Mallory’s physical beauty impressed many of those who first met him, and this advantage gave him many opportunities. It might even have led indirectly to this offer of a climbing holiday. I do not suggest any impropriety, just that his attractiveness might have given him chances in life that were not open to others.
Harry Gibson had to return home after a week, and Irving and Mallory roamed the Mont Blanc region for a further 18 days. In our suspicious times eyebrows might be raised at this teacher–pupil pairing, but in their classically educated days such adult–child jaunts were seen as healthy and mutually beneficial.
That first Alpine season was a turning point in the young Mallory’s life; he had found something he was good at and something he loved. On his second season with Irving they tackled the Dent Blanche, a formidable peak with a bad reputation. The young George wrote to his mother in a good descriptive style, introducing some of the themes that would later become familiar: the importance of an early start, the beauty of the mountain scene and the way he would set his heart on climbing a particular mountain:
At 3:15 yesterday morning we started by moonlight across the huge snow field, on the most delightful hard crisp snow; and after the most enjoyable walk and a short scramble over easy rocks, we found ourselves on the arête of the Dent Blanche at 7:15. The sun had of course risen as we nearer the Dent Blanche; and, as we had already gone up quite a lot, the view was splendid right over the Mont Blanc range. It was altogether too inexpressibly glorious to see peak after peak touched with the pink glow of the first sun which slowly spread until the whole top was a flaming fire – and that against a sky with varied tints of leaden blue.
We had a halt and breakfast for nearly an hour on the arête and then climbed straight to the top in a little over three hours, arriving there at 10:25 … We had no difficulty coming down, but a most laborious walk across the snow field. The rest of the party were waiting tea for us at the Bertol hut as prearranged, and rejoiced with our rejoicing – the Dent Blanche was the one peak we had set our hearts upon doing.2
Going up to Cambridge in 1905, he found new male admirers: his college tutor A. C. Benson was a celibate homosexual who collected beautiful young men and who fell earnestly in love with Mallory at first sight. The son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Benson had written the Coronation Ode, including Land of Hope and Glory, which boys of my generation belted out to Elgar’s music in the school chapel. Poor Benson was a tortured individual who was not able to express the love he felt. The intense attention he lavished on Mallory helped the young student gain access to a privileged inner circle, who went on to form the Bloomsbury set. This select group of artists and writers contained talents such as the poet Rupert Brooke and the economist John Maynard Keynes. They were at the forefront of liberal thought, the Suffragette movement and socialism, and later included the writer Virginia Woolf and the painter Clive Bell. George Mallory never quite seemed to make his mark, though – until much later.
Cambridge was a hotbed of homosexual intrigue – the love that dared not speak its name – and the Gillmans’ biography uncovers an affair between George Mallory and James Strachey, the younger brother of the writer and wit Lytton Strachey. It is not clear just how serious this was, but one gains the impression that the naive but beautiful Mallory was inveigled into the relationship by a scheming John Maynard Keynes. It was around this time that Mallory took to dressing in black shirts and garish ties, and grew his hair long.
I have a copy of The Yellow Book, with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, the fin-de-siècle publication from the 1890s that so influenced this group. A glance inside at Beardsley’s arch, pen-and-ink gothic figures conveys something of the look of these young men. The kind of impression Mallory made is conveyed in this passage from Lytton Strachey. His high-camp squawk gives a hint of the febrile atmosphere of Cambridge at the time:
Mon Dieu! George Mallory! When that’s been written, what more need to be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words – oh heavens, heavens! I found of course that he had been absurdly maligned – he’s six foot high, with a body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face – oh incredible – the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an imaginable English boy. I rave, but when you see him, as you must, you will admit all – all! … He’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?3
Notions of sexuality change over the ages, and that Cambridge concept of male friendship was not the same as what we now call ‘gay’. It was more along the lines of Platonic love, and perhaps we have lost something by our assumptions about same-sex friendships. The comradeship forged in mountaineering can be closer than a romantic relationship, but among the hundreds of climbers I have met I cannot remember one who has come out as gay. They must be there, but it is a robustly macho pursuit. Mallory’s later relationship with his wife Ruth certainly seems to have been a straightforwardly conventional one, and many of his contemporaries married after experimenting with same-sex friendships.
