Vitals

Kenneth Branagh as Sir Ernest Shackleton, prolific polar explorer

Antarctica, December 1914 to August 1916

Series: Shackleton
Air Dates: January 2-3, 2002
Director: Charles Sturridge
Costume Designer: Shirley Russell

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

The Channel 4 series Shackleton aired in two parts during the first week of January 2002, winning Emmy Awards in two of the seven categories for which it was nominated among nods from the BAFTA Awards and Golden Globes. Kenneth Branagh stars as the titular Sir Ernest Shackleton, specifically depicting his leadership of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition toward the end of what many call the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration”. Though the specific expedition failed in its scientific objective, his leadership and the resourceful group’s survival have become legendary as a feat of, well, endurance. Despite this, Shackleton wisely avoids hagiography as it presents the titular adventurer with virtues and flaws intact.

After securing funding and approval from the British Admiralty despite looming war across Europe, Shackleton’s crew departed from Plymouth in August 1914 aboard the Endurance. Shackleton had purchased this Norwegian-built three-masted schooner, which was originally christened Polaris before he renamed it from his family motto (“By endurance, we conquer”), thus its journey from England through the South Atlantic was its maiden voyage. Following stops in Buenos Aires and South Georgia Island, Shackleton and his crew of 28 men—and 69 dogs—finally departed for the Antarctic on December 5th.

Shackleton commanded the Endurance through the Weddell Sea, while Aeneas Mackintosh helmed a supporting party aboard the Aurora through the Ross Sea. Hoping to make landfall by Christmas, the seagoing expedition stretched into January 1915 when the Endurance became beset in pack ice. To conserve fuel for a potential return to South Georgia, Shackleton cut the engines and began drifting in the ice… for nine months.

110 years ago today on October 27, 1915—one year and a day after the Endurance left Buenos Aires—Shackleton finally gave his crew the orders to abandon ship, establishing a camp on the ice after—aside from Frank Hurley’s photographs and Leonard Hussey’s banjo—each man was instructed to dump all but two pounds of personal possessions from aboard the ship. Endurance finally sank just over three weeks later on November 21, 1915, starting a new chapter as the crew realized their mission shifted from science to survival.

My job now is to make sure you all live: every single one of you. To do that, I cannot afford to be sentimental. If I am, you will die—die starving, die frozen, die mad. I’ve seen it before, I do not intend to see it again.

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What’d He Wear?

Shirley Russell’s BAFTA-winning costume design recreated everything from evening-wear to exploration gear for Shackleton. In real life, much of the latter worn by the Endurance crew was made by Burberry, from their gabardine overalls and knitted helmets to sturdy boots for marching through the ice. Ernest Shackleton himself maintains a warm wardrobe of hats, sweaters, intermediate and heavy outer layers, and trousers that he cycles through, wearing nearly every conceivable combination of them during his saga from departing South Georgia Island in December 1914 to returning to Elephant Island and rescuing the rest of the Endurance‘s crew in mid-1916.

Headgear

Particularly while commanding the Endurance, Shackleton wears peaked caps associated with mariners. He alternates between white and black cloth covers, though the hats are otherwise similar with gold-embroidered nautical badges over the front, stiff black mohair bands detailed with narrow black patent leather chin-straps, and matching short black patent leather visors.

Occasionally aboard the Endurance but especially when on the ice, Shackleton signals his leadership in a high-crowned fedora crafted from olive-brown felt, styled with a matching band and dramatically shaped self-edged brim. By the mid-1910s, fedoras were a fledgling semi-formal alternative to dressier homburgs, a decade away from rising in popularity after the trend-setting Edward, Prince of Wales adopted them in 1924.

Turtlenecks

Shackleton exclusively wears turtlenecks through his months in the Antarctic, all in shades of brown. His most prominent turtleneck features a distinctive design showing Russell’s painstaking efforts to reproduce the real Shackleton’s clothing for Branagh’s portrayal. This brown fisherman’s-style sweater has a wide-ribbed rollneck and a basket-weave covering the chest and back, separated by a plain-woven body and set-in sleeves that are finished with wide-ribbed cuffs and hem. The sweater has a large olive-drab kangaroo-like pouch pocket sewn onto the front, most clearly seen while on Elephant Island.

