Mallory did indeed have an excellent physique. I have worn replicas of his climbing clothes on the mountain and found he was slim, and slightly shorter than me. He stood five feet, eleven inches, a height Norton considered ‘the best all-round build for a man: 5 foot 11 inches in height and 11 stone 7 lb. in clothes. Mallory, Somervell, Geoffrey Bruce and Hazard fulfilled these conditions so nearly that they might have all exchanged clothes very respectably …’8
He was ambitious, like most climbers. Having become disillusioned with school-mastering he had given up his teaching post at Charterhouse. Many of the other members of the expedition were heading upwards in their professions, and he might be excused for wanting to make his name. Norton was on his way to an eventual governorship of Hong Kong. Somervell was already eminent in his profession. Also, Mallory’s younger brother Trafford was doing rather well in the Royal Air Force, having ended the war as a squadron commander and being well on his way to heading Fighter Command during the Second World War. Everest must have seemed a tremendous opportunity.
I have never seen this suggested as an element in his motivation, but Mallory surely must have felt time slipping by, with his peers getting ahead of him. At Cambridge he had been surrounded by the best and brightest of the day: the poet Rupert Brooke was dead but lionised, John Maynard Keynes was by now a world-class economic theorist, having worked out how to pay for the war, and Lytton Strachey had published his much-applauded Eminent Victorians. Of his Pen-y-Pass climbing friends, four earned the Nobel Prize, five became cabinet ministers and fifteen were knighted. What had George Mallory achieved?
Walt Unsworth resists the temptation to deify Mallory, and in his definitive book Everest he describes him as ‘a drifter, uncommitted and indecisive’.9 Unsworth doesn’t think Mallory was particularly talented, and certainly considered him forgetful and lacking in any practical ability, citing his failure to operate the survey camera properly in 1921. He thinks he became obsessed with the mountain, even to the point of being frightened of the power it held over him. As evidence he quotes Mallory in a letter to Winthrop Young:
Geoffrey, at what point am I going to stop? … I almost hope I shall be the first to give out!10
I think Unsworth’s judgement is harsh, possibly in reaction to too much Mallory-worship by other writers, and ignores his many good qualities. He was hardly untalented, as he managed to win scholarships to both Winchester and Cambridge, the second after switching from maths to history at a late stage. He was a committed and decisive climber, as anyone who has attempted one of his routes can testify. Added to these qualities, he was a sensitive and evocative writer.
Audrey Salkeld, who has studied him more than most, has this to say:
Yes, GM could be absent-minded and sometimes clumsy. But, despite the camera plates, I don’t believe he could be described as impractical after serving in WWI in charge of one of the big guns; and I don’t think you could describe him as uncommitted.11
His whole life was one of commitment to building a fairer future – even if that didn’t always stretch to domestic commitment coming high on the priority list.
Here is another voice from a man who actually knew him at that time. Robert Graves was taught by Mallory at Charterhouse in its most philistine period, and in Goodbye to All That he describes him thus:
The most important thing that happened in my last two years … was that I got to know George Mallory: a twenty-six or twenty-seven-year-old master, not long up from Cambridge and so very youthful-looking as to be often mistaken for a member of school. From the first, he treated me as an equal …12
Mallory was notably young-looking all of his short life, and it was one of his attractive qualities. Rather surprisingly, for anyone who has seen photographs of him looking like a matinee idol, he smoked a pipe and occasionally wore spectacles. He was a kindly and egalitarian master who spotted Graves’s literary talent and nurtured it. Graves’s family was not wealthy and he wrote poetry, and as a result of both of these he was ostracised and bullied. Graves wrote that Mallory made a point of looking after boys who were having a hard time:
He always managed to find four or five boys who were, like him, out of their element, befriending and making life tolerable for them.
