BURNLEY historian Ken Spencer has been uncovering the history of a local man who visited the Antarctic on a whaling ship before World War II.

He believes John Fleming Warnock, who had a small island named after him down near the South Pole, was an early researcher.

A native of Glasgow, John married Ethel Turner, a dressmaker, of Bank Parade, Burnley, at St Peter's Church in 1917; the family home was there right up until the late 1970s.

He served with the Royal Navy in the First World War, but it wasn't until nearly 20 years later, in 1935, that his Antarctic adventures began.

For, out of 500 applications, he was appointed engineer lieutenant on the Royal research ship William Scoresby, whose work was involved with the whaling industry.

A report Ken has discovered says that by June, 1937, the crew had marked 832 whales, with harmless identity darts, but all this was abandoned at the start of the war.

The Polar Research Institute at Cambridge has information that John was posthumously awarded a Polar Medal for his work during three visits to the ice sheet - he was killed in an accident in Quebec in 1940.

Mrs Warnock later wrote a lecture script for Burnley schoolchildren about her husband's work and Burnley Library holds a copy.

She died in 1974 aged 86 and Ken said: "She is remembered as having been a rather small lady, perhaps a little theatrical. She used rouge and dyed her hair , which was thought rather way out' at the time."

The marriage produced two children, Irene and Ian.

Irene, always known as Renee, was the principal of her own school of dancing and elocution, the Reno School, in Grimshaw Street, which she had opened in 1938.

In the late 1930s, it was officially an elocution centre and she and Miss Shannon Leslie were in charge.

One pupil of Miss Leslie, was Irene Sutcliffe, who became known for her radio and television work.

Elocution was very fashionable in Burnley during the 1930s as the wireless and talking films made people conscious of their accents.