I wish you well in your search for this important clue to the fate – success or failure – of Mallory and Irvine in 1924.3
Having received the blessing – or at any rate, the agreement – of everyone who might be upset, I relaxed a bit. I didn’t realise that I was now risking my reputation on the actions of other individuals.
At around about this time, working hard on putting together a search for Mallory, I bought a house at Ford Hall, Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, after selling my previous home in Somerset. It was a pleasant stone-built place, somewhat in the Arts and Crafts style. I don’t expect anyone to believe this, but after I had agreed the purchase the owner said, ‘Oh, by the way, the last owner was a cousin of that Everest chap, what’s his name? Mallory.’ It turned out that the Longridges, relatives of Mallory’s nephew Ben, had indeed owned Ford House. I attach no significance to this; it just goes to show that England is a small place. Mobberley, where Mallory was born, is only a few miles away in the next county.
I also completed a novel I had been working on, an adventure yarn about finding Mallory’s body. I little knew I was about to shoot myself in the foot, being responsible for finding the actual body, and therefore making the novel impossible to publish.
I met Firstbrook in Bristol and took him to a meeting with Brice near Wells, the Somerset town with its fine cathedral. I explained all the family contacts and arrangements I had made, and as far I as understood we were going with Brice. Young Jochen Hemmleb was invited to come along, too. Even though we were working closely together in a production team, without telling me Firstbrook had then gone to the US with a possible director, Matt Dickinson, to meet up with Eric Simonson, another commercial expedition operator, who was looking for business. (‘Didn’t I tell you?’ Firstbrook asked later.) Firstbrook presumably wanted American climbers on the film so that he could co-produce it with an American TV company. Then the question arose of who would write the expedition book for the BBC. I wanted to tell Somervell’s story and the background of my researches, and I submitted a chapter and the synopsis of this book I am writing now to my BBC bosses. To my disappointment, Peter Firstbrook won the contract. I began to feel that I was losing control of a subject I knew could potentially be very sensitive.
Many commercial expeditions are advertised without the acknowledgement that if the necessary funds are not raised, the expedition will not take place. Perhaps Firstbrook was concerned that there would be some kind of race to search for bodies from the two teams, but I knew very well that Simonson’s trip was unlikely to happen unless he got considerable funding. Firstbrook’s arrival with BBC money was a godsend. The trip could run. Then I discovered that Jochen Hemmleb was going with Simonson instead of our BBC team. And the next thing I knew was that Brice had been dropped, and that our precious BBC funding was going to pay for a large element of Simonson’s expedition. I was very unhappy about this decision.
In the event Matt Dickinson opted out of the project and Firstbrook appointed me high-altitude director. At least my name was in the expedition prospectus as the initial founder of the Mallory project, but acknowledgements of my efforts were few and far between. We went out to Kathmandu in March 1999. I knew Firstbrook was a diabetic and promised his wife that I’d keep an eye out for him. As a non-climber he wouldn’t be travelling far out of Base Camp. We flew out with 500kg of excess baggage in 44 bags of film gear (I remembered that the 1924 expedition had 1,000 cases of gear). We arrived in Kathmandu to hear some shocking news: a German newspaper report that a Japanese team had found Mallory’s camera! It turned out to be a complete misunderstanding of a Mail on Sunday report, but it shows how jumpy we were.
We met the American team and they actually turned out to be a nice bunch: Conrad Anker, already with a fine reputation, on his first expedition above 24,000ft (7,300m); Dave Hahn and Andy Politz, both Everest veterans; and Jake Norton (no relation of Colonel Norton) and Tap Richards, two likeable young climbers. They didn’t seem to know very much about Mallory, and they still mispronounce Irvine’s name (which rhymes with Mervin). Liesl Clark (who was now David Breashears’s girlfriend after his divorce) would film for NOVA, with Ned Johnston as cameraman. Breashears was giving input as executive producer back in the States. How I wished he was there to steer the expedition! Everyone was welcoming and I genuinely enjoyed their company. Eric Simonson I had already met in London, and we got on very well, although I could see he had a robust leadership style. Jochen I had already met, and we found we had a great deal to talk about.