Although he generally took the liberal view in debate, he was not pious. In many of the team photographs on Everest he is clowning about. In one shot he is clearly head-wrestling with Somervell just as the camera-shutter clicks. General Bruce is turning round to see what all the commotion is about, and the other members are looking rather bemused.
In 1990 David Breashears and I found the exact spot where in 1922 Morshead, Mallory, Norton and Somervell posed after the first-ever attempt to climb the mountain. David matched up the boulders in the foreground and we studied the original. Morshead is clearly suffering from his frostbite injuries and Somervell looks fairly dour but Mallory looks as though he is puffing himself out in comical grandiosity. In other stills he has his foot on someone’s shoulder and in the moving footage he seems to be cracking jokes and making the others laugh. One gets the impression that he didn’t want to be taken too seriously.
Somervell described what they talked about:
Sometimes we played card games for two, such as piquet, but more often we read selections from the Spirit of Man, by Robert Bridges, or bits of modern poetry, each reading aloud to the other passages of which we were particularly fond. We discussed climbs in the Alps and planned expeditions for the future. We made, among other things, a detailed plan for the first complete ascent of the Peuterey ridge of Mont Blanc.13
This is very much what we do nowadays on the mountain: poetry reading and planning expeditions for the future (the first ascent of the entire Peuterey Ridge, including the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey – the Intégrale – had to wait until July 1934).
Mallory knew many of the artists in the Bloomsbury set. He had stayed in France with Simon Bussy and his wife, and knew the English artist Duncan Grant even better – he sat nude for him, telling Grant ‘I am profoundly interested in the nude me’. He enjoyed the iconoclasm of modern art and the way it challenged established views, and Somervell’s brand of muscular cubism was to his taste.
What is striking is the amount of love he engendered in his friends. He was a ‘great dear’. Somervell went on to say:
During this and subsequent Everest expeditions, George Mallory was the man who I always felt that I knew the best, and I have seldom had a better or more intimate friend. When one shares a tent for days on end throughout the better part of six months with such a man, one gets an insight into his character such is vouchsafed to few other men. These many days of companionship with a man whose outlook on life was lofty and choice, human and loving, and in a measure divine, still remains for me a priceless memory … in general he took always the big and liberal view. He was really concerned with social evils, and recognised that they could only be satisfactorily solved by the changing and ennobling of individual character. He hated anything that savoured of hypocrisy or humbug, but cherished all that is really good and sound. His was a great soul, and I pray that some of its greatness may live on in the souls of his friends.14
I have always admired men like Somervell and Mallory, but I try to see them with clear eyes. As boyhood heroes they gave me something to live up to, and as an adult I still find them inspirational. They were much more than just mountain climbers; they were Renaissance men and polymaths. Mallory had a genuine belief in the improving power of education, and had he survived he could well have helped Kurt Hahn and Geoffrey Winthrop Young in setting up Gordonstoun, a school that embodied some of his beliefs. Somervell told of his schemes to bring the classes together. Equally, he might have become a socialist politician within the League of Nations.
However, it is important to note that in 1915 Ruth and George had four servants: a nursemaid for the children, a cook, a maid and a gardener. This was quite normal for a middle-class family at the time; even a bank clerk such as T. S. Eli
ot would be expected to have a house-maid. In 1921 George suggested to Ruth in a letter from the Kharta valley that they might employ another servant. He was one of the expedition porters, Nima, an eighteen-year-old boy:
… he would fetch and carry – he is a coolie whose job is to carry; and if you want a box weighing 70 pounds brought from the station, you would simply send him … He would save many a taxi drive by carrying luggage to the station … His present diet is chiefly flour and water, rice, occasionally meat, and as luxuries a little tea and butter … He might inhabit part of the cellar … Would the other servants like him? Well, he is a clean animal and though he would look a bit queer to them at first they couldn’t help liking him. He is not very dark skinned like a plainsman.
