by Ed Caesar
Loch said no. He could not allow it. The sheikh at Sharjah would not permit a private aviator to land there. The route was for official airlines and military use only. Loch asked Wilson to write an assurance that he would not attempt to fly that way, which he duly composed and signed. Meanwhile, a cable arrived on Loch’s desk from the Royal Air Force Headquarters in Iraq, reinforcing the point:
MR. WILSON FLYING MOTH GABJC UNDERSTOOD PROCEEDING INDIA VIA BAHRAIN AND SHARJAH. INFORM HIM ARABIAN COAST ROUTE NOT OPEN TO CIVIL AIRCRAFT EXCEPT IMPERIAL AIRWAYS. HE IS NOT REPEAT NOT TO PROCEED BY THIS ROUTE.
Wilson couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. He didn’t realize that preventing mischief was a full-time job for the British officials in the Gulf. Only a few weeks earlier a female British traveler had gone into Sharjah wearing “beach pyjamas”—a long, revealing jumpsuit, with no sleeves, often made of silk, which was then at the height of fashion. (In the early 1930s, the chic and somewhat louche resort of Juan-les-Pins on the Côte d’Azur was known in the press as Pyjamaland.) The episode had scandalized the sheikh and nearly became a full-blown diplomatic incident. Then one of the Imperial Airways officers accidentally shot a local man while out hunting birds. Air travel seemed to bring nothing but trouble.
Wilson saw the fix he was in. If they wouldn’t let him fly the Gulf route or through Persia, he could forget about Everest. He played for time. Loch asked him the range of his airplane. About 750 miles, Wilson said, with the extra tanks. They looked together at a map of the Gulf that hung on the wall outside Loch’s office, to see which airfields were in range. The British agent airily suggested landing in Persia, which seemed a ruse to get Wilson arrested, and which quietly enraged the Yorkshireman. The two men also discussed the dispiriting proposition of Wilson returning home to England, through Iraq, by retracing his steps. Wilson said he would sleep on it, but that he hoped that Loch would write him a fuel permit, so that he could fly either to Persia or back through Iraq the next day. Loch agreed. With the matter settled, the two men went for tea together.
In fact, Wilson had no plans to turn back or to spend his days in a Persian prison. His only thought was Everest. When he looked at Loch’s map, he saw the new Imperial Airways airfield at its southeast edge that the pilots in Shaibah had told him about: Gwadar. The airfield had only opened earlier that year and was just a few miles on the other side of the Persian border. Gwadar was a protectorate governed by Oman. If Wilson could get there, he would be more or less out of the Gulf, with one foot in India. It also seemed unlikely the desk wallahs would turn him back. If they did so, it would just mean more trouble for them, and more awkward conversations with the sheikhs about mischievous English travelers. Wilson saw from Loch’s map that it was 740 miles from Bahrein to Gwadar, which was at the absolute limit of his plane’s range, and farther than he had ever flown in a single leg. But to hell with it—he hadn’t come this far to be beaten.
The next morning, he arrived at Loch’s office to fetch his fuel chit. He was told once more that he would only receive the permit on the understanding that he would proceed directly toward Iraq. Wilson agreed and asked if he could borrow some maps. Loch had none to spare, but he told Wilson he was welcome to make a copy of the map on his wall. As Loch wrote out the fuel chit, Wilson sketched his route to Gwadar by hand, being as precise as he could be with his coordinates. One deviation off course would mean failure—and probably his death.
Loch went to the airfield to see Wilson off, happy in the execution of his duties. But Wilson did not do as he’d promised. He ascended into the sweltering morning of June 1, 1933, and instead of flying northwest—to Iraq, and Europe, and home—he nudged the control column to his right, eastward, to India, and to Everest. Loch was outraged. He had been fooled. But what was he going to do? Chase Wilson?
* * *
Loch, incensed, telegrammed ahead to British agents in Sharjah and Gwadar. He informed his colleagues that if Wilson touched down, they were on no account to refuel his airplane. Wilson, meanwhile, was delighted. He had his goggles on and his course set. He had no intention of stopping at Sharjah. He would take his chances at Gwadar if—and it was a big if—he made it. Seven hundred and forty miles in a single leg was just about possible, if he made no mistakes.
