The
Uncrowned King of Mont Blanc. Peter Foster.
The
life of T.Graham Brown, physiologist and mountaineer.
Published
by Vertebrate. £14.95. 256 pages, Perfect Bound Paper Back.
‘Only
those who will risk going too far, can possibly find out how far they
can go’. T.S. Eliot
In
the mid-1960’s I moved to live in a flat in Manor Place in
Edinburgh, and unbeknown to me in a house in that secreted close
lived T.Graham Brown.
My landlord was a Captain Bowler and his daughter observed as I moved
in that ‘strange happenings’ were taking place in the property
opposite. Intrigued I kept a watch on its approaches that first night
and noted people coming and going that to my trained eye looked like
they might be climbers. At that date most of us were still rough and
readily dressed, but the baring of rucksacks and the wearing by some
of these residents of boots ought to have given a lead and eventually
I found out who these strangers were? They were youthful members of
the Edinburgh University Mountaineering Club, lodging freely in the
basement of a house belonging to T.Graham Brown the pioneer of the
famous Brenva Face routes, Mont Blanc, and author of a book ‘Brenva’
the story of these ascents.
In retrospect this should have indicated
to me that TGB must be a most unusual landlord in allowing his house
to be so used, situated as it was in the very upmarket area of the
West End of the City just off the Princess Street!
In
the years previous to my sojourn in Edinburgh I had ascended one of
the Brenva routes, and in the latter part of that decade I studied
psychology at Leeds, and this occasioned me to enquire about Graham
Brown’s academic work mistakenly believing that his research was in
the field of Psychiatry, but once I discovered it was experiments
within the discipline of physiology I did not pursue my interest any
further. But Peter Foster as a retired consultant physician is most
able to explain these in a manner that most none medically trained
readers will understand.
TGB at the foot of a boulder in Mosedale. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
T.
Graham Brown was born in Edinburgh in 1882 into a family of some
distinction, his father being a
distinguished
Doctor
who became the President of the Royal College of Physicians of
Edinburgh. He had two brothers and a sister, but unfortunately his
mother died of cancer when he was just nine years old. His father
demanded/expected outstanding results from his eldest son TGB, and
Peter Foster has well interpreted for us how this so influenced him
in the career he decided to eventually follow in physiology; another
major influence and mentor being one of his father’s closest
friends, Sir Charles Sherrington, who eventually was to be a Nobel
laureate holding Chairs in Physiology first at Liverpool then Oxford.
Although initially at his school Edinburgh Academy he was not a stand
out pupil once he had gained entrance to study medicine at Edinburgh
University his ability for painstaking and methodical research soon
became apparent. Finishing at Edinburgh on Sherrington’s advice he
studied in Germany (as had both his father and mentor) for in the
early part of the 1900’s that was where the finest medical schools
and researchers were and TGB became fluent whilst there in that
language.
Returning to the UK in 1910 he obtained a post at Liverpool
and adapting the methods of his mentor he began his research work
into the neural control mechanisms of locomotion, part of which work
he submitted for his Doctorate which was awarded with a gold medal.
His researches in Liverpool and later at Manchester University
whilst a lecturer there were perhaps his most productive, but he
recognised at the latter he did not like teaching preferring to work
solely at research projects. It was whilst he was at Liverpool he
started hill walking and camping in the Lake District..... This would
eventually lead him via chance meetings into becoming a climber and
also whilst residing in Merseyside he involved himself in the
University settlement, dedicated to improving the living conditions
of the City’s slum dwellers.
The
First World War intervened and there was much need for medical
knowledge. And as the conflict progressed and it became ever more
bloody, specialists in such as brain and spinal injuries were sought
as were those who might have ideas as to how to combat-the ever
growing phenomena of shell shock. TGB was commissioned into the RAMC
and initially posted to a hospital near Liverpool but as the conflict
spread he was sent out to Salonika, where on occasion he was in the
front line under fire. However it was during the war that the
‘difficult’ side of his temperament seems to have surfaced,
champing at the waste of the possibility of undertaking original
research into such areas as brain and spinal injuries instead of
patching / bandaging /stitching up injured squaddie’s.
TGB
was appointed to the Chair of Physiology at University College
Cardiff in 1920 and he was to spend the next forty years in and
around that institute and he was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal
Society in 1927 on the strength of his pre-war research. Over these
years he was to be involved in ever more disputed arguments about the
place of the College in the provision of medical education in Wales,
and his constant absences away climbing and in his later years
sailing! He had started climbing in Easter 1914 by ‘accident’,
when camping in Mosedale and by being invited by a climber to
accompany him on an ascent of Pillar Rock and a few days later some
easy climbs on Great Gable.... and he was hooked. He was back again
at the Whitsuntide holiday and climbed on Scafell and the Napes once
more and he even took part in the first ascent of the Peregrine Gully
on the Cam Spout Crag in Eskdale. But two months later the war
intervened and it was to be 1920 before he was back to rock climbing
in the Lake District
where he met up with some climbers from Yorkshire’s Gritstone
Club at a Wasdale Head gathering.
