This dissertation will explore two sets of family scrapbooks held in the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI)’s archives, examining them as historical sources in their own right, and subsequently for the alternative narratives and experiences of polar expeditions that they offer to our historic understandings of exploration. These are unusual, heterogenous, and relatively unexplored sources; curated from a variety of press clippings, letters, images, and expedition ephemera, these volumes were made to preserve a narrative of the explorer’s life story, lived experiences, and movements by those that they left behind. I will examine these sources for the alternative perspectives of polar exploration that the family expressed through their collection, and to examine how these accounts shifted in the light of the explorer’s death. Combining frameworks from the academic literature on scrapbooking with discussions from several other disciplines, I will take an interdisciplinary approach to these sources, reading them both for their ephemera, and as a whole narrative, as individual sources, and together as representations of polar scrapbooking, in order to explore these overlooked sources for all that they are, and all that they represent.

My research questions are anchored in the three themes that run throughout this dissertation. The first theme, authorship, is explored by asking whose voices are prominent or conspicuously absent within the sources in order to examine the combined effort and layers of narration that build up the scrapbook’s overarching accounts. The second, curation, examines the material culture of the scrapbooks. Through examining the most common forms of ephemera in the scrapbooks, and how each scrapbooker ordered and captioned their collections, we can gain a sense of the scrapbook’s purpose, and how this changed over time. The final theme, absence, explores the emotional histories of the scrapbooks, and how this influenced their changes in purpose. Originally curated to soothe familial anxieties during their loved one’s precarious absences, I ask how the news of their deaths altered the sources’ collections and purposes as their creator scrambled to preserve a cohesive memory of their loved ones.

My primary research has been impacted by the ongoing restrictions necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although my scope was limited to two sets of scrapbooks, my sources have revealed a number of valuable conclusions when read together; and the sheer variety within the scrapbooks in the SPRI archives create an interesting scope for further study. The two sources in question are markedly different in format, with the six large scrapbooks detailing Lieutenant Wyatt Rawson’s naval and exploratory career standing far larger in scope and scale than the single volume narrating the Antarctic experiences of Victor (‘Vic’) Hayward. These unique sets of sources offer valuable, alternative narratives of the experiences of polar exploration. I hope to show how these narratives can expand and enhance our understandings of historic polar exploration to account for the long-lasting impacts that these expeditions had on those that the explorers left behind.