Wilson flew due east. First he was above the sea, and then above the Qatar peninsula, and then all that lay ahead was ocean, the occasional small boat, a distant tiny island, and the horizon. After an hour or two of listening to the whir of the engine and the windrush, it was hard to imagine silence. After a day of flying, the sound and sense of that noise inhabited your whole body. The clatter of the pistons and the roar of the exhaust lingered inside you long after landing, like a day in the worsted mills, or a night of shelling. Sometimes you would do anything to stop the gale in your ears, anything to stop that vibration in the bones.
But when the engine cut during a flight, the quiet arrived like a death sentence. And somewhere just after Wilson had passed the Qatar peninsula, that awful hush came over the Moth. Wilson was nowhere near land. His airplane had behaved badly before, once or twice, in England—the Cleckheaton crash—but his engine failure above the still waters of the Persian Gulf must have felt terminal.
Wilson struggled to restart the Moth. Remembering his lessons, he knew he needed to point the nose down when he restarted the engine, as crazy as it seemed. Keep the plane gliding, flick the switch. He performed the drill once—pointed the nose down and felt the windrush—hoping the engine would roar again, but it simply spluttered and cut. He pointed the nose of Ever-Wrest down again, the water beneath him as flat and unforgiving as pavement.
Months later, Wilson would write that he prayed to God to save him in this moment. The Almighty, apparently, was listening. With the Moth nose down and seconds from destruction, the engine restarted. Wilson pulled hard on the joystick, and Ever-Wrest leveled out just in time, a few feet above the sparkling sea, then rose to a cruising altitude. Its pilot—brave or lucky or both: the old question—gathered himself, then set his course once more.
The jolt of adrenaline fixed Wilson’s concentration. Once he was high enough, he checked his instruments and his hastily sketched map. He needed to be dead straight on his path to Gwadar. After five hours, he crossed a port town on the western edge of a strip of land. It was Ras-Al-Khaimah, on the Musandam Peninsula. He was exactly where he should have been. The Persian Gulf was behind him. He crossed the spit of rock and scrubland. Soon he was once more flying over the water—this time, the Gulf of Oman.
The sun was intense in the open cockpit. After six hours, Wilson reached the edge of Persia. The sight of land must have been both balm and torture. He would have done anything to rest on that dusty stretch of coastline. To do so would have been to risk imprisonment, the impounding of his Moth, and endangering the success of his whole enterprise.
Wilson kept on flying. He followed the Persian coast eastward. Gwadar was just between the borders of Persia and India. As he approached seven hours’ flying, his body began to complain violently from cramps. Then, Wilson started to fall asleep. He was woken more than once by the sound of the Moth beginning a whistling dive toward the ocean. Eight hours in the cockpit. Nine hours. Darkness was falling, and the fuel gauge wobbled above zero. The Moth flew low over the coastline, its pilot now desperate. Then he saw it. Gwadar: the fishtail peninsula; low white huts and a landing strip. Wilson brought the Moth down as day turned to night. He had spent nine and a half hours in the air. He climbed out of the cockpit, thirsty, sunburned, and aching. There was barely enough fuel in the tank to fill a thimble. He’d made it to the gateway to India—five thousand miles from Stag Lane in twelve days. The job was not yet done, but someone up there was smiling at his adventure.
That night at the airfield, he ate like a rescued starveling with a French crew who were traveling in the opposite direction. He then fell asleep near the Moth, in the open—the warm, black night his blanket.
CHAPTER NINE ADVENTURE PERSONIFIED
• June 1933–March 1934 •
Wilson awoke in Gwadar. Perhaps he had a moment to reflect on what he had just achieved. Wilson had always been sanguine about the success of his mission, but he must have known that a bookmaker would have offered slim odds on a novice flier, opposed by the authorities in his own country, one-eighth crippled, reaching the Indian subcontinent with body, soul, and craft intact. That Wilson had made it this far was a triumph. The mountain awaited him, and he felt reinvigorated by his accomplishments.
