Odell’s extraordinary performance over the next few days is even more remarkable when one realises that he had been turned down by Mallory for the final summit push in favour of the far less experienced Irvine. He showed no resentment, though, exerting himself to the utmost. What a man! If only Mallory had chosen him as his climbing companion history could have been very different. His sighting of the pair has been agonised over by countless authorities, so it is worth going back to see exactly what he wrote. I will add an emphasis to certain words to show the changes in what he recounted.
After his crucial sighting of Mallory and Irvine on 8 June he first recorded his observation in a single line in his diary:
At 12.50 saw M & I on ridge nearing base of final pyramid.
This was subsequently expanded in the expedition dispatches and later printed in the Alpine Journal thus:
The entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock-step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great rock-step and shortly emerged at the top; the second did likewise … The place on the ridge referred to is the prominent rock-step at a very short distance from the base of the final pyramid.3
Forty pages on in the same Alpine Journal, though, is a subtly different version of the same story, also by Odell:
I saw the whole summit ridge and final peak of Everest unveiled. I noticed far away on a snow slope leading up to the last step but one from the base of the final pyramid a tiny object moving and approaching the rock step. A second object followed, and then the first climbed to the top of the step. As I stood intently watching this dramatic appearance, the scene became enveloped in cloud, and I could not actually be certain that I saw the second figure join the first.4
Another slightly different version appeared in the official expedition book. I have a first edition of it open in front of me, a grand, green giant of a book, with the title The Fight for Everest 1924 picked out in gold letters on the front. Odell writes:
At about 26,000 I climbed a little crag which could possibly have been circumvented, but which I decided to tackle direct, more perhaps as a test of my condition than for any other reason. There was scarcely 100 feet of it, and as I reached the top there was sudden clearing of the atmosphere above me and I saw the whole summit ridge and final peak of Everest unveiled. I noticed far away on a snow slope leading up to what seemed to me to be the last step but one from the base of the final pyramid, a tiny object moving and approaching the rock step. A second object followed, and then the first climbed to the top of the step. As I stood intently watching this dramatic appearance, the scene became enveloped in cloud once more, and I could not actually be certain that I saw the second figure join the first.
Then he contradicts himself on the same page. Having said the whole summit ridge and final peak were unveiled he continues:
Owing to the small portion of the summit ridge uncovered I could not be precisely certain at which of these two ‘steps’ they were, as in profile and from below they are very similar, but at the time I took it for the upper ‘second step’. However I am a little doubtful now whether the latter would not be hidden by the projecting nearer ground from my position below on the face. I could see that they were moving expeditiously as if endeavouring to make up for lost time.5
I hate to be nit-picking, but this is important stuff. The answer to the whole mystery could depend on the accuracy of his sighting. Could he see the whole summit ridge and final peak, or could he only see a small portion? Were they ‘nearing the final pyramid’, or were they on the ‘last step but one from the base of the final pyramid’?
Odell was not as familiar with the topography of the summit ridge as we are now, and in particular he didn’t know that the Second Step is a formidable climbing proposition that now has a ladder attached to it. Most experts agree that it could not be climbed quickly, in the way Odell describes, by Mallory and Irvine wearing their clumsy boots. He also didn’t know that the First Step is easily bypassed from below.
Most intriguingly he doesn’t mention another step, nearer to the final pyramid, that Audrey Salkeld calls the ‘Third Step’. I have been near Odell’s viewpoint on the North Ridge and the First and Second Steps look nothing like what Odell describes. However, the only feature that approximates to a step near the base of the final pyramid is the Third Step. If Mallory and Irvine were surmounting this at 12:50pm they were almost certainly not going to stop until they reached the summit.
In the 1933 expedition book there is a possible solution to the mystery. Shipton and Smythe were climbing near Camp VI and saw what they thought were Wyn-Harris and Bill Wager climbing the Second Step. They stared hard at the two little dots, which appeared to move. Then they realised that they were rocks. Furthermore there were two more rocks on a snow slope above the Step.
The jury is still out on this sighting. One can argue it either way, and people do. Wade Davis points out in Into the Silence one ‘curious uncertainty’ about Odell: that he went to his death convinced that he had been wounded three times during the war. However, Davis could only find evidence of one wound. The implication is that his memory could not perhaps be totally relied upon. In the end I think you have to file Odell’s sighting as an unreliable clue, rather like the shifting mists that did – or did not – obscure his vision.
There is another clue that is even more tantalising. My father had a story that a body had been seen back in the 1930s, below where the axe was found. A telescope had been used to spot it. Then we saw a story in the newspapers. In my edition of After Everest is tucked the cutting from The Times of 21 February 1980. It is a Reuters report headlined ‘Riddle of Everest nears solution – Japanese climbers to seek Briton’s body’. It states that a Chinese climber, Wang Hong Bao, had found the body of an Englishman during the Chinese Everest expedition of 1975. This was reported by Wang to Ayoten Hasegawa, a member of a Japanese reconnaissance party, as they stood just below the North Col in October 1979.
