The 1922 expedition closed with a dreadful accident on 7 June, which horrified those caught up in it. Somervell explains what happened:
When we began the initial walk to the foot of the North Col – normally an easy business – we found that we had to plough our way through snow of a most unpleasant texture, and took two hours for this first half-mile.3
Nowadays this would have rung alarm bells for experienced climbers. In good climbing conditions the snow covering on the glacier is dry and crunchy, rather like walking on polystyrene foam. But the monsoon had just set in and the snow was lying deep. Mallory had noted that there had been wind driving fine particles through the tent walls two or three days previously. As climbing leader he really should have recognised the danger.
The wind had probably whisked the fresh snow over the crest of the North Col, pulverising it into a fine ice-dust and laying it down in the form of wind-slab. This is a hard crust which is deadly dangerous because it is poorly attached to the underlying snow. When disturbed by climbers it detaches, and thousands of tons of heavy snow slide with astonishing speed: an avalanche. It is bad enough being inside one of these maelstroms, as limbs can be torn off and bodies crushed. But worse still, when the whole mass stops it quickly freezes, setting like concrete. You have only minutes to get to the surface before being trapped forever. We only know these things by learning from the pioneers.
They obviously sensed something was wrong:
At 10.15 we started the ascent of the snowy slopes of the North Col, which are steepest near their lowest part. Here we considered it most likely that an avalanche would occur. We tried to start one by stamping and jerking and treading out long trenches across the slope. But the snow would not budge, and we put all thoughts of such a possibility from our minds.
Somervell led up the slope, Mallory was next, then a porter, followed by Crawford, and behind him thirteen more porters, all heavily laden. This was quite a load for the slope. Noel had retreated, finding the weight of his cameras too exhausting. Somervell had un-roped and was moving ahead, kicking steps to save time while Mallory and Crawford waited for the toiling porters below.
I had reached a point only 600 feet below our objective, the camp on the Col, when, with a subdued report ominous in the softness of its violence, a crack suddenly appeared about 20 feet above me. The snow on which I was standing began to move, slowly at first then faster.
I was rolled over, and slid down under the snow on a swift journey which I was convinced was my last. So utterly certain of this was I that I felt no conscious fear. To my intense relief, however, the sliding mass began to slow up and, after a short time, stopped.
To his horror, though, he could only see some of the porters. The avalanche had swept over an ice-cliff and some had been killed by the fall and others by suffocation in the rapidly hardening avalanche debris. The survivors dug frantically, trying to get to their companions before they died.
The first to be dug out was my servant, Narbu. He was dead, poor fellow; with four cylinders of oxygen still tied to his back … I remember well the thought gnawing at my brain. ‘Only Sherpas and Bhotia killed – why, oh why could not one of us Britishers have shared their fate?’ I would gladly at that moment have been lying there dead in the snow, if only to give those fine chaps who had survived the feeling that we had shared their loss, as we had indeed shared the risk.
Somervell was clearly distraught by this accident and it probably contributed to a decision about his future in India that he was soon to make. Today we recognise a condition known as survivor guilt, which is sometimes experienced by those left alive after wars or accidents. It has recently been reclassified as one of the indicators of post-traumatic stress disorder. Somervell had survived both war and accident, but he was not blameless. Longstaff clearly considered him as one of those responsible:
Mallory is a very good stout hearted baby, but quite unfit to be put in charge of anything, including himself. Somervell is quite the most urbanely conceited youth I have ever struck – and quite the toughest. He was very politely scornful of our refusing to countenance the German-alpine, forlorn-hope, success-at-any-cost, death-doesn’t matter, stunt. He was honestly prepared to chuck his life away on the most remote chance of success.4
However, it seems Mallory was largely responsible for this accident, and ultimately he would be responsible for at least nine deaths, including his own. It is significant that in his account of the climb in Asia magazine, he skates over the incident. Salkeld points out:
The 1922 avalanche – I mean it was Mallory’s fault, and he was right to feel so guilty. And it reinforces that caution of Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s about sweeping along weaker brethren, ‘carried away by their belief in you, to take risks or exertions that they were not fit for.’5
The matter of Somervell’s big-headedness was noticed by others, and any dispassionate assessment of him has to acknowledge it. He clearly knew he was tough and talented, which goes some way towards explaining it. He was also comfortable and confident in his Christian faith, which perhaps led to a superior attitude. Perhaps the aftermath of the 1922 accident and a lifetime of service in India knocked some of that out of him. Wade Davis describes him thus: ‘Immensely strong, with a stout body and a head so large the men teased him about his hat size, Somervell was in fact the gentlest of souls, decent and compassionate, a devout Christian of unfailing good humour.6
It is unclear whether in this assessment of the team, published on his return to England, Bruce thought Somervell was big-headed, or just had a big head:
SOMERVELL – Stands by himself from the point of the Himalaya in his capacity as an absolute glutton for hard work, not so much that he is better on any particular day as for his extraordinary capacity for going day after day. He is a wonderful goer and climber. He takes a size 22 hat, that is his only drawback.
MALLORY – Second to Somervell in going capacity. Genuinely anxious to look after all his men. Everything else you know about him. He is a great dear but forgets his boots on all occasions.
