On Saturday 11 May 2019, Girlguiding Eastbourne division welcomed a very important guest – the Hon. Alexandra Shackleton, granddaughter of the great explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. She was there because her grandmother, Lady Emily Shackleton, was the first division commissioner of Eastbourne. In 1919, Emily gave a shield to the Guides of the division. The Shackleton Shield had been kept carefully in our archives since 1991.
In 2018, we felt it was time the shield was used again, and we set our Guides a Now and Then Challenge to compete for it. In the process we realised that it was 100 years since the shield had been given, but the icing on the cake was that Alexandra’s aide saw a write-up of the Challenge and Alexandra offered to come down to present the shield to the winners!
To honour both of Alexandra’s grandparents, the event started with the Guides being given a ‘ticket to Antarctica’. Eight teams of between four to six girls arrived to board the ‘Endurance’, where they received passports. During the day they visited three outposts: