Teaching was a reserved occupation and it was not until 1916 that the headmaster of Charterhouse permitted Mallory leave to go to the front where he served as a gunner in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Although he enjoyed the campaigning and organizational aspects of the army and was relieved that he was not fainthearted about the horrors he beheld, he was nevertheless sickened by much that he saw. He came back to Britain to have an operation on an old ankle injury, sustained in a climbing accident at Thurstastan quarry in 1909 after which he had not sought proper treatment. Following his recovery he returned to France for the last few months of the war, when he found he had more time to write, think and read than he had had before. In the meantime two of their three children, Clare and Beridge, had been born and Ruth had her hands full caring for the girls and organizing their new house in Holt.
After the war Mallory returned to teaching but was never as content as he had been before. He continued with his climbing, which was a form of release, but the discontent grew and he knew that he would have to seek a greater challenge. In the spring of 1920 he was climbing in North Wales with Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who was trying to learn how to climb again, having lost a leg in the war. Young had heard that there was a planned expedition to Everest and even contemplated going himself but then realized that the proposal was wholly unrealistic. He talked to Mallory about the expedition and encouraged him to consider the possibility of leading the climbing party. The seeds of an idea were sown although his initial reaction to the invitation from the Mount Everest Committee was to refuse out of concern for Ruth. On receiving word of Mallory’s refusal, Young visited them in Holt and after twenty minutes of talking up the possibilities that would follow if he reached the summit Mallory and Ruth were convinced, and Ruth told him to go to Everest.
It was not until 1852 that the mountain recorded simply as Peak XV was even known to be the highest mountain in the world. The British Survey in India was occupied in the nineteenth century with surveying and mapping India and the Himalaya. As successive peaks were measured there was growing interest in which mountain might prove to be the highest. The story, founded no doubt on fact but which has taken on a somewhat mythical status, is as follows. The Bengali chief computer, a man rather than a machine in those days, rushed into the office of his superior, Sir Andrew Waugh, exclaiming: ‘Sir! Sir! I’ve discovered the highest mountain in the world.’ After a series of lengthy analyses of the computations by means of a series of triangulations, Sir Andrew Waugh felt confident enough to announce, in 1856, that the Survey could confirm it had established that Peak XV was ‘probably the highest mountain in the world’, standing 29,002 feet above sea level. Its closest rival in the Karakoram, K2, had been assessed at 28,156 feet.
This important revelation brought with it the desire to give the mountain a suitable name. Ignoring the generally accepted tradition of adopting local names for geographical places, Sir Andrew suggested that the mountain should be named after his illustrious predecessor, Sir George Everest. Sir George, during his tenure at the Survey of India, had instigated most of the work of establishing the Great Arc of the Meridian. Ironically Sir George was against the idea of the naming of Peak XV after himself, but nevertheless the mountain soon became known as Mount Everest. Its Tibetan name, Chomolungma, which is variously translated as ‘Goddess Mother of the Earth’ or, ‘the peak at the end of the vallery’ was ignored.
By the 1890s there were serious discussions amongst British mountaineers and explorers about the problems climbing Mount Everest might pose. Prior to that it was not known whether man could climb so high or whether indeed human life was sustainable above 25,000 feet. It seemed clear to the main parties involved in this speculation, amongst them Capt. Charles Bruce and Francis Younghusband, that any attempt to climb the mountain would have to be preceded by a reconnaissance mission to map and chart the immediate environs of Everest and to plot a possible route to the summit. Relations with Tibet and Nepal were particularly fragile prior to the Great War and the then secretary of State for India, John Morley vetoed a proposal put forward by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, to seek permission to mount an expedition to approach the mountain.
By now the seeds of interest had been sown and several people were occupied with contemplating seriously the possibility of climbing Mount Everest. In 1913 Capt. John Noel took leave from his Indian regiment to make an illicit reconnaissance of the mountain by means of a route through Tibet. He was able to get within forty or fifty miles of the mountain before he was turned back by armed guards, and was very nearly court-martialled for entering a foreign country without permission. Fortunately his service was required in the First World War and the court martial was dropped. Noel’s plan was to make the foray and report back his findings to Col. Rawling who planned an expedition to the mountain the following year. This expedition had the blessing of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society, but it was stopped by the events of the Great War.
After the war, relations between Britain and Tibet were not improved, but the desire to take an expedition to the mountain had reached new heights. In 1919 Francis Younghusband was appointed President of the Royal Geographical Society. He later wrote of the ‘spark which set flame to the train’. There was a meeting in London that year of the Royal Geographical Society. Captain Noel was asked to deliver a lecture on his reconnaissance trip of 1913. ‘He made no reference to anything more than approaching the mountain: he made no suggestion of attempting to reach the summit.’ The lecture was followed by a discussion in which Capt. Percy Farrar, then President of the Alpine Club, announced that the Club ‘viewed with the keenest interest the proposal to attempt the ascent of Mount Everest’. It was the impetus that was required to reassess Britain’s relations with Tibet and to put forward the proposal of a serious reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest. The Alpine Club, Farrar proposed, would not only make available what financial aid it could but would be prepared to suggest the names of two or three young mountaineers who, he felt, would be qualified to deal with any ‘purely mountaineering difficulties that were likely to be met with’.
