Orders, Decorations & Medals - Other Properties - Aus

Lot 3696    SESSION 13 (2.30PM THURSDAY 2ND APRIL)    Orders, Decorations & Medals - Other Properties - Aust.

Estimate $12,000
Bid at live.noble.com.au
SOLD $17,000

POLAR MEDAL, (GVR type 1 admiral's uniform), in silver - clasp - Antarctic 1912-14. S.N.Jeffryes, "Aurora". Impressed. Extremely fine.

See Australians Awarded 2nd edition by Clive Johnson, p305 for illustration of this medal and edge naming. Note the medal is named to S.N.Jeffryes, however the correct name is S.H.Jeffryes. In various government and other documents his name is recorded as S.Jeffryes, S.N.Jeffryes, S.E.Jeffryes and S.H.Jeffryes.

PM clasp Antarctic 1912-14: Pro Adm 1/8407, to S.N.Jeffryes.

Sidney Harry Jeffryes was born at Toowoomba, Queensland in 1884, the son of a postmaster and telegraphist with the Queensland Post and Telegraph. Sidney is recorded as working as telegraphist from 1909 and then qualified as a wireless operator with Australasian Wireless Co Ltd. In October 1911 it was reported in the Sydney Sun, 'Record by the Kyarra. Mr S.H.Jeffryes, wireless operator on the A.U.S.N. Co's Kyarra, which was fitted up by the Australasian Wireless Co Ltd, has put up a record for overland wireless messages between ships.'

Radio operator, Sidney Jeffryes, and his contribution to Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14, has been recognised with a plaque at his formerly unmarked grave, at a cemetery in Ararat, Victoria. The bronze plaque, commissioned by the Mawson's Huts Foundation, reads - 'Mawson's expedition was the first to use wireless in Antarctica and Queensland born Jeffryes is credited with establishing reliable two-way communications between the AAE Main Base and Macquarie Island where a five-man team relayed messages from Antarctica to Australia.'

The following is an extract from an article courtesy of Wikipedia.
'The AAE expedition was the first Antarctic expedition in history, and the only one during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, to maintain radio contact with its country of origin. Only a high power facility of comparable capacity to those recently established at Sydney (VIS) and Perth (VIP) would have been capable of direct communication between Hobart and Cape Denison and this would have been prohibitively expensive and resource hungry for the expedition. It was decided to establish an intermediate station at Macquarie Island, and by halving the maximum distance for each signal to traverse, it was expected that the 2kW Telefunken transmitters of the Australasian Wireless Co., Ltd. would enable reliable communication.

Jeffryes had a keen interest in both Antarctica and wireless telegraphy and when the first call for applications to join the AAE was made, he sought an appointment as wireless operator. But at that time his length of experience as a telegraphist and wireless telegraphist was not great and he was not successful. Douglas Mawson appointed Walter Henry Hannam who was associated with the prominent patriot George Augustine Taylor and had himself been involved with the establishment of the Wireless Institute of Australia.

A series of tragedies and mishaps had led to the Cape Denison shore base on Antarctica being kept open for a second winter, March-December 1913. But there had been some tension between Mawson and Hannam and in January 1913, Hannam elected to return home after his year at Macquarie Island and Cape Denison. The intermediate station that he set up at Wireless Hill on Macquarie Island was fully functional and providing sterling service exchanging messages with the Hobart coastal station VIH. But there had been ongoing issues with both transmission and reception at Cape Denison, and only occasional messages were got out. This failure prevented the expedition fulfilling the terms of its contract with Australian and London Press in providing timely updates on the activities and status of the expedition. The replacement wireless officer would bring with him improved wireless telegraphy receivers (sensitivity of the crucial detectors was taking great strides at the time) which it was expected would make the Cape Denison station fully effective.

An appeal was made for a wireless operator to serve during the second winter of the AAE, and now Jeffryes was given the appointment. Jeffryes arrived at the Cape Denison shore base in February 1913 as the base was enduring a near-nightmare situation. The expedition's leader and commander, Douglas Mawson, stumbled into the base, the sole survivor of a sled dog probe eastward along the previously unknown interior coastline of the Australian Antarctic Territory. As the new wireless operator, Jeffryes was able to start the relay of communications that would inform Australia of the expedition leader's survival. However, within days of Mawson's arrival, the Antarctic winter began.