Everything started well but went sour pretty quickly. Peter Firstbrook and Eric Simonson travelled through Tibet arguing over the contract and a final payment that hadn’t been dealt with earlier. I note from my diary that in Zhangmu Hotel (which had improved noticeably) Eric told me, ‘Do not expect any warm feelings from us.’ As a result there was mutual distrust and the seeds of disagreement were sown.
I have now worked on many filmed expeditions, and I have learned that one has to work very hard to keep film-makers and climbers on the same side. In 2006 on the North Ridge and in 2007 on the South Col route I made sure that film-makers and climbers travelled together, ate together and climbed together, and the result was much more harmonious expeditions.
We travelled to Tingri, where Jochen said he felt unwell, so I volunteered to stay another night there with him. I felt we had much in common and my diary notes that ‘I do like him – he’s sweet and open + earnest.’ I admitted to him that I had a bad feeling about the mountain this year, telling him, ‘Whenever I come here I feel the ghosts of Everest all around.’ In the event this ominous feeling was justified, but perhaps the remark gave him the title for his book.
On the plus side the expedition had had a good start, with none of the usual respiratory or gastric infections that often bedevil travel in Tibet. We arrived at Base Camp early in the season, on 29 March, to see Everest in the driest condition any one of us had seen. This was a very good sign for a search party. We were also an extremely strong team, with seven of the 12 Sherpas having summited at least once previously, as had four of the Westerners.
There was the usual puja ceremony before we started climbing, which we were invited to attend. We always make a big event of this on every expedition because we know how important it is to the Sherpas; the safety of the climb depending on a successful outcome of the service. We all put our ice axes and crampons on a roughly constructed altar that is laden with offerings such as butter, whisky bottles and Marmite. A lama was asked to come up from the monastery to undertake the ceremony. Juniper smoke wafted towards the mountain and rice was thrown into the air to placate the mountain gods. Long lines of prayer flags radiated from the altar like the spokes of a wheel.
During the rather lengthy service the climbers became aware that there was the sloshing sound of clothes being washed just next to the moraine. Then I saw Firstbrook, sleeves rolled up, manfully pummelling his underwear. There were mutters and sideways looks from the Sherpas. Poor Peter didn’t realise his solecism, so I had to race down the side of the hill and ask him to stop. After this episode the scowls from Sherpas and climbers alike became more and more evident. Washing his dirty laundry in public had turned out to be a bad idea.
I was feeling more and more disturbed by the growing conflict between the camps, and I tried my very best to smooth things between them. I worked on assembling a camera crane and helped to get shots of the climbers walking through the camp. Things went well at first, with some beautiful filming by Ned Johnston using a yak-portable crane up in the penitentes. But then personal disaster struck. When we eventually headed up the Rongbuk valley I had to wait around in a cutting wind while Ned filmed me. Then there weren’t enough tents to go around at interim camp and I got a chill. Approaching Camp III at 22,000ft (6,700m) I became aware of a spreading numbness in my face and in my foot. I realised I was having a TIA – a transient ischaemic attack. This is a temporary spasm of a blood vessel in the brain, cutting off oxygen to part of it.
I still had symptoms in the morning, so I had a discussion with Eric Simonson, who was very sympathetic. He told me he’d had a similar but worse episode years before on Everest that left him without sensation down his left side for a couple of years. By continuing up the mountain I risked another episode, and Eric made it clear that I could not expect rescue from high on the North Face.
I found out later that these TIAs are fairly commonplace at altitude but clearly one should not continue upwards. I could have remained safely at Base Camp, and in fact I could have contributed to the interpretations of the eventual findings, but Firstbrook took the opportunity to send me home, despite the fact that his own condition was worsening. His book was coming along fast.
