by Wade Davis
For the March 7, 1921, meeting of the RGS, see: Francis Younghusband, “The Mount Everest Expedition: Organization and Equipment,” Geographical Journal, vol. 57, no. 4 (April 1921), pp. 271–82. For medical reports, see: RGS Box 29, File 5. The announcement naming the members of the 1921 expedition, including Finch, appeared in “The Monthly Record: The Society,” Geographical Journal, vol. 57, no. 5 (May 1921), p. 232.
For Guy Bullock’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 2, File 3. For records of his diplomatic service and correspondence concerning leave to join the expedition, see: National Archives, Foreign Office records FO 369/635, FO 369/646, FO 369/794, FO 369/752, FO 369/874, FO 369/1500, FO 369/1573, FO 369/1576, FO 369/1785, FO 371/2677, FO 371/24188, FO 382/292, FO 382/392, FO 382/1034, and FO 383/213. See also Bullock’s obituary in: The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Year Book, 1957 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1958), p. 492.
For correspondence between Hinks and the Alpine Club (January 1921 to May 1923), see: RGS Box 12. For Collie’s correspondence as president of the Alpine Club, see: RGS Box 11, File 5, and Box 25, File 9. For letters of Douglas Freshfield, see: RGS Box 26, File 5. For Sydney Spencer, see: Box 34, File 3. For sale of magazine rights, see: RGS Box 6, Files 2 and 6. For correspondence with the Times, see: Box 34, File 8. For fund-raising and accounting, see: RGS Box 21 and Box 16, Files 5 and 6. The pledges of support by King George V and the Prince of Wales, essential to Hinks’s fund-raising efforts, were announced in: “The Monthly Record,” Geographical Journal, vol. 57, no. 5 (May 1921), pp. 394–95.
5: Enter Mallory
George Mallory’s papers are housed at the Magdalene College Archives, Cambridge. Among the documents are notes and letters from his time at Charterhouse, as well as a manuscript of “The Book of Geoffrey” and reviews and correspondence concerning his one published book: Boswell the Biographer (London: Smith Elder, 1912). Mallory aspired to be a writer, and he was responsible for roughly a third of the content of the official expedition accounts of both 1921 and 1922. In making these contributions, he recycled material from letters sent to friends and family members from the mountain. The 1924 account includes his actual letters, written to Ruth before his death. Mallory is at his best as a writer in such direct and simple exchanges. When he consciously sets out as an essayist, his prose tends to the florid. Mallory’s biographer Peter Gillman has compiled a collection of his writings, including the contributions to the official expedition accounts: George Mallory, Climbing Everest: The Complete Writings of George Mallory (London: Gibson Square, 2010).
The bulk of the Mallory papers at the Magdalene College Archives consists of letters written to his wife. These are arranged in seven boxes, four of which contain 723 letters written between April 3, 1914, four months before the outbreak of war, and January 1919, two months after the Armistice. The Everest correspondence is limited to eighty-four letters (Box III, 5 Files), with the last dated May 27, 1924. Ruth’s letters to George appear to have been lost; the archive contains but one. For Mallory’s correspondence with the Everest Committee, see: RGS Box 3, Files 4 and 5.
For Mallory’s early life, see the biographies already cited, especially Robertson (1969), Pye (1927), and Gillman and Gillman (2000). For a sense of prewar Britain, see: Simon Nowell-Smith, ed., Edwardian England, 1901–1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). For the writings of Graham Irving, see: R. L. G. Irving, Ten Great Mountains (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1940); A History of British Mountaineering (London: B. T. Batsford, 1955); and a volume he edited, The Mountain Way: An Anthology in Prose and Verse (London: J. M. Dent, 1938).
Having attended a British boarding school, albeit one transplanted to British Columbia, complete with cadet corps, rugby, predatory prefects, and English and Scottish masters hardened by the wars, I was not completely unfamiliar with the ethos of public schools such as Winchester and Charterhouse. Still, to reach back to Edwardian society and venture to understand male sexuality in the context of the times was a task as challenging as deciphering the most obscure cultural practices of Tibet. Among my guides were five fine books: Michael Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895–1995 (London: HarperCollins, 1997); H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love (London: Heinemann, 1970); Alisdare Hickson, The Poisoned Bowl: Sex and the Public School (London: Constable, 1995); and Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Century, 2003).
To be sure, physical intimacy among men was publicly perceived as something perverse, and it remained, as Oscar Wilde’s companion Bosie Douglas wrote, “the love that dare not speak its name.” But in Edwardian parlance, sex implied penetration. Other forms of physical contact, such as kissing or mutual fondling, were not necessarily tolerated, but they were anticipated, especially among the cloistered halls of public schools and universities, where women rarely entered. Men who would be appalled to be labeled sodomites expressed homoerotic sentiments reflexively and shamelessly. The term “homosexuality” was coined in Germany only in 1890 and did not come into common usage in England until the turn of the century. Greek love, as the practice was known, was seen as a passing phase, an indulgence that boys would outgrow as they moved into the world and married. As Robert Graves, a student of Mallory’s at Charterhouse, wrote, “In the English public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion.” In Edwardian discourse, the term “effeminate” referred to a man who spent too much time with his wife.
