Ernest Shackleton - Legacy

Legacy

Before the return of Shackleton's body to South Georgia, there was a memorial service held for him with full military honours at Holy Trinity Church, Montevideo, and on 2 March a service was held at St Paul's Cathedral, London, at which the King and other members of the royal family were represented. Within a year the first biography, The Life of Sir Ernest Shackleton, by Hugh Robert Mill, was published. This book, as well as being a tribute to the explorer, was a practical effort to assist his family; Shackleton died some £40,000 in debt (2011: £1.6 million). A further initiative was the establishment of a Shackleton Memorial Fund, which was used to assist the education of his children and the support of his mother.

During the ensuing decades Shackleton's status as a polar hero was generally outshone by that of Captain Scott. Scott's polar party had by 1925 been commemorated in Britain alone by more than 30 monuments, including stained glass windows, statues, busts and memorial tablets. A statue of Shackleton designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens was unveiled at the Royal Geographical Society's Kensington headquarters in 1932, but public memorials to Shackleton were relatively few. Likewise, the printed word saw much more attention given to Scott–a forty-page booklet on Shackleton, published in 1943 by OUP as part of a "Great Exploits" series, is described by cultural historian Stephanie Barczewski as "a lone example of a popular literary treatment of Shackleton in a sea of similar treatments of Scott". This disparity continued into the 1950s.

In 1959 Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage was published. This was the first of a number of books about Shackleton that began to appear, showing him in a highly positive light. At the same time, attitudes towards Scott were gradually changing as a more critical note was sounded in the literature, culminating in Roland Huntford's 1979 treatment of him in his dual biography Scott and Amundsen, described by Barczewski as a "devastating attack". This negative picture of Scott became accepted as the popular truth as the kind of heroism that Scott represented fell victim to the cultural shifts of the late twentieth century. Within a few years he was thoroughly overtaken in public esteem by Shackleton, whose popularity surged while that of his erstwhile rival declined. In 2002, in a BBC poll conducted to determine the "100 Greatest Britons", Shackleton was ranked eleventh while Scott was down in 54th place.

In 2001 Margaret Morrell and Stephanie Capparell presented Shackleton as a model for corporate leadership in their book Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer. They wrote: "Shackleton resonates with executives in today's business world. His people-centred approach to leadership can be a guide to anyone in a position of authority". Other management writers were soon following this lead, using Shackleton as an exemplar for bringing order from chaos. The Centre for Leadership Studies at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom) offers a course on Shackleton, who also features in the management education programmes of several American universities. In Boston USA a "Shackleton School" was set up on "Outward Bound" principles, with the motto "The Journey is Everything". Shackleton has also been cited as a model leader by the US Navy, and in a textbook on Congressional leadership, Peter L Steinke calls Shackleton the archetype of the "nonanxious leader" whose "calm, reflective demeanor becomes the antibiotic warning of the toxicity of reactive behaviour". The Athy Heritage Centre-Museum, Athy, County Kildare, Ireland established in 2001 the Ernest Shackleton Autumn School, which is held annually, to honour the memory of Ernest Shackleton and to commemorate the era of heroic polar exploration.

Shackleton's death marked the end of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, a period of discovery characterised by journeys of geographical and scientific exploration in a largely unknown continent without any of the benefits of modern travel methods or radio communication. In the preface to his book The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of Scott's team on the Terra Nova Expedition, wrote: "For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time".

In 2002, Channel 4 produced Shackleton, a TV serial depicting the 1914 expedition with Kenneth Branagh in the title role. Broadcast in the United States on the A&E Network, it won two Emmy Awards. On 15 February 2011 the 137th anniversary of Shackleton's birth was celebrated with a Google Doodle on the search company's homepage. In a 2011 Christie's auction in London, a biscuit that Shackleton gave "a starving fellow traveller" on the 1907–09 Nimrod expedition sold for £1250.

Shackleton is the name of one of the halls of residence for Merchant Navy Officer Cadets at Warsash Maritime Academy, one of Britain's Merchant Navy Training Colleges.