Tim Foley's Blog

Tom Crean’s Retirement On March 24th, 1920, 43-year-old Tom Crean left the Navy and returned to a life of retirement in Ireland. A month earlier on 24th February, 1920, he’d been admitted to Chatham Naval hospital after being diagnosed with Retinitis. Eyes that had been subjected to the fiercest and coldest conditions imaginable over the […]

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A Half-Sung Song No Longer: Bringing Tom Crean’s Story Into the Classroom Tim Foley · tomcreanbook.com A Half-Sung Song No Longer: Bringing Tom Crean’s Story Into the Classroom For eleven years, I fought to get Tom Crean the recognition he deserved. When the RV Tom Crean was named in his honour in 2021, I thought […]

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Whatever plans the new owners have in mind, the South Pole Inn remains the hub of pilgrimage for Tom Crean fans worldwide. I believe the place should retain the authenticity of its era, as it currently does, and I hope it retains the same style and layout, structural issues notwithstanding.

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Tom Crean and the Elephant Island Rescue Endurance Expedition Tom Crean and the Elephant Island Rescue By Tim Foley April-September 1916 9 min read The Elephant Island rescue, illustrated for Tom The Mighty Explorer. Four rescue attempts. Three desperate months. Twenty-two stranded men, and not one life lost. This is the complete story of the […]

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Over the years I've gathered a large collection of Tom Crean images. Among them I've tracked down a few rare photographs, and it's only through the recent, rapid advancement in technology that I've been able to restore them

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In the annals of Tom Crean's remarkable life, there is perhaps no single year more consequential, more dramatic or more revealing of the extraordinary circumstances that shaped his destiny than 1914.

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There are things about this story that remain frustrating, and I won't pretend otherwise. The campaign was written out of the official narrative by those who should have known better. The supporters of the Ireland Should Honour Tom Crean campaign — all 50,000+ of them — deserved to be acknowledged, and they weren't.

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Back then words such as ‘traitor’ and phrases like ‘taking the kings shilling’ didn’t sit right with what I had discovered about Tom Crean. Those accusations also displayed a lack of knowledge about the era in which families like the Creans and their neighbours, were living a hand to mouth existence and had to work relentlessly to earn enough to cover their rents whilst desperate to avoid eviction.

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Knowing, as I now do, the immense preparatory efforts that went into it prior to publication, Tadhg's account is best defined not as a labour of love, but as a labour-intensive work of love.

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The man who brought Tom Crean’s story to life In 2017, when I first began researching Tom Crean’s life in depth for the biography I was to later write, one of the first things I wanted to discover was information about the person who first introduced me to Tom Crean’s story. Through my father, who […]

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