Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent. Graham Hoyland
of any success. Bragging is considered one of the cardinal sins. The top winning strategy in this contradictory game is therefore to die heroically trying to reach some impossible goal. I believe heroic failure may have played a small part in Mallory’s psychology, as well as in the minds of his predecessors.
Scott and his party had been beaten by the Norwegian polar explorer Amundsen, who pipped them to the post by employing more effective dog-teams, keeping his attempt secret and treating his expedition as a race. Scott thought it was unsporting to use dogs and insisted on man-hauling the sledges, rather as later explorers thought it would be unsporting to use supplementary oxygen to climb Mount Everest. British moral indignation rose in step with Scott’s elevation to heroic status. ‘Amundsen even ate his dogs!’ they cried. Edward Whymper had referred to Everest as the Third Pole, and this term now gained currency. British pride had to be assuaged, and the ascent of Everest would do as well as anything else.
So, after more years of negotiations and the intervention of the First World War, the Dalai Lama reluctantly gave permission for Mount Everest to be reconnoitred in 1921, with a climbing party to be led by General Bruce the following year. This turn of events was largely thanks to the persistence of Younghusband. By then president of the Royal Geographical Society, he was determined to get an expedition out to the mountain. His 1920 presidential address hints at why people still want to climb Mount Everest:
The accomplishment of such a feat will elevate the human spirit and will give man, especially us geographers, a feeling that we really are getting the upper hand on the earth, and that we are acquiring a true mastery of our surroundings … if man stands on earth’s highest summit, he will have an increased pride and confidence in himself in the ascendancy over matter. This is the incalculable good which the ascent of Mount Everest will confer.1
Before Younghusband’s address the Royal Geographical Society had staged a talk in March 1919 from a truly remarkable Everester. John Baptist Lucius Noel was another one of those privileged soldiers, his father being the second son of the Earl of Gainsborough. Noel was a handsome man and something of an entrepreneur, as later events revealed. I have an interest in Noel because he was the first man to film on Mount Everest, predating my own filming there by some 70 years.
He stood up to read a paper entitled ‘A Journey to Tashirak in Southern Tibet, and the Eastern Approaches to Mount Everest’. Noel described how, when stationed in Calcutta as a lieutenant, he would take his leave in the baking summer months up in the hills to the north, searching for a way to the highest mountain on earth. As with so many of us he became captivated by Everest. Eventually he crossed the Choten Nyi-ma La, a high pass in Sikkim to the north of Kangchenjunga (I saw this pass in 2009, which is now heavily guarded on both sides by soldiers from China and India). Unseen, Noel slipped across, disguised as an Indian Muslim trader:
To defeat observation I intended to avoid the villages and settled parts generally, to carry our food, and to keep to those more desolate stretches where only an occasional shepherd was to be seen. My men were not startlingly different from the Tibetans, and if I darkened my skin and my hair I could pass, not as a native – my colour and shape of my eyes would prevent that – but as a Mohammedan from India.2
His plan was to find the passes that led to Mount Everest and, if possible, to come to close quarters with the mountain. Unfortunately, as I too saw in 2009, there is a difficult tangle of high country between that north-west corner of Sikkim and Everest, and Noel could not get closer than forty miles before he was intercepted and turned back. But it was the closest any Westerner had been, and Noel would play a key part in the 1922 and 1924 expeditions.
His lecture stirred up public debate about the possibility of climbing the mountain, which of course it was intended to do. After many years of wheeling and dealing, of encouragement from Lord Curzon and obstruction by Lord Morley, the Secretary of State for India, an expedition was mounted.
As a result, the 1921 Everest reconnaissance was highly political. The leader was the posh Lt Col Charles Howard-Bury, wealthy and well connected. He was just the man for the job. He moved easily in high diplomatic circles, and proved his worth in helping to secure permission for a reconnaissance in 1921 and a climbing attempt in 1922. He had a most colourful life, growing up in a haunted gothic castle at Charleville in County Offaly, Ireland, travelling into Tibet without permission in 1905, and being taken prisoner during the First World War. He was a keen naturalist and plant hunter (Primula buryana is named after him), and he was the first European to report the existence of the yeti. He never married and during the Second World War he met Rex Beaumont, a young actor with whom he shared the rest of his life. Mallory didn’t care for his high Tory views, nor for the way he treated his subordinates, but Howard-Bury got a difficult political job done, then led the expedition off the map.
The Mount Everest Committee, a joint committee of the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club whose purpose was to fund and organise the reconnaissance, chose the team members on the basis that they had to be able to provide a thorough survey of the massif and give a good assessment of the climbing possibilities. The committee was run by Arthur Robert Hinks.
Hinks is an excellent example of why bureaucrats should not run expeditions. He was a mathematician specialising in map projections and the weight of the moon, but he had no field experience whatsoever. He was contemptuous of those he regarded as intellectually inferior to him, and he was a snob. He failed to be open-minded about climbing talents such as Finch, and his ability to rub people up the wrong way annoyed everyone. Even though the press and film-makers paid for all the Everest expeditions, he was full of loathing for journalists. They were a ‘rotten lot … all sharks and pirates’. Hinks’s pernicious influence as secretary of the Mount Everest Committee probably helped to put back the climbing of the mountain by thirty years.
As with Scott’s Antarctic expedition, there was strong emphasis on the scientific value of the expedition, with the geographers keen to travel around the mountain and draw maps. The surveyors were Henry Morshead, Oliver Wheeler and Alexander Heron. The climbers were drawn from the ranks of the Alpine Club, which was desperate to get a man to the top. Harold Raeburn, a 56-year-old Scottish climber with an impressive record of guideless climbing, was appointed mountaineering leader, but proved to be prematurely aged and, struck down by illness, didn’t perform well. Then there was Alexander Kellas, who had huge Himalayan experience gained during his studies of high altitude, and Mallory. George Finch, another talented alpinist, was dislodged at the last minute by skulduggery within the committee, and so Mallory proposed his school-friend from Winchester, Guy Bullock, who had limited climbing experience. The team doctor was Sandy Wollaston.
Of all the climbers, Alexander Kellas brought most experience to the expedition. Even contemporary climbers owe him a huge debt, as he discovered the techniques necessary to climb the mountain. In 2009 I filmed and climbed in an area of Sikkim north of Kanchenjunga that was his high-altitude testing ground. This politically sensitive mountainous region had not been visited by Westerners since Frank Smythe’s climbs there in the 1930s, and it was hard to reach. I had gone there to learn about Kellas’s work on human physiology at high altitudes.
The ancient Greeks knew that the body would deteriorate at high altitude but it wasn’t understood why until the late 19th century, when it was realised that low levels of oxygen led to a condition known as hypoxia. Kellas spent the war at the Air Ministry, working with Professor J. B. S. Haldane on the high-altitude oxygen deprivation suffered by pilots who were flying higher and higher. Before that, he taught chemistry to medical students at Middlesex Hospital, combining laboratory experiments with tests on his own body while climbing high Himalayan peaks during the holidays.
He made many first ascents, culminating in an ascent of Pauhunri at 7,128m (23,386ft), and by 1921 he had spent more time at 7,000m than anyone else on earth. He realised that hypoxia led first to loss of appetite, then to loss of weight, reduced brain function and ultimately death. Above a certain altitude the