Everest-The First Ascent...review

With the 60^th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest just a few months behind us, it’s a pleasure to have come across one of the most revealing and well researched books that I have yet read on that auspicious event. All the more remarkable is the fact that this is a daughter writing about her father's contribution to the expedition and his fascinating life and times, in a such a quiet, dispassionate way.

Everest-The First Ascent: the untold story of the man who made it possible, is a biography of one of mountaineering’s’ great unknowns-Griffith Pugh; scientist, doctor and physiologist whose contribution to the cause was-as the book painstakingly reveals- absolutely crucial in its successful outcome, yet cruelly under-played by climbing historians and fellow mountaineers. Not least, expedition leader, John Hunt. Author Harriet Tuckey’s work-ten years in the making-could not be described as a labour of love exactly with regard to her subject. In his lifetime, she loathed him at times and felt betrayed and rejected by a man for whom the description ‘socially dysfunctional’ was invented.

Born into a fairly privileged background, Pugh’s father was a career diplomat, his upbringing was predictably chaotic. Not least when his parents returned to a diplomatic station in India leaving 5 year old Pugh and his younger sister in the care of a young nanny and living in a remote rambling country house in the Mid Wales hills. Left to his own devices, the young Pugh developed into the self contained, free spirited loner that  defined his character for the rest of his life. After the torture of boarding school, Pugh went on to study law at Oxford before switching to medicine. After qualifying he eventually found a career which complimented his love of sking and mountaineering; becoming an instructor at the army school of mountain warfare in Lebanon.

It was while serving at The Ceders Mountain School amongst the snow capped mountains of the Lebanon, that his career as an expert in high altitude physiology took off. By the time the Everest expedition was going through the recruitment process, Griffith Pugh was already a strong candidate to take on the role as scientific adviser. He had made a great contribution in the field of research during a preparatory expedition to Cho Oyo in 1952, where, despite the non cooperation of climbers like Hillary- who viewed Pugh’s physiological experiments as a needless distraction-he still managed to gain valuable information regarding the effects of altitude on the human body. Particularly the importance of supplementary oxygen and its impact on performance .  Many climbers at the time were not convinced that carrying heavy oxygen apparatus was anything other than a self defeating burden. Pugh’s experiments with different types of apparatus proved to the contrary.

Subject and author

Apart from his work with Oxygen, he was instrumental in highlighting the importance of hydration when undertaking extreme exercise at altitude and his research and designs of effective clothing and footwear to counteract the worst excesses of extreme sub zero temperatures was a crucial factor in the ultimate success of the 53 Everest  expedition. 

The Everest story is told quite early in the book, leaving the reader to discover the complexity of a man who was part eccentric absent minded professor, part playboy, part husband and father and part establishment gadfly. Characteristics fused with an aloofness, disdain for mere mortals and a detachment from colleagues which certainly went a long way towards explaining why his achievements were swept under the carpet by those who chronicled the expedition. Not least, John Hunt in his best selling account The Ascent Of Everest. In the book, Pugh plays Trotsky to Hunt’s Stalin and is effectively erased from history.  Just after Hunt's book came out, Tom Stobart’s documentary film, The Conquest of Everest, further irritated Pugh by presenting him as a fringe figure. The mad scientist conducting his irritating experiments on men who just want to be out there on the big hill. In fact Pugh was an experienced climber and skier who had represented Britain in the winter Olympics and his skills as a mountaineer compared with many in the party.

 John Hunt’s qualities as a leader and flaws as a mountaineer and human being have been detailed elsewhere. However, suffice it to say, Harriet Tuckey’s book doesn’t exactly diplomatically dance around his failings. Hunt is portrayed as an egotist and like so many British heroes, from Scott to Franklin, a bit of a buffoon at times. Fiercely religious, Hunt wanted the conquest of Everest to be seen as a victory for the human spirit guided by a higher force; most definitely not achieved through the cold application of rational scientific logic. If John Hunt is not covered in glory then a bigger surprise comes with the revelation that good old Edmund Hillary, the genial New Zealand beekeeper and intrepid mountaineer who went on to become a tireless charity worker in the field of Nepalese education, was something of a climbing journeyman who happened to be in the right place at the right time.