His climbing career certainly benefited from his attractiveness to men. Charles Sayle was a founder member of the Climbers’ Club and took him climbing in North Wales, introducing him to an older mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young. This was a significant meeting. Winthrop Young was a colourful character, an educationalist and a brilliant writer. It was he who conferred the name ‘Galahad’ upon Mallory. He was vigorously homosexual, and visited clubs that catered to his tastes in Berlin and Paris. He was attracted to the young Mallory at once. Winthrop Young was the leading climber of his day and organised the legendary Pen-y-Pass meets in Snowdonia. Every year he gathered around him a coterie of bright young things, and tackled increasingly difficult routes on the Welsh crags. George was soon part of the scene, impressing Winthrop Young with his lithe climbing style and inventive approach to routes. Here is Winthrop Young’s assessment of him as a climber:
He was the greatest in fulfilled achievement; so original in his climbing that it never occurred to us to compare him with others or to judge his performance by ordinary mountaineering standards. Chivalrous, indomitable, the splendid personification of youthful adventure; deer-like in grace and power of movement, self-reliant and yet self-effacing and radiantly independent. On a day he might be with us; on the next gone like a bird on the wing over the summits, to explore some precipice between Snowdon and the sea; whence he would return after nightfall to discuss climbing or metaphysics in a laughing contralto, or practise gymnastics after his hot bath, on the roof beam of the old shack, like the youngest of the company.4
After several more seasons in the Alps, Mallory was considered as one of the best British climbers of his day. His writing style was developing, too, and he made a serious stab at explaining why we climb in a long article in the Climbers’ Club Journal entitled ‘The mountaineer as artist’. He compares a long alpine climb to a symphony, with separate movements for each section of the climb. This might today be considered pretentious, but he makes the point that mountaineering has a spiritual dimension that other sports perhaps lack. It certainly attracts poets and writers. In another piece, written in the trenches, he remembers the joy of reaching the summit of Mont Maudit, and this quotation for me sums up the modest delight of the man:
We’re not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished … Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.5
Just before the outbreak of the First World War he met and married the love of his life, Ruth Turner, the daughter of Hugh Thackeray Turner, a wealthy architect who had worked closely with William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. Their letters reveal that Ruth, although not the clearest of writers, was a wonderful soul-mate, with an unerring ability to get to the nub of things.
In 1910 George had taken a position as a teacher at Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, and attempted to settle down into married life with Ruth. With the outbreak of war, however, he
became restless and guilty, feeling that he ought to join up, and obtained a commission as an artillery officer. He was off to war. This was the beginning of many absences from his beloved Ruth, but they wrote to each other nearly every day for the rest of his life.
Mallory survived the war, unlike so many of his climbing peers. Artillery officers had a better chance of survival than ‘the poor bloody infantry’ as they spent less time on the front line, although they were hardly safe. On Mallory’s very first day with his battery, a bullet passed between him and a man walking a yard ahead. On another occasion two men walking with him were killed feet away from him as they laid out a telephone wire.
Of course, if that bullet had swerved a fraction of a degree, the history of Mount Everest would have been different. My father had a torpedo pass right under his ship during the liberation of the Netherlands in the Second World War, and he and his future family were thus inches away from oblivion. Such is the contingency of life, and during dangerous climbing one is well aware that possibilities such as this are multiplying before your eyes. That stone melting out of the ice a thousand feet above you might have your name on it.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young also survived the First World War, although he lost a leg. When he and Mallory organised another of the Pen-y-Pass parties, it was noted that out of 60 climbers mentioned in the diaries from before the war, 23 had died and 14 had been injured.
The more I studied that little band of men in the black and white photographs of the 1921 expedition to Mount Everest, the more I saw the ghosts of the First World War.
Today it is hard to imagine the degree of disconnection between the general public and the soldiers engaged in the slaughter. Now we have live television feeds from journalists embedded on the battlefields, and the death of even one soldier in Afghanistan is headline news. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, however, when Somervell was operating at his field hospital, 19,000 of the British forces were killed: 20 per cent of their total fighting strength. That is over six times the number killed during the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, and yet General Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander, felt able to write in his diary the next day: ‘This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked.’
During the First World War heavy guns were heard in Kent, but successful propaganda duped the British public into believing that all was going well, with the press reporting only light casualties. And the fact that the conflict was so localised and so immovable meant that life could go on in Berlin or London without non-combatants realising what horrors were being perpetrated in their name. One result was that the participants felt disconnected from life at home, even when they returned, and in some cases effectively became walking ghosts.
One such was Mallory’s pupil Robert Graves, who was badly injured by shellfire at the Somme on 20 July while leading his men through the churchyard cemetery of Bazentin-le-Petit. His injuries were so severe that it was reported to his family that he was dead. On his return to London he suffered from hallucinations, seeing the streets filled with corpses. Like many of these veterans he seemed to be slightly lost for the remainder of his life.
What effect might such feelings have on the 26 men in the photographs at Everest Base Camp taken a few years later? And in particular, what consequences might there be on a man making climbing decisions at high altitude?
Most of the members of the 1921 expedition had served in the war and they were being led by a colonel. They saw their attempt to climb the mountain as similar in many respects to warfare, and the whole bandobast of Gurkha soldiers, pack animals and baggage resembled a military expedition. Norton described it as ‘our mimic campaign’, and Mallory wrote in his last Times despatch: ‘We have counted our wounded and know, roughly, how much to strike off the strength of our little army as we plan the next act of battle …’
For Mallory, any notion of warfare as a chivalric enterprise must have swiftly evaporated in 1914 as his former pupils at Charterhouse were shipped off to the trenches: 686 of them would perish in the mechanised slaughter. As we have seen, the reproach of his fireside became intolerable, and he sought some way of joining up, but the headmaster of Charterhouse refused to release him. His university friend the poet Rupert Brooke died in April 1915 in the Aegean on his way to Gallipoli, provoking Mallory to write to Benson: ‘I’ve been too lucky; there’s something indecent, when so many friends have been enduring such horrors, in just going on with one’s job, quite happy and prosperous.’