NORTON – the great success of the expedition. Is a first rate all round mountaineer, and full of every sort of interest. Is recovering now but was very overdone.
MORSHEAD – A first rate goer, absolutely unselfish. Just the man for this sort of expedition, irrespective of his professional qualifications.
FINCH – Probably the best snow and ice man on the expedition, but has a curious constitution. On his day can probably last as well as any man, but apparently very soon shoots his bolt. I should say not a robust man for a long strain and has delicate insides. Is extraordinarily handy in all sorts of ways outside his scientific accomplishments. A convincing raconteur of quite impossible experiences. Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until next year. Six month’s course as a lama novice in a monastery would enable one to occupy a Whymper tent with him.
And in case one makes the mistake of taking Bruce’s opinions as altogether serious and unprejudiced, here is his assessment of the expedition’s Catholic, John Noel:
NOEL – Stupor mundi St. Noel of the Cameras. He is an R.C. Please approach the mountaineering Pope for his beatification during lifetime.7
After the disaster of the avalanche, it was obvious that there could be no more climbing that year and the expedition started for home. Crawford and Somervell decided to leave early and do a bit of climbing around Kangchenjunga. They climbed several virgin peaks of around 18,000ft (5,500m) and attempted Jonsong Peak (23,344ft/7,095m) from the Lhonak side, making a crude map as they went. If they had succeeded this would have been the highest mountain climbed to the summit up to that time, even though they had been a couple of thousands of feet higher a few weeks before. It shows that they still had a healthy desire to break records.
This is where I travelled in pursuit of the shade of Kellas, and it is great country still virtually unvisited by Westerners since Frank Smythe climbed Jonsong Peak on t
he Dyhrenfurth Kangchenchunga Expedition in 1930. They exited over the Lhonak Pass and returned to Kalimpong. Once at Darjeeling Somervell decided to take a look at India, and with £60 set off on his travels.
This part of his life is an interesting reflection on his character. He saw something that changed the whole course of his life, something far more compelling than the high mountains: the unrelieved suffering of India.
He had taken up an invitation from a Dr Pugh to visit Neyyoor Hospital, which was probably at that time the largest medical mission in the world in terms of patients dealt with annually. Medical missionaries taught religion, as well as dispensing more corporeal relief. Somervell found patients awaiting operations, some of them having been waiting for weeks. He rolled up his sleeves and dived in to help, and after ten days he felt an urgent need to make this his life’s work:
I have often told my friends that if I had not then gone to India at the call of suffering I should never have dared to look God in the face, nor to say prayers to him again. Nobody who saw such need and neglected to relieve it could call himself either a Christian or a sportsman. I take no credit for taking this decision, and deserve none. I simply felt that my job lay in Neyyoor, and that there was no getting out of it.8
That word ‘sportsman’ is interesting. It refers to a code of ethics that was followed by that generation, instilled in them at school and similar to the codes of the European knights or the Japanese samurai in that all of them encouraged self-denial for the benefit of the community. Almost as a test of his mettle, on his return to London he found that University College Hospital had given him a position on the surgical staff, which meant that the front door to his chosen profession had been opened. The temptation was placed squarely before him. He would also miss his home and his family and Europe, with the Alps and the Dolomites and ‘a thousand other delights’. But he was adamant, and when he told his professor of his decision he felt he had done the right thing.
When I had thus burned my boats a great peace of mind, and a contented feeling that things were all right, came over me.
I felt that I had at last obtained an object in life. I had had an unsettled existence, both during the War and after it had finished, sleeping very often in a tent, sometimes in an hotel; now cooking my own food in a dugout, now eating a good dinner with well-chosen wine in London; at one time shivering among the snows of the Alps or the Himalaya, at another scorching under a tropical sun. Now that was all ended, and it was to be the tropical sun for the rest of my life. So be it. It was a grand thing to have got it settled and off my chest. ‘The peace of God which passeth all understanding …’9
Somervell wasn’t finished with climbing, though, nor with music. He had to write the score for the Everest film that Noel had been making and arrange it for a small orchestra of nine players. He had preserved the atmosphere of the Tibetan folk-tunes he had been collecting and recorded them in Western notation. Then followed an unrelenting six months of lectures with the film when he had to give two, sometimes three talks a day, at first in London, then in all the big cities. There was clearly much public fascination with Mount Everest, one which remains today. Meanwhile Mallory was doing a similar lecture tour in the US.
In 1923 Somervell met the girl who was to become his wife: Margaret Simpson, the daughter of Sir James Hope Simpson, a Liverpool banker. She stayed with the family at Kendal, and it was at this time that he thought about marriage. But he knew by now that he was to be selected for the next year’s expedition, and he thought it unfair to ask her to marry him before he took this serious risk. This suggests that these pioneers thought that death was a real possibility. (I have to say that before every one of my expeditions I too would visit family members and put my financial affairs in order in case I didn’t return.) He hoped that no one would snap her up while he was away. I have noticed that many climbers marry immediately after an Everest expedition – in fact I did, too, in 1999. Howard married Margaret in 1925.