Mallory attended Cambridge at a time when a man could not remain a don if he elected to marry. Arthur Benson’s repressed desires no doubt played on his depression, and he was not alone in his confusion. For a fine biography, see: David Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise: A. C. Benson, Diarist (London: John Murray, 1980). For biographies and memoirs of several of the key figures in Mallory’s circle, see: Christopher Hassall, A Biography of Edward Marsh (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), and Rupert Brooke (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964); Nigel Jones, Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth (London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999); Geoffrey Keynes, The Gates of Memory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Nicholas Mosley, Julien Grenfell (New York: Holt Reinhart & Winston, 1976); Mike Read, Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1997); and Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant (London: Pimlico, 1998). See also: Paul Delany, The Neo-Pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (London: Macmillan, 1987), and S. P. Rosenbaum, ed., The Bloomsbury Group (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
In the prewar Cambridge scene, sexual license was celebrated as the antidote to Edwardian convention. “Do you understand about loving people of the same sex?” Rupert Brooke asked in a November 30, 1908, letter to Erica Cotterill. “It is the question people here discuss most, in all its aspects, and of course most of the sensible people would permit it.” Returning to Cambridge after a sojourn at the India Office, Maynard Keynes put it more bluntly in a letter to an old friend: “The thing has grown in leaps and bounds in my two years of absences and practically everybody in Cambridge is an open and avowed sodomite!”
For a sense of the web of emotional entanglements among these friends, see: Keith Hale, ed., Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905–1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). Lytton Strachey was seven years older than his brother James. Duncan Grant, a cousin from India, moved in with the Strachey family in 1902, the year Lytton went off to university, leaving younger brother James at home. When Duncan visited Cambridge, Lytton was smitten. Grant dismissed his overture with a turn of phrase: “Relations we may be; have them, we may not.” But in the summer of 1905, they began an affair. In a letter to Maynard Keynes, Lytton described the experience as a glimpse of heaven: “Oh dear, dear, dear, how wild, how violent, and how supreme are the things of this ear
th! I am cloudy, I fear almost sentimental. But I’ll write again. Oh yes it’s Duncan.”
Maynard Keynes, meanwhile, was in love with Arthur Hobhouse, an undergraduate who had also captured Lytton’s heart. When Hobhouse hinted at affection, Strachey advised Keynes not to waste a moment and to proceed directly to rape. Maynard responded to Lytton with kinder advice about Duncan: “You are the only person it would be the least good his being in love with, and he is the only person for you to be in love with. I am in love with your being in love with one another.”
Lytton then gave Maynard the lowdown on Duncan: “He’s a genius—a colossal portent of fire and glory … His feelings transcend all—I have looked into his eyes, and the whole universe has swayed and swam and been abolished, and we have melted into one indescribable embrace. His features were molded by nothing intermediary, but by the hand of God itself; they are plastic like living marble, they clothe a divinity, a quintessential soul.”
With his older brother distracted, James Strachey fell for Rupert Brooke, described by Leonard Woolf as “exactly what Adonis must have looked like in the eyes of Aphrodite … [his] was the sexual dream face not only for every goddess, but for every sea-girl wreathed with seaweed red and brown.” James, seven years younger than Lytton, admitted that his friendship with Rupert was founded in lust. “I have spoken to Rupert again,” he wrote to Duncan Grant. “Nowadays three sentences in the street seem incredibly heaven like … The whole of my behavior must have seemed to indicate to him that I wanted to bugger him.”
Crushed to learn that Brooke was having an affair with Lytton’s lover Hobhouse, who was also sleeping with Duncan Grant, James was diverted by a new face in the crowd. To Vanessa Bell’s news that Rupert had twice bedded Hobhouse, Virginia Woolf responded with an “equally thrilling piece of gossip … a divine undergraduate with a head like a Greek God … George Mallory.”
Mallory fell for James Strachey, though Lytton remained keenly interested, at one point describing Mallory’s body as “vast, pink, unbelievable … a thing to melt into and die.” Lytton pursued Mallory to Charterhouse.
“Lytton seems to have had a hot time of it with George,” James reported in an October 19, 1910, letter to Rupert Brooke. “I gather that on Sunday he only didn’t go right through with it out of terror that someone would come in—as there was no key to the door. “The copulation never came,” Lytton admitted to Duncan Grant, “though there were singular moments.”
