by Michael Gill
‘Our pace was wretched,’ Norton wrote. ‘My ambition was to do twenty consecutive paces uphill without a pause to rest and pant on bent knee; yet I never remember achieving it – thirteen was nearer the mark.’3 At 28,000ft Somervell could go no further. At lower altitudes he had been an oxygen sceptic but if he’d been offered a bottle here, at the end of his tether, he might have accepted. In less than a minute the desperation would have gone from his breathing and the torpor of extreme exhaustion would start to fade. He would see and think more clearly about his situation and surroundings. When he got up he could have moved without stopping. He would surely have become an oxygen convert.
To help Norton and Somervell even more, we would give them oxygen for their climb all the way from the North Col at 23,000ft to their top camp where, with new-found energy, they would spend hours melting snow for drinks and eat solid food before enjoying a good night’s sleep breathing oxygen. When they set out next morning, on easy ground, they would be climbing at a rate of at least 600ft per hour. If the climbing had stayed easy – a big ‘if’ on the north side of Everest where there is the exceptionally difficult Second Step still ahead – and the weather had stayed fine, they would be on the summit within four hours. By evening they would be back to an ecstatic welcome on the North Col.
This is the template against which to compare the realities of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s.
The story of Everest is also the story of oxygen.
The approach from Tibet, 1921
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Tibet was closed to foreigners except for a few adventurers who darkened their faces with walnut juice, donned Tibetan dress, and crossed one of the Himalayan passes to the north of India – but this was not an option for a full-scale mountaineering expedition. Sir Francis Younghusband, in 1903–04, paved the way for British expeditions to Everest by establishing communications with Tibet – at the point of a Maxim machine-gun to begin with. In August 1904, a document was signed, agreeing on trade and the exclusion of foreign powers such as Russia and China. Another most useful exclusion was that of foreign mountaineering expeditions. The British now controlled approaches through both Tibet and India. For 30 years at least, Everest had become their mountain.
The First World War intervened, but after the armistice the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and the Alpine Club formed a joint committee, the Everest Committee – later the Himalayan Committee – to launch expeditions: seven in all between 1921 and 1938. The expeditions in 1921, 1922 and 1924 came together as an extraordinary drama, a tragedy in three acts, with a cast of personalities who made the expedition members of the 1930s look pallid. The only person to take part in all three expeditions was George Leigh Mallory, the man who made Everest his own. He was supported by officers from the British Army in India, some of whom had been active in the Indian Himalayas for decades. They were all survivors of the Great War.
The 1921 expedition was an advance into terra incognita. Everest had been seen as a massive block of rock and ice on a distant horizon, but how to reach it and what it would look like from close up was unknown. A reconnaissance would be the first step, but there was always a chance, a slim hope, that there would be a linked route of ledges and broad snow slopes that would take them all the way to the top on their first encounter.
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury was appointed leader of the 1921 expedition. At 39, he was a man of independent means thanks to his ownership of a large estate in Ireland. He trained for the army at Sandhurst, and was posted to India, which he used as a base for travelling into the Himalayas, Tibet and Russian Turkestan. After surviving a long war as an officer on the Western Front, the last eight months as a prisoner-of-war, he returned to Ireland but must have found country life too quiet: when the Everest expedition was announced in January 1921 he volunteered. The Everest Committee would have liked what they saw. He was strong, enterprising, battle-hardened, an able linguist, knowledgeable about Tibet and its neighbours, a hunter and a botanist. He was a good organiser and a good leader.
There was another ‘leader’, too: the influential Arthur Hinks, secretary of the RGS and of the Everest Committee. Born in 1873 and educated in Croydon, South London, he had an outstanding mathematical brain that took him to the Cambridge Observatory, where he worked until 1913. He was also the RGS lecturer in cartography. He did not fit easily into Cambridge and when the position of full-time secretary to the RGS came up, he was pleased to be appointed there. Although not a mountaineer, he held firm opinions about who should go on Everest expeditions and how they should behave. His values were soon put to the test when J.P. Farrar of the Alpine Club recommended his two most favoured climbers, George Leigh Mallory and George Ingle Finch.