In fact ,when the Everest team was chosen, Hillary had no real experience of climbing in the Greater Ranges and his mountaineering had largely been confined to his native peaks. Everest was always going to be the highpoint of his mountaineering career, however, the author describes how he never over came serious health problems performing at altitude and never established himself at the cutting edge. A real body blow to someone so competitive and egotistical. A trip he organised with Pugh to Makalu some years later saw Hillary suffering from altitude sickness and persuaded to come down off the mountain. Later events went from bad to worse when several climbers and Sherpas  had to be rescued and evacuated thanks to the incredible efforts of a non climbing member of the group, John West. Pugh himself was conducting experiments at ‘The Silver Hut’, the teams scientific base lower down the mountain at the time.As with Hunt's Everest book, Hillary's original account practically erased Pugh's contribution from the records with Hillary even taking the credit for the scientific contributions.

 Back home, Pugh’s wife, the former society debutant- Josephine (Doey)- was tiring of her husbands’ lifestyle. The amount of time he spent away from his family, the times when he did come home and he would lock himself away in his study-his penchant for expensive cigars, fast cars and fast women. Predating The Beatles by several years, Doey took herself off to India to hang out with the Maharishi Yogi and study transcendental meditation. When she did return she effectively had to fund and bring up her family virtually single handed. With Doey looking after their four children-one of whom was disabled- Pugh continued to do his own thing. Living high on the hog with millionaire friends while diverting his scientific energies into other fields of research.

His research into performance at altitude did continue however, and he was appointed as a chief scientific adviser to the British Olympic team competing at the high altitude games held in Mexico City in 1968. After retirement, his long suffering wife found him a role running a family farm and garage in which he applied the same intense scientific approach to these contrasting roles. With his health deteriorating, he was left to live out his days, a disillusioned and disappointed man who never felt he received his due desserts for the pioneering work in his field. It was only after she heard Michael Ward speak at an Everest lecture in 1993-a year before Pugh's death- organised by the RGS, that Harriet Tuckey began her journey to discover the truth behind the unknown person with whom she had shared so much of her life. Ward’s words of tribute lit the blue touchpaper and sent her on something of a magical mystery tour. Revealing sides to his character and life experiences of which she had never been aware of. Her goal.....to bestow- albeit belatedly-a degree of respect and recognition that the achievements and breakthroughs he had made in his field so richly deserved. In Everest-The First ascent the author’s quest has been well and truly achieved.

Amazon link to Everest the First Ascent

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John Appleby:2013 

 

One Man's Way

Once every week for two years and on every day of every holiday a quiet,middle  aged Kendal man has been out and about on the eastern fells of the Lake District – almost always alone – exploring, writing, sketching and photographing and collecting the results in a bulky pocket book. Two or three days ago this long labour of love, together with hundreds of hours of patient, painstaking work in the quiet of his study at night, came to splendid fruition with the publication of what I sincerely believe to be the most remarkable book of its kind about the Lake District ever printed. 

 

The book is remarkable first of all because every page – the text, the lovely drawings, the accurate maps, the revealing diagrams –have all been penned by the author and then printed from 300 engravings. It is further remarkable in that each of the 300 illustra­tions – drawings, diagrams and maps are correct  to the smallest detail.

No book about the Lake District has ever carried this tremendous wealth of detail before. Perhaps no greater example of one man's patience in the sphere of a book production has been seen since the days of those beautifully illuminated books done by the monks of years ago.  

Even if you have no interest whatever in the Lake District you will be staggered by this book, by the care and effort that have gone into its production and also by the remarkable fact that the book is only the first of a series of seven. Let me tell you more about the modest author and this latest addition to Lakeland literature. He is forty-eight-year-old Mr Alfred Wainwright, for the last seven years borough treasurer of Kendal, and his book is the first volume, The Eastern Fells, of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (Henry Marshall, Low Bridge, Kentmere, Westmorland, 12s 6d).

 

Mr Wainwright, a Lancashire man, has been exploring the Lake District fells for twenty years, but something over two years ago he decided to examine them minutely and to record his impressions in notebook form. He had no thought of publication. He divided the whole area into seven parts and decided to make a start with the area most easily accessible by bus from Kendal. This is the area, covering about 50 square miles of territory, bounded on the west by the deep trough of Dunmail Raise and Thirlmere, to the east by the trench of Kirkstone Pass and Ullswater, and to the north by the broad Keswick to Penrith gap. This is the area covered by his first book. His second, on which he is now working, will be called The Far Eastern Fells, and, all being well, five others dealing with the whole of Lakeland will follow in their turn.