Lytton suggested that Grant use Mallory as a model. Mallory was charmed by the idea. “I am profoundly interested in the nude me,” he responded in a note to Duncan. Grant, at the time in love with and living with Adrian Stephen, visited Mallory at the school and they agreed to collaborate on a series of portraits, both photographs and paintings. Grant left Charterhouse in a whirlwind of emotions. “I did not mean to suggest that I was in love with you,” he wrote to Mallory. “I am far too fond of somebody else I think to fall in love. But I cannot help wanting to express my feelings for people to them and mine are so complicated towards you that I was somehow conscious that a kiss would somehow do it. When I say complicated I mean difficult to explain in words … I think you beautiful for one thing …”
More than anyone, Cottie Sanders understood what lay at the heart of the “Cambridge School of Friendship.” For her remarks and her description of meeting Mallory at Zermatt, see David Robertson’s biography, George Mallory, pp. 37, 59. Mallory’s breathless correspondence with James Strachey, including his December 20, 1909, letter from France, is deposited at the British Library, Additional Manuscripts Collection (ADD 63119, 63119–63126 Blakeney Collection, vols. XLI–XLVIII Papers and Correspondence Relating to Mountaineering: 1861–1971; ADD 60679 Strachey Papers [20th Century Series], vol. XXV [ff. 181]. 2. ff. 4–40, George Herbert Leigh Mallory, Mountaineer). For Robert Graves on Mallory, see: Good-bye to All That, pp. 61–66. Additional correspondence between these Cambridge friends and lovers is on deposit at King’s College Archives, Cambridge. The Geoffrey Winthrop Young Collection, Alpine Club Archives, contains twenty-five letters from Mallory to Young, as well as three from Mallory’s daughters to Young, their godfather.
For the “Dreadnought hoax,” see Frances Spalding’s Duncan Grant, pp. 85–89. For Bloomsbury’s reaction to the war, see: Jonathan Atkim, A War of Individuals: Bloomsbury Attitudes to the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). The highlight of Mallory’s school career at Winchester was the day his 1904 shooting team, competing against all the other public schools, won the coveted Ashburton Shield, securing a victory with a bull’s-eye on the final shot. “It was simply glorious,” he wrote to his sister Avie. “We won the Public Schools Racquets last holidays, we badly beat Eton at cricket, and now we have won the Public Schools shooting, which is really the best of the lot, because every decent school goes in for it, and it comes to the public notice much more than anything else.” The entire school had welcomed home the winners, hoisting them aloft and carrying them through the gates of the school. Ten years later, skill at shooting had taken on a new significance. In 1914, 383 boys from 43 schools competed for the Ashburton Shield. Of these 66 would die in the war, and 79 others would be wounded, many severely. For a haunting sense of the role these schools played in the war, see: Peter Parker, The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public School Ethos (London: Constable, 1987). For Mallory’s popularity as a lecturer, see back issues of the Carthusian, 1912–14, Charterhouse School Archives. Also to be found is a list of his students in two forms of Under VI Modern History; cross-referenced against casualty lists, these provided a sense of rates of morbidity and mortality among the students he had taught and sent off to war.
During the war Mallory was attached to the 40th Siege Battery, and invalided home. Upon his return to France in September 1918, he served with the 515th Siege Battery. Having consulted seven relevant war diaries, we found no record of Mallory. In a more promising avenue of research, we tracked the service record of James Lithgow, Mallory’s commanding officer in the 40th Siege Battery in the University of Glasgow Archives and at the National Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh. Among the documents were the reminiscences of Lithgow’s batman Ramsey, which included an account of the deaths of the Port Glasgow lads, Craig and Forrest, as they accompanied Mallory back from a forward observation post. In tracking the movements of the 40th Siege Battery through the war diary of the 2nd Corps commander of artillery (TNA: PRO WO 95/689–691), we found it evident that Mallory’s battery was part of the 30th H.A.G. (Heavy Artillery Group), attached to the 8th Division. The war diary for the commander of artillery of the 8th Division (TNA: PRO WO 95/1684) revealed that 30th H.A.G. was put at the disposal of the commander of artillery of the 8th Division at 9:45 a.m. on July 1, 1916, the morning of the Somme assault. Hence it became possible to follow the movements of the 40th Siege Battery at a crucial period of Mallory’s service.
Mallory’s correspondence with Eddie Marsh (thirteen letters, seven postcards) may be found at the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library. Also in this collection are 128 letters from Robert Graves to Marsh, including one (October 10, 1916) noting that Mallory had not had leave for six months, and another (December 29, 1917) that looks ahead to his marriage to Nancy Nicholson: “George Mallory as my oldest surviving friend who first introduced me to mountains and through you to modern poetry, my greatest interests next to Nancy and my regiment, is going to be my best man on the 23rd.” Also of great interest in this collection are 128 letters and three postcards written by Graves to Siegfried Sassoon. It was fascinating to discover that Mallory had met Wilfred Owen, and through Graves had become familiar with not only the two finest poets to emerge from the war, but arguably two of the bravest soldiers.
Siegfried Sassoon was with Graves at the Somme, where he fought with the savagery of the doomed, making a specialty of murderous forays into enemy trenches at night. Wounded by a sniper’s bullet through the chest, and later shot accidentally in t
he head by his own men, Sassoon received the Military Cross and the DSO, medals he would one day toss into the Mersey. A graduate of Marlborough and Cambridge, a published poet and a son of the landed gentry, he was deemed a hero, which made it especially awkward when he stunned the British establishment by coming out against the war in the summer of 1917 with a powerful manifesto published in the Times. “I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority,” it began,
because I believe the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest … I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust … On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception that is being practiced on them; also I believe that I may help destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize.