An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor Read Free

was a Royal Navy station. Crean and another local lad called Kennedy approached the recruiting officer and, suitably impressed by his patter, blithely agreed to join Queen Victoria’s mighty Navy.

    Although Crean was a fiercely independent young man, he was still unsure about the reception he might receive at home and did not immediately tell his parents about his new life. He chose not to inform them until after he signed the recruitment papers, which meant there was no chance of persuading him to stay on the farm. It was also an early indication of Crean’s self-confidence and determination. And, if the two youngsters were looking for extra courage, they probably found it in each other’s company.

    But, after deciding to enlist, Crean had another problem. He was penniless and did not even possess a decent set of clothes to wear for the trip to a new life. He promptly borrowed a small sum of money from an unknown benefactor and persuaded someone else to lend him a suit. Tom Crean took off his well-worn working clothes in July 1893, squeezed into his borrowed suit and left the farm, never to return.

    As he strode off, the young man had precious few possessions to carry with him as a reminder of his home and upbringing. But Crean did remember to put around his neck a scapular, a small symbol of his Catholic faith and a token souvenir of his roots. The scapular, which is two pieces of cloth about two and a half by two inches attached to a leather neck cord, contains a special prayer that offers particular spiritual relief to the wearer. As he set off into the unknown for the first time, Crean will have drawn special comfort from its fundamental tenet – that the wearer of the scapular will not suffer eternal fire. It was to remain around his neck for the rest of his life.

    He travelled down to Queenstown (today called Cobh), near Cork on Ireland’s southern coast with James Ashe, another Irish seaman from the merchant navy. Ashe was a close relative of Thomas Ashe from nearby Kinard, who was to become a leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and achieve martyrdom in 1917 by dying on hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison at the height of the war with the British.

    Tom Crean was formally enlisted in the Royal Navy on 10 July 1893, just ten days before his sixteenth birthday. 2 Officially the lowest enlistment age was sixteen and the assumption is that the fifteen-year-old lad either forged his papers or lied about his age before signing up.

    At this formative stage in his life, young Tom was not the tall, imposing figure well known on the polar landscape in later life. According to Ministry of Defence records of the time, the farmer’s son, who had a mop of brown hair, stood only 5 ft 7¾ inches when he signed on the dotted line in July 1893 as Boy 2nd Class, service No 174699. 3

    His first appointment was to the boys’ training ship, HMS
Impregnable
at Devonport, Plymouth in the southwest of England, where he served his initial naval apprenticeship. 4

    Life in the navy was tough, particularly for a young man away from home for the first time in his life. Discipline was strict and the regime harsh and unsympathetic. His initiation into naval life was perhaps the first test of the strength of character which was to become a hallmark of his adventurous life.

    He survived his first examination and promotion of sorts came fairly quickly for the young man. Within a year Crean had taken his first step upwards and was promoted to Boy 1st Class. A little later on 28 November 1894 the Boy 1st class was transferred to HMS
Devastation
, a coastguard vessel based at Devonport. 5 Crean, for the first time, was at sea.

    Little is known about Crean’s early career in the Navy. It was, however, punctuated with advancement and demotion and it may not have been an altogether happy time for the youngster as he came to terms with the new life a long way from home. Some reports suggest that at one stage Crean became so disenchanted