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ERNEST SHACKLETON: THE IRISH BACKGROUND
RICH IRISH ANCESTRY OF THE GREAT POLAR EXPLORER
Ernest Shackleton (1874-1922) was born on 15 February 1874 at Kilkea House near Athy in County Kildare, Ireland, around 50 miles south-west of Dublin.
Christened Ernest Henry, he was the elder son of Henry Shackleton and Henrietta Gavan and the second eldest of ten children: two boys (Ernest Henry and Francis Richard, who was two years younger than Ernest) and eight girls: Gertrude, the oldest child, just over a year older than Ernest; Amy, a year younger; then Ethel and Eleanor, born in 1878-9; then Clara, Helen and Kathleen, all born in the early 1880s; and finally the youngest of the family, Gladys, who arrived in 1887.
Their parents had married in 1872. On their father Henry’s side, the Shackletons had lived in County Kildare since the 1720s. However on their mother Henrietta’s side, the Gavans and the Fitzmaurices had lived in Ireland for 800 years, since the 12th Century. It was, arguably, from the Gavan side that Shackleton's deep-deated Irishness especially derived.
Henry Shackleton's family on Ernest's grandfather Ebenezer's side could also trace its antecedents back to the time of Edward I (one early provenance was, it seems, Northumberland). A distant Shackleton ancestor is credited with fighting in "the wars in Lombardy" - hence the family coat of arms (see below). The Yorkshire branch of the family (the name possibly derives from the area of Halifax and has been thought to mean 'settlement' (-ton) on a spit of land - OE 'scacol') was in the 16th century located at Newsholme, near Gisburn, and later owned property ("Shackleton House") north west of Leeds at Harden, near Bingley, Yorkshire. Indeed there is a Shackleton Farm to this day, although the original building has since been demolished. The family's location in the West Riding of Yorkshire is attested by the genealogy of their mothers: Roger Shackleton (?-1597) married Jenet Sharpe of Bingley; his son John Shackleton (1584-?) married Jenet Clapham of Keighley; his son Roger (1616-77) married Mary Roper and Roger's son Richard (1643-1705) married Sarah Brigg(s) of Keighley. Richard's son Abraham (1696-1771) was to found the Ballitore branch of the family, with which we are concerned, for it was from these that the famous explorer was descended.
It was at Harden that Abraham Shackleton was born on 27 August 1696, the youngest of six children. His father had previously converted to Quakerism, which had begun to emerge after the Civil Wars ended in 1648, and been imprisoned for three years for not attending an Anglican church; and the very year of Abraham's birth their home Shackleton House began to be used as a meeting house.
However Ireland beckoned. When Abraham was just six, his mother Sarah died; his father died just two years later, leaving him, aged 8, and his siblings orphaned; although he remembered his father well and would, according to his granddaughter, frequently mention "the tender concern of his pious father."
At the age of 20 young Abraham sold his Yorkshire inheritance to his brother Roger, then studied Latin and began teaching. In 1720 he made a significant decision, and moved to Ireland, to Ballitore, a village which had been founded by Quakers in 1685. Here he became private tutor to the children of two Quaker families, in neighbouring County Carlow, a few miles to the south.
Quakerism, and education, became for Abraham an undoubted 'calling'. By 1725 he had married Margaret Wilkinson, the niece of his former Yorkshire employer.
In 1726 Abraham Shackleton firmly and proudly established the Shackleton name in Ireland: he opened a Quaker school in Ballitore (Béal Atha an Tuair), south of Kildare near Crookstown, 28 miles from Dublin on the Kilkenny Road and just a few miles north-east of Kilkea, where Ernest, the future explorer would be born a century and a half later.
Abraham died at the age of 74, by which time his son Richard (1726-1792) succeeded him, and Richard's son Abraham (1752-1818) in due course took over the running of the education. Thus the Ballitore school flourished for over a century. One of its most famous alumni was the politican and orator Edmund Burke (1729-97), who studied up there to the age of 15, before proceeding (in 1744) to Trinity College Dublin. "If I am anuything,", Burke later wrote, "it is the education I had there that has made me so." When he heard of Abraham's death in 1771 he wrote, "I had a true honour and affection for that excellent man."
Another of the school's outstanding later pupils was Cardinal Cullen (1803-78), later Archbishop of Dublin (1849-78), Rector of the Irish College, the friend of two Popes (Gregory XVI and Pius IX) and also of a future Pope (Leo XIII).
