Design
- Architect University of Cambridge Architects
- Fit-out The Workhaus
- Display cases ClickNetherfield; The Workhaus
- Building contractor (galleries) ISG Cathedral
- Building contractor (stores) York Construction