Eventually the headmaster relented and Mallory joined the Royal Garrison Artillery, a relatively safe billet behind the lines compared with living in the trenches. His ankle injury, suffered in a climbing accident in 1909, was ignored by the medics, but it would become a recurrent problem.
The horrors of the Somme were too terrible to write about to his wife, but in a curious forerunner to Wilfred Owen’s ‘My subject is war, and the pity of war’, Mallory wrote to Ruth: ‘Oh the pity of it, I very often exclaim when I see the dead lying about.’
We have already seen his narrow escapes from bullets and shells. He had a curiously lucky war with his postings, too, and it now appears that he had a guardian angel. Eddie Marsh, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, had interceded to make sure Mallory had ten days’ leave at Christmas 1916, and it is possible that he kept a lookout for him throughout the conflict. Marsh was another of those who had become enamoured of George Mallory – and Rupert Brooke – when, ten years before, he had seen the pair on stage at Cambridge.
One senses an invisible hand guiding events. After his leave Mallory was sent well behind the lines to act as an orderly officer. Then, when he had successfully applied to return to his battery at the front, he was invalided out by the ankle injury the day before the attack at the Battle of Arras. A ‘Blighty wound’ was one that enabled you to be sent back home to Blighty, and one that many soldiers devoutly wished for. After convalescence, Mallory managed to crush his right foot in a motorcycle accident, and missed the Battle of Passchendaele. Then, just before the Spring Offensive of 1918, he was assigned to another training course. In all, he managed to miss nearly a year and a half of the most murderous fighting at the front, even though he had actively sought to put himself in the way of danger by joining up in the first place.
I suspect that Mallory felt a sneaking sense of guilt at surviving the war unscathed while all around him were being killed or maimed. And all because of a slightly embarrassing ankle injury caused by falling off a minor crag, with perhaps a little help with his postings from a well-placed admirer. Could this have fed into a relative lack of concern for his own physical safety high up on the mountain?
A more tangible effect of the war on the first Everest expeditions was that it forced the selection of older men who had done little recent climbing. Sandy Irvine, for instance, was ten years younger than the average age of the other members in 1924. This would have reduced the overall strength of the team, and on his last climb Mallory simply didn’t have a powerful back-up of climbers forcing stores and Sherpas up the mountain behind him.
Mallory’s experiences in the war may have led him to go too carelessly, too impatiently against the greatest enemy he ever faced. His Blighty wound may also have helped his demise, as it was his right ankle that broke once again in his last fall (having saved him in the war, it may have contributed to his death after it). No one can have been very surprised at Mallory and Irvine not returning from their battle with Mount Everest, and in the official history of the 1924 expedition it seemed that Norton had seen it all before:
We were a sad little party; from the first we accepted the loss of our comrades in that rational spirit which all of our generation had learnt in the Great War, and there was never any tendency to a morbid harping on the irrevocable. But the tragedy was very near; our friends’ vacant tents and vacant places at table were a constant reminder to us of what the atmosphere of the camp would have been had things gone differe
ntly. To several of us, particularly to those who, on previous expeditions to Mount Everest or Spitzbergen, had been close friends with the missing climbers, the sense of loss was acute and personal, and until the day of our departure a cloud hung over the Base Camp. As so constantly in the war, so here in our mimic campaign Death had taken his toll from the best, for they were indeed a splendid couple.6
5
The Reconnaissance of 1921
The British Empire was driven by bloody-minded individuals with a sense of mission, such as Livingstone, Napier and Burton, and one such was Francis Younghusband, the man largely responsible for the first attempts to climb Mount Everest.
He was a small, heavily moustached man, who was almost the personification of Empire. He had become the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society, and in 1890 received the RGS Patron’s Medal for his great journey through Manchuria, undertaken when he was only 23. While on leave from his regiment, he pioneered a route between India and Kashgar, prime Great Game territory. Later, as a captain, he was ordered to survey part of the Hunza valley, where he bumped into his Russian counterpart, Captain Grombchevsky, who was surveying possible invasion routes. After dinner they swilled brandy and vodka, and compared their soldiers. They also discussed the possible outcome of a Russian invasion. After this friendly sparring, straight out of a buddy movie, they rode off in opposite directions.
The threat from Russia was therefore very real, and there was an obvious psychological advantage in gaining the high ground between the two great empires. Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, clearly wanted the highest point of the Himalayas climbed, writing that:
As I sat daily in my room, and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky, that huge palisade shutting off India from the rest of the world, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit.
Last Hours on Everest Page 4