WILLIAM Photos: By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections A

By MIchael Russell MSP

SMALL plaque

on an outside wall of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh is the only memorial in Scotland to a man who

devised, organised and led what has been described as “by far the most cost-effective and carefully planned

scientific expedition of the Heroic Age.” 86 August 2015

He travelled to the Arctic on another expedition and met Prince Albert of Monaco, a noted hydrographer who invited him to join his team on a voyage round Spitsbergen.

William Speirs Bruce - the unusual spelling of his middle name always caused problems for him - was the son of a Scot who worked in London as a doctor. He was educated almost entirely in England, but elected to study medicine in Edinburgh because of his interest in wider scientific study. That pursuit had been stimulated by an internship at the Scotish Marine Station at Granton where one of the directors was the great ecologist and polymath Patrick Geddes.

Before graduating, Speirs Bruce took part in a Dundee whaling expedition which was intended to explore the commercial possibilities of the Antarctic waters. It was not a success, but it wheted his appetite for a return to the area and he spent some years trying to put together funding to allow him to revisit South Georgia whilst working at the Ben Nevis