Last Hours on Everest

by Graham Hoyland

  O the valley in the summer where I and my John

  Beside the deep river would walk on and on

  While the flowers at our feet and the birds up above

  Argued so sweetly on reciprocal love,

  And I leaned on his shoulder; ‘O Johnny, let’s play’:

  But he frowned like thunder and he went away.5

  This is how the inevitable accident happened, which led to the clue about Mallory’s body. John went to the Alps that year with Paul Wand, the son of the Archbishop of Brisbane. Paul was a sensitive soul, and a protector of the weak. His father reported that when travelling in Germany in 1932 they saw a Jew being led out of Würzburg by the Nazis, ‘and I had to hurry him off the train for fear he would attempt a single-handed rescue’.

  They started with a hard route on the Grépon in the Mont Blanc massif. John wrote ‘a very gleeful note’ to Longland, perhaps trying to impress the Everest man, and decided to try something even harder. This was the Innominata Ridge on the savage South Face of Mont Blanc, a route that Mallory had looked at in 1920 with his friends David Pye, Herbert Reade and Claude Elliot, but had turned back due to poor weather. If only John Hoyland and Paul Wand had done the same, as the ridge was far too ambitious for such inexperienced climbers. On 22 August they arrived late at the Gamba Hut from Courmayeur and were extremely tired from carrying huge loads. The following day they left in the morning, telling the guardian that they would be attempting the Innominata route. Bad weather came in, and nothing was ever heard of them again.

  Jack Longland, who was an educationalist as well as a climber, clearly felt guilty as he knew that he had encouraged the journey to the Alps that ended in the deaths of two young men. In a letter to Geoffrey Winthrop Young he wrote:

  It’s a rotten futile business, and I don’t feel wholly clear of blame myself, especially after your letter. I encouraged John to go out to the Alps, and begin fitting himself for the future that seemed to lie obviously open to him … After that it’s just a miserable story – tired boys losing their way to the Gamba hut, the too-heavy packs, the pushing off in poor weather, and all of it.6

  Winthrop Young would have known about those feelings of guilt as he had encouraged Mallory himself years before, and persuaded Ruth in 1921 that Everest was just the ticket her husband needed.

  After hearing no news for a month my grandfather asked Frank Smythe to accompany him out to the Alps to look for his son. One can only imagine his feelings during that month of waiting. They arrived in Courmayeur, where Smythe engaged the famous guide Adolf Rey and climbed up to the Gamba Hut (now replaced by the Monzino Hut). It was the first time Smythe had ever climbed with a guide. The next morning they set off up the Brouillard glacier and reached the Col du Fresnay. Just above the col one of the guides found an ice axe protruding from the snow. In the 1934 Alpine Journal Smythe wrote about John’s accident, and refers to Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance, and the discovery of the ice axe:

  The discovery of the ice axe reminded me immediately of the similar find on Everest last year. What most probably happened was that the leader slipped, and the second man having no firm snow into which to drive his axe put it down in order to seize the rope in both hands and, failing to stop the leader, was himself dragged down, leaving his axe behind him.7

  Looking down from here on to the other side of the col all the way to the Fresney glacier, they saw ‘an object on its surface which did not possess the appearance of a stone’. This is a strange echo of Conrad Anker’s description of his first sighting of Mallory’s body: ‘I saw a patch of white, that was whiter than the rock that was around and whiter than the snow that was there.’ They descended, coming across signs of gross over-loading:

  Full-sized table forks and spoons, heavy skiing gloves, heavy woollen sweaters, guide-book and underclothing, a condensed milk tin, a bivouac tent weighing at least six pounds.

  They reached the surface of the glacier and found the bodies of the two students lying about ten feet apart. Smythe was shocked by the sight:

  The bodies were lying some 50 yards beyond the bergschrund and it was obvious from the nature of their injuries that they had been killed instantly.

  They were wearing crampons, which in the soft snow would have balled up between the spikes and become dangerously insecure. Their bivouac gear hadn’t been used and the watch on John’s body had stopped at 3:52pm, suggesting they had been slow, perhaps as a result of carrying too much.