Wilson’s task was now to fly more than fifteen hundred miles due east to Purnea, base of the 1933 Houston flight, and—he hoped—the launchpad for his own more ambitious Everest attempt. From Purnea, he believed he could fly over Nepal to the mountain without stopping. If Wilson was to reach the highest point on earth this year, however, he needed to act quickly. As the expeditions of the 1920s had established, only one period of the year favored climbers in the high Himalayas: April and May, and maybe early June. Before that period, it was too cold. After that period, monsoons swept the Indian subcontinent, abating only for a brief period in the autumn. A monsoon at altitude means snow.
As Wilson approached India, snowstorms approached the Himalayas. The window to climb Everest in 1933 was slamming shut. Wilson persuaded the engineers at Gwadar to allow him to refuel, then flew to Karachi. He was exhilarated, but exhausted. He had been in the air, cramped in his cockpit, and concentrating for long, repetitive hours.
In Karachi, he took a break, despite the ticking clock on the 1933 climbing season. Although Wilson knew about the climbing calendar, he characteristically dismissed information that was unhelpful to his sense of mission. Moreover, Karachi was fascinating. The westernmost port city of the British Raj, it offered appealing diversions: good restaurants, handsome buildings, a promenade, English faces, and a tram reminiscent of the old Bradford trolley-bus.
But trouble, as well as pleasure, awaited him. Within hours of touching down in Karachi, Wilson was visited by a British official, warning him not to attempt to fly over Nepal. The British government in India, forewarned by the Air Ministry, had already made concrete plans to stop Wilson. On June 3, 1933—Wilson’s first morning in Karachi—a British government official in the city of Simla sent an express cable to the British envoy in Nepal:
Individual called Wilson has reached Karachi by air and requests permission to fly over Nepal State with view to landing on slopes of Everest.
Government of India recognises that any such attempt is bound to lead to disaster and are doing everything possible to dissuade Wilson.
There is however no law to prevent anyone making such an attempt from Indian soil but Government of India feel that their hands would be strengthened if they could inform Wilson that Nepal Government had definitely refused to allow him to cross border.
We presume that such refusal can be taken for granted but would be glad if you would confirm our view that recent permission given to Everest expedition was quite exceptional and that Nepal Government are not prepared to repeat it at present.
The Kingdom of Nepal had been independent from the British Empire since a treaty in 1923, but in the subsequent decade, the relationship between the two countries had remained close. There were no customs controls at the Indian-Nepali border, and military supplies moved freely. The British envoy to Nepal had considerable influence on the Nepali prime minister. It took only three days for the British envoy to cable the government official in Simla, “Nepalese government regret permission cannot be granted Wilson to fly over Nepalese territory.”
* * *
In his fight with the authorities over his Nepal permit, Wilson attempted to use the only weapon he had: his newfound fame. After his landing in Gwadar, a few reporters had caught wind that the aviator was in India and would soon reach Karachi. Men from the news agencies greeted Wilson at the Karachi airfield and reported his safe arrival to the London papers.
The first articles from Karachi reinvigorated interest in Wilson’s story. From the moment he set out from Stag Lane, most people had assumed that Wilson had no chance of survival, let alone triumph. But when he reached India, curiosity about his adventure—and maybe some optimism about its ultimate success—started to grow. For instance, until Karachi, William Courtenay, the Evening Standard’s aviation correspondent, had apparently felt no compulsion to write about Wilson, even though Courtenay knew about Wilson’s remarkable plans. Only on June 10, 1933, did Courtenay report the following:
Mr. Maurice Wilson, who has reached Karachi on his flight to Everest, came to see me a few weeks before the start. He sought advice about his project.
He had then only just taken his “A” licence at Stag Lane aerodrome. When he said he proposed to fly to Everest I reminded him that Lord Clydesdale’s party had already gone there [the Houston–Mount Everest flight]. He said that did not deter him, as anybody could fly over the mountain if they had enough engine power. He proposed to climb it. I told him there was another expedition under Ruttledge climbing it at that moment. What if they succeeded? No matter. A climb by a lone airman was a better show than a highly organised expedition. As to landing on the mountain he had studied that and felt sure there were plateaux which he could get down on to start his ascent.
