Explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes

has backed an urgent appeal to save negatives of photographs taken by Captain Scott on his ill-fated final polar expedition,

EXPLORER SIR Ranulph Fiennes has backed an urgent appeal to save negatives of photographs taken by Captain Scott on his ill-fated final polar expedition.

The Polar Museum at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge has just weeks to raise £ 275,000 to avoid the prospect of the 113 negatives being sold at auction, possibly to a foreign bidder.

The negatives are described as an “extraordinary visual record” of Scott’s famous 1912 Terra Nova Expedition in which he and his four companions perished on their return after being beaten to the South Pole by Norwegian Roald Amundsen.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who is spearheading the fundraising campaign, said: “Scott’s negatives are of outstanding importance to the United Kingdom’s heritage and the opportunity to keep the collection intact, and in this country, cannot be lost.

“This is the only chance a museum in the UK will have to purchase the actual negatives taken by Scott on his final expedition.

“We must raise the funds by the end of March so that they can take their rightful place in Cambridge alongside the camera on which they were taken as well as the remaining Scott and Herbert Ponting prints, all of which speak so powerfully to us of the courage and sacrifice of those on the British Antarctic Expedition.”

The negatives, which had been in a private collection, only emerged in 2012 after having been thought lost.

The institute, which has no budget for acquisitions, said this is the only chance a museum in the United Kingdom has of acquiring this extraordinary visual record.

The negatives are a record of Scott’s earliest attempts — under the guidance of expedition photographer Ponting — through to his unparalleled images of his team on the southern journey.

Institute director Julian Dowdeswell said: “Beyond the quality of the images, the negatives offer something unprecedented. Scott’s death and the subsequent loss of the negatives, have meant that his photographic experiments and errors have been preserved along with his successes.

“They give us a record of a talented student of photography moving from apprenticeship to mastery. The collection as a whole is a remarkable record of artistic development, quite apart from being of value to the national heritage.”

The Polar Museum is already home to the remaining prints of Scott’s photographs and Ponting’s glass plate negatives

For more information on the appeal visit www.spri.cam.ac.uk

Picture: RF Scott. Photographs taken by Captain Scott, left, include this shot of a crewman and pony. see more at