Dulwich Kept Shackleton’s Boat Under a Tarpaulin. So Do We.

I used to see this as a failure. Then I read David Jowett, at Dulwich from 1951 to 1958, recalling a time when the James Caird “languished under a tarpaulin and covered in dust behind a grille in an alcove attached to the old swimming pool”.

We are not failing. We are in our 1950s.

The pool, Jowett adds, had once had a roof, and was now open-air “thanks to Hitler”, as his first-year form master explained. None of this held him back. He and his wife have since covered over 24,000 miles on a tandem and gone to Svalbard and then the Antarctic Peninsula, as far as 68 degrees south. As an Old Alleynian, he writes, he was “obviously interested in Shackleton”. One tarpaulin, one man at 68 degrees south. I looked at our tarpaulin with new respect.

The James Caird has since moved up in the world. It lives in the College’s Laboratory, alongside 18 science labs, and 1,400 primary school children visit it every year. Schools can download a pupil workbook. I printed it. I stapled it. Our youngest, who is nine, finished it before his toast had cooled and asked whether ours was the same kind of boat.

On Saturday we inflated the kayak in the sitting room, for educational purposes, with a foot pump, which took forty minutes and most of my husband’s goodwill. It filled the room from the bay window to the piano. Our youngest paddled the carpet until teatime.

Dulwich has served open-morning refreshments in the James Caird Hall, and next time we will be there, slightly late. The kayak does not fit back through the sitting-room door, and nobody can find the valve. It is in an alcove now, behind a clothes horse. In about seventy years somebody will write fondly about it.