Frank Debenham was an Australian-born geologist and geographer, whose career ranged from participation in Scott's last expedition in 1912 to founding and directing the Scott Polar Research Institute in 1920 and seeing through its transformation and relocation to a new building in 1934. Peter Speak's well researched biography is a fascinating memorial of a bygone age in science and exploration. Whilst it is very much a Cambridge story, since Debenham's professional career started in Cambridge in 1913 and officially finished there with his formal retirement in 1949 and finally with his death in 1956, it does also provide some fascinating insights into Antarctic exploration and the birth pangs of a new discipline in an ancient university.
Debenham's first ordinary degree at the University of Sydney in 1904 was in Classics but after a spell in school teaching he returned to Sydney in 1908 to major in geology and petrology in 1910 with the Welsh-born Tannant William Edgeworth David as professor. David had been with Shackleton's 1907–9 Nimrod expedition to Antarctica and when Scott was recruiting for his second Antarctic expedition he asked David to recommend a young geologist. Although Debenham's scientific experience had not extended beyond southeast Australia and included little mountaineering, let alone experience of snow and ice, he was proposed as a likely candidate by David. Interviewed by Scott in a Sydney hotel, Debenham was immediately offered a place on the expedition and was one of the youngest in the scientific party.
At Scott's suggestion, Debenham and some others at least got some brief experience of snow and ice in New Zealand in November 1910. The following month they were ‘en route’ and crossing the Antarctic circle in Terra Nova, making land on January 4th 1911. Debenham's task in Antarctica, the geological re-examination of the Royal Society Range, begun by David on the Nimrod expedition, included collecting geological specimens and some plane-table surveying which was to become a feature of his later academic career. Debenham was never likely to have been part of Scott's small party that made the ill-fated assault on the South Pole. By January 1913 it was all over with Debenham and the other survivors on their way home. But home for Debenham was no longer Australia: his immediate task was to write up the geological results of the expedition and that was to take place in Cambridge.
After the luck of being in the right place at the right time that led to his Antarctic experience, Debenham's future trajectory, like that so many young men of the time, took him into active service and the lottery of the First World War. Luck was still on his side and despite being blown up in Salonika in 1916, he survived but did not return to the front lines. From here on it was less luck and more personal determination that drove him. There were still Antarctic reports to be completed and he found a ‘home’ alongside hoards of unsorted rocks and fossils in the attic rooms of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, loaned by Professor Marr. This was where the Scott Polar Research Institute was effectively born and remained until the University sanctioned a move in 1927 to a permanent home in Lensfield House. Meanwhile in 1919 Debenham joined the Geography Department, first as a lecturer, then reader and finally became the first Professor. So he saw the transformation of that department and indeed the discipline from the first fully-accepted honours degree in 1919. It had taken 31 years for Geography to be formally recognized from when the University had first appointed Francis Henry Hill Guillemard as a lecturer in Geography in 1888.
Peter Speak's biography gives glimpses of many different aspects of Debenham's remarkable career and the important changes that took place in the wider academic environment following the First World War.