Mawson's expedition hut was located close to what was then the location of the South Magnetic Pole, and continued radio interference and static associated with polar conditions threatened the base's minimal ability to contact Macquarie Island. The expedition leader at first admired Jeffryes's assiduity with earphones and Morse-code key, but grew increasingly guarded in his praise. In Mawson's words, Jeffryes "applied himself to work with enthusiasm and perhaps an over-conscientious spirit." Climate conditions outside the hut made winter outdoor exercise impossible, leading to cabin fever. All the expeditioners would have been familiar with tales of Antarctic winter madness and particularly the problems of the Belgian Antarctic Expedition. Conditions at Cape Denison were clearly worse than those on the Belgica due to the Katabatic wind which because of the unique geography is at its upper extreme in the vicinity.

In July 1913, as Antarctica neared midwinter, wireless operator Jeffryes began to present symptoms of paranoia to his fellow shore-party winter explorers, none of whom knew how to receive or transmit messages in Morse code. Expedition leader Mawson began to encourage another expedition member, Airman Frank Bickerton, to learn Morse code as quickly as possible. Jeffryes's condition waxed and waned; for some weeks his comrades believed he was recovering, but in September of the same year the radioman experienced a psychotic break and began transmitting a message, through Macquarie Island, to Australia. Declaring himself to be the only sane man on the expedition, Jeffryes accused all of his comrades of having joined a criminal conspiracy to murder him. Mawson thereupon relieved Jeffryes of his duties. In December 1913, the expedition's vessel Aurora relieved the troubled Antarctic shore party.

Jeffryes was excluded from the welcoming celebrations in Adelaide due to his medical status. Yet he was paid off two days after arrival at Adelaide. Mawson stated subsequently that he believed that Jeffryes had returned to full health: "Later on Jeffreys improved, and on the arrival of the ship he became quite normal, and in that condition he was landed at Adelaide we believing that he would never again have any further trouble of the kind. On the return voyage Dr. Maclean occupied the same cabin with him, and kept him closely under observation. Dr. Maclean reported to me that Jeffreys was quite well and no thought ever entered our mind that he would not travel straight home without risk. In fact his condition was so good that I decided not to make any mention of the matter to his people.

In March 1914 it was realised that Jeffryes had not returned to the family home in Toowoomba and was missing. Six days later he was found near Stawell, exhausted and starved, having lived on roots and grubs, and drinking water from stagnant pools. He was arrested, clearly in a psychotic break and presented at the Stawell Court. His poignant plea from the dock was "Let me go back and die, where I have hidden my trunk, in the silence of the ranges." The Court committed Jeffryes to the Ararat Asylum.

His mental condition was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia while he was confined to the Aradale Mental Hospital in Ararat, Victoria. Letters from the health center, written to Mawson in 1915, testify to his challenges. Little is known of his later life. He died under confinement in 1942.

Jeffryes' meticulous records of wireless reception quality during the second year of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition were correlated by himself, and by other expeditioners, with other observations of variables such as magnetic readings, auroral intensity, and St Elmo's Fire. These identified, perhaps for the first time, the impacts of Antarctic conditions upon low frequency radio wave propagation.

The expedition's head and designated spokesman, Douglas Mawson, had little to say in his published histories about Jeffryes' active service in Antarctica. For almost 100 years, the unfortunate wireless operator's name was suppressed from most Antarctic records. But in August 2010, the Australian Antarctic Division honored Jeffryes for his pioneering winter service by naming a previously unnamed glacier after him. The Jeffryes Glacier is located at 67?4' South, 143?59' East, in the Australian Antarctic Territory. It should not be confused with the Jeffries Glacier.

In December 2013, the first opera to be based on Mawson's 1911-14 expedition to Antarctica, The Call of Aurora (by Tasmanian composer Joe Bugden) was performed at The Peacock Theatre in Hobart. A chamber opera, The Call of Aurora investigates the relationship between Douglas Mawson and his wireless operator, Sidney Jeffryes.'

See also Peter Fitzsimons book, 'Mawson and the Ice Men of the Heroic Age: Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen', pp575, 579, 593, 612-3, 621, 623, 626, 629, 632-3, 638-51; also of interest is Mawson's Antarctic Diaries edited by F. & E. Jacka.