by Ed Douglas
Eric Bailey, known as ‘Hatter’ to his friends, had little time for Charles Bell’s method of ‘Tibetanising’ himself to advance British interests. Although softly spoken, Bailey was a military man, who maintained an unyielding dignity, one of Younghusband’s young officers during the campaign of 1904, and an explorer too, making a celebrated journey to the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra. During the war he’d been badly wounded on the Western Front, served with the Gurkhas at Gallipoli and was then sent on an intelligence mission to Tashkent to assess the intentions of Moscow’s new Bolshevik government in Central Asia. When Bailey needed to get home, he posed as an Albanian army clerk and persuaded the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret service, to help him look for British spies in Bukhara. En route, he received a telegram from his handler requesting he keep a look out for a notorious British agent called Bailey.
Bell had dismissed the idea of Soviet influence in Tibet, but Bailey and his former boss and ally Frank O’Connor were convinced the new Soviet Union would seek to undermine British interests in the region: the Russians certainly had their spies in Lhasa. They were both proponents of a more aggressive ‘forward’ policy, like their old patron Younghusband. Perhaps Bell feared what impact this would have on his painstaking efforts at closer relations; when Bailey arrived in Sikkim in 1921 anxious to visit Tibet, Bell, who was still in Lhasa, kept him out. This snub provoked a deep loathing in Bailey, one that he largely kept to himself but revealed in a letter to his mother: Bell, he wrote,
is a hopeless fraud and has got on entirely by writing himself up. He did all he could to make the work for me here difficult – as he was jealous of giving it up after 15 years. I wanted to go to Lhasa in 1921 and for him to introduce me to the Dalai Lama and others in Lhasa but he would not let me go there . . . after retiring he has been trying to continue his correspondence with the Dalai Lama which makes things difficult for me here as they hardly realise that when a man has retired he is finished.
Bailey was writing in November 1924, soon after returning from Lhasa himself and at the start of a sudden cooling in diplomatic relations between Tibet and the government of India, a process that scuppered the good work done by the despised Bell. This reversal would result in a pause in the British attempts on Everest, but its cause lay in Bailey’s efforts at steering the Tibetan elite towards British imperial interests and away from the threat of communism. At the centre of those efforts was Tibet’s security apparatus, which Bailey was keen to assess and influence. Unlike Bell, he lacked the necessary permission from his superiors to visit Tibet for himself. To influence Tibetan policy from a distance was difficult and Bailey had to be creative, just as he had been in Tashkent.
In October 1922, George Pereira, a former British army general, arrived in Lhasa having crossed China and the Tibetan plateau. Pereira, known as ‘Hoppy’ because of a childhood riding accident, had been military attaché in Beijing before the war and was fluent in Chinese, but the old soldier had taken a shine to Tibet on his way to the capital.
I have seen the children running about, playing games, and heard the laughter of the elders, and there seemed to be a freedom of care about the Tibetan peasantry, very different from village life in China.
Officially termed a ‘private traveller’, Pereira was in fact an old friend of Bailey, who had arranged Pereira’s journey personally, without informing his superiors in Calcutta. Pereira was doing his old job of military attaché, reporting back to Bailey on the state of the Tibetan military and meeting with the head of the army Tsarong Shap-pe. The day after Pereira left Lhasa, on a return journey that proved fatal, the Tibetan government requested help from the government of India in establishing a modern police force, an idea Bell had planted but hadn’t seen bear fruit. Bailey’s policy, on the other hand, seemed to be making progress.