Shackleton’s other jumpers include a slightly heavier brown turtleneck without the pouch pocket and a light-taupe turtleneck made from a lighter-weight wool that allows him to wear it more comfortably as a base layer.

Intermediate Layers

Shackleton also rotates through an assortment of mid-weight outerwear that serve as intermediate layers over his turtleneck without the restrictive warmth of heavier coats. One of these is an ivory over-shirt made of heavy flannel, pre-dating the modern shirt-jacket (or “shacket”) trend but functionally similar. This over-shirt has a seven-button front up to the shirt-style collar, a flapped breast pocket, open-top patch pockets over the hips, and single-button cuffs.

Briefly seen while joining the rest of the Endurance crew for a shipboard photograph, Shackleton pulls on a unique soft-knit beige tunic with a double-breasted 12×6-button configuration in a tapered keystone shape that fully covers his torso up to the wide boat-neck which avoids conflict with the top of his hefty brown turtleneck beneath it. A pair of welted pockets are set-in on each side, aligned with the lowest row of buttons.

Shackleton and other expedition members like Hurley and Worsley often layer up with wool jerkins. These sleeveless jackets distinguish themselves from traditional waistcoats or vests by their full front closures that can entirely cover the wearer’s chest up to a rounded neck. Shackleton’s olive felted wool jerkin has six two-hole buttons up the front and large patch pockets over the bottom quarters.

Outerwear

Based on the conditions he anticipates facing, Shackleton also varies his outermost layers—seemingly also sharing these with his top most-trusted mates. One of these jackets is styled like a pea coat with its dark-navy heavy woolen shell and high-fastening 8×4-button double-breasted front, though its fish-mouth lapels, welted breast pocket, and jetted hip pockets are less characteristic of pea coats.

Shackleton alternates this with a very similar dark-navy wool double-breasted coat, though this is structured more like a tailored reefer jacket with its sharper peak lapels, short double vents, and less crowded 6×3-button front. Unlike a reefer jacket’s gilt buttons or a pea coat’s anchor-motif buttons, both of these coats have plain black horn two-hole buttons.

In wetter conditions, Shackleton wears a full-length dark-brown oilskin rain slicker with a broad collar, double-breasted front, loops for shoulder boards that go unused, a long rear vent, and wide-flapped side pockets slanting rearward.

Trousers and Boots

For daily life aboard Endurance while at sea and even trapped in the ice, Shackleton wears heavy woolen flannel trousers in subdued shades like olive and charcoal, styled with side pockets and reinforced plain-hemmed bottoms. His shipboard work boots have black leather lace-up uppers which reach over his ankles.

Snow Gear

After the Endurance crew abandons ship to march and camp across the Antarctic ice, they wear identical light-khaki gabardine two-piece snowsuits. These may be representative of the “light gabardine Burberry overalls” that Alfred Lansing describes Shackleton’s six-man team wearing over “heavy wool underwear, woolen trousers, [and] a thick, loose sweater” when rowing the spray-drenched James Caird from Elephant Island toward South Georgia Island.

The screen-worn overalls consist of a billowing pullover anorak-like top, styled with a broad round collar cinched with beige drawstrings, a round shoulder yoke, and pointed button cuffs.

Under the sleeves, Shackleton wears gray woolen fingerless gloves that offer him dexterity when not warming his hands in the massive animal-fur gauntlets that he and his crew wear suspended from beige woven straps around their necks. As the fedora and peaked caps just won’t cut it for extra protection, he wears a heavy gray knitted cowl around his neck which can be extended up into a hood.

The bottom half of these snowsuits are pants with an appropriately high rise to ensure nothing between the garments is left uncovered against the elements. The bottoms are cuffed with button-closures to blouson them into boots or leg-warmers.

