Why fans of Antarctic adventure beat a path to a pub in County Kerry

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“Why keep going back to Antarctica?” This was a question I expected to come up while interviewing the grandson of one of the continent’s incontestable heroes — I just didn’t expect him to be asking it of me. Enda O’Brien claims to have “not one ounce” of grandfather Tom Crean’s need to explore the unknown, but would like to know why I travel back there most years.

I try a couple of lofty sentences about untrammelled beauty and magnificently naive wildlife, then a common line about it being the world’s last pristine place, but the words feel fat and false in my mouth. Does the great Irish explorer’s own kin not have a sense of it already? “No, not me,” says Enda. “My sister’s a different story, but not myself now.”

We’re talking in the Kerry County Museum in Tralee, beside an exhibit dedicated to Tom Crean, with a dozen images of the Kerryman looking down on us. A couple of these are familiar: one with Crean looking stern while smoking a pipe; another the sort most dating app users would kill for, featuring him holding a clutch of husky puppies. Many more images show Crean in less familiar poses — in navy uniform and family portraits, jug-eared and gentler, with even a hint of a smile.

I ask Enda if it ever gets weird, being the descendant of a man who, for a certain set of people, is as legendary as any figure of the so-called “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration”. “Yes,” replies Enda, who lives here in Tralee and who is a de facto gatekeeper of his grandfather’s belongings, including his cherished polar medals. “I’ve had people come up to me wanting to shake my hand and I just have to smile.”

Crean was, as his biographer Michael Smith puts it, a “serial hero”, a man who not only survived the incompetence and hubris of his expedition leaders Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, but whose incredible ability to endure saw him emerge from the distant south with a reputation as one of the most dependable men of the era. On Scott’s fatal mission to the South Pole, Crean trekked 56km alone to get help for two dying men; on Shackleton’s Endurance calamity, he was selected by “the boss” to travel to South Georgia, then traverse the island to seek salvation.

After years of high adventure in lands as foreign to his countrymen as the dark side of Pluto, he returned home to Annascaul on the Dingle Peninsula, then bought a pub and named it the South Pole Inn. Today it is a mecca for Antarctic nerds like myself, a sort of gathering place in which to contemplate and celebrate the deeds of Crean and his shipmates.

The pub has endured since Crean’s death, aged 61, in 1938 but today has a strangely staged feel to it. While there’s no shortage of fantastic Antarctic photography and the odd bit of memorabilia, like much of the Dingle Peninsula it has been tailored for the American tourists who come here in search of their Irish idyll. Presumably for their benefit, the sound system during my visit mostly plays the likes of Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, while the portion sizes of the bar lunches are of the sort men aboard Crean’s ships would have fantasised about while they were starving on the ice.

“I’d say 80 or 90 per cent of the people we get in here are American,” one of the bar staff tells me. “They’re always really nice — and they tip well — but it is funny when they come in saying things like: ‘Is this Ernest Shackleford’s house?’”

The Crean family no longer own the pub, but his granddaughter Aileen Crean O’Brien runs the Tom Crean Brewery in nearby Kenmare. Though born long after his passing, Aileen perhaps more than anyone inherited her grandfather’s fixation with Antarctic tribulation. In 2016 she travelled all the way to South Georgia, the site of Crean’s greatest endurance test.

Exactly a century after her forebear had made the journey, she planned to follow in his footsteps, only to suffer a terrible leg break on a glacier. Eventually she was evacuated from the island by the Royal Navy. The whole episode made her appreciate her grandfather’s career all the more.

“He had a remarkable time, a poor farmer’s boy who had to borrow money to join the navy, then ended up at Buckingham Palace twice on the same day to collect two polar medals,” she says. “Now they’re teaching kids about his life in school.”

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