  They brought the news back to my grandfather. The next day he set off with Smythe to watch a rescue party of bearers retrieve the bodies. I have next to me a yellowed letter with a rusty paperclip, a letter he sent at the end of that day. It is a painful document, full of stoical grief:

  This has been a long day. It started at 5.30. Smythe and I got off about 7.00 and climbed up and up through meadows full of autumn crocuses to a Col, and then left to a point (eventually) 8,500 feet up, exactly opposite to Mont Blanc. We had borrowed an extremely inadequate telescope, and watched the bearer party struggling up and down over the frightfully rough Fresney glacier towards where we could see the boys lying.

  My grandfather was worried that the Courmayeur guides might be injured in this operation. In the event two of the men were slightly injured by falling stones. The bodies were brought down and loaded into a lorry.

  At the villages people came out and bared their heads, and at Courmayeur people, especially poor people, ran out and put wreaths on the coffins and gave the Fascist salute.

  This is an odd detail but in 1934 Italy had a Fascist government, Mussolini having been in power for 12 years. The following day an Italian padre came from Aosta for the burial, and the coffins were carried by the guides who had retrieved the boys. Two of them carrying John were bandaged from injuries received in the stone-swept couloirs the previous day. Jack’s last words in the letter were:

  Everybody has been extraordinarily kind: lots of people shaking hands, and saying ‘Courage!’

  I have been to the graveyard in Courmayeur. It is a sad little place, filled with the dead from Mont Blanc. I wish every young climber who takes big risks could read Jack’s letter. I wish John could have been an uncle to me. The grief caused by mountaineering accidents is immeasurable and never-ending. Sandy Irvine’s mother left a candle burning in the porch for years after his disappearance, just in case her boy found his way back home.

  The Hoyland family were devastated, and that year Somervell painted one of his best pictures, an oil painting titled The Aiguille de Grépon, to help commemorate his young cousin who had climbed the peak just before his death. It still hangs at the Downs School. Jack Hoyland was consoled to some degree by a letter from Longland received before the search:

  I can’t say how grieved I am at what has happened. If things are as you fear, I can only say that I looked on John as potentially the best mountaineer of his generation. There is literally nobody of whom I had hoped such great things, and to whose development I looked forward to so intensely. I doubt if there has been any young climber since George Mallory of whom it seemed safe to expect so much, and there was certainly no one who would have been so certain to fulfil his Everest or Himalayan ambitions in five or six years time.

  For my own part, John attracted me and impressed me personally more than anyone else of his generation and I was proud to have his friendship.8

  What killed John Hoyland – and his hero George Mallory – was obsession. This word crops up again and again. John Jenkins, his climbing friend, knew this very well:

  Men are born into every generation who, from their early boyhood, are destined to become great in some particular sphere. John Hoyland was one of these. All great men make mistakes. Some mistakes don’t matter very much and are soon forgotten – an ill-timed speech, a dauby painting, a shoddy poem. But in mountaineering a mistake can be, and often is, fatal … From the very first John had been possessed of an almost fanatical love of the mountains, which later developed into a sort of obsession. He
was never really happy unless he was in the hills, and he used to look up at them with a strange look of understanding in his deep-set eyes …9

  John Jenkins was himself killed 13 years later on Mont Blanc, on the Old Brenva route, not far from where his friend met his end. John Hoyland was obsessive and over-reached himself, but he might have been killed in the Second World War as his brother was. Is it not better to die in the mountains striving, rather than trying to kill another person?

  Privately, Frank Smythe was far less complimentary than Longland and Jenkins had been, having, literally, to pick up the pieces. He saw the accident as symptomatic of the sort of do-or-die climbing that was arising on the Continent. He referred to this incident in a to-date unpublished letter to Norton (the letter was kindly sent to me in 2006 by Tony Smythe, Frank’s son, although my father already knew the story). The letter was written in response to Norton’s praise for Camp Six, Smythe’s account of the 1933 expedition, and in it he discusses the discovery of the ice axe mentioned in his book:

  I’m afraid I can’t have put the ice axe theory very clearly. To begin with I’ve always assumed the yellow band to continue right up to the crest of the NE ridge as the rock is similar in colour all the way. The axe was found not more than 60 feet from the crest of the ridge and this rules out your idea that it was Somervell’s axe. Also it was made by Willisch of Täsch, who is known to have supplied a number of axes to the expedition, and Somervell, who must have seen it, has never claimed it. Even if you had been on the ridge when S. dropped his axe you would have recovered it. I doubt whether it would be even out of sight of the ridge.