Since these aren’t as tailored as his normal trousers, Shackleton holds them up with a set of blue-and-gray striped cloth suspenders (braces) that have double sets of brown leather hooks extending down to connect onto the buttons around the outside of the waistband. He reinforces them with a navy-and-beige striped cotton web belt that closes through a fancy gold-finished buckle.

Most of the men wore heavy Burberry-Durox boots—ankle high leather boots with gabardine uppers reaching to the knee—designed for marching on hard ice. But as the party struggled over the slushy floes, those boots continually filled with water. In the soaked state, each weighed about seven pounds. It was an exhausting exertion at every step to lift one foot and then the other out of two-foot holes of snowy slush.

— Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage

When trekking out onto the ice (and beyond), the Endurance crew pulls on heavy boots with dark-brown leather uppers to stand in for the Burberry-Durox boots worn in real life. Shackleton’s boots are derby-laced through four sets of eyelets, then pulled through several sets of brass-finished speed hooks. Light-gray ribbed wool leg-warmers cover his boot tops and trouser bottoms to ensure continuity of protection.

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What to Imbibe

For a bright midnight on Christmas 1914, Shackleton brings a tray of grog to serve the Endurance crew still on watch, later also issuing grog to all hands after the Endurance first sticks in the ice floes.

Over time, “grog” evolved into a catch-all for booze—usually something cheap but effective—but its origins spill much deeper into British naval history. After England seized Jamaica in 1655 and discovered the delights of its local spirit, half-pints of rum gradually replaced the Royal Navy’s previous ration of eight pints of mild beer. As sailors sloshed back strong rum for decades to follow, the Admiralty sought a way to curb the resulting drunkenness unbecoming of officers and gentlemen, so Vice-Admiral Edward Vernon ordered the spirit diluted with a quart of water to junior-rated personnel. Following the admiral’s nickname of “Old Grognam” (for his characteristic grosgrain cloak), Vernon’s stipulated four-to-one ratio became immortalized among Commonwealth sailors as “grog”.

Even splitting the ration into two servings a day didn’t solve the disciplinary issues that come with too many drunken sailors early in the morning, so the daily half-pint was eventually cut down to a one-eighth pint “tot” in 1850. At least it was still a high proof, typically around 54—57% ABV, what we now call “Navy Strength” for a reason you can surely surmise at this point.

This beautiful, centuries-old tradition ended on the last day of July 1970, known as “Black Tot Day”, when the Royal Navy issued its final rations of rum. (For what it’s worth, the abolition took an additional two decades to make its way around the globe to New Zealand, who still issued rum to its RNZN sea warriors until 1990!)

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How to Get the Look

Advancements made in cold-weather clothing over the last century would make Shackleton’s wardrobe impractically outdated for your own Antarctic expedition, but there’s no harm in channeling a woolly dash of ice-breaking Edwardian exploration to your winter style.

• Dark-navy wool reefer-style double-breasted coat with peak lapels, 6×3- or 8×4-button double-breasted front, welted breast pocket, jetted hip pockets, and double vents
• Olive felted wool 6-button sleeveless jerkin with round neck and large hip pockets
• Ivory woolen flannel over-shirt with 7-button placket, flapped breast pocket, patch hip pockets, and single-button cuffs
• Dark-brown wool turtleneck sweater with ribbed roll-neck, cuffs, and hem
• Olive or charcoal wool trousers with side pockets and plain-hemmed bottoms
• Dark-brown leather derby-laced work boots
• Light-gray ribbed wool leg-warmers
• Brown felt fedora with matching band and self-edged brim
• Light-khaki gabardine two-piece snowsuit:
  • Pullover jacket with broad collar, drawstrings, and single-button cuffs
  • Long-rise trousers with suspender buttons around waistband and button-fastened hems
• Blue-and-gray striped cloth suspenders with brown leather waist-button hooks
• Navy-and-cream striped web belt with ornate gold buckle
• Gray knit wool hooded cowl
• Gray woolen fingerless gloves

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Do Yourself a Favor and…

Check out the series, and read Alfred Lansing’s book Endurance that chronicles the expedition.

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The Quote

After today, nothing will be hard ever again.