According to Mr. Hasagewa, Wang, pointing with his pick axe to the final pyramid area, said he saw the body behind rocks and wrote the figure 8,100 on the snow, indicating the height in metres.
Mr. Hasegawa does not understand Chinese but with the help of Wang’s gestures and written Chinese characters he understood what Wang wanted to say.6
But did he really? In an extraordinary twist of fate Wang himself was killed in an avalanche on the North Col the very day after he had told his story, so it could never be corroborated. The report announced that the Japanese team would be searching for the camera carried by Mallory or Irvine. This was the first of many such search expeditions.
The question my father and I discussed after seeing this news was this: was Uncle Hunch’s camera next to the body? The two climbers certainly might have been expected to have taken a picture of the highest point reached. I contacted Kodak, and they said that a printable image could in theory be obtained should the camera ever be retrieved. The old black-and-white film was less susceptible to cosmic rays than modern colour reels. If found and developed, this photograph could solve the mystery. Imagine one’s feelings as the image developed in the bath of solution. Is that Lhotse looking lower in the background? Is that Mallory holding up the British flag?
The prevailing opinion within the international climbing fraternity in those days was that Mallory and Irvine died trying to reach the top, and that Hillary and Tenzing were the first to climb Mount Everest in 1953, on a British expedition that had finally learned how to put men on the summit after years of embarrassing failures. Mallory was clearly on their minds in 1953 – Hillary wrote in The Ascent of Everest that the first thing he did on reaching the summit was to look for traces of Mallory and Irvine.
I then discovered another vital clue, one that has not until this moment been revealed in public, and is again closel
y connected to my family.
10
John Hoyland and a New Clue
It is a wonderful morning and the sun is full on the summit of Mont Blanc, high up above me as I write … I do not wonder those poor boys went all out to climb it. ‘The Utmost for the Highest’. I am gazing up at it now with the early morning sun on the white-domed summit. Such a tombstone as he would have longed for, poor boy.1
These words were written by my grandfather, Jack Hoyland, as in September 1934 he prepared to set off with Frank Smythe to search for his 19-year-old son. My uncle John had disappeared on Mont Blanc in an attempt to climb the Innominata Ridge with his companion Paul Wand, and had not been seen since.
I have the little leather-bound book that my grandfather edited and had privately circulated. It is entitled John Doncaster Hoyland. John looks out of the photograph with a dark swipe of hair across his forehead: handsome, diffident, with intense brown eyes. There is a coil of hemp climbing rope around his shoulders. As I carefully turn over the tissue paper protecting the photograph, I read an inscription from Frank Smythe suggesting the curious mixture of mountaineering and spirituality that John embodied:
The philosophy of the hills is a simple one. On them we approach a little nearer to the ends of the Earth and the beginnings of Heaven. Over the hills the spirit of man passes towards his Maker.2
John’s story is a tragic one. His mother, Helen Doncaster, of the Sheffield steel family, had met John Somervell Hoyland (Jack) before the First World War. She was an Oxford graduate and had been to the Mount, a Quaker school. He, too, was from a Quaker family with a long liberal tradition, including support for female emancipation and the anti-slavery movement (the seal of his aunt’s letters featured a black American slave and the words ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’). Quakers were pacifists and engaged in non-belligerent businesses, such as the chocolate of the Cadburys.
Jack and Helen married, and she followed him to India. However, she died in 1919 of enteric fever shortly after their baby son, Peter, was born. Peter then died of malaria. John, her eldest child, died on Mont Blanc. And Denys, her second son, was later to die fighting the Germans in the fierce fighting at Coriano Ridge on the east coast of Italy during the Second World War. My grandfather’s first family was completely wiped out. It must have tested his faith to the utmost, particularly as his own beloved mother, Rachel Somervell, had died when he was five years old, whispering ‘Be a good boy, Jack.’
He took her instruction to heart, becoming a missionary in India like his cousin Howard Somervell, and like him won the Kaisar-i-Hind medal, in his case for relief during the 1918 influenza epidemic.
In the Central Provinces alone the mortality during those terrible few weeks was greater than the casualties of the whole British Empire during the whole war. Bad harvests and near famine conditions made things worse. Some villages were practically wiped out; many lost 50% of their people … They (John Somervell Hoyland and some of the Christian boys from his school that he took with him) worked furiously, 14–16 hours a day, week after week, snatching a little food when they could … local doctors supplied the medicines and the instructions, and magnificent work was done. Jack was proud of his volunteers …3
He was described to me by Robin Hodgkin, the 1930s climber, as ‘a Quaker saint’. When the local postman was eaten by a tiger he took on the mail round until a replacement was found.
He was also supportive of the Indian independence movement and knew Gandhi, the most famous recipient of the Kaisar-i-Hind. They shared a voluminous correspondence until Gandhi begged, ‘Jack, please don’t write such long letters.’ He came to stay at Woodbrooke in Birmingham, the college where Jack was principal, in 1931. My father, then a little boy, was touched on the head by Gandhi, and was blessed by him. He remembered ‘a little old man wearing a dhoti’. The great Mahatma famously visited Buckingham Palace wearing the same loin cloth, probably the first visitor to do so.