One article begat another. Back in Bradford, an agency reporter from Reynold’s News tracked down Wilson’s elderly mother. Sarah Wilson told the journalist that she awaited news of her son’s success with “complete confidence.” She offered only one quote, which appears to have been massaged by the journalist: “I realize that his war-shattered left arm may prove a serious handicap when he has to carry his oxygen apparatus.”
Soon after the first reports were published, Wilson received a message in Karachi that the Daily Express had requested an interview. He decided to wait for the Express journalist, who said he could be in Karachi in a couple of days. It was a shrewd move. The Express had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world, and Wilson wanted public opinion on his side.
* * *
After the interview, Wilson flew to the city of Hyderabad, where he refueled, and on to Jodhpur, in Rajasthan, where he stayed at the gorgeous State Hotel, its colorful lobby filled with traders and potentates. The next day, he flew to the city of Allahabad. There, his progress was rudely halted. The local Imperial Airways emissaries at the Allahabad airfield had been instructed by government officials not to allow Wilson to refuel. Only hours after the envoy’s cabled confirmation of Nepal’s unwillingness to grant permission for the flight, staff at all airfields on Wilson’s route were informed of the decision. The government men were serious about stopping him.
Wilson took this impediment like all the others he had encountered: as an opportunity for creative mischief. He checked into an Allahabad hotel, which was run by a talkative Irishman, who offered to drive him around the city and show him the sights. On the tour, Wilson explained his predicament and persuaded the Irish hotelier to tell him where the fuel stores at the airfield were housed. The Irishman, presumably no fan of stuffy Brits, was only too happy to oblige. Wilson broke into a hangar in the dead of night, pilfered the fuel, and filled up his plane. He left some money for the Imperial Airways representative under a rock by the door. Even in extremis, he remained Mark Wilson’s son. The Book says, thou shalt not steal.
The next morning, Wilson took off before anyone could cause him more trouble. The last hitch across India was a four-hour, 360-mile journey to Lalbalu airfield, which was about eight miles from the town of Purnea. On the flight he passed over Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, its banks thronged with pilgrims, and Patna, the capital city of Bihar state, with its incongruous Victorian clock tower jutting high above the government headquarters. He was close. At the Lalbalu airfield, he landed. The local chief of police and a magistrate were, however, expecting him.
The police chief, seemingly like every other official in India, knew about Wilson’s proposed plan, and the government of Nepal’s decisio
n to block it. He instructed Wilson to fly his plane to Purnea, to a field owned by the maharaja of Darbhanga. Wilson had no choice but to comply, although he bought himself some time by telling the policeman that his plane was too heavy to land on a small airstrip in its current fully laden state.
Wilson’s excuse had the benefit of being true. On his flight from Allahabad to Lalbalu, Wilson had considered landing at the maharaja’s airfield with a loaded plane, but judged it too risky. Now he told the policeman that if he could find lodgings in Purnea and store his climbing gear, then he would come back to Lalbalu and move Ever-Wrest the following day. The chief, who liked Wilson the moment he met him, was happy with the arrangement. He even found the aviator a place to stay, with a fellow policeman, one Sergeant Major Rimmington. Wilson discovered, to his delight, that Rimmington was a brother Yorkshireman.
* * *
On Wilson’s first morning in Purnea, his interview from Karachi was printed in the Daily Express. His adventures were now entertainment for millions of readers, and, he believed, a victory over the Air Ministry and the Indian government men. The headlines on the article were intoxicating: “Diet of Dates to Climb Everest”… “Lone Flier Preparing in India”… “Deep Breathing and One Meal a Day.”
The text was no less hyperbolic:
Maurice Wilson, the young Bradford airman and rock climber, who has undertaken the amazing adventure of a combined aerial and foot climb of Everest, gave me some remarkable details of his plans when he landed here after flying from England.