In Ghosts of Everest, Hemmleb and Simonson’s book of the expedition, they have this to say:
Though the crisis had clearly passed and he could certainly be of value even at Base Camp, Hoyland’s boss, BBC series director Peter Firstbrook, hustled him off the expedition to Kathmandu, an ignoble and, to the rest of the expedition members, unfair fate for someone who had been so central to the idea of the expedition in the first place.4
Later on Firstbrook became so ill that the expedition doctor, Lee Meyers, thought he would die. ‘I thought it interesting,’ commented Eric Simonson, ‘that when Graham Hoyland got sick, Firstbrook insisted that he leave the expedition immediately, citing BBC rules. But when Firstbrook himself became ill – much more seriously ill than Hoyland – he simply refused to leave, despite our doctor’s orders.’5
I turned my back on Mount Everest and walked the 12 miles down the glacier back to Base Camp. I got in a jeep to Kathmandu and returned to England to watch events unfold on the Internet and the satellite phone. In the end one of the climbers, Conrad Anker, found a body in just 90 minutes of looking, exactly where Smythe had seen it. Oddly enough there were times when I felt I knew more about what was happening on the upper mountain than my film colleagues at Base Camp, as although there was radio silence from Advanced Base Camp, their daily internet bulletins continued.
When I heard that in the course of the first search Conrad had found the body of George Mallory, not Sandy Irvine, I was surprised. We had assumed the body described by Wang was that of Irvine, because it was his ice axe above the body, and indeed that was the first reaction of the climbers on the spot. When I flew back to Kathmandu to pick up the film gear at the end of the expedition we all met up in the Rum Doodle bar, and I got the story at first hand from the man who found him. I wrote this interview up for High magazine on my return:
Conrad Anker is one of the world’s boldest climbers – and a lovely guy – and it was entirely appropriate that he should be the one who found George Mallory. He told me how he and Andy Politz, Dave Hahn, Jake Norton and Tap Richards had left Camp V, at 25,700ft, at 5:00am on 1 May to go up to Camp VI. They got there at 10:00am and split up to look around the area where the 1975 Chinese Camp had been. He spotted a couple of modern bodies and then in the course of removing his crampons to climb up some rock suddenly saw a patch of white, a patch that seemed even whiter than the surrounding snow.
It was a body, bleached to an extraordinary degree by 75 years of sun. He radioed his companions with the cryptic request for ‘a mandatory group meeting’ and they began the lengthy process of identifying the body.
Dave Hahn broke in here and said that it looked like a white marble Greek statue. I remembered Lytton Strachey’s gushing description of George Mallory’s body as a sculpture by Praxiteles, and thought that it had come only too true.
It looked as though he had died from a fall. There was some trauma, but the body hadn’t been beaten to bits so he probably hadn’t fallen all the way from the North-East Ridge crest where the ice axe had been discovered in 1933. It was obvious that the birds had found him. There was a perfectly preserved hob-nail boot on his right foot and a boot top fracture of his tibia and fibula above that. This was the leg that he had broken in his youth. There was also a piece of white cotton rope around his waist which had snapped, and I was stunned when I saw the piece the team had brought back down with them. It was about ten millimetres in diameter, and frankly one wouldn’t tie a dressing-gown with it. The rope was knotted with a bowline, and had caused severe crushing and bruising to the ribs consistent with a free fall to the left of perhaps 30 feet. There was a severe head injury above one eye. He was lying face down, and had arrested his fall with outstretched hands after sliding some distance down the snow slopes. Strangely, the hands appeared to be darker than the rest of the body, perhaps suggesting some frostbite before death – or was it the remains of a tan? All the witnesses felt that he had survived the fall, and composed himself to die, crossing his unbroken leg over the other to get some last relief.
They weren’t sure whether to disturb the body, but wanted to see if he had succeeded in reaching the summit and so they started looking for a camera. At this stage they were still assuming this was Irvine, as the hair appeared to be blond. In cutting away some clothing, Jake came upon a label that said ‘G. Mallory’. They all looked at each other and said, ‘Why would Andrew Irvine be wearing George Mallory’s shirt?’ Then it finally dawned on their oxygen-starved brains that they hadn’t found Irvine. They hadn’t just found Wang Hong Bao’s English dead. They had found George Leigh Mallory himself.