This might read to us today as the most breathtaking, patronising racism, but remember that Mallory was considered a liberal. Most of his British companions would have had similar attitudes. It did not mean that they despised their local employees; the attitude was more like that of benevolent pet-owners. They loved their men, and when they died in their service the Europeans were genuinely grieved.
Mallory had a curious aversion to Canadians, for no apparent reason. ‘Wheeler I have hardly spoken to,’ he wrote to Ruth in 1921, ‘but you know my complex about Canadians. I shall have to swallow before I like him, I expect. God send me the saliva.’ However, Mallory did not just restrict his prejudices to Canadians; he had it in for the Tibetans, too. He described their land as ‘a hateful country inhabited by hateful people’. As for progress towards a fairer world, the war threw all classes and races together, and helped to do more for social equality than any amount of talking. Servants were hard to find after 1918.
My feeling is that Mallory had ambitions as a writer and wanted to make writing his career, as is made clear in a letter to Graves. His chapters in Everest Reconnaissance 1921 far out-shine Howard-Bury’s account. His writing is full of the excitement of exploring new country, and the details of puzzling out the landscape. The reader is drawn into the quest for a route up the great mountain. Had he climbed Everest and returned I could see him having the same kind of success that T. E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) had with Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Like him, he would have had a story of great adventure to tell, and like Lawrence – with his good looks and whiff of homo-eroticism – he would probably have become the public’s darling.
Mallory clearly had plans for the future and I believe he was well aware of the cachet he would obtain if he climbed the mountain. This fame would help to further these plans. When he hesitated in 1921, considering the fact that he was married with three children, Winthrop Young went down to see him and Ruth, and urged him to go to Everest for this very reason – to get ‘ticketed’:
I saw them both together, and in twenty minutes talk, Ruth saw what I meant: how much the label of Everest would mean for his career and educational plans.
And this is when I think the rot set in. People often try to climb Everest ‘to get famous’, in the words of Thendup Sherpa. The mountain has been seen as a ticket to success since the very beginning.
7
1922, and the First Attempt to Climb Mount Everest
After establishing a set of intermediate camps, Camp IV was established on the North Col, at a height of 23,000ft (7,010m). Mallory, Morshead, Norton and Somervell were chosen to make the first attempt on the peak.
The first climb on Mount Everest was to be an oxygen-less attempt, and on 20 May they set up Camp V at around 25,000ft (7,620m) at the top of the long snow-slope leading from the North Col. I filmed there in 1990 with David Breashears and Brian Blessed, and it is an awful camp, stony and sloping at an angle of 30°. Worse, it lies in the funnelling wind-blast between Changtse and the North Ridge. The next day they climbed to about 27,000ft (8,230m). Norton said, ‘Our tempers were getting a bit edgy, and though no actual quarrels broke out we were each feeling definitely quarrelsome.’ After climbing higher than anyone had ever climbed before, they decided to call it a day.
On the way back, with Morshead suffering from extreme dehydration and clearly very unwell, there was a slip that nearly killed them all. This seems to me a strange portent of an accident that was to happen not far from this spot two years later. The incident is worth examining, as I think it might help us understand how the fall that killed Mallory in 1924 might have begun. Somervell tells the story:
I was going last and Mallory first, at a place where we had to cross the steep head of a long, wide couloir which swept down to the foot of the mountain, 3,000 feet below us. The man in front of me slipped at a time when I was just moving myself, and I, too, was jerked out of my steps. Both of us began sliding at increasing speed down the icy couloir. The second man checked our progress for a moment, but could not hold us. He, too, was dragged off his feet.1
Having been involved in a couple of accidents myself this all seems terribly familiar. Most start with a tiny mistake, which leads to a small problem, which leads to a full-blown disaster, as happened with Whymper’s party on the first ascent of the Matterhorn. It often begins with carelessness, such as not bothering to fasten a loose crampon strap, or fatigue, when you can’t be bothered to check where your feet are going. Somervell was nursing Morshead in front of him, although he decently refrains from naming him. Morshead was clearly at his last extremity and this is when slips happen. So here, as described by Somervell, are three men sliding down the mountain on their way to a fatal end to the first attempt to climb Mount Everest:
But Mallory had had just enough time to prepare for a pull on the rope, digging his axe firmly into the hard snow. It held, and so did the rope, and the party was saved. I remember having no thought of danger or impending disaster, but experimenting, as I slipped down, as to whether I could control my pace with the pick of my axe in the snow and the ice of the couloirs, and whether the rest of us could, too. I had just decided that my pace was constant, and was not accelerating, and was feeling rather pleased with myself when the rope pulled us up with a jerk. My experiment was stopped, for Mallory had saved my life and the lives of us all.
