Raymond Priestley

Who is Raymond Priestley?

Sir Raymond Priestley was a British geologist and polar explorer who took part in two major expeditions during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. He served as a geologist on Ernest Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition (1907-1909) and later joined Robert Falcon Scott's Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1913), where he was part of the six-man Northern Party that became stranded and was forced to survive an entire winter in a snow cave dug into a hillside at Inexpressible Island, subsisting largely on seal and penguin meat before eventually trekking back to the expedition's main base. Priestley went on to a distinguished academic career, serving as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne and later of the University of Birmingham, and helped found the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge. He is best remembered today for a widely quoted 1956 address to the British Science Association in which he ranked the leadership qualities of the three great Antarctic explorers he had known of or served alongside — Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton — a line that has since become one of the most repeated tributes in polar exploration history.

Sources: Raymond Priestley, Antarctic Adventure: Scott's Northern Party (1914) · Sir Raymond Priestley, address to the British Science Association (1956), as widely reported