  And here was the clue about the location of Mallory’s body (the emphases are mine):

  Since my search for the two Oxford fellows I feel convinced that it marks the scene of an accident to Mallory and Irvine. There is something else, which I mention with reserve – it’s not to be written about, as the press would make an unpleasant sensation. I was scanning the face from the Base camp through a high-powered telescope last year, when I saw something queer in a gully below the scree shelf. Of course it was a long way away and very small even when seen through a high-powered telescope, but I’ve a 6/6 eyesight and I do not believe it was a rock. I remember when searching for the Oxford men on Mont Blanc we looked down on to a boulder-strewn glacier and saw something which wasn’t a rock either – it proved to be 2 bodies. The object was at precisely the point where Mallory and Irvine would have fallen had they rolled on over the scree slopes below the yellow band. I think it is highly probable that we shall find further evidence next year.10

  It is probable that he is referring to Mallory’s body, which still lies just where he describes it (or possibly Irvine’s, which surely lies nearby). This letter corroborates the family story that an English climber had seen a body at this place. The Wang Hong Bao report seemed to tie in with this earlier sighting: two independent witnesses, which together made it a more reliable clue.

  While on leave in Britain between 1935 and 1936 Somervell had met Frank Smythe to discuss the forthcoming 1936 Everest expedition and mentioned to him that he thought it might be possible to place a camp in the Great Couloir that Norton had reached in 1924. I would guess that it was then that Smythe passed on this story, knowing that Somervell was John Hoyland’s cousin.

  These facts together made me convinced that I should try to search for Somervell’s camera at Smythe’s suggested location, and look for further evidence along the route I thought Mallory and Irvine had taken.

  11

  I First Set Eyes on Mount Everest

  I realised I should now start trying to climb the mountain to search for the body that Wang Hong Bao had seen. His report seemed to back up my father’s story of the Smythe sighting. Surely Somervell’s camera would be lying next to the body? I was learning how to make films at the BBC by then, as this seemed to be the only way I could obtain leave for the three months needed for big-mountain climbing.

  This had the incidental benefit of paying for me to indulge in my hobby; indeed I’ve worked on all nine of my Everest expeditions. I put in my first programme proposal, titled Mallory’s Camera, to the BBC in 1986. It was to take 13 years before the idea was realised – and then the whole project would be stolen from under my nose.

  Uncle Hunch died at the age of 84 in 1975, never knowing about the Chinese climber’s grisly find. But he had passed on the torch as effectively as anyone could. I just had to climb Everest myself, and I had to try to find his camera. It was very hard. I am not a mountaineer of his calibre. After learning the techniques in the Alps I knew I had to get out to the Himalayas and try some high-altitude climbing. On my first two trips to Nepal I trekked around the Annapurna massif and the Langtang range, and then I decided it was time to attempt a high peak. In the early 1980s I bought some cheap tickets to Kathmandu from a bucket-shop in London. The carrier was an airline called Ariane Afghan; I hadn’t heard of them but they sounded exotic.

  The first intimation that this was going to be the flight from hell was the Aeroflot plane standing at Heathrow ready to take us to Moscow on the first stage of the journey. The vicious-looking, grey brute of a plane reminded me that this particular airline was part of its country’s armed forces reserve. It took off with a roar from Armageddon and accelerated like an SS20 missile. The stewards looked terrifying.

  We stopped at Prague, then Moscow, and were herded on to an Ariane Afghan DC10 that was leaking fuel from its wings. I wondered what the spare parts contract could be, considering that this was an American aeroplane owned by a country that was under occupation by the Soviets, which was still engaged in the Cold War with the US.

  It was early on Monday morning, and a group of Russian hard-men clambered on board, presumably en route for a week’s oppression in Kabul. The chap sitting behind me suddenly grasped my seat in both hands and unaccountably launched into a frenzy of head-butting. The seat twanged and thumped against his forehead, whilst I politely leaned forward and gazed out of the window.