A few weeks later, however, another white man arrived in Lhasa, this one uninvited. This man’s presence would reveal how tenuous British influence in Lhasa remained. William McGovern was a young American lecturer teaching at the School of Oriental Studies in London. He had been part of an official research group that had arrived at Gyantse but was then refused permission to continue to Lhasa, largely at Eric Bailey’s insistence. The India Office in London had cabled Bailey to warn him that although the party comprised Oxford University graduates, they ‘clearly show the cloven hoof’, meaning they were sympathetic to communism. Bailey wasn’t going to stand for that and the group were recalled to India. McGovern refused to accept this decision and later recrossed the border without permission and in disguise, reaching Lhasa in February 1923. When monks got wind of his presence in the city, they stoned his accommodation and McGovern was soon escorted back to India. Bailey and other political officers, including Bell, were furious when the American published an account of his journey, an account that revealed the existence of a pro-China faction in Lhasa. Bailey asked the secretary of the Everest committee, Arthur Hinks, for help, in rubbishing McGovern’s reputation through the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, a ‘quid pro quo’ for supporting the Everest expeditions.
The person charged by the Indian government with helping the Tibetans establish a modern police force was another veteran of the Younghusband mission of 1904. Sonam Wangfel Laden La, now forty-six, had grown up in the intelligence world of the British in the Himalaya. The nephew of a famous pundit, his first job, aged eighteen, had been for another one: Sarat Chandra Das, who was compiling his Tibetan dictionary. After that Laden La joined the Darjeeling police and performed a number of sensitive tasks, like keeping an eye on the Panchen Lama as he made a pilgrimage to India, at a time when the British were contemplating support for a breakaway state based on the Panchen Lama’s seat at Shigatse. Later Laden La was security officer for the Dalai Lama during his period in exile and one of those chosen to accompany the four Tibetan boys to Rugby School. When Laden La arrived in Lhasa in August 1923, the factionalism McGovern had witnessed was coming to the boil and Bailey must have hoped the policeman’s presence in the city would strengthen the British position.
Laden La soon built an embryonic police force and developed a bond with the head of the army Tsarong Shap-pe. Quite what that involved is controversial but there is some evidence that either early in the summer of 1924, while Mallory was on Everest, or a few weeks later, the two agreed to topple the established religious government in favour of a more progressive secular version, with the Dalai Lama remaining as a national figurehead running the monasteries. Although he claimed ignorance, it seems likely Eric Bailey, a deeply experienced intelligence officer expert in the region, knew of this plan. He arrived in Lhasa himself later that summer and held meetings with both Tsarong and Laden La. Whether he knew about what Tsarong and Laden La were contemplating in advance is another matter. But years later, when a version of what happened finally leaked into the British press, Bailey defended Laden La to his superiors, something he might not have done had the policeman acted alone.
When Bailey left Lhasa, Tsarong did so too. But when he returned that autumn, Tsarong found he had been dismissed as head of the army and his favoured junior officers dispersed to remote corners of Tibet. He had been replaced by a shrewdly political aristocrat called Lungshar, who was already a senior treasury minister, or tsipon. Lungshar and Laden La had history; Lungshar had been to Europe with the Rugby schoolboys and without Lhasa’s approval had met China’s ambassador, which Laden La had reported to his superiors. Understanding the fragility of his position, Laden La now returned to India, where it was said he suffered a nervous breakdown. As the purge of the Tibetan army got underway, a Bhutanese monk called Pema Chandra, who had been working for Laden La in Lhasa, also fled. Tibetan soldiers caught him before the border; his head was brought back to Lhasa and put on public display, together with a note accusing him of embezzlement and speaking ill of the Dalai Lama. Frank Ludlow, still teaching in Gyantse, now began hearing rumours that his school would be closed. The axe finally fell in 1926, partly because of what Ludlow de
scribed as the ‘tom-foolery on the part of Laden La, Tsarong and others in Lhasa in 1924’. Whether or not Tsarong and Laden La’s talk of a coup had been serious, it had been enough to turn the conservative Tibetan establishment against British support for the modernisers. Bailey’s efforts had been in vain and he was now out in the cold.
