It was the scene of 24-year-old Jane Griffin’s first romance, and the occasion of her first extended trip outside England. It was exhilarating and stressful, not least because all of these new experiences had to be navigated in a second language. All she wanted to do was be left alone to read Byron and Goethe.
But then she met someone new.
This wasn’t a romance: it would prove to be much more important than that.
Continue reading “Jane and Amélie: a portrait of two ladies”
They were cold, they were tired, and they had just torn down a large stone cairn on a freezing Arctic headland and found it empty. This is where Sir John Franklin’s men should have left a written record of where they had gone next. To find Erebus and Terror, the searchers had first to find a note.
But there was something even worse than finding nothing in the cairn.
It was finding a cylinder in the cairn, frantically opening it, unrolling the note with shaking hands and hammering heart, and finding it was a missive from another Franklin searcher – possibly even from someone on your own expedition.
Continue reading “Communication channels: how one little search note found its way home”
No.1 in an occasional series where love is bestowed upon a Franklin searcher – or a Franklin researcher – who doesn’t get enough of it. Today: Frances J. Woodward.
As usual, I was looking for something else when I found it: a story about the sale at auction of an item once belonging to Lady Jane Franklin, found among the effects of the late Frances J. Woodward, her first biographer.
Woodward’s Portrait of Jane: A Life of Lady Franklin is one of my favourite Franklin-related books. I consult it regularly, and often have to tear myself away from it when I’ve found the reference I need. To my shame, I’d never given the author much thought. The book was published way back in 1951 and I’d assumed she was long dead.
But this story told me that not only had Frances J Woodward died relatively recently, in 2014, but also that she had served as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.
From the first traces discovered on Cape Riley in 1850, the RUSI Museum in Whitehall, London, laid a strong claim to being the world’s premier museum of Franklin relics. Even the trove brought back by McClintock was first exhibited there before travelling to Greenwich.
In the 1960s, however, this august museum was kicked out of its home at the Banqueting Hall, and its historical treasures dispersed throughout the world. Continue reading “Disposal records of the RUSI Museum”
Nobody noticed the break-in at first. But when the cleaners came in to dust the room and they realised that some priceless relics were no longer in their display case, the museum staff went into a frenzy.
It was 23rd October 1878 at the Royal Naval Museum in Greenwich, and some of the Franklin relics were missing.
Continue reading “Easy money: the theft of Franklin relics in 1878”
He was “the father confessor for so many officers in Arctic service”, the person they poured their hearts out to in confidential letters before, during and after their expeditions in search of the Franklin Expedition.
He was the man who protected their interests and checked in on their families while the searchers were risking their lives in the Arctic, acts of kindness that were never forgotten.
Continue reading “John Barrow Junior, the quiet hero of the search for Franklin”