  Kabul airport was a sea of Soviet helicopter gunships, and all photography was strictly banned. We learned here that the locals used Ariane Afghan flights for missile practice, which explained the unconventional, low, jinking landing approach. In the airport lounge there was the head of a Marco Polo sheep mounted on the wall wearing a startled expression, above a legend stating ‘Stuffed by Jones Bros., Seattle’. You wouldn’t think they would brag about it.

  Eventually I made it to Nepal, and set out to trek into the Khumbu area. My aim was to climb Pokalde, a beautiful little snow and ice peak 19,049ft (5,806m) high, a few miles south of the Everest massif. Four of us walked in from Jiri, the rough little village at the road head. As I plodded up the pine-filled ridge up to Namche Bazaar, the Sherpa capital, I looked up. And I recognised it immediately. Through the treetops the black-rock shark’s-fin of Everest’s summit stuck out above the ridge between Nuptse and Lhotse. I had seen it in a hundred photographs, I had dreamt of it in a hundred boyhood dreams. It looked impossibly high, clean – and somehow sacred.

  We had a great climb on Pokalde, with its lovely little ice ridge and a crampon-scrabbling heave-up on to the summit boulder. Oddly enough, in Wilfrid Noyce’s book about the 1953 British expedition, South Col, he writes that he viewed Everest from the top of this peak, but I found there was a mountain, Nuptse, in the way. These curious facts emerge when you follow in the footsteps of the pioneers.

  Pokalde’s vast neighbour stood to the north, but I didn’t really think I would ever have a hope of setting foot on Mount Everest. I looked back at the mountain as we trekked down the valley, but somehow at that stage it seemed right out of my league. That was for the big boys.

  I left Nepal that year wondering how I could get myself invited on to a proper expedition to a slightly bigger mountain.

  In 1986 I joined an expedition to Changtse, Everest’s neighbour to the north. It was being run by two friends of mine in Bristol, Steve Bell and Steve Berry, who together had st
arted a company called Himalayan Kingdoms. They had begun by organising treks, and this was to be one of their first climbing expeditions – in fact one of the very first commercial expeditions of all. But when I arrived in Kathmandu I was met by a brusque New Zealander, a guide called Russell Brice. ‘Changtse’s off,’ he announced. ‘We’re going to switch to another mountain.’

  There had been trouble in Tibet with lamas rioting against Chinese rule, and so the border was closed. I was very disappointed, as I had hoped to see Somervell’s route up to the North Col. But the attempt on an unclimbed route on Himal Chuli (25,896ft (7,893m)) in Nepal proved to be excellent training, and I made some good friends, including leader Steve Bell, Mark Vallance, who ran a climbing equipment company, and Brice himself. He was a climber with a big reputation, being the first to complete Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker’s traverse of the Pinnacle Ridge on Everest – a route on which both had died in 1982. With Harry Taylor, Russell had traversed the ridge but had not managed to complete the route all the way to the summit, which would have joined the Mallory route somewhere around the old Camp V. It was an impressive feat, and I watched Brice with interest.

  At first he clearly regarded me as just another whinging Pom, but I was quietly determined not to let him get the better of me. Mark Vallance and I teamed up, and I did more carries of stores up the mountain to Camp I than anyone else – ten, in fact. Commercial trips in those early days had few porters, and no Sherpas. Until I proved I could be a useful porter he ripped the piss out of me mercilessly.

  Brice has a vigorous leadership style, and is fond of aphorisms that encourage his clients, such as, ‘If you don’t eat, you don’t shit, and if you don’t shit … you die.’ Because most of his climbing clients are alpha males he seems to have to top them in the aggression stakes. He can be autocratic, and this has made him some enemies. But after more than 20 years of knowing him I understand that beneath the rough exterior he has a kind heart that only shows itself to his Sherpa guides and cooks – his ‘family’. Woe betide any client who dares to treat Russell’s staff with anything less than total respect. He routinely rescues people off Everest every season with very little thanks, and to me this makes up for any amount of hurt feelings.