The Sounds of Antarctica in an Irish Classroom: Tim Foley has created the The Ultimate Tom Crean Learning Bundle for children . . .
Somewhere in Ireland this term, a teacher will point a phone at a worksheet, scan a small square of black and white pixels, and the class will hear the wind howling across the Ross Ice Shelf. They’ll be sitting at a desk, not standing on Antarctica’s Great Ice Barrier over a century ago — but for that moment, they’ll be exactly where Tom Crean was.
That small moment is what sixteen years of work has been building toward, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
Tom Crean
I first heard of Tom Crean as a boy, during summers spent near Castlemaine in County Kerry, close to where my father was born. He’d tell me, in the way fathers do, about the local man, known, in the wider community, as ‘Tom The Pole’, who’d served with Scott and who’d saved lives on the ice at the bottom of the world — and like most things you’re told as a child, I filed it away without quite grasping its size. It took me until 2010, as an adult, to go searching properly for the man behind the story, and to discover that Ireland hadn’t just forgotten Crean’s story. In places, it had gotten it wrong.
What started as a Facebook campaign to win Crean the recognition he’d never been given, has grown, over sixteen years, into a 37,000-strong Facebook page, a 6,000-member Tom Crean Appreciation Society, and thousands more across other platforms — momentum that, in 2018, saw a petition of over 16,300 signatures handed directly to the Irish government. Three years later, in 2021, a research vessel bearing Crean’s name was launched in his honour.
Campaign/Research/Book
Somewhere in the middle of that campaign, the campaign became research, and the research became a book. Crean: The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero, was published by Merrion Press in 2023, built on almost four years of archival work that corrected details about Crean’s life the record had gotten wrong or failed to make mention of, for over a century — his birthdate, his age, his siblings, his Naval career, even the year he opened the South Pole Inn. That research has since found its way into the Dictionary of Irish Biography, care of the Royal Irish Academy, and into the Department of Education’s own Scoilnet resources on Crean, after I was commissioned to revise them.
None of that, though, is really why I’m writing this.
Funny Crean
Back in his own lifetime, Annascaul’s children knew Tom Crean as “Funny Crean” — a nickname passed down through an oral history recording made with his godson years ago. Not “Brave Crean,” not “Heroic Crean.” Funny Crean. The man who lifted spirits on ships trapped in ice, who sang his own indistinct version of ‘The Wearing Of The Green’ while steering the tiller of a lifeboat crossing 800 miles of the most dangerous ocean on Earth, who once gulped down an entire cup of curry without flinching, thinking it was cocoa. That’s the Tom Crean I think children deserve to meet first — not the Albert Medal, not the four separate acts of heroism, but the man who made frightened, freezing sailors laugh.
I’m a learning facilitator and work coach for teenagers with special educational needs by profession, not a teacher in the traditional sense — though both my daughters are, and I leaned on their advice more than once. My work role taught me one thing above all: a lesson that doesn’t entertain doesn’t survive first contact with a child’s attention span, however important the history behind it.
The Ultimate Tom Crean Learning Bundle
So over the past year, I’ve built The Ultimate Tom Crean Learning Bundle — over 25 resources spanning literacy, numeracy, geography and history, for ages 3 to 11. Colouring sheets and a poetic alphabet for the youngest children. Two-tier worksheets, pitched differently for younger and older primary classes, so one resource genuinely serves a whole school rather than one year group. Fifteen mission worksheets built around real Antarctic sound recordings — the QR code and the howling wind I mentioned at the start — finishing with a Junior Polar Explorer’s Certificate, signed, for a teacher to award. I know, as do many of us, how much an ‘official-feeling’ moment of achievement means to a child who rarely gets one.
Everything in the bundle can be run just as easily by a parent at the kitchen table as by a teacher at the front of a classroom, and it comes with a full Teacher’s Notes guide — because I know that for teachers, the school day doesn’t end at 3pm so much as just move location.
I don’t expect most of the children who complete these missions to grow up and write a biography, the way I did almost by accident. That’s not really the point. The point is that Tom Crean’s story survived largely by luck for a hundred years — passed down in fragments, in pubs, in half-remembered nicknames — until someone happened to go looking. I’d rather it survive on purpose this time, in the hands of children who were given the whole story, told properly, with the humour left in.
The Ultimate Tom Crean Learning Bundle is available now at mash.ie/tom-crean-learning-resources. You can find out more, including the full story of Tom Crean himself, at tomcreanbook.com.
About Tim Foley
Tim Foley is the author of Crean: The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero (Merrion Press, 2023) and the children’s book Tom The Mighty Explorer. He led an eleven-year campaign that saw Ireland name a research vessel, RV Tom Crean, in the explorer’s honour in 2021. Tim was commissioned by Scoilnet, the Irish Department of Education’s official education portal, to revise its Tom Crean resources, and his research has since been incorporated into the Dictionary of Irish Biography’s entry on Crean by the Royal Irish Academy.
Read more from him on Writing.ie here.