The unwitting victim of this frost in the diplomatic air was the Everest adventure. In November 1924, Arthur Hinks wrote to Bailey asking for his help in securing permission from the Tibetans for another try in 1926. Having helped Bailey out by denigrating the American academic McGovern, he would have hoped for a positive response. But Bailey cabled back saying permission for Everest was unlikely. He claimed offence had been taken in Lhasa from John Noel’s film of the expedition, The Epic of Everest, in particular a sequence of an old Tibetan eating lice from a child’s head. He followed this with a letter explaining that Lhasa was also upset at Noel hiring a group of lamas from the monastery at Gyantse. Noel had then brought them to Britain to perform dances, an attempt to add an exotic human dimension to screenings of a film that seemed austere and harsh. The sight of lamas using thighbone trumpets at cinemas in the British provinces was hardly the stuff of diplomatic nightmares – they regularly did such tours in India – but Bailey insisted that what became known as the ‘affair of the dancing lamas’ had made things impossible. When he realised that the lamas hadn’t been given the correct passports, despite Noel’s insistence, Bailey saw his chance. He had the India Office in London fall on the Mount Everest Committee with icy fury. There would be no more Everest expeditions in the foreseeable future.
John Noel knew perfectly well it was Eric Bailey who had blocked the Everest application and not the Tibetans. What he didn’t understand was why. Bailey had been Younghusband’s protégé and Everest was Younghusband’s dream. His friend Henry Morshead, with whom he’d shared the Tsangpo gorge adventure, had been part of the Everest reconnaissance in 1921. Bailey was usually so helpful to fellow explorers, no matter what he thought of them privately. In the summer of 1924 he had supported Frank Kingdon-Ward and Lord Cawdor as they prepared to follow in Bailey’s footsteps and solve the riddle of the Tsangpo gorge. He had welcomed the mystical French traveller Alexandra David-Néel to the residency at Gangtok after her clandestine journey to Lhasa. No one understood that the affair of the dancing lamas was the best excuse available for the real story: that Bailey’s policy had failed and relations with Tibet had almost collapsed.
It would be another two years before any news of the alleged coup attempt that summer reached the outside world and by then Bailey was nearing the end of his posting. In October 1928 his replacement arrived at Gangtok. Leslie Weir had been trade agent at Gyantse when the Dalai Lama was in exile and knew Tibet. He was also an admirer of Charles Bell, describing him as ‘his guru’. Settling into his new job, Weir discovered that ‘our prestige . . . has gone back woefully since I was last here’. By then, Eric Bailey, a man with many secrets, had moved on: to the plum posting of Kashmir and then his final job, as the British envoy in Kathmandu.
17
Utopias
On 16 August 1936, the German-born mountaineer Günter Dyhrenfurth arrived at Albert Speer’s Olympic Stadium in Berlin to receive the International Olympic Committee’s alpinism prize, a gold medal for mountaineering. Recognising the best climb done in the years before each Olympics was a passion for the founder and president of the modern games, the Baron de Coubertin (as were hunting and aviation). Others on the committee were lukewarm: the medal was first awarded at the inaugural winter Olympics in 1924, held at Chamonix in the French Alps, twenty-eight years after the revival of the summer games. That year Edward Lisle Strutt, climbing leader of the 1922 Everest expedition, collected medals on behalf of the British and Sherpas, seven of whom had died on the mountain in an avalanche. The alpinism prize stuttered on thereafter. Dyhrenfurth and his wife Hettie were chosen in 1936 for a successful expedition to the Karakoram two years earlier. Hettie was among the climbers who made the first ascent of Sia Kangri, breaking the female altitude record Fanny Bullock Workman claimed in 1905.
Dyhrenfurth barely made the closing ceremony, which featured a parade of standard-bearers lowering their national flags under the watchful gaze of Adolf Hitler, his arm raised in the Nazi salute. (This was so similar to the Olympic salute that the latter didn’t survive the comparison.) While he had known about the award for some time, an official invitation, sent by telegram, hadn’t arrived at Dyhrenfurth’s new home in Switzerland until the day before. This was no oversight. Dyhrenfurth was a Mischling, of mixed Aryan and Jewish blood, who had in 1933 quit his post as geology professor at Breslau (now Wrocław) University, as a protest at Hitler’s rise to power. Hettie herself was from a notable Jewish family of Silesian industrialists, a former tennis champion who despite her slight frame was courageous in the mountains. She also hated convention. In 1930, on the boat out to India to take part in her husband’s expedition to Kangchenjunga, Hettie got a ticking off from the British mountaineer Frank Smythe for dancing with Indians, something he deemed ‘impossible for a lady’. She smiled politely and kept on dancing.
