Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

  As we shall see, George Mallory would have had the need for a belay very much in mind on 8 June 1924 as he scanned the cliffs above him for a route to the top of Mount Everest.

  3

  Renaissance Men

  I was a bookish child, and rather shy. I didn’t quiz Uncle Hunch about his story, but when we got home from Aunt Dolly’s memorial service I found out more about him, Mount Everest and his friend Mallory in the memoir that he wrote titled After Everest. I have the book next to me, still wrapped in my grandmother’s sewn cover. His climbing life, including Mount Everest, takes up less than a third of the pages, and he makes it clear that his medical missionary work was far more important to him. So many Everesters keep going back and back to the mountain of their obsession, and it is entirely typical of him that he was able to develop himself away from it.

  One of the problems of assessing multi-talented individuals is that most of us can only appreciate one aspect of them at a time. If anyone has heard of T. H. Somervell nowadays they might think of him as one of Mallory’s fellow-climbers on Everest, or maybe as a painter of mountain landscapes. Some readers in India might still remember his medical work in their country, but he excelled in several fields and was one of the most interesting characters on those early Everest expeditions.

  He was born in 1890 to a well-to-do evangelical family in Kendal who owned K Shoes, a prosperous boot-making company. At Cambridge he at first derided modern art, then adopted it. Similarly, he toyed with atheism, joining a society named the Heretics, and ‘for two years I strenuously refused to believe in God, especially in a revealed God’.1 Afterwards he felt there was something missing from his life, and felt that his atheist fellow students were ‘wallowing in an intellectual nowhere’. After a chance prayer-meeting he rediscovered his faith and became for a while a passionate evangelical. This mellowed into a steady religious faith that remained with him and informed all the major decisions of his life. It is almost as if the young Somervell had to experiment with opposites, push hard in contrary directions, before he could find his place in both art and religion. Perhaps the extreme horror of his war-time experiences swung him towards extreme faith.

  I wanted to know how he began climbing. The 18-year-old Somervell had taken to solitary walking in his native Lake District, and one day saw a party of rock climbers. He followed them up their route on his own, and when he reached the top he was ticked off for climbing without either a companion or a rope. On buying one of the Abraham brothers’ guidebooks he was delighted to realise he’d done a climb described as ‘Difficult’. He continued going rock climbing, and this eventually led to the Alps, where one of his early climbs had an ecclesiastical flavour: he teamed up with a parson and the Bishop of Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, the bishop slipped off an overhang and dangled in mid-air, swinging like a pendulum. Somervell started to lower him but the noose around his waist was loose, the unfortunate cleric raised his arms and the rope slid off. He hung by his hands alone, and ‘certain death was beneath him if he could not hold on.’2 Somervell redoubled his lowering, and got the bishop to the safety of a snow-slope before his strength gave out. This calm rescue of another climber foreshadowed his rescue of porters on Everest in 1924.

  Next came his experience of the army. After Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and qualification as a surgeon at University College Hospital, London, he joined up in early 1915 and went to the Front. This experience had a profound effect on him, as it did on other members of the Everest expeditions. His casualty-clearing station, the 34th, was on the Somme Front, at Vecquemont, between Amiens and Albert. Another Cambridge man, Second Lieutenant George Mallory of the 40th Siege Battery, was not far away at Pioneer Road, Albert. Mallory’s job as an artillery officer was to pound the enemy lines with high-explosive shells in preparation for the greatest British offensive of the war, when 300,000 men attacked the Germans on 1 July 1916.

  It was a disaster. Somervell’s clearing station, with its two surgeons per six-hour shift, was expected to deal with a thousand casualties; instead, streams of motor-ambulances a mile long brought nearly 10,000 terribly wounded young men after the attack. The camp, in a field of five or six acres, was completely covered with stretchers. The surgery was a hut with only four tables, and Somervell had to walk among the victims and choose which they could try to save.

  Occasionally, we made a brief look around to select from the thousands of patients those few fortunate ones whose life or limbs we had time to save. It was a terrible business. Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes, as we passed along the rows of sufferers.

  Hardly ever did any of them say a word, except to ask for water or relief from pain. I don’t remember any single man in all those thousands who even suggested that we should save him and not the fellow next to him … There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth – a terrible sight if ever there was one, yet full of courage and unselfishness and beauty.3

  Beauty seems an odd word to use about this most grotesque of wars, and it is worth being alert to it, as it is relevant to our subject. Somervell goes on to explain:

  I know that, again and again, when, sick of casualties and the wilfulness of man that maims these poor bodies, I did see an unselfishness, a fine spirit, and a comradeship, that I have never seen in peace-time. But in spite of all that, the very gloriousness of the spirit of man is a call to the nations to renounce war and give love a chance to bring forth the best that is in mankind.4

  Note the reference to the spirit of man. The Poet Laureate Robert Bridges chose The Spirit of Man as the title for an anthology of prose and poetry, published in 1915. It is a curious book, written during the war under the auspices of the War Propaganda Bureau, and full of exhortations to self-sacrifice. ‘We can therefore be happy in our sorrows,’ writes Bridges, ‘happy even in the death of our beloved who fall in the fight; for they die nobly, as heroes and saints die; with heart and hands unstained by hatred or wrong.’5 Mallory and Somervell were to read selections from the book as they lay in their shared tent on Everest in 1922.