Very often during an accident one observes it dispassionately as Somervell does here, which means that one can try to retrieve the situation. Mallory in this case had time during the development of the accident to dig his axe in and brace himself. One wonders if there had been just two climbers, as in 1924, whether he would have had the time.
Morshead proved to have been badly frost-bitten, and was ‘obviously not far from death’. Today we might guess that he had become severely dehydrated by the dry air of high altitudes, which, exacerbated by the high respiration rate, sucks the fluid out of you faster than you can believe. Modern-day climbers at great altitude try to drink at least three litres of fluid a day.
To our pioneers’ horror Camp IV on the North Col below them had been abandoned and the stoves taken down, so they were left with no means to melt water. They suffered appalling thirst and when they eventually got back Somervell drank 17 large cups of tea without stirring from his seat. Morshead’s frostbite had been exacerbated by his lack of fluid intake, as the more viscous blood would not circulate properly to his extremities. Poor Morshead. He tried to remain cheerful in company, but used to go off on his own and cry like a child with the pain of his frostbite injuries. He was to lose the tops of three fingers on his right hand.
The first attempt to climb Mount Everest had been made, they had come very close to death, but important lessons had been learned about dehydration, the value of Sherpas and the need for parties to be supported by manned camps below. Finch was about to prove the effectiveness of oxygen. We benefit by those lessons even today.
Next up the mountain were the oxygen party of George Finch, determined to prove the benefits of his derided gas, with his inexperienced companion Geoffrey Bruce, here on his first-ever mountain climb, and on the way setting an altitude world record. Can there be any other sport in which this would be possible? Everest has often been kind to amateurs.
It is worth remembering that they really didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. I found a recording of Geoffrey Bruce in the BBC archive, and realised that they must have been concerned about the altitudes they were going to:
We were warned it would probably be extremely dangerous to attempt to spend the night at 23,000 feet above sea-level, and that it might even be fatal to attempt to penetrate without oxygen to a height of 26,000 feet. We were able on that very first attempt to show that the human frame was able to stand up to very considerably greater exertions than the scientists had told us.2
Finch had proved his point with the oxygen apparatus, getting to around 27,300ft (8,320m), but they had only added a few hundred feet to the record. They went the same way as the others, indeed by the same route taken by all the pre-war British attempts: a traverse under the Second Step into the Norton Couloir (also known as the Great Couloir).
After a retreat to Base Camp, there was an ill-considered last attempt at the beginning of June, the party consisting of Somervell, Mallory, Noel, Colin Crawford and 14 porters. Pressure was being applied from London, and General Bruce was aware that with a worsening political atmosphere in Lhasa this might be the last chance.
Finch was supposed to go, too, but retired with exhaustion and an enlarged heart. Is it possible that with his superior snow-craft he was uneasy about this last, desperate attempt? Was there a disagreement? Could this partly explain his non-selection for the next expedition, considering what was about to happen? We know he was more experienced in snow mountaineering than Mallory, good with the oxygen and strong, but he was also didactic and opinionated. The Everest pundits tell us that this was a class antipathy, with the horrid colonial being shunned by the English upper-class gentlemen, but I suspect there might be more of I-told-you-so in the reason.
Last Hours on Everest Page 8