On April 7, 1909 the American explorer Robert Peary, nine months into an exhausting Arctic expedition, recorded an ecstatic entry in his diary" "The Pole at last! The prize of three centuries, my dream and ambition for 23 years! Mine at last...."

It was not, however, his. Unhappily, he was still some distance from the geographic North Pole, and so had not, as he claimed, just become the first man to walk to the top of the Earth. Though the American's achievement has been in doubt almost since he returned from his expedition - and it is now accepted that his measurements were probably faked - his is the name that has remained most closely associated with the race to the North Pole.

Now the exploration community plans to change all that. Sixty years after Peary's disputed expedition, a young Briton named Wally Herbert led a four-man dog-sled team to the pole as part of an ambitious and still-unrepeated expedition to cross the Arctic ocean on foot. In so doing, they became the rightful holders of the record that Peary had falsely claimed.

But while Sir Wally, as he became in 1999, may be one of the greatest explorers Britain has produced, he remains relatively unknown outside his field. This week, however, a group of fellow adventurers including Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Sir Chris Bonington and Robin Hanbury-Tenison will host a testimonial event at the Royal Geographical Society, at which they hope to remind a forgetful nation of the 71-year-old's achievements.

"To those that know, he is the man," the polar explorer Pen Hadow, one of the organisers, said yesterday. "He is the explorers' explorer, as Sir Ran Fiennes put it, but over time his reputation and stature has been allowed to lapse somewhat, when really he is up there with Scott, Shackleton and others."

In truth, getting to the pole was no more than an incidental ambition for the explorer. On February 21, 1968 his party set out from Point Barrow, Alaska, aiming to make the first ever surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean via the North Pole. After 15 months on the ice pack - five of them in darkness - the men arrived in Spitzbergen in northern Norway, completing a journey of 3,100 kilometres, several times

longer than other polar expeditions.

One member of the party took ice core samples every other day, which have become the benchmark data for all studies into the impact of global warming on the polar ice caps, Mr Hadow said. "And that was just one expedition Sir Wally led."

He also mapped thousands of square kilometres in three areas of the pole.

"He personally drew the maps, which are still the maps polar explorers use today."

Sir Wally's adventure began in the mid 1950s as a surveyor with the Falklands Islands Dependencies Survey. In 1957, aged 23, he completed the first crossing of the Antarctic Peninsula; and the following year hitchhiked from Uruguay to the UK.

"It's not a case of rewriting the history," said Mr Hadow. "It's more about repositioning him in the pantheon of polar explorers where he belongs."

Sir Wally has not gone entirely uncelebrated. In addition to two polar medals, an RGS gold medal and an Explorers Medal from the New York Explorers' Club, a mountain range, an Antarctic plateau and a mountain in northern Norway all bear his name.

In 1909 two American explorers, Frederick Cook and Peary, both claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole. Cook was soon proved a fraud - all he'd done was hide out in the Arctic for a year. The laurels were therefore awarded to Peary.

The trouble was that Peary probably faked it too. There were no trained witnesses to corroborate his readings and his recorded distances were outrageously imaginative. The controversy has raged ever since.

At the time the Royal Geographical Society couldn't make up its mind. The consensus was that Peary might possibly have succeeded - the Edwardian logic being that to say otherwise would be to brand him a liar. Now, however, it has come to a firm decision: Peary didn't do it. But Wally Herbert did.

Herbert is one of the nation's unsung heroes. Between 1968 and 1969 he made history when, equipped with dog sleds, he led an expedition from Alaska to the North Pole and then continued to Spitsbergen, becoming the first person to cross the Arctic pack. Only now has it been recognised that he was also the first to reach the pole. The society's decision will infuriate Peary fans who claim it is a conspiracy.

Fergus Fleming is a writer of books on the history of exploration.

Esther Addley & Fergus Fleming

The Guardian