Raymond Priestley

Sir Raymond Priestley on a British Antarctic Territory stamp issued to mark the 150th anniversary of the Royal Geographical Society .

Sir Raymond Edward Priestley (born July 20, 1886 in Tewkesbury , Gloucestershire , †  June 24, 1974 in Cheltenham ) was a British geologist and early Antarctic explorer.

Life

Raymond Priestley was educated at Tewkesbury Grammar School. He was about to graduate from the University of Bristol in geology when he was hired as a geological assistant on Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod expedition (1907-1909) to Antarctica . On the expedition he worked closely with the renowned Edgeworth David , another member of the expedition. Priestley collected mineral and lichen samples from the region, including from islands in the Ross Sea , the north face of Mount Erebus volcano and mountains near the Ferrar Glacier . He was also a member of the group that laid the food and fuel depots for Shackleton's near-successful attempt to be the first human to reach the South Pole. On a trip in November 1908, Priestley spent three days in a blizzard in front of the tent in his sleeping bag due to the lack of space in a tent. When the blizzard raged, he slowly slid down the glacier and almost fell to his death at its base.

Priestley returned to Antarctica as a member of Robert Falcon Scott's fateful Terra Nova expedition from 1910 to 1912. Immediately after landing with Scott at Cape Evans in 1911 , Priestley and five other men set out north to explore the Victoria Land coast , where they built a hut near Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink's 1898 camp on Cape Adare . The same group returned to the coast at Terra Nova Bay in 1912 , halfway between Cape Evans and Cape Adare. Ten weeks later, their tent was destroyed and the Terra Nova , the expedition's ship, was unable to penetrate the pack ice and pick up the group. In mid-February they dug a small cave in a snowdrift and stayed there until the end of September, the beginning of southern spring, in an accommodation they named “Inexpressible Island”. In September the men marched for five weeks before they accidentally found a camp with food and fuel and finally returned to Cape Evans.

His research on glaciers in Antarctica earned him a research bachelor's degree at Cambridge after the First World War . In 1920 he founded the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge with Frank Debenham . From the 1930s until his retirement he held a number of academic and administrative posts in Australia and England, becoming Vice Chancellor of the University of Melbourne , Vice Chancellor and Chancellor of the University of Birmingham , 1953 Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service and Deputy Director of the today's British Antarctic Survey was made. From 1961 to 1963 he was President of the Royal Geographical Society , in 1949 he received the accolade as a Knight Bachelor .

Four geographic objects in Antarctica are named after Priestley. Specifically, these are Mount Priestley , Priestley Peak , Priestley Glacier , Priestley Firnfeld and Priestley Lake .

literature

• S. Murray-Smith: Raymond Priestley . In: Douglas Pike (Ed.): Australian Dictionary of Biography . Melbourne University Press, Carlton (Victoria) 1966–2012 (English).