TGB making notes at the bivouac hut on Col d' Estelette en route to the Aiguille de la Tete. August 1927. His companion Herbert who took the image annotated it 'authentic contemporary portrait of Dioggenes'. reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
Over the next three years he
attended regularly at their meets and he made close friends with
Leslie Letts a member of the famous diary manufacturing family. It
was to be Letts who persuaded him to accompany Cecil Wood and himself
to the Alps for the first time in 1924. In 1925 TGB in company with
the well known Lakeland pioneer George Basterfield, having remembered
seeing these whilst out walking previously, visited the Boat Howe
crags situated on the northern flanks of Kirkfell overlooking
Ennerdale and began a pioneering spree of new routing on these
previously unclimbed rocks.
The
visit
to the Alps in 1924 was to be a life changer for TGB, and from that
year onwards until the outbreak of the second war he spent most of
his summers in the mountains. Much of his climbing in the Alps was to
be accompanied by guides ascending voie normales or classic routes,
but by 1927 he was a seasoned campaigner, being elected to the Alpine
Club in 1926 and he had already begun his lifelong ability to fall
out with rope mates including his original Alpine partner
Letts.
It was to be in the 1927 season that a fateful introduction to Frank
Smythe set him on course for two outstanding ascents on the Brenva
Face. He was so introduced by Edwin Herbert, later to be a President
of the Alpine Club 1953-1956, and a life Peer as Baron Tangley.
TGB
had read A.E.W Mason’s ‘Running Water’ a romantic adventure
story which reaches its action climax on the ridge of the Old Brenva
route, and this inspired him to think and plan for new routes on the
then unclimbed face of the mountain. To record that this was
presumptuous is still true, for few alpinists of that era would have
dared to contemplate such ascents. But in 1927 accompanied by Smythe
he ascended a route on the Face following a series of ribs on the
right flank of the Great Couloir which is a major feature of the
Brenva Face. They called this route the ‘Sentinelle Rouge’. The
following year 1928 they made their second new route on the Face,
‘Route Major’ and this second route was far more impressive than
the first, and included more difficult/technical climbing, following
rock steps, walls and steep snow bands on the left side of the Great
Couloir and exiting on the summit of Mont Blanc.
Smythe
unlike TGB was not a well heeled professional, he was in the mode of
Whymper, someone who through his mountaineering writing, books and
lectures crafted out a precarious living for himself, and so having
lead on two of the most important first ascents of the inter war
years he wished to write them up, include them in a book he was
writing and to have his enterprise acknowledged by his peers,
particularly in the pages of the Alpine Journal, whose editor in that
era Col.E.L. Strutt was almost an equally spiky personality as TGB!
And so the scene was set for one of the most contentious ‘Fallouts’
in the history of British mountaineering, spawning a feud that lasted
for more than 20 years, the reason for this with hindsight is
attribution?
Who was the true progenitor of these climbs, Smythe or
TGB? The latter believed with all his being that it was him and as
Smythe’s claims and his writing up of these events were published
the more vehement TGB became sending to Strutt on one occasion a
letter over 70 pages in length refuting Smythe’s claims, requesting
publication of it in the Alpine Journal. When he did prepare to write
his own history of his Brenva ascents (including the Pear Buttress in
1933) in his book so entitled, the MSS was sent to Smythe who
threatened to take legal action, and Lord Tangley (who was a high
flying lawyer) intervened and helped to edit it in a way to avoid any
such possibility.
Lord
Tangley wrote of TGB after his death, a tribute in the Alpine
Journal, noting that he was one of the most complex persons he had
ever known. Somehow he remained friends with both of these two
climbers, but he noted how difficult and touchy TGB could be for he
had been subjected to a wall of silence for quite some time simply
because he had retained his friendship with Smythe.
He also noted how
TGB’s obsession with detail could be so frustrating whilst actually
on a route, insisting on stopping and noting the smallest of facts;
times, distances, weather, and any difficulties in his notebooks
which he always had about him whatever the conditions, whilst the
other members of the party grumbled about the need to get on with the
climbing. Tangley suggested that it was his scientific background
that led to this obsession, and perhaps his combative nature was in
part due to his physique, burley, small, and with the shortest legs
he had ever seen! Nevertheless he accorded him to be one of the
leading alpinist in the years between the wars who despite not being
one of the best technical climbers, made up for this by his
incredible stamina and ‘push’.
The
final route in 1933 of TGB’s Triptych on the Brenva Face, the Via
Della Pera (The Pear) was in retrospect the most impressive. With its
long dangerous approach across the Brenva Glacier, the technical
climbing on the Buttress and the route finding through the upper
sections threatened with serac fall were a masterpiece of route
finding.
His companions were two Swiss Guides Alexander Graven and
Alfred Audenblatten and despite this outstanding success he could not
resist some criticism of the latter for his fears about the objective
dangers of the route, pointing out he had a family to support....
which cut no ice with the hard bitten Professor Brown. For me what is
perhaps most impressive about TGB was his longevity, he was into his
‘fifties by this date and he still had some major mountaineering
trips ahead of him.
