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Coastal View & Moor News Issue 17


Hollie Bush Writes A whimsical look at our area


I


f you have a lot of time later this month, you might want to come along on a journey to see a long-lost son of East Cleveland laid finally to rest in the land he loved. This land is not amongst the woods and hills of East Cleveland, but many thousands of miles away, literally at the ends of the earth - the frozen wastes of Antarctica.


Everyone knows of our greatest local explorer, James Cook and his travels that opened up the South Pacific, Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. But few, sadly, have heard of Frank Wild of Skelton. Born in 1873, Frances Wild lived as a boy at 131 High Street, Skelton, a house now Skelton’s Post Office which doubles up with Kingston’s Chemists. Frank’s dad, Ben Wild, was a teacher who had moved into Skelton earlier that decade. It was a boom time for Skelton and the surrounding villages. Ironstone mining had made East Cleveland the new Klondike, and the influx of new families, as well as the introduction of compulsory elementary education, meant teachers at Skelton’s village school were in demand. But Frank, as he was called, did not follow his father’s career at the chalk face. Instead the call of the deep led him to join


the merchant navy and later, to enlist in the Royal Navy as a rating.


The atmosphere at the time for a young man wanting to expand his horizons was potent. It was the time of High Imperial Noon, and it was British ships and British seamen like Frank who sustained the British Empire.


At such a time, the call of expedition and discovery was a compelling one, and when, in 1901, the Admiralty called for volunteers to crew the ships that would be sailing to the Antarctic on Captain Scott’s fatal voyage of discovery, Frank Wild applied and was selected. It was on that voyage that he met a man who was to influence him for a generation, the famous polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.


Shackleton was impressed by Wild’s seamanship and his power of command, and Frank was selected by Shackleton for his 1908 ‘Nimrod’ expedition, becoming a leading member of a squad that reached the furthest point south on that expedition, journeying across the Ross Barrier and Beardsmore Glacier.


Frank later served as second in command on Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’ expedition in 1914. It was here he made his name. HMS Endurance ended up crushed in the


Antarctic ice and Wild. along with the rest of the crew were forced to make an epic 500 mile journey by foot, dog sledge and then in the ship’s one remaining lifeboat (which had been dog sledged by a large team of huskies) to the nearest open water harbour, Elephant Island. Wild was left in charge of the bulk of the crew on the island as Shackleton made a second epic 800 mile voyage in that small lifeboat to a whaling station on the island of South Georgia to try to bring help for the rest of the crew.


For six long months Frank Wild and the men he commanded waited, not knowing if Shackleton had made that contact with the outside world, and surviving on a diet of penguin, seal meat and seaweed. Help eventually came after Shackleton broke through, and the site where the Endurance’s crew were rescued by Shackleton and a Chilean whaling ship, was named ‘Cape Wild’ in his honour. Despite this ordeal, the exploration bug never left Wild, and in the 1920’s, after he had left the Royal Navy, he again joined up with Shackleton on the ‘Quest’ expedition of 1922. On that expedition Shackleton met his death from a heart attack on South Georgia, where he was buried. Frank then became leader of the party and took them home.


For all this, Wild was honoured with several awards including a CBE and a civil pension. As I said, Wild was a man of empire, and it was in that empire he found fame, but he also found degradation and poverty. He


could not settle back in the quietness of East Cleveland and instead drifted around remote African colonial outposts trying and failing to make a living from gold and diamond mining, tea and cotton planting and rubber extraction.


But this was at the beginning of the ebb tide for empire, and these business failures, compounded by an increasing drink problem, messy divorces and illness, saw him eking out a poverty stricken life as a hotel barman in South Africa. He died in 1939 and was cremated in Johannesburg, his ashes and memory seemingly lost. And so we return to the beginning, for a British writer, a lady called Angie Butler, became engrossed by Frank Wild and his life. After a lot of digging in Africa, she found Frank’s funerary urn and his ashes in a locked vault in a derelict Johannesburg chapel. She has now written a book on Frank’s life, and later this month she will, with Ernest Shackleton’s granddaughter, Alexandra, be taking his ashes back to the icy wastes of Antarctica so that they can be laid alongside his friend and comrade, Ernest, and in the land he loved. So would it not be fitting to see that his birthplace is marked also? His house is still there, and there is a handy piece of brickwork on the Post Office façade which would be much improved by a blue plaque.


So over to you, Redcar & Cleveland Council and Skelton Parish Council!


Hollie Bush.


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