Hettie Dyhrenfurth chose not to join her husband in Berlin, partly out of disgust at German antisemitism. Her son Norman, still a teenager, had faced harassment earlier in 1936 working as an assistant on the film being made of the winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, summer and winter games being held in the same year until 1994. The cameraman on that film was the other reason Hettie stayed away. Hans Ertl, an ambitious young climber turned filmmaker, had also been part of her husband’s Karakoram expedition. Ertl had been there to get high-altitude footage for the production company underwriting the venture. (Their route to the Karakoram led them through Kashmir and past the dramatic Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Lamayuru in Ladakh but despite such vivid locations, the film, Der Dämon des Himalaya, was roundly panned. This didn’t stop the Hungarian-born director Andrew Marton remaking the movie in Hollywood after the war as Storm over Tibet, using the original footage. ‘See the roof of the world cave in . . . in a billion tons of ice!’) During the expedition, Hettie and Ertl had become lovers but he was mortified at this betrayal of team spirit and decided to confess. Günter Dyhrenfurth, substantially taller than Ertl, clasped the shoulders of his wife’s lover and then reassured him: ‘These things happen, my young friend.’ Dyhrenfurth liked everything to be open: marriages, mountains, borders. That was not how things were in Europe anymore. Now Ertl was in Berlin working for Leni Riefenstahl, another former lover, on her technically dazzling paean to fascism Olympia. Hettie had no wish to run into either of them. A year later, and now separated from Günter, she left for the United States; her son Norman would soon follow.
As the rise of right-wing nationalism permeated every aspect of European life, even mountain climbing, in India a different kind of political storm was gathering. Gandhi’s movement of peaceful disobedience and other strands of the independence movement were coiling themselves around a weakening British Empire, a struggle that already included political hotspots in the Himalaya like Darjeeling. Change came more slowly elsewhere in the mountains. In Nepal, the Rana dynasty’s iron grip on power had begun to fracture following the death in 1929 of Curzon’s ally Chandra Shamsher, but the absence of a large, educated middle class meant challenging the status quo was both desperately difficult and dangerous.
In Tibet, the political class were wholly absorbed in the search for a new Dalai Lama following the death in late 1933 of the energetic Thubten Gyatso. Tibet was still reeling from a disastrous border war with the army of China’s nationalist party, the Kuomintang, under the command of Muslim warlord Ma Bufang. Since the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911 and the declaration of a Chinese republic a year later, China had been mired in civil war and warlordism. The Kuomintang, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, had spent the 1920s reunifying the country and was now attempting to regain influence in its more distant colonies like Tibet. More bord
er wars followed and the souring of relations between Tibet and China encouraged a thaw between the Indian government and Lhasa – leading in turn to the first Everest climbing permit in nine years.
Despite this, conservative opinion remained powerful. Beyond political changes in Europe that followed the Great War, the end of empires and the rise of nations, technological advances were making the world a faster, smaller and more materialistic place. When George Mallory went to Everest for the first time, aircraft were made of canvas and travel was expensive. Radio stations were new and rare. Films, like John Noel’s The Epic of Everest, were silent. In ten years all that had changed. If the Wall Street Crash had made the lives of many ordinary working people miserable, modernity carried on creating new futures that seemed alienating and almost inhuman. For a moment, the Himalaya seemed to the West somewhere suspended in time, a lost world of light above dark clouds threatening war. The 1930s would be the golden years of Himalayan mountain travel: a last glance at an old world before the storm broke and it disappeared for ever. To the people who lived there, they were also the last years of outmoded regimes that had held the people of the Himalaya back for far too long.