From these, Ernest's grandfather Ebenezer (1784-1856) and his son Henry Shackleton, Ernest's father (1847-1921), as well as other branches of the family in direct line from Abraham's sister, Deborah (1749-1824)and Ebenezer's brother (i.e. Ernest's great-uncle) George Shackleton (1785-1871), are all descended. They include Jonathan Shackleton and Neale Webb (to both of whom sincere thanks for much of the invaluable information, illustrations and family trees displayed in this article), and are known as the "Ballitore Shackletons".
In the late 1700s while the school still had many years to run the Shackleton family turned to milling; in 1824 Ebenezer Shackleton, purchased Moone mill, a local mill. Moone is part of a cluster of villages in the far south of Co. Kildare, along with Ballitore and Timolin.
Ebenezer Shackleton (himself one of ten children) and his wife Ellen had six sons; Henry, Ernest's father, was the fifth of these and their second from youngest child. Henry and Henrietta Gavan married in 1872 and moved to the farmhouse in Kilkea, County Kildare - a few miles down the road from Ballitore - where their own first child, Ernest, the future explorer, was born in February 1874.
The house is shown as it is today. The front porch was added later, ; but otherwise the exterior is much as Ernest would have remembered it as a small boy.
Six of Henry and Henrietta's children (Gertrude, Ernest, Amy, Frank, Ethel and Eleanor) were born at Kilkea House, a short distance from the hamlet of Kilkea, where Henry, who was brought up a Protestant, initially strove to make a living by farming "in the green, fertile, rolling fields of County Kildare".
As Roland Huntford puts it in his biography of `Shackleton, "Kilkea was a very Irish place. To the east, was a view of the mountains of Wicklow. On a rise lay an Anglo-Norman castle; started in 1180, rebuilt in the 15th century, and now the somewhat tumbledown property of the Duke of Leinster." The views of the surrounding countryside (including historic Kilkea Castle, seen across the fields) would have been much the same when Shackleton was a small boy playing around the house or swimming in the River Griese, which flowed through the farm. On family walks Ernest regularly hung behind, earning the nickname 'Mr. Lag.' On another trip, a visit to cousins in nearby County Carlow, he was fascinated by his first encounter with a penguin skin.
However the idyll of Kilkea and of rural County Kildare eventually had to end. When Ernest was six and the prospects of farming looked less promising for a growing family, Henry Shackleton moved his wife and family to 35 Marlborough Road, a three- storey terraced red brick dwelling in South Dublin, adjacent to the village of Donnybrook - now a prosperous and desirable suburb of the city - where they lived while his father, Henry, was studying medicine at Trinity College, Dublin. Jonathan Shackleton's revealing book Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica recounts (p. 26) how 'One of the last things Ernest did at Kilkea House before climbing into the carriage that would take him away from his birthplace was to stand on the fallen tree trunk on the lawn. This had been his ship's cabin for as long as he could remember, the place where he played on summer afternoons and lay long into the evening....'
It was in the Dublin garden that Ernest, began digging a hole which would, he claimed, take him to Australia. He also, with the connivance of a housemaid, dug in search of buried treasure. Much later, putting his passion for Geography and for ships (Marlborough Road's garden frame replaced the tree trunk as his ship's cabin) together, he would reach the Southern Hemisphere by more orthodox means. One of his other greatest delights was to chase after the funerals that passed and join the line of mourners - something he first attempted when they were all still living in Kilkea.
The back garden would doubtless have been much the same when Ernest and his sisters played there. A plaque to Sir Ernest Shackleton has recently been put up on the front of the Marlborough Road house.
Dr. Henry Shackleton qualified as both Bachelor and Doctor of Medicine at Trinity in 1884, and in December of that year, when Ernest was nearly 11, while one of the eight girls (Kathleen) was still a baby and the youngest, Gladys Mabel, had not yet even been born, the Shackleton family with its nine youthful members upped sticks and took ship at Dublin's port of Dun Laoghaire (Kingstown), moving lock, stock and barrel to South Croydon; and six months later to Sydenham, near Dulwich in South London, where his father began a new practice in England.
In September 885 eleven-year-old Ernest, who had previously been educated at home by a governess, became a day boy at Fir Lodge preparatory school.
His first biographer, Hugh Robert Mill, observed "He was now a sturdy, broad-shouldered boy of eleven, full of life and noise, with an accent that, despite the parental care which had refined it by comparison with the brogue of Dublin, struck the ears of Londoners as terribly Irish."
To reflect his Irish accent and temperament (and as the school already boasted a Paddy) he was nicknamed Micky (a name of endearment he later retained). He soon acquired the reputation (as Jonathan Shackleton's book notes) of being 'a brave litle fellow, ready to fight the universe and all therein.' His Irishness stood out: indeed he and a fellow Irish pupil, egged on by classmates, duly engaged in a fight to celebrate St.Patrick's day.
In September 1887, aged 13, Ernest moved on from Fir Lodge to nearby Dulwich College, one of the most respected public day-boarding schools in the south of England, where he stayed till Easter 1890. However his notable lack of academic progress, at least initially, at school - although his restlessness did find useful channels in football, gymn and boxing, which he excelled in - may have had something to do with his being lively and headstrong, and also feeling wrenched from his Irish roots.
"An Irishman in England Shackleton remained for the rest of his days," Huntford concludes. Shackleton himself frequently declared, "I am an Irishman, and I consider myself a true patriot...when I say Ireland should not have Home Rule." It is notable that in the log of the Emma, the Chilean ship in which he made his third rescue attempt, both Shackleton and Tom Crean gave their nationality as 'Irish'; the family crest history (houseofnames.com) alludes to him as a 'famous Irish explorer of the Antarctic.' When he wrote to his wife Emily Dorman, whom he married on 9 April 1904 following his return from the Discovery expedition, he invariably signed himself 'your loving Micky' or just 'Micky'.
Purchase a copy of Shackleton's coat of arms
There is no doubting Shackleton's genuine Irish credentials. Colleagues aboard Discovery, on which Shacketon served during 1901-4, recalled, "Shackleton was the life and soul of the Discovery: his mind was alert, his good humour inexhaustible. In his deep Irish voice he could wheedle and coax: successfully, if he required something, which he usually did."
Other expedition members, such as Dr. Edward Wilson, who was initially very close to Shackleton, appreciated his qualities, such as his Irish volubitiliy, cheerfulness, Irish good-naturedness and optimism, his witty and sparkling conversation, and his gift for an Irish yarn thanks to his remarkable memory, from which "an anecdote could be extracted at any moment to suit any occasion", and whence "derived his habit of quoting thick slabs of poetry from memory."
Others, such as his staunch ally Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills, remarked on "the reckless generosity of his Irish ancestry", "the Irishman's instinctive theatricality," on which he could lean, and perhaps most notably of all his winning confidential manner: "the Irishman's terrible gift of intimacy".
It especially notable that three of the members of the party aboard the James Caird were Irishmen: Ernest Shackleton; first officer Tom Crean; and able seaman Timothy McCarthy, who was tragically killed on 16 March 1917 fighting in the Great War, within six months of returning home from Shackleton's Endurance expedition.
Much of the material for this extended article comes from Jonathan Shackleton's first-rate book about his family and ancestors: Shackleton - An Irishman in Antarctica is meticulously researched and magnificently presented, and contains much early material either not found at all elsewhere, or not easily located in the other Shackleton literature. In a compelling narrative Jonathan reveals the profound influence of Ernest Shackleton's Irish and Quaker antecedents, explores his Irish upbringing in Kildare and Dublin, his time in the Merchant Navy, each of his four Antarctic expeditions, his marriage and love affairs, his life as a public figure and as briefly a politician and the haunting story of his final, fatal expedition in 1921-22 aboard the Quest.
Visit Jonathan Shackleton's family website about Sir Ernest Shackleton
Described by Books Ireland as "A biography full of wit combined with sharp observation of a flawed and troubled, but ultimately great, Irish man. Full marks." Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica, written in collaboration with John MacKenna, is available direct from Jonathan Shackleton's website. It was first published in November 2002 in hardback by The Lilliput Press, 62-3 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin 7, Ireland (ISBN 1 84351 009 x). 208 pages long, the book is lavishly illustrated with over 100 photographs, maps and engravings, many of them appearing here in print for the first time.
Buy Jonathan Shackleton's book
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 from Dublin.jpg "the great Edmund Burke (1729-1797)")
 249.jpg "Portait of Cardinal Cullen, Archbishop of Dublin 1849-78")
 continued in the milling trade anmd took over Moone Mill, Ballitore in 1824.jpg "Ernest grandfather Ebenezer Shackleton (1784-1856) took over Moone Mill, Ballitore in 1824. Great grandson of the founder (his father was also an Abraham), he had eight siblings: Richard, Margaret (I), Abraham, Betsy, George, Lydia, Mary & Margaret (II)")
 at Fir Lodge Preparatory School 200percent lge 350.jpg "Ernest at Fir Lodge Preparatory School: like the picture at the top of this article, it is one of the very earliest photographs of the explorer")
 360 270.jpg "Jonathan Shackleton pictured at Port Loughroy, Antarctica. He and Bob Headland are in frequent demand as lecturers on the Antarctic")
 225 270.jpg "Jonathan Shackleton on Polar duty.")
