Awarded at midsummer in 1910 to a B. M. Middleton, VIth Form of the County Secondary School in Brockley, for Science, this copy of Self-Help is signed by Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton.
The prize-binding was a mainstay of the British school award system from the eighteenth until well into the twentieth century. By the Edwardian period, the convention usually entailed a suitably inspiring text to be as lavishly bound as budgets would allow, and stamped with the school or local council’s specific arms or insignia. Books by and about explorers were great favourites of the prize book genre, encapsulating the kind of stoic sense of hard work and self-sacrifice that the British school system sought to instil in young men.
Prize giving ceremonies would often have a guest speaker to give the awards, and it is entirely plausible that Sir Ernest Shackleton, recently returned from the 1909 British Antarctic Expedition aboard his ship Nimrod, would include a South London secondary school in his extensive lecture tour raising funds for his next expedition.
After a move from Ireland at age ten, Shackleton spent his own boyhood attending schools in suburban South London, including Dulwich College, not far from Brockley. Described in his schooldays as a “rather odd boy who, in spite of an adventurous nature and the spirit of romance that was in him, loved a book better than a bat, solitude better than a crowd, his own companionship better than a mob of other lads”, one can imagine that the recently knighted Shackleton, lauded in the press as a national hero, might empathise with the young boy he handed this book to. The book itself, a paean to self-made British men like David Livingstone, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Horatio Nelson, couldn’t be more fitting.
The Antarctic explorers of the Heroic Age represented a sort of apotheosis of these values. As the boy’s own adventure-style publications of the day analysed every aspect of the expeditions racing to achieve the South Pole, Shackleton’s character quickly set him apart from his peers. He undoubtably strove to achieve his goals, but he never did so at the risk of his men–a quality which would come into its own on the Endurance expedition four years later, wherein though he lost the ship and any hope of the expedition’s objective, not a single man under his watch lost their life. Indeed, in the course of his mission to save his stranded crew, he and five companions sailed a modified lifeboat, the James Caird, on a journey of 700 miles from Elephant Island to South Shetland, from where they were able to arrange rescue of their shipmates. The choices Shackleton made in preparation for and during this legendary open boat journey not only demonstrate great bravery, but the way in which he guided his crew to safety has come to be recognised and studied as sterling example of leadership qualities. It speaks volumes that one of Shackleton’s sponsors, John Qiller Rowett, would go on to donate the James Caird lifeboat to their old school, Dulwich College, where it could inspire future generations of young people.
Huntford, R., Shackleton. (Abacus 1996), pp.8-9.