Mallory, the son of a vicar, had been educated at Winchester and Cambridge, where he took history without distinction. He enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of Cambridge, was on the fringe of the Bloomsbury group, took part in amateur theatricals, liked Picasso, Cézanne, van Gogh. Above all, he distinguished himself at climbing, a sport widely embraced in Cambridge and particularly in intellectual circles. Add to this his striking good looks and fine physique, photographed to advantage in Cambridge – and later bathing on the march in to Everest – and you recognise those star qualities that were to make him the prima donna of the Everest grand opera.
His younger sister recalled that as a child he ‘had the knack of making things exciting and often rather dangerous. He climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb … He used to climb the downspouts of the house, and climb about on the roof with cat-like sure-footedness.’4 On rock he moved with ease on the most difficult routes of the time, and attracted the admiration of Geoffrey Winthrop Young, doyen of the Alpine Club in the pre-war years. Mallory also wrote well, a valuable attribute in anyone who might achieve lasting fame. His diaries and letters to his wife Ruth are widely quoted in expedition literature and from time to time he expressed the hope that he might become a writer. Of climbing a peak he wrote: ‘Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves’ – a sentiment adopted by various climbers since, including Ed Hillary.
Even more famous is his cryptic reply to a New York Times journalist in 1923. ‘Why do you want climb Everest?’ he was asked. ‘Because it is there,’ Mallory replied, expressing the compulsion mountaineers feel to climb a peak when they are confronted by it: because it is there.
On the downside Mallory was disorganised and forgetful, and was technically illiterate when it came to gear such as cameras and oxygen apparatus, though a good minder could fill the gaps. Most importantly, however, he came to identify his destiny with that of Everest, and was willing to take ever greater risks to reach its summit.
The other Alpine Club climber recommended by Farrar was George Finch. By origin, temperament, upbringing and intellect, he was someone who asked questions of everything and sought his own answers. He was born in 1888 on an outback cattle station in Australia, and at the age of 14 was taken to Europe by his lively, theosophist mother who never returned to Australia. After rejecting a placement at an English public school, he was taught by a French tutor in Paris, then spent five years at university in Zurich studying physics and chemistry. Mountaineering in the Swiss Alps was at his back door.5
After training under a guide, George Finch and his brother Max began guideless climbing. This practice earned the strong disapproval of the Alpine Club of London whose members were for the most part gentlemen who left the sweaty business of hewing steps and grunting up steep rock to a guide, a trained peasant who provided the safety of a tight rope from above for his client coming up in leisurely fashion from below. Finch earned the undying enmity of some of this group by writing a dismissive article in The Field magazine about guided climbing. All you needed behind a guide, he said, was reasonable fitness, leisure and a secure income.
In 1912 Finch moved to London as a chemist and lecturer at the Imperial College of Science and Technology. He would be employed there for most of his
working life, apart from during the First World War when he became an expert on explosives, and from 1921 to 1924 when he was involved with the Everest expeditions.
An invitation to join the 1921 expedition came partly because he and Mallory were recognised as the best Alpine climbers in England, and partly because his scientific and technical expertise was required for developing an oxygen apparatus and for improving primus stoves which were known to perform poorly at high altitude. This early interest in oxygen looks quixotically ahead of its time, given the antipathy to it that would soon develop. During the war, however, oxygen tanks and face masks had been developed for use by Royal Flying Corps pilots at higher altitudes over enemy territory. Finch visited Oxford to try out his stoves in the low-pressure chamber of a Dane, Professor Dreyer, who was the recognised expert in the use of oxygen when flying. Dreyer’s experiments and measurements had shown that climbing at the oxygen pressure found on top of Everest was marginal to say the least. As a demonstration, Finch was placed in the chamber at a simulated altitude of 21,000ft, then given oxygen from a mask. The experience made Finch a life-long convert to the use of supplementary oxygen.
