Raymond Priestley
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Sir Raymond Edward Priestley (July 20, 1886 - June 24, 1974) was a British geologist and early antarctic explorer.
[edit] Biography
Raymond Priestley was born in Tewkesbury in 1886 and educated at Tewkesbury Grammar School. He was close to completing studies in geology at the University of Bristol when he enlisted as a geologist for Shackleton's Nimrod Expedition (1907-09) to Antarctica. There he worked closely with the renowned (Sir) Edgeworth David, also a member of the expedition. Priestley collected mineral and lichens samples from the region including islands in the Ross Sea, the North face of the Mount Erebus volcano, and mountains near the Ferrar glacier. He was part of the advance team that laid the food and fuel depots for Shackleton's nearly successful attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1909. In a November 1908 expedition, due to a lack of space in a tent, Priestley spent three days of a blizzard sleeping outside in his sleeping bag. As the blizzard raged, he slowly slipped down the glacier and nearly fell off its end to his death.
Priestley returned to the Antarctic as a member of Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1912). Immediately after landing at Cape Evans with Scott in 1911, Priestley and five others departed to the north to explore the coast of Antarctica's Victoria Land where they established a hut near Carsten Borchgrevink's 1898 site at Cape Adare. The same group returned to the coast in 1912 at Terra Nova Bay, midway between Cape Evans and Cape Adare. Ten weeks later, their tent was destroyed and the ship, the Terra Nova, was unable to penetrate the ice pack and pick up the party. In mid-February, they excavated a small cave in a snow drift and remained there in a shelter they nicknamed "Inexpressible Island" until late September, the end of the austral winter. The party walked for five weeks, fortuitously finding a cache of food and fuel, eventually arriving back at Cape Evans.
His research on glaciers in the Antarctic earned him a BA (Research) at Cambridge after World War One. In 1920, he co-founded, with Frank Debenham, the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. From the 1930's until his retirement, he held a series of academic and government administrative posts in Australia and England becoming Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University, Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, Chairman of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service in 1953 and deputy Director of the former Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (now British Antarctic Survey). He was President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1961–63. Priestley was knighted in 1949.
He was the brother-in-law of fellow Terra Nova expedition members C.S. Wright and Thomas Griffith Taylor.