Younghusband, who was sitting next to Farrar at the meeting, got to his feet. He reminded the meeting that he and Charles Bruce, then Captain, now General Bruce, had considered twenty-six years previously the proposition of ‘going up’ Mount Everest. He vowed that during his presidency of the Royal Geographical Society, he would make ‘this Everest venture’ the main feature of his three-year term. He felt that his indepth knowledge of both the Tibetan government and the government of India would put him in a particularly good position for initiating such a project. He also felt the combined strengths of the RGS and the Alpine Club would be able to draw on the greatest expertise that was available at the time.
Action followed quickly. The Mount Everest Committee was formed, taking members from both the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society. Younghusband had on more than one occasion to defend his position as Chairman of the Mount Everest Committee. Purists regretted that the formation of such a committee was required and felt that it would have been altogether more sporting for the mountain to be climbed by an individual on a personal mission. R. G. Irving, the schoolmaster from Winchester, who had first introduced Mallory to climbing, was a particularly stern critic. His objection was that the climbers on the Mount Everest expeditions were selected by a panel. ‘The Everest expeditions are not the result of individual enterprise. The selection of the climbers and the payment of the cost are the responsibility of men of whom few have taken part in the actual climbing of the mountain.’ Written as this objection was, after the death of Mallory and Sandy, it is possible that some of his misgivings stem from the belief that the climbers felt a pressure on them to succeed. Had they initiated the venture themselves, they would have only had to make mountaineering decisions and not concern themselves with the possibility that they might be letting the expedition down. He went on to regret the publicity that was now surrounding mountaineering, compari
ng it with the spotlight shone on the cricketers and footballers of the time. ‘By all means let us encourage men to go on their own responsibility to climb the Himalaya and any other mountain, but do not let us set the ring for them as we have begun to do. Our great footballers, our great cricketers have become public entertainers, and we must accept the fact. Mountaineering is altogether unfitted to follow such a trend.’
Younghusband acknowledged that it might well have been more desirable for Everest to be climbed by a team of climbers that had initiated the expedition themselves but there were overwhelming reasons for that not working. First and foremost, Everest was not easily accessible. It was situated in one of the most secluded countries of the world, a country which rarely opened its borders to foreigners of all descriptions. Moreover, the Tibetans held the mountains in high regard, places of the gods, and they did not welcome the proposition of these holy sites being violated by foreigners. The British government was respectful of Tibet’s deep sensitivities, so much so that even after the Mission to Lhasa in 1904 the India Office in London felt unwilling to ask permission from the Tibetan government for a British explorer to enter Tibet. Younghusband and the other members of the Mount Everest committee felt, however, that whatever the India Office and the Tibetan government might not feel able to agree to on behalf of an individual, they might well consider a representation from such serious scientific bodies as the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club. This was perhaps the overwhelming reason for the formation of the Everest Committee.
Another, more practical reason, was that of organization and finance. Sending an expedition half-way round the world to explore unmapped territory leading up to the highest mountain in the world was a very expensive and complex proposition. The Everest Committee was at its best thoroughly realistic. It realized that one if not two expeditions would have to be dispatched before the summit was finally reached. Younghusband wrote in 1936:
Ideally it would have been delightful if a band of happy mountaineers, accustomed to climbing together on holidays in the Alps, would have undertaken the tremendous task of tackling Everest. But in practice this was not feasible. At any rate, no such band came forward. And even if it had, the probability is that it would have been incapable of giving to the enterprise that sustained continuity of effort which the committee of a permanent society can provide. Thus it came about that the attack on Mount Everest was organized by a committee and not by an individual.
At the time of the first Everest expedition the highest point on earth was seen by many as the last great adventure. Both the Poles had been gained over the past two decades and the ‘third pole’, as some people chose to term Everest, was an adventure of equal importance and, moreover, a manifestation of the spirit of human endeavour. The challenge from the start was the unknown factor of altitude. It was not even known if man could survive at an altitude of 29,002 feet; indeed balloonists who had aimed to reach such heights had died from lack of oxygen at 26,500 feet. Everest was already an enigma, it had cast a spell and the committee felt bound to attempt to break the spell if it was possible to do so.