A mere two weeks before the expedition was to embark for India, Arthur Hinks and Alexander Wollaston, the expedition doctor, required its members to undergo a medical examination by two Harley Street specialists, one an orthopaedic surgeon, the other a paediatrician. To his astonishment, as well as that of his Alpine Club backer Farrar, Finch was declared unfit. The two reports, both brief, stated that Finch was sallow, in poor condition, anaemic, tired, losing weight, unfit and, if the test for sugar in his urine was correct, possibly diabetic. Dr Wollaston, whose interest in medical practice was fairly perfunctory, agreed that Finch could not possibly go on the expedition after two such damning reports.
When Finch went back to Oxford a few days later, he asked for an independent assessment. Professor Dreyer wrote that Captain Finch was slightly underweight but otherwise of excellent physique. He had an unusually large vital capacity, indicating a high degree of physical fitness. Tests in the low-pressure chamber proved that he possessed quite unusual resistance to high altitude. Of more than a thousand athletic young men Dreyer had examined, none had resisted high altitude so well.6
Dreyer and the Harley Street doctors seem not to have been examining the same man. Among explanations put forward for such discrepancies, the first, that Finch was recovering from treatment for recurrent malaria, is the least compelling, though this might have contributed to a ‘sallow look’. The second, that the medical findings were rigged, is ungentlemanly, reflecting as it does on the integrity of the medical profession and the RGS. The third has a ring of truth and fits with the unconventional personality of George Finch.7 It was a story of brief romance, pregnancy, marriage and divorce that must have been common during the war. Around the day of his medical examination for the 1921 expedition, Finch was unwinding an unsuitable marriage by providing evidence of adultery: he had reason to be tired and sallow. And Hinks, who never married, and the examining doctors must have felt that the end justified the means when they came to write their report. During the summer of 1921, Finch went on to complete a difficult climb on the south face of Mont Blanc. Farrar wrote acidly to Hinks, ‘Our invalid Finch took part in the biggest climb in the Alps this season.’8
The other climber-scientist invited on the expedition, and this time accepted, was Arthur Kellas, a 53-year-old Scot with a DPhil from Heidelberg that secured him a lectureship in chemistry at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. His enjoyment of hill-walking took him to the Sikkim Himalaya, where he organised six serious mountaineering expeditions between 1907 and 1914, with first ascents to a height of 23,180ft. Accompanied only by local porters, he recognised the special qualities of Sherpas, writing after his fourth expedition in 1912: ‘Of the different types of coolie, the writer has found the Nepali Sherpas superior to all others. They are strong, good-natured if fairly treated, and since they are Buddhists there is no difficulty about special food for them – a point surely in their favour at high altitudes.’9 He had become fond of his Sherpas and in the phrase ‘if fairly treated’ recognised their independent cast of mind. As a scientist he could hardly fail to become curious about the physiological problems that came with altitude, and by 1920 he was able to write a remarkably accurate prediction of the physiological situation of a man standing on top of Everest.
Having come from an expedition in Garhwal, Kellas should have been acclimatised and fit when he joined the 1921 Everest expedition, but he was unwell with persistent dysentery. He rode a pony, as did others, but became so weak with continuing diarrhoea that he was reduced to being carried on a litter. Nine days out from Darjeeling, he weakened further and died. Thus were lost to the expedition the two scientists – Finch and Kellas – who could have started an understanding of the physiological problems of high altitude.
By late June, with the recently arrived monsoon whitening the mountains in new snow, Howard-Bury and his reduced expedition had established a first base at Tingri, within 60 kilometres of Everest to its north. He spread his small band across the countryside, mapping and exploring the expanse of the wider Everest region stretching from the Nangpa La in the west to Kharta and the upper Arun Valley in the east. Centrally placed was Everest whose topography was completely unknown. The exciting task of examining its northern approaches was given to George Mallory and a companion from Winchester, Guy Bullock, who had been called in at short notice to replace Finch. The nominated climbing leader, Harold Raeburn, a tetchy 56-year-old Scot, had survived the medical examination in London but not the walk through Tibet. He retired sick at an early stage.
