Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent. Graham Hoyland
started to show his abilities at Winchester College, where he excelled at shooting, soccer and gymnastics. But he was more than just a sportsman; he was good at maths and chemistry, and was becoming a gifted writer.
The English public schools of Mallory’s time were nurseries for the military leaders and administrators of the empire, who possessed an aggressive attitude to the acquisition of new lands, and even cast covetous eyes on our nearer neighbours. We, with our post-colonial guilt, might have difficulty imagining a world in which an Englishman could legitimately make his name by conquering territory, but the young George would certainly have imbibed some of this empire spirit.
While he was at Winchester something happened that changed his life. His college tutor, Graham Irving, an Alpine Club member, took George under his wing when he heard about his talent for climbing on roofs, and in 1904 took him for his first visit to the Alps with another boy, Harry Gibson. In his obituary in the Alpine Journal, Irving wrote of Mallory:
He had a strikingly beautiful face. Its shape, its delicately cut features, especially the rather large, heavily lashed, thoughtful eyes, were extraordinarily suggestive of a Botticelli Madonna, even when he ceased to be a boy – though any suspicion of effeminacy was completely banished by obvious proofs of physical energy and strength.1
Mallory’s physical beauty impressed many of those who first met him, and this advantage gave him many opportunities. It might even have led indirectly to this offer of a climbing holiday. I do not suggest any impropriety, just that his attractiveness might have given him chances in life that were not open to others.
Harry Gibson had to return home after a week, and Irving and Mallory roamed the Mont Blanc region for a further 18 days. In our suspicious times eyebrows might be raised at this teacher–pupil pairing, but in their classically educated days such adult–child jaunts were seen as healthy and mutually beneficial.
That first Alpine season was a turning point in the young Mallory’s life; he had found something he was good at and something he loved. On his second season with Irving they tackled the Dent Blanche, a formidable peak with a bad reputation. The young George wrote to his mother in a good descriptive style, introducing some of the themes that would later become familiar: the importance of an early start, the beauty of the mountain scene and the way he would set his heart on climbing a particular mountain:
At 3:15 yesterday morning we started by moonlight across the huge snow field, on the most delightful hard crisp snow; and after the most enjoyable walk and a short scramble over easy rocks, we found ourselves on the arête of the Dent Blanche at 7:15. The sun had of course risen as we nearer the Dent Blanche; and, as we had already gone up quite a lot, the view was splendid right over the Mont Blanc range. It was altogether too inexpressibly glorious to see peak after peak touched with the pink glow of the first sun which slowly spread until the whole top was a flaming fire – and that against a sky with varied tints of leaden blue.
We had a halt and breakfast for nearly an hour on the arête and then climbed straight to the top in a little over three hours, arriving there at 10:25 … We had no difficulty coming down, but a most laborious walk across the snow field. The rest of the party were waiting tea for us at the Bertol hut as prearranged, and rejoiced with our rejoicing – the Dent Blanche was the one peak we had set our hearts upon doing.2
Going up to Cambridge in 1905, he found new male admirers: his college tutor A. C. Benson was a celibate homosexual who collected beautiful young men and who fell earnestly in love with Mallory at first sight. The son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Benson had written the Coronation Ode, including Land of Hope and Glory, which boys of my generation belted out to Elgar’s music in the school chapel. Poor Benson was a tortured individual who was not able to express the love he felt. The intense attention he lavished on Mallory helped the young student gain access to a privileged inner circle, who went on to form the Bloomsbury set. This select group of artists and writers contained talents such as the poet Rupert Brooke and the economist John Maynard Keynes. They were at the forefront of liberal thought, the Suffragette movement and socialism, and later included the writer Virginia Woolf and the painter Clive Bell. George Mallory never quite seemed to make his mark, though – until much later.
Cambridge was a hotbed of homosexual intrigue – the love that dared not speak its name – and the Gillmans’ biography uncovers an affair between George Mallory and James Strachey, the younger brother of the writer and wit Lytton Strachey. It is not clear just how serious this was, but one gains the impression that the naive but beautiful Mallory was inveigled into the relationship by a scheming John Maynard Keynes. It was around this time that Mallory took to dressing in black shirts and garish ties, and grew his hair long.
I have a copy of The Yellow Book, with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, the fin-de-siècle publication from the 1890s that so influenced this group. A glance inside at Beardsley’s arch, pen-and-ink gothic figures conveys something of the look of these young men. The kind of impression Mallory made is conveyed in this passage from Lytton Strachey. His high-camp squawk gives a hint of the febrile atmosphere of Cambridge at the time:
Mon Dieu! George Mallory! When that’s been written, what more need to be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words – oh heavens, heavens! I found of course that he had been absurdly maligned – he’s six foot high, with a body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face – oh incredible – the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an imaginable English boy. I rave, but when you see him, as you must, you will admit all – all! … He’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?3
Notions of sexuality change over the ages, and that Cambridge concept of male friendship was not the same as what we now call ‘gay’. It was more along the lines of Platonic love, and perhaps we have lost something by our assumptions about same-sex friendships. The comradeship forged in mountaineering can be closer than a romantic relationship, but among the hundreds of climbers I have met I cannot remember one who has come out as gay. They must be there, but it is a robustly macho pursuit. Mallory’s later relationship with his wife Ruth certainly seems to have been a straightforwardly conventional one, and many of his contemporaries married after experimenting with same-sex friendships.
His climbing career certainly benefited from his attractiveness to men. Charles Sayle was a founder member of the Climbers’ Club and took him climbing in North Wales, introducing him to an older mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young. This was a significant meeting. Winthrop Young was a colourful character, an educationalist and a brilliant writer. It was he who conferred the name ‘Galahad’ upon Mallory. He was vigorously homosexual, and visited clubs that catered to his tastes in Berlin and Paris. He was attracted to the young Mallory at once. Winthrop Young was the leading climber of his day and organised the legendary Pen-y-Pass meets in Snowdonia. Every year he gathered around him a coterie of bright young things, and tackled increasingly difficult routes on the Welsh crags. George was soon part of the scene, impressing Winthrop Young with his lithe climbing style and inventive approach to routes. Here is Winthrop Young’s assessment of him as a climber:
He was the greatest in fulfilled achievement; so original in his climbing that it never occurred to us to compare him with others or to judge his performance by ordinary mountaineering standards. Chivalrous, indomitable, the splendid personification of youthful adventure; deer-like in grace and power of movement, self-reliant and yet self-effacing and radiantly independent. On a day he might be with us; on the next gone like a bird on the wing over the summits, to explore some precipice between Snowdon and the sea; whence he would return after nightfall to discuss climbing or metaphysics in a laughing contralto, or practise gymnastics after his hot bath, on the roof beam of the old shack, like the youngest of the company.4
After several more seasons in the Alps, Mallory was considered as one of the best British climbers of his day. His writing style was developing, too, and he made a serious stab at explaining why we climb in a long article in the Climbers’ Club Journal