After Somervell’s lecture circuit there followed a glorious mountain holiday, perhaps with a bittersweet taste, as it may have felt like the last one he was to have for a while. At first he climbed in the Dolomites with his brother Billy and Frank Smythe, whom he had helped to introduce to rock-climbing in Yorkshire three years earlier. Smythe was being evaluated for the next Everest expedition. After a visit to Venice they met Beetham, Rusk and Brown to test the oxygen system for the next Everest expedition. Beetham, too, was being assessed. In the end they made the wrong decision: they took Beetham, who performed badly, whereas Smythe went on to be the foremost climber of his generation.
The oxygen set had been modified and slightly lightened. They chose a traverse of the Eiger from Scheidegg to maximise the cutting and kicking of steps, so as to test the balance of the apparatus and to see how much it hampered them. Somervell wasn’t impressed:
We got up all right in spite of its awkward size and thirty pounds weight, but we were glad when the tests were finished and we could climb again unhindered.
One might question the value of testing oxygen at such relatively low altitudes. We now know it doesn’t come into its own until 10,000ft (3,050m) higher. Somervell was more interested in how it felt to carry. It does not surprise me that he did not use the apparatus in the following year. He clearly went well at altitude and didn’t consider that the advantages outweighed the disadvantages of the cumbersome device.
I have tried one of these 1924 sets and it was an unpleasant experience. The metal frame jabbed me in the kidneys, the weight was more than you would comfortably want to carry at that altitude and I found it tended to swing me off balance. All the pipes felt fragile and I had to be careful not to bang them on a rock. The mask was unpleasant to wear and obscured the view of my feet.
The Russian Poisk set I used to the summit in 1993 was lighter, and the cylinder slid inside my rucksack, so there was no uncomfortable carrying frame. The leather mask was horrible, though, restricting visibility, and with a valve that kept on freezing up. When it worked, however, I could feel a distinct improvement and was able to make upwards progress without a feeling of suffocation. Undoubtedly oxygen would make climbing faster and the summit a possibility for the pioneers.
Before his passage out to India in October 1923 Somervell had to make preparations for six years’ residence there, as well as collecting equipment for another Everest expedition. On his way out he found the usual mixed bag of fellow-passengers:
I cannot help recording that the missionaries among them were not the most pleasant people on board. I was reprimanded by them for dancing and playing bridge … I cannot help thinking that these people do more harm than good to the Kingdom of God, and when I hear objections to missions and missionaries, I am inclined to agree with them heartily – so far as that variety is concerned.
He was himself no holy Joe, and clearly preferred practical imitation of Jesus Christ to pontificating about a set of rules. In 2009 I interviewed his son David and asked at the end, ‘Just sum up. I haven’t got to grips with him yet: what was your father like?’ He considered for a minute, and then said, ‘He was just a good bloke.’
8
‘No trace can be found, given up hope …’
The first Winter Olympics opened at Chamonix on 25 January 1924. Medals were awarded for the 1922 Mount Everest expedition. Colonel Strutt accepted them on behalf of Charles Bruce, Geoffrey Bruce, Finch, Mallory, Norton, Somervell, Tejir Bura, Narbu Sherpa, Lhakpa Sherpa, Pasang Sherpa, Pemba Sherpa, Dorje Sherpa, Temba Sherpa and Sange Sherpa. The Sherpas’ medals were awarded posthumously, as they had been killed in the avalanche. It is somewhat unusual to award Olympic medals posthumously, even for ‘the greatest feat of alpinism in the preceding four years’. And that brings us to a nice point.
As Doug Scott has pointed out, there have been many attempts to bring climbing into the Olympic fold.1 He argues that while indoor events can be judged competitively, outdoor mountaineering is a completely different kettle of fish. Most of
the participants seem to agree that there should be no competition in the high mountains, and how would one judge it, anyway? Scott goes on to say that imposing external organisation on to a small group of individuals compromises their decisions and may even threaten their lives. I would add that it was precisely that kind of external pressure from Hinks and the Mount Everest Committee that helped to bring about the 1922 disaster. Alpinism is not a game.
The whereabouts of the medals awarded to Bruce, Mallory, Somervell, Wakefield and Finch are known, but not those awarded to the Sherpas. Baron de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympic games, suggested that one of the medals should be placed on the summit of Everest and, in May 2012, the year of the London Olympics, the British climber Kenton Cool took a medal loaned by Wakefield’s family to the top. He said, ‘This promise needed keeping, and after ninety years the pledge has been honoured for Britain.’
Norton, Mallory, Geoffrey Bruce and Somervell were chosen for the 1924 attempt from the 1922 team. General Charles Bruce would again be leader, having demonstrated his excellent relationship with the porters. With success expected, Hinks, secretary of the Mount Everest Committee, wrote to congratulate Somervell and asked him for a pastel sketch from the summit. Quite what he thought the conditions would be like on the top is hard to imagine.
A Quaker climber, Richard Graham, was selected for the 1924 team, but someone objected anonymously to a pacifist being chosen. With the First World War still recent history, conscientious objectors were loathed by many of the military men that made up the expedition. But Mallory wrote to General Bruce immediately:
Last Hours on Everest Page 9