The committee invited George Mallory and George Ingle Finch, both widely regarded as two of the strongest alpinists of the day, to make up the core of the climbing party. Finch and Mallory had great mutual respect but little affection for one another. From the outset Finch seemed to be at odds with the committee and, in the event, he was prevented from going on the 1921 expedition on slightly spurious grounds of his health. Despite his own misgivings about Finch’s health and, to be honest, his ability to get along with him, Mallory was very concerned by the lack of strong Alpine climbers on the 1921 expedition. He privately considered it unlikely that either Alexander Kellas or Harold Raeburn would get above 24,000 or 25,000 feet and after Finch was dropped Mallory was slightly desperate about the prospects of getting to any height on the mountain. He finally succeeded in convincing the committee to include his old climbing partner and friend Guy Bullock, who was available at short notice and the party set off for India.
When the first British expedition left Darjeeling in 1921 no European had been within forty miles of the mountain and nothing was known about Everest other than its height, latitude and longitude. The committee concluded, therefore, that the first expedition should have as its objective a preliminary reconnaissance of the region. With this in mind a team of surveyors, mountaineers, medical officers and interpreters was assembled under the leadership of Lt. Col. Charles K Howard-Bury. Mallory was appointed Acting Climbing Leader and together with Guy Bullock, represented the climbers on the expedition. Dr A. M. Heron from the Geological Survey of India accompanied Maj. Henry T. Morshead and Maj. Edward Wheeler, both from the Survey of India. Dr Alexander Wollaston was the medical officer and naturalist. Dr Alexander Kellas was a key member of the expedition: he had extensive knowledge of travelling in the Himalaya, having climbed over a period of seven years in Kashmir, Sikkim and the Garhwal Himalaya and had been the first mountaineer to ascend three of the great peaks seen on the Sikkim stretch of the march through Tibet: Chumiomo, Pawhunri and Kangchenjau. He was the only member of the team who had given serious thought to the possible routes up Everest. Prior to 1919 Kellas had been a chemistry lecturer at a London medical school. He and the celebrated scientist, Professor Haldane had worked together and Kellas had conducted experiments in pressure chambers, concluding that bottled oxygen might well provide a help to climbing at altitude. He had made studies of the problem of acclimatization and was in fact the world’s expert at the time on mountain sickness and on the problems of lassitude that affect climbing and other performance at high altitude. He was planning to undertake experiments using the gas as an aid to climbing on this expedition.
Tragically the expedition was robbed of Kellas’s experience. He died of heart failure on the last high pass on the trek across Tibet, before the expedition had even reached base camp. His death was a tremendous blow to the expedition and Mallory personally was appalled by his loss. He had greatly looked forward to getting to know Kellas better and to benefiting from his unique Himalayan experience.
Howard Bury had not been the first choice of the Everest Committee for expedition leader. They had wished to appointed General Charles Bruce but he could not be spared from the British Army at the time. Howard Bury, however, travelling to India at his own expense, had been instrumental in gaining permission from the Dalai Lama for a British expedition of climbers to go to Everest. This was rightly considered to be a real coup after years of abortive applications via the India Office and the committee felt deeply indebted to him and his efforts. As this first mission had as its brief the reconnaissance of the area as its primary objective the Everest Committee concluded it would be better to employ Howard Bury in 1921 and to keep Bruce in reserve for 1922 when a climbing expedition would almost certainly be launched. Howard Bury was, at forty, some five years older than Mallory. He had been brought up by his cousin the Viceroy of India and had developed at an early age a great passion for travel. He was widely respected as an excellent linguist as well as being a good photographer, a naturalist and a keen plant collector. His Victorian upbringing coupled with his career in the British Army had turned him into a strict disciplinarian. Mallory was wary of him and wrote to Ruth after their first meeting: ‘He is well-informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know. For the sake of peace, I am being careful not to broach certain subjects of conversation.’ With Raeburn Mallory also failed to form a satisfactory relationship. Before the expedition had even left England he had been exasperated with Raeburn’s desire to cut down on the amount of climbing equipment, most of which Mallory considered to be essential. Raeburn did not see the reason for taking with them adequate clothing nor making provision for the extreme cold they would encounter at great heights. From the outset, Mallory believed the expedition to be fatally flawed. In the event, Raeburn began to exhibit worrying symptoms shortly after the death of Kellas and
Wollaston decided he should be taken down quickly – the expedition could not afford another fatality. Raeburn’s departure further weakened the climbing team, but Mallory persevered.
From Kampa Dzong, some forty miles from Everest, he gained his first sight of the mountain and the frustrations he was feeling with his fellow team members were momentarily swept away as he stood, awe-struck, contemplating its size. He recognised Everest’s neighbour, Makalu, and described the mountains in a letter to Geoffrey Young: ‘That to the left must be Makalu, grey, severe, and yet distinctly graceful, and the other, away to the right – who could doubt its identity? It was a prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the world.’ Mallory was captivated. The spell of Everest had caught his imagination and his enthusiasm began to shine through his letters to Ruth. He reported to her: ‘I felt somehow a traveller. It was not only that no European had ever been here before us, but we were penetrating a secret: we were looking behind the great barrier running north and south which had been as a screen in front of us ever since we turned our eyes westwards from Kampa Dzong.’
Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Page 12