Long after Helen died, Jack met a young woman, Jessie Marais, who had also lost her family. Her father, François Marais, had been a doctor in Johannesburg, and in March 1904 he returned home feeling unwell. He had been treating patients among the Indian mining community, and had caught pneumonic plague. A lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi had been helping to segregate those infected.
Jessie’s father died very soon afterwards. The family were called to his bedside and kissed him goodbye, but Jessie, then aged 11, refused to kiss him, even though she adored him. She always believed this saved her life, because one by one, in the order they kissed her father, the rest of the family died. Perhaps Jack and Jessie were drawn together by the shared experience of loss. He proposed to Jessie with 1,000 kisses. Jessie later wrote, ‘I don’t advise this method, it was something to be endured.’ Soon they had three children: my father Michael, who became an artist and writer; Rachel, a marriage-guidance counsellor; and Francis, an artist of religious conviction.
John Hoyland, the eldest son of the first marriage, had been left with his Doncaster grandparents at the age of four, virtually orphaned, while his father went back to India to save souls. Charity ended at home, it seems. His father taught him not to cry when he fell over, but to laugh: an ironic injunction considering the way he was going to die.
John started climbing on Stanage Edge near Sheffield with his Doncaster cousins, who pioneered such climbs as Doncaster’s Route in 1935. I have climbed this and it would have been a tough, dangerous proposition in the 1930s, wearing socks over the boots for grip, and protected by only a hemp rope. John went up to Oxford in 1933 to St Peter’s Hall to study medicine and surprised the Oxford University Mountaineering Club with his climbing ability during the Helyg meet in North Wales in March 1934.
Here he performed a spectacular rescue on Longland’s Climb on Clogwyn Du’r Arddu. Jack Longland himself, repeating his own climb, had just persuaded a Professor Turnbull, of St Andrew’s University, to tie on to the end of the rope. It has only recently come to light that the professor, who was somewhat overweight, had arrived at the bottom of the crag wearing two left plimsolls. John’s climbing partner, John Jenkins, described the route:
The most difficult part of Longland’s Climb is a sloping crack at the top of a long 100-foot slab. The left hand edge of this slab is an overhang, so if anyone slips on this difficult part they slip over the overhang and there is nothing to stop them until they reach the grass at the foot of the climb.
The fat professor fell off, unsurprisingly, and was dangling 12 feet away from the crag, 10 feet above the ground. John raced down his own climb and managed to climb above the victim, reach his rope and reel him in. ‘It was John’s rescue of Turnbull that really brought him to the notice of the “great men”,’ wrote Jenkins.
In fact, the ‘great man’ Geoffrey Winthrop Young was privately furious with the ‘great man’ Jack Longland, and ticked him off for endangering the reputation of their famous Pen-y-Pass Easter climbing parties. John Hoyland had certainly made his mark. A couple of days later he joined Winthrop Young’s party, where he met ‘all sorts of great men – two Everest men and daughters of Mallory among others’.
Longland had been on the Everest expedition of the previous year, 1933. In a letter of thanks to Winthrop Young, John Hoyland wrote:
I had a very enjoyable climb with the two Mallory girls the day I left. The way they glided up the rocks made me feel quite ashamed, as you said, they were wonderfully grateful and pleased whatever one did with them – even though they were quite as capable of leading as I was.4
It must have been heady stuff, socialising with the great and the good of English climbing. Did John push himself too far as a result? Yes, almost certainly. Was he seeking approval from older men, having lacked his own father when he was growing up? Probably.
John wasn’t humourless, though. One warm summer’s night at Oxford he climbed onto the roof of the Indian Institute, where he removed the elephant-shaped bronze weathervane. Pursued by a knife-wielding Indian caretaker (a light
sleeper), he roped down into the darkness and landed on top of the warden’s wife, who was asleep in a hammock. John was fairly shy but he must have charmed her, as she let him off if he promised to return the way he came. (I didn’t know this story when I abseiled off my college tower on the flagpole line during a circumnavigation of the roof in 1977. Luckily I didn’t end up on top of anybody’s wife.)
After that first year at Oxford John taught maths and cricket for a few weeks in 1934 at his old prep school, the Downs at Malvern. He was there with his brother Michael (my father), who was the first child from Jack Hoyland’s second marriage to Jessie Marais. The headmaster, his uncle Geoffrey (my Aunt Dolly Cadbury’s husband), employed the poet W. H. Auden at the school from 1932 to 1935, so he would have known John well. My father remembered staff and boys sleeping outside in the summer and Auden’s famous poem about agape, or divine love, ‘A Summer Night’, evokes the scene. It was dedicated to Geoffrey Hoyland:
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
In the windless nights of June;
Forest of green have done complete
The day’s activity; my feet
Point to the rising moon …
Auden and Isherwood’s play The Ascent of F6, written in 1936 and containing the famous ‘Stop all the clocks’ stanzas used in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, features a doomed hero-mountaineer who owes more than a little to John Hoyland. I think it might have been influenced by him, as might Auden’s poem about loss, ‘Johnny’, which is a companion-piece to ‘Stop all the clocks’:
Last Hours on Everest Page 12