Eric Marshall

Eric Marshall was a British Army doctor and Antarctic explorer. Born in Hampstead on 29 May 1879, he was educated at Monkton Combe School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and qualified as a surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital. Ernest Shackleton recruited him as surgeon, surveyor, cartographer and principal photographer of the Nimrod Expedition of 1907 to 1909, and he was one of the four men who reached Furthest South at 88 degrees 23 minutes south on 9 January 1909. His diaries and later letters were sharply critical of Shackleton, a friction recorded by the writer Leif Mills. In the First World War he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, was mentioned in despatches for service at Ypres and the Somme, and received the Military Cross in 1918. He was then senior medical officer in the British North Russian Expeditionary Force at Archangel, and was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. After a few years farming in Kenya he rejoined the medical corps in the Second World War, later served as a medical officer with the Ministry of Pensions, and died in 1963.