Mr Wainwright is not greatly concerned about valleys, lakes and villages. His great interest is the fells, and in his book he deals, in the very greatest detail, with thirty-five of them, from lordly Helvellyn and its satellites to little-visited Great Mell Fell, from mighty Fairfield and its fine precipices to Nab Scar, which the Lakes poets knew so well. It makes little difference – except in length of description – whether the fell is a fine mountain or a humble hillock; each one receives the same complete and careful treatment.

Each fell is illustrated by lovely line drawings – accurate, often dramatic and always artistic – by carefully drawn maps showing all possible routes, by diagrams indicating special points of interest, by smaller drawings of crags, cairns, waterfalls and so on, and by most detailed indications of the views from the summits. We are shown full panoramas in the form of outline drawings of the views from eight points of the compass or in other ways, such as concentric circles with the distant mountains accurately plotted. The text is detailed, informative, even amusing at times.

Mr Wainwright, as I have said, had no intention at first of publishing his notebook. He was persuaded to do so later by friends who realised that nothing so painstakingly complete, so beautifully finished, had ever been done before. Incidentally, although the author is the most unassuming of men, it is pleasant to discover in the Clough Head section a self-portrait – typically, a back view.

It would be niggardly of me to criticise a book that is going to give a great deal of pleasure to thousands of people, but I have already told the author that he runs the risk of taking all the adventure, all the joy of discovery, out of the fells by the very completeness of his work. His answer to this is that publication of his own discoveries – many of them never before mentioned in print – will encourage other fell-walkers to rediscover them for themselves.

 

He also poses many questions – 'Who cut this strange path across the fells and with what purpose?' – and deliberately leaves them unanswered. People purchasing the book will have to decide for themselves whether to use it as a guide, treasure it as an inspiring reference book or browse through it as a work of art.

Mr Wainwright made, on an average, six visits to each fell to collect his information and get the material for his illustrations and diagrams, but he went up Raise eight times before he had a view from the summit. On his trips he has taken many hundreds of photographs – not for publication but to help him with his illustrations, which in each case have been checked and elaborated on the spot.

His panoramas to show the hundreds of summit views have also been drawn from photographs and checked and double-checked both on the spot and at home, on the map, with compass and protractor. All the maps have been accurately reproduced by hand – in most cases to the scale of 2 inches to the mile – from the 2/2 inch map, and the book is charmingly dedicated to 'the men of the Ordnance Survey'.

The hand-printing of the text is a work of art in itself – delight­fully readable and attractive. Each page had to be done at least twice, and each line is carefully planned. You will notice, for instance, that each line finishes exactly on the margin with no parts of words carried onto the line below. Not one piece of type has been used, even for the embossing of the cover. All had been done by hand, for it was originally intended as a personal notebook only.

Mr Wainwright is now hard at work on his second book, and he tells me that the whole project, the seven books, will take him perhaps ten years. 'One man's way,' as he says in his introduction, `of expressing his devotion to Lakeland's friendly hills.' May I wish him many happy days in his further journeyings in the Lakeland he loves so well.

 AH (Harry) Griffin: First published in the Lancashire Evening Post-27th May,1955.

 

Envoi

EIGHT years ago, fresh air was still the property of moneyed men, a luxury open to the few. With a hundred faces and places fresh in my mind, I find this fact difficult to believe, yet it is true. Eight years ago there were only a few Choochters, and Hamishes on the roads ; and the Highlands, where to-day the youth hostel chains link the most remote glens, were a desert of deer-stalking. Hiking was the hobby of an enthusiastic handful, and climbing was a rich man's sport. Only the cyclists had learned to escape from the cities.

Then came the hostels and lightweight tents, both of them cheap ; and now the roads are thick with week-end traffic, and in glens once deserted are hostels where the summer visitor must book in advance if he is to find a bed. In Glen Nevis, for example, there is a hostel which is one hundred miles from the nearest city and consequently stands empty most of the winter :yet each year the total number of times its beds are slept in is over six thousand. A bed in Glen Nevis in July is a thing to be prized, and the ground round the hostel is white with tents. Fresh air has become cheap.

It is unfair to make the previous chapters of this book illustrate the point, for most of the incidents described in them occurred in districts far removed from my home yet, even so, none of them was expensive. The hunger-march holiday in Skye lasted for a fortnight and cost me £4 from Glasgow back to Glasgow. A pound note would cover the cost of any other incident mentioned, and ten shillings was enough for most of them. I once spent a week-end in Dan Mackay's barn, eighty miles from home, with a hitch­hiker who had raided the larder before starting and had two days of first-class climbing for sixpence, which he spent on cigarettes !

