Enjoy an evening of polar exploration with all proceeds to The Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

At the Flavel Arts Centre next month, there is the chance to look back at the ‘Heroic Age’ of polar exploration in a two-part illustrated programme which includes excerpts from Symphony No. 8 ’Symphonia Antarctica’ by Ralph Vaughan Williams.

After the interval, you can enjoy a viewing of the 45 minute film ’The Crossing of Antarctica’, the accomplishment achieved by the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1957-1958, led by Sir Vivian Fuchs with Sir Edmund Hilary.

In the first half of the programme, the British attempts to reach the South Pole by Captain Robert Falcon Scott RN and Sir Ernest Shackleton are compared; and the triumph achieved in 1911 by the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen.

In the 150th year since the birth of Scott, a Devon man born at Plymouth in 1868, we make a detailed analysis of that tragic return polar journey, which resulted in the Winter of 1912 being a time of crisis for the expedition, when eleven men were unaccounted for.

We look at the roles of each of the men in Scott’s 16 man polar party and the events involving his deputy, Lieut. Teddy Evans.

Were the available dogs suitably employed? Were the rations left at bases pilfered by the returning parties ?

Recent research has thrown new light on that tragic return journey. Scott left written instructions at Base, setting out how his final party, those who would be longest out on the ice, were to be supported.

But were Scott’s last written instructions carried out? What of Dr. Edward Leicester Atkinson?

He found himself, the senior Royal Navy officer in command during that time of crisis and it was he who led the search party which found the bodies. But the question is raised ‘Could Captain Scott and his party have been saved?’

Presented by Michael C. Tarver, a member of the Devon and Cornwall Polar Society; the James Caird Society; a friend associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge; a Vice President of the Cardiff based Captain Scott Society and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society

This night of polar adventures is on Wednesday, October 10, at 7pm for 7.30pm at the Flavel Arts Centre theatre in Dartmouth. Tickets cost £8.00