Poles Apart – Frank McNally on new and old Stella Cinemas and Shackleton’s last voyage

A gloriously restored Stella Cinema in Rathmines was the ironic setting earlier this week for the world premiere of a documentary called Shackleton’s Cabin.

The film is about a restoration job too, but of a rather more spartan building: the wooden ship's quarters in which the great polar explorer Ernest Shackleton made his final voyage and in which he also died, 100 years ago last January.

A glorified shed, it spent most of the past century in Norway, until donated to the Shackleton Museum in Athy, a town which, as well as being his place of birth, thereby also gained the explorer's place of death.

It was then loving restored to its original condition by Connemara-based conservationist Sven Habermann, the film's other hero.

A further (but not farther) reading from the Stylebook of Leviticus

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Honoured Guest – Frank McNally on the exemplary death of Major Compton-Smith

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Bound for Glory – Frank McNally on the lost and re-found art of bookbinding

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Park Avenue – Frank McNally on the case for a drive-through Dublin Zoo

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But viewers watched the preview screening in the Art Deco splendour of the new Stella, from armchairs you could sleep in, especially if you put your feet up on the leather-covered ottomans with which each seat is now equipped.

Soft lighting was provided by personalised table lamps, on personalised tables. And while we waited for the show to start, people waited on us, serving wine and canapés.

It must have from a feeling of guilt that, in sending pictures to a friend on WhatsApp, I also sent a copy of the newspaper advertisement Shackleton is supposed to have placed when seeking recruits for an expedition. You know the one: “Men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honor (sic) and recognition in case of success.”

Alas, as I now realise, the ad is a myth.

Or at least nobody has found the alleged original, usually said to have appeared in the London Times, despite assiduous searching. The earliest known reference to it anywhere was in a 1944 book, long after Shackleton’s death.

This appears to have been yet another of those phantom quotations that take on lives of their own. But fictional as it may be, it derives its undoubted authority from the facts of Shackleton’s ill-starred career.

It has been said of the great South Pole explorers, and was again during the Q&A after the screening, that while Scott and Amundsen might have been better organisers or navigators, it was Shackleton you would want beside you in an emergency.

Judged against the ambitions he and his rivals competed for, he was a failure. But he is perhaps best remembered now for one outstanding achievement: never having lost a crew member on his voyages, despite the appalling conditions he faced.

His leadership was most notoriously tested on the well-named Endurance expedition of 1914-1917, when the ship was crushed by ice and he, Tom Crean, and others had to row 800 miles across open sea, then traverse the icy mountains of South Georgia, without proper climbing equipment, to get help.

By contrast, Shackleton’s last voyage – a sub-plot of the documentary – was much less eventful, except in one respect. On another trip to South Georgia, worn down by stress and alcoholism, he suffered a fatal heart attack in his cabin in the early hours of January 5th, 1922.

He was duly buried on the island, and still is. But the cabin at least now rests in Kildare.

The documentary will be screened on RTÉ next Monday, May 2nd. In the meantime, this week's preview also had me trying (and failing) to remember the last time I had visited the old Stella, an entirely difference experience from the current one. It was not this century, and possibly not even in the 1990s. But whenever it was, the venue had by then acquired a certain infamy.

The promise of an evening at the Stella during its declining years was the cinematic version of the Shackleton recruitment ad. It might not be a hazardous journey, in bitter cold, complete darkness, and with a safe return doubtful. Even so, it was far from comfortable.

When I invited Twitter to jog my memory, many veterans recalled the sticky carpets that were its defining feature.

Somebody else mentioned the rat, seen scurrying across the floor once by a friend. I remembered the rat too. It was a local celebrity back then. Although I never saw it myself, many others (or their friends) did. In the best versions, it had run across someone’s foot.

I wonder now if the rat was a myth too. Then again, rodent infestations were hardly unknown in the run-down buildings of the 1980s. And where better to have one than in a suburb pronounced by many Dubliners, and by its flat-dwelling rural residents, as “Rat-mines”?