There were a number of artefacts removed from the body; some goggles found in his breast-pocket, an altimeter calibrated up to 30,000ft, some letters, a penknife, some scissors, a couple of monogrammed handkerchiefs with his G.L.M. initials on them and a watch.
After they had removed all the artefacts the climbers read a short Christian committal prayer that the Bishop of Malmesbury had prepared for them. They then buried the body, safe, I hope, from the birds and the souvenir-hunters.
Later in the expedition came a very creditable rescue of a Ukrainian climber by our climbers, and then a successful summit bid when Conrad Anker, accompanied by Dave Hahn, climbed the Second Step trying not to use the Chinese ladder. He had to place one foot on it as a rung was in the way. This he did partly to attempt a ‘clean’ climb of the North Ridge, without using artificial aids. They also wanted to see if it would have been possible for Mallory and Irvine to surmount this obstacle. I watched the BBC rushes of this climb, and Conrad said at the top of the Second Step that he didn’t think the pair could have done it. Later he revised this opinion. Then one of Mallory and Irvine’s oxygen cylinders was found by Jake and Tap behind a boulder beyond the First Step, confirming a previous sighting of it by leader Eric Simonson. Thus ended an eventful expedition.
What can we conclude from all of this? We can speculate that Mallory and Irvine were descending, possibly in the dark or in poor visibility, when the fall occurred. This is suggested by the direction of the rope injuries (they were indicative of a fall to the left, which would be consistent with the direction of travel if descending this part of the route) and by the fact that the goggles were in his pocket. It was reported that Mallory was still carrying three or four coils in his right hand and it looks as though the rope snapped after taking the weight of a free fall – there was a clean break. This suggests that either it was deliberately hooked over a rock horn, or that it snagged. In this case, we are left with Sandy Irvine alive high up the North Face, possibly in the dark, alone. What would he do? Would he circle around beneath the fall-line, looking for Mallory? Or could it be that he sat down behind a rock and waited for a dawn that would never arrive for him?
So where was Sandy Irvine’s body, and was Somervell’s camera on him? Why was Mallory not carrying the camera, when Somervell distinctly remembered him putting it in a pocket? Was it because Irvine was taking a picture of George Mallory? And why would he do that? Either to record the highest point they reached, or maybe because they were on the summit together?
This whole discovery left me with more questions than it answered. At the very beginning of it all, I knew that we couldn’t prove that they didn’t summit, but with luck perhaps
that they did. Therefore I hoped that we wouldn’t damage the legend of George Mallory that has been so important to me all my life.
Even though we have now found his body, for me he still stands for the quality I most admire in our species: the triumph of the human spirit over apparent impossibility, and the triumph of the human spirit over the inevitability of death.6
But then events started spiralling out of control. Photographs of the corpse were sold around the world and the reputation of the expedition became tarnished. There was a big fuss about the way the photographs were sold to the press, which I think was largely a consequence of naivety on the part of the Simonson team. Unfortunately, John Mallory, the son, opened a newspaper at his home in South Africa and was confronted by a picture of his father’s corpse.
I was mortified. I felt that if only we had stuck with Russell Brice we would have found the body, as we knew exactly where to look. We certainly would not have sold pictures of the dead body. This might have contained the press criticism. Once again money was calling the shots on Mount Everest. Firstbrook warned me to be ‘very careful’ when an article by Ed Douglas appeared in the Observer, in which Douglas wrote:
Close-up pictures of the body of Mallory, dubbed the Galahad of Everest, are reported to have been sold to Newsweek magazine for more than $40,000 by the expedition searching for clues on the mountain to prove whether or not Mallory had reached the summit before his death. Last night the picture agency Rex Features, which controls the copyright to the photographs in Britain, circulated warnings to national newspapers that they would face legal action if they published the photographs. Family members and leading mountaineers have condemned the sale of the photographs and accuse the American climbers who found Mallory of exploitation. ‘Frankly, it makes me bloody angry,’ George Mallory II, grandson of the climber – who reached the summit of Everest in 1995 via the same route his grandfather attempted – told the Observer from his home in New Zealand. ‘It’s like digging for diamonds, without having to do any of the digging.’
Last Hours on Everest Page 17