Discovering the North Col route on Everest
Tibetans advised Mallory that if he and his party wished to see Chomolungma, they should advance to the valley in which they would find the Rongbuk Monastery. On 25 June they had their first startling, close-up view. A bare valley flanked by mountains led to a vast mountain pyramid with the ribbon of the Rongbuk Glacier at its foot. The monastery, built only in the last 20 years, was a huddle of grubby, flat-roofed buildings with a large Buddhist stupa in their midst. There were said to be hundreds of lamas in the monastery or in caves and retreats in the surrounding hills. How could this grimly Spartan community sustain itself? The answer was the deep spiritual charisma of its founder, the Dzatrul Rinpoche, who later would cross the Nangpa La to found a sister monastery at Tengboche in the Khumbu Valley.
In the often abysmal monsoon weather, Mallory and Bullock spent a month exploring the Main Rongbuk Glacier and its western tributary. They looked over the divide into Nepal to become the first climbers – perhaps even the first people – to see the Khumbu Icefall and, above it, the entrance to a deep trench which they called the Western Cwm. From the great cirque at the head of the Main Rongbuk they saw to their left a 23,000ft snow col which they called the North Col. The snow and ice face leading to it looked dangerous, but once on the col a relatively easy north ridge led to a north-east shoulder from which a well-angled ridge led to the summit. Here, in their first month of exploring, they had found a route which looked climbable.
An irritation for Mallory at this stage was a message from Tingri that the photographs he had been taking for the past month were all blank: he had probably been inserting the plates back to front. He vented his frustration by blaming the geologist who had instructed him and by writing to his wife Ruth a paragraph of positively Shakespearian invective at the expense of his unfortunate sardar – ‘a whey-faced treacherous knave whose sly and cultivated villainy too often, before it was discovered, deprived our coolies of their food, and whose acquiescence in his own illimitable incompetence was only less disgusting than his infamous duplicity’.10 One cannot say for sure that Mallory was being unreasonable, but there is a nagging suspicion that the military chaps were the ones who knew how to handle porters.
Three weeks later Mallory received another letter, this time from Oliver Wheeler, a Canadian surveyo
r attached to the expedition, who had been doggedly mapping from west to east, sitting out long patches of bad weather while he waited for brief clearances that would permit completion of his photo-survey. Entering the Main Rongbuk valley, he noted and then followed a stream coming in from the east through a narrow gap in the side wall. He was surprised to find that it emerged from a substantial body of ice, the East Rongbuk Glacier, which provided relatively easy access to the North Col. The missing piece of the route up Everest had been found and Wheeler had drawn a map of it. Mallory was annoyed with himself for missing the East Rongbuk and with Wheeler for finding it. Early in the expedition he had written to Ruth, ‘Wheeler I have hardly spoken to, but you know my complex about Canadians. I shall have to swallow hard before I like him, I expect. God send me the saliva.’11 Wheeler’s map was just one more thing to be swallowed at an altitude where saliva was in short supply.
On 24 September, Mallory, Bullock and Wheeler, and three Sherpas, made Everest history by becoming the first men to set foot on the mountain. From the East Rongbuk they climbed to 23,000ft, and by 11 a.m. they were leaning into a torrent of wind and driven snow on the crest of the North Col with a gentle north-east ridge inviting them to go on. The wind was less welcoming and they were not equipped to climb higher. It was the end of the 1921 expedition. But what a success it had been, what a tough group they and their Sherpas had proved to be. Next year would surely see them to the top.
The 1922 expedition
The Everest Committee had permission from Tibet for an expedition in 1922 but time was short. Howard-Bury might have thought his excellent leadership in 1921 had earned him the same role the following year, but instead they chose the colourful General Charles Bruce who, at the age of 56, would always, if things went wrong, have the excuse that he was too old. Educated at Harrow, Repton and then military college, he was the youngest of 14 children of the 1st Baron Aberdare whose fortune came from coal in Wales. In 1888 he joined the Indian Army with the 5th Gurkha Rifles and in 1915, as a Brigadier-General, he landed in Gallipoli where he was severely wounded.