Pen Hadow and Foreign Legionnaire, Simon Murray have completed the Tetley South Pole Mission in support of the Royal Geographical Society’s polar archives.

British businessman Simon Murray (63) and ground-breaking explorer Pen Hadow (41) have completed a 58 day, 680 mile totally unsupported trek from the edge of continental Antarctica to the South Geographic Pole to raise funds for, and enable worldwide access to, the Royal Geographical Society’s polar heritage collection.

The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) is engaging in a £7.2 million project with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund to build new exhibition and educational facilities at its Kensington headquarters that will be open to the public from June 2004.

The Society houses one of the world’s largest private collections of maps – more than one million – and a million other items. These include Captain Robert Scott’s golden ‘Special Antarctic Medal’, photographic images from Roald Amundsen’s 1911-12 expedition which beat Scott to the Pole, and Ernest Shackleton’s Burberry helmet worn on his famous Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, together with original copies of The Polar Times which his crew produced. These important, and in many cases, unique social records will be preserved in perpetuity for people to view in person or in digital form via the web.

Murray, an ex-French Foreign Legionnaire, has stepped into the record books by becoming the oldest person ever to have trekked unsupported to the South Pole – the previous record holder being the ‘world’s greatest living explorer’ (Guinness Book of Records), Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who was a decade younger when he made his successful crossing of Antarctica via the Pole in 1993.

Murray, whose worldwide best-selling book ‘Legionnaire’ detailed the unremittingly harsh regime of life in the Foreign Legion endured by him as a young man was confident that he could meet this great personal challenge.

Pen Hadow has also created another remarkable record by becoming the first British explorer to have reached both the South and North poles completely unsupported. On his trek in the Spring of 2003 he walked alone from the North American continent to the North Geographic Pole. This time he had the benefit of the company of Simon Murray, which involved a trek of 680 miles/1,170km.

“Geography is the only academic subject totally devoted to understanding the complex relationships between people and their environment. As we pulled our 120 kg (19 stone) sledges in sub-zero temperatures, at times as low as -40°C, we got very close to one of the planet’s most extreme environments. Antarctica is the windiest, coldest, highest and least known of all the continents.”

Pen Hadow, who made the first solo expedition without re-supply from the American continent to the North Geographic Pole this Spring added, “It’s the greatest privilege of my polar career to enable the conservation of, and widening access to, some of the world’s most important artefacts from The Golden Age of polar exploration by making this journey to the South Pole.

“As a parent with young children I know one of the best ways to understand today’s world is through an appreciation of our past. This is exactly what the RGS is aiming to achieve and I consider it a great honour for our mission to be associated with such a significant cause.”

Dr Rita Gardner CBE concluded, “We will soon unlock our archives so that every secondary school in the UK has access to our superb resources that, as well as bringing to life the important history of exploration, will also improve people’s understanding of the world and its many shared cultures.”