  It was not noble to die chopped up by a machine-gun or gassed. The Spirit of Man was an encouragement towards self-sacrifice. Like the older members of my family, these men had a culture of public-spiritedness and Christian unselfishness that would be inconceivable to most of today’s Everest climbers. I think it might have influenced the climbing choices that Mallory and Somervell made, and partly explains the extreme guilt they felt when seven Sherpas died in the accident that ended that expedition of 1922, a guilt I have rarely seen in the carnage of a modern Everest season.

  The casualty work was exhausting, and on one occasion Somervell had to operate for two and a half days on end, without sleep. One day during the Somme campaign he went for a short walk on the battlefield and sat down on a sandbag. He saw a young lad asleep in front of him, looking very ill. After a while, with horror, he realised what he was looking at:

  My God, he’s not breathing! He’s dead! I got a real shock. I sat there for half an hour gazing at that dead boy. About eighteen … For a moment he personified this madness called War … Who killed him? The politicians, the High Command, the merchants and financiers, or who? Christian nations had killed him by being un-Christian. That seemed to be the answer.

  Somervell’s view was that the two world wars were simply one prolonged war, with the failure of the Versailles Treaty to curtail German aggression meaning that it reasserted itself during the 1930s. Somervell felt that if Germany had been occupied and stabilised, the horror and madness of the Third Reich could have been contained.

  A few miles away, Mallory’s experience as an artillery officer was somewhat different, as he would not have seen as much of the bloody consequence of shelling as would a surgeon. Although the two men’s roles were different, the common experience of the Great War formed a similar outlook and cemented their later friendship.

  It is difficult to exagg
erate the effect the conflict would have had on those survivors of the Great War. Gas was used on the Somme on 18 July:

  Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

  Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

  But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

  And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …

  Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

  As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

  In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

  He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

  If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

  Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

  And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

  His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

  If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

  Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

  Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

  Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

  My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

  To children ardent for some desperate glory,

  The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

  Pro patria mori.6

  Wilfred Owen, the author of this poem, was losing his Christian faith by the time he was killed, just a week before the end of the war. Arthur Wakefield, another Lake District surgeon at the Somme who experienced the same horrors as Somervell, and who also went to Everest, completely lost his faith. So did another Everester, Odell, who was also at the Somme. Many others lost their confidence in the solidity of things, and perhaps those first attempts to climb Mount Everest tried to put things right for an empire that had taken such a grievous battering.

  For Howard Somervell, however, the horrific work somehow made his faith stronger, not weaker. His sons both said to me that it was the most important thing about him; it was the key to his character.

  After the war Somervell resumed climbing. He went to Skye in June 1920 and made the first solo traverse of the Cuillin Ridge, from Sligachan to Gars Bheinn at the south end. I have done this route – but not all in one day – and it is a tough proposition. Like others of Somervell (and Mallory’s) climbs that I have repeated, it is surprisingly extended and sometimes poorly protected – that is to say, the rope running out behind the leader goes a long way back to an attachment to the rock, and those attachments are not very secure.

  We modern climbers like to think we are better than our predecessors because we do harder climbs, but when we strip out the technology we realise they were probably tougher and braver. They lived harder lives in unheated houses, and maybe just walked more than we do.

  After Skye, Somervell returned to the Alps in 1921, where he climbed nearly 30 Alpine peaks in one holiday. Here he was accompanied by Bentley Beetham, who went to Everest in 1924. He climbed in the Alps with Noel Odell and Frank Smythe a couple of years later, and these trips were a way of testing climbers for an Everest expedition. Some modern pundits tell us that these men formed an exclusive upper-class clique devoted to keeping colonials and the lower classes out of their club, but I think they just chose to climb with congenial people they knew, just as the rest of us do. Later on, Irvine was selected, because he also knew Odell. Then Somervell thought his big chance had come:

  Everyone who is keen on mountains … must have been thrilled at the thought – which only materialised late in 1920 – that at last the world’s highest summit was going to be attempted. And by no means the least thrilled was myself … I had at least a chance of being selected to go on an expedition which was then being planned for 1921.7

  Somervell applied to join the 1921 reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest, but was not chosen. However George Mallory was taken, as he was considered the foremost alpinist of the day. They did not know each other well at that stage since Somervell had gone up to Cambridge after the older man. So, for the moment Howard Somervell had to stand on the sidelines and watch.

  4

  Galahad of Everest

  Brothers till death, and a wind-swept grave,

  Joy of the journey’s ending:

  Ye who have climbed to the great white veil,

  Hear ye the chant? Saw ye the Grail?