The Brenva Face of Mont Blanc showing L-R the lines of Via Della Pera-Route Major-Sentinelle Rouge and the Brenva Spur: Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
He
had made friends with Charles Houston, who he met on a youthful first
trip to the Alps, and who subsequently invited him first on a trip to
Alaska in 1934 to climb Mount Foraker, then the highest unclimbed
peak in the USA at approx 17,000feet, and then on a joint Anglo-USA
party to Nanda Devi(7,186 metres) in 1936. The first was an
outstanding success and Houston, Waterston and TGB finally reached
the summit after many weeks on the mountain, whilst the second trip
although successful with Odell and Tilman reaching the top, TGB’s
paranoia surfaced once again believing that he should have been
included in the summit bid, straining his previous good relations
with Charlie Houston who always referred to TGB as Tim or Timmy.
1938
was to be the worst instance of TGB’s paranoia, when high on
Masherbrum (7,821 meters) the lead climbers Jock Harrison and Robin
Hodgkin in retreat from a summit bid, were caught out in a blizzard
and forced to bivouac in a crevasse, suffering severe frostbite. TGB
had disputed Hodgkin’s view of the best route to attempt the final
sections of the climb, and even wished to remain in a high camp on
the mountain to make another summit attempt despite have frostbitten
big toes himself. He even accused Hodgkin of over playing his
injuries and pain, something that would come back to haunt him, for
as someone who knew Robin well, his injuries were terrible and
shocking and the worst frostbite injuries I have ever seen, losing
most of his fingers and suffering partial foot amputations. So to
infer that Hodgkin was some kind of mamby pamby was cruelly
unsympathetic and interestingly it was the route via the south east
face that he favoured that the first and second ascents of Masherbrum
were made, thus vindicating his opinion as to the best and safest
route to follow.
TGB Roping down Chamonix Aiguilles, 1931. Photo-R Goodfellow: Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
Somehow
TGB continued to arouse controversies and antipathy, the more so when
he became editor of the Alpine Journal in 1948. He tended to support
via the journal ultra traditional views and downplay modern
developments, he also used the position to make veiled attacks on
those who he felt held unjustified power in the climbing world, not
the least Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Leo Amery for their support of
the British Mountaineering Council over the wishes of some of the
senior AC members like himself, believing the Alpine Club should
represent the British climbing world. He was however able to rest his
feud with Smythe who died tragically in 1949. Things came to a head
partly because of the setting up of The Alpine Climbing Group in 1952
which had highlighted how moribund the Alpine Club was becoming in
not embracing modern developments and a letter to the committee from
Bill Murray who had joined up with the ACG pointing out that the last
place one looked for up to date developments and news was in the
Journal. The committee met in January 1954 and with one dissenting
voice, they decided to sack TGB and appointed Francis Keenlyside to
take over as Editor of The Alpine Journal, tasking Lord Tangley to
pass on this news to TGB who did not speak to him again for some
years post this act. But TGB was not totally without feeling and he
eventually invited Tangley to lunch with him at his club The
Athenaeum to rekindle their friendship some years before he died in
late1965.
Amongst
his many abilities TGB was an Alpine historian, and a book
co-authored with Sir Gavin De Beer (An Alpine Club member and the
head of the Natural History Museum) about The First Ascent of Mont
Blanc was published to some acclaim in 1957, he also was an
accomplished sailor having his own boat Thekla moored at Mallaig,
from where he made some adventurous sailings including a crossing in
1959 of the North Sea to Tromso in the Arctic circle of Norway, and
he was also a poet. His book Brenva published in 1944 is adorned by a
verse at the head of each chapter, and he was friends with Canon Adam
Cox professor of poetry at Oxford who advised him about how best to
present these to be appropriate to the Brenva story.
Graham
Brown finally moved out of Cardiff back to his birthplace, Edinburgh
and to Manor Place in 1961. He made contact with the Edinburgh
University Mountaineers and though he had finally stopped climbing
and sailing himself, he loved to attend their mid week gatherings
either in a pub or at his house. He advised and encouraged their
climbing, putting to use his wide knowledge of the Alps and the
Greater Ranges. When he died in October 1965 he left his house in
Manor Place to Edinburgh University, and requested for EUMC members
to have a first call for residency at this facility, and his large
collection of mountain themed books and papers he left to the
National Library of Scotland.
TGB Glencoe 1950- D Bird.Image reproduced by permission of the National Library of Scotland
TGB
was a pioneer mountaineering author so replete in a sport that has
one of the finest literatures of any human activity, graced by all
human kind. He was born privileged but he was talented and his early
researches into human neural locomotion are now being recognised as
important. And as Lindsay Griffin notes in a Foreword to ‘The
Uncrowned King’ that while the book does not disprove he was a
complex and cantankerous old sod Graham Brown was undoubtedly one of
the foremost British mountaineers during the interwar period and
indeed one of the most experienced alpinists of his generation. And
I wish to thank Peter Foster for bringing out such a fascinating and
true picture of the life TGB, he has produced a master work which
must have meant hundreds of hours of research and effort and I trust
this will be widely acclaimed and well reviewed, perhaps by some who
have medical expertise like himself.
Dennis Gray: 2019