  Geoffrey Winthrop Young, 1909

  How to approach an understanding of George Mallory? On the face of it he was a somewhat unfulfilled teacher who died trying to climb a mountain. However, if we go by the sheer number of words written about him he is one of the most studied characters in British history, about whom there are at least a dozen biographies. Other, more conventionally successful members of his Everest expeditions, such as Norton or Somervell, do not even rate one published biography. How can this be?

  After all these books that have been written about Mallory, it is hard to say much about him that is unclouded by them. There is a strong whiff of hero-worship about much of what has been written, and so an objective view of the man is elusive. Most of the books avoid any mention of his sexuality, some misunderstand it, and some misrepresent the circumstances of the finding of his body. That said, a book of this sort depends heavily on its predecessors, and it was far easier to learn about Mallory than Somervell.

  I have met Mallory’s son John (now deceased), and I know his grandson George (who has climbed Mount Everest himself) and his granddaughter Virginia. I have followed his climbs in Wales, Scotland, the Alps and on Mount Everest itself, and I have read a fair few of his writings. Yet I still do not feel that I know the man. All I can do is struggle towards an understanding.

  His first biographer was David Pye, whose George Mallory was published in 1927. Pye was his constant friend and fellow-climber, and knew his subject almost better than anyone. Like many of Mallory’s friends he became eminent in his own field, the development of aircraft engines, a science that led to the need for oxygen sets for the pilots who were being propelled to higher and higher altitudes. Then in 1969 David Robertson, who was married to Mallory’s daughter Beridge, wrote a biography – or rather a hagiography – in which our hero disappears like Sir Galahad. Mallory’s heroic status has hardly faltered since. An early death does wonders for your career; and this might be one clue to his appeal.

  In 1981 Walt Unsworth’s magisterial Everest was published, which was rather less complimentary about Mallory, followed by Dudley Green’s 1990 illustrated biography, and Because It’s There in 2000, prompted by the finding of Mallory’s body. Audrey Salkeld, the foremost Mount Everest researcher, wrote a series of books on the subject, including the larger part of The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine and Last Climb. Then Peter and Leni Gillman’s book The Wildest Dream (2000) mined the vast number of letters between George and his wife Ruth, and turned up innumerable documents from other sources. They depicted Mallory’s life in painstaking detail. Even more detail on the expeditions and their participants appeared in Wade Davis’s Into the Silence (2011), which among other things examined the experience of the First World War and how it might have shaped the characters of the climbers. There will be more books about Mallory, I am sure, as his life seems to hold endless fascination for all kinds of writers. There are also a number of films that have been made about him, one or two of which I have had a hand in making. But who was he, and why does he have such a hold on our imaginations?

  I found answers to these questions by looking at him through the eyes of those who have been influenced by him. These include his student contemporaries, his climbing companions, his pupils, and the theorists who try to work out what might have happened to him on his last climb. On the way we may also find answers to the question ‘Why climb Everest?’

  The bare bones of George Mallory’s life are well known. He was born the eldest son of a rector in 1886 in the village of Mobberley on the Cheshire plain, which, ironically, is one of the flattest parts of England. He roamed the countryside as children do, and climbed walls and the family house roof, as well as his father’s church. His sister Avie recalled that
he was completely fearless:

  He climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb. I learned very early that it was fatal to tell him that any tree was impossible for him to get up. ‘Impossible’ was a word which acted as a challenge to him. When he once told me that it would be quite easy to lie between the railway lines and let a train go over him, I kept very quiet, as if I thought it would be a very ordinary thing to do; otherwise I was afraid he would do it. He used to climb up the downspouts of the house, and climb about on the roof with cat-like surefootedness.

  He started to show his abilities at Winchester College, where he excelled at shooting, soccer and gymnastics. But he was more than just a sportsman; he was good at maths and chemistry, and was becoming a gifted writer.

  The English public schools of Mallory’s time were nurseries for the military leaders and administrators of the empire, who possessed an aggressive attitude to the acquisition of new lands, and even cast covetous eyes on our nearer neighbours. We, with our post-colonial guilt, might have difficulty imagining a world in which an Englishman could legitimately make his name by conquering territory, but the young George would certainly have imbibed some of this empire spirit.

  While he was at Winchester something happened that changed his life. His college tutor, Graham Irving, an Alpine Club member, took George under his wing when he heard about his talent for climbing on roofs, and in 1904 took him for his first visit to the Alps with another boy, Harry Gibson. In his obituary in the Alpine Journal, Irving wrote of Mallory:

  He had a strikingly beautiful face. Its shape, its delicately cut features, especially the rather large, heavily lashed, thoughtful eyes, were extraordinarily suggestive of a Botticelli Madonna, even when he ceased to be a boy – though any suspicion of effeminacy was completely banished by obvious proofs of physical energy and strength.1