 

But cheapness and popularity have their dangers, particularly for those who climb. The sport is growing too quickly. There was a time when no novice climbed except by invitation : it was an obscure game, contagious rather than infectious, and people took to rock and snow because they had friends who were addicts. The itch was transmitted by personal contact, and first ascents were supervised by competent leaders. But now it is an infectious disease, a something in the air, contracted by people who have no leader to help them over the dangerous learning period. They go to a hostel. They see people, strangely booted and swathed in ropes, setting off for the hills. Then one day they find themselves walking up a hill by an easy route, and, coming on a cliff and remembering what they saw at the hostel, decide that this might be a sport worth investigating. They investigate it. They have unnailed boots, no rope, no experience ; but they investigate it. And next morning the newspapers have the same old story to tell.

The number of fatal mountaineering accidents in Scotland has more than trebled during the past three years ; and, almost without exception, those killed have been novices. This is wicked waste of life. There is no excuse for it, for clubs exist which are willing to train new members ; and, even if clubs were not available, theoretical knowledge gained from books is safeguard against the more flagrant errors, and might easily have reduced the recent death-roll by half. Few people imagine that they can buy their first set of golf clubs and break seventy on a first-class course within a week ; but a surprising number buy their first boots and set off to climb the north face of Buachaille in winter.**These remarks apply even more forcefully in these post-war days. The accident rate has been rising steadily year by year. Most of the victims are still non-climbers.

I do not preach without experience. I was just as stupid myself. It is customary for writers of books in which mountaineering is mentioned to explain at this stage why they commit the safety of their necks and limbs to inhospitable crags; why, by deliberate choice, they freeze in gullies, alarm their relatives, suffer wind, rain, hail, sleet, and snow, parch themselves on waterless ridges, dress like scarecrows, squander their substance on ropes and railway fares, eat seldom, and fill the kitchen Monday after Monday with a collection of soaked and odorous rags.

It is vain, against such accumulated evidence, to say that one meets such nice people, or that there was a pretty view on top, or even that one just happens to like climbing. So inadequate did any arguement appear to the pioneers of the Alps, where mountaineering was born, that they disguised themselves as scientists and battled their way up Mont Blanc weighed down by barometers for measuring the altitude, tinted cards to tell posterity precisely how blue the sky was on top, and pistols to explode the theory that sound behaved in an unorthodox manner at 15,000 feet. 

Each and all of these experiments was completely fatuous; but no doubt they were the most convincing ones the pioneers could think of on the spur of the moment. Not until the seventies of last century, when Leslie Stephen wrote The Playground of  Europe, did mountaineers dare to admit that they climbed for the sheer love of climbing. They have been bogged ever since in a morass of psychology, metaphysics, and physiology, floundering in search of concrete arguments wherewith to convert the heathen to the sanity and sweet reasonableness of climbing.

 

They have been unsuccessful, and always will be.Tibetans, seeing the yak-train of an Everest expedition approach, nudge each other and remark that these foreigners must either be seeking gold, or suffering from delusions. The Briton, with his superior knowledge of metallurgy, inclines to the second of these conclusions.

Climbing is incomprehensible, and therefore silly. And moreover, it is dangerous. If it is pointed out to a golfer that nothing of ethical or practical value accrues from propelling a ball round a curiously farmed field into eighteen cavities decorated with flags, he snorts and says :

 

" But that's different. I don't run the risk of breaking my neck."And with the, air of having squashed the arguement once and for all, he goes out and plays another round. That is the Man in the Street's argument, and he will not budge from it however ingenious the arguements advanced by mountaineers. 

It is reasonable, and, indeed, praiseworthy, to play bridge, darts, pontoon, ludo, billiards, tennis, shove ha'-penny, dominoes ; to solve crossword puzzles and acrostics ; collect stamps and ancient coins ; pay a shilling to boo at football or sleep at cricket ; perform any of the hundred and one exercises by which mankind seeks to divert itself. But you must not break your neck. You must play safe, take care of yourself, keep your feet dry and your throat well wrapped up against the night air.

 

I shall break my neck if I choose ; but I have no intention of doing so. Mountaineering, whatever the Man in the Street may think, is not a dangerous sport unless it is embarked upon without knowledge, though it would be idle to contend that accidents, serious  accidents, cannot happen. They do happen. Experienced climbers have been killed. In Scotland an experienced man is killed roughly once every two years. But, even considering the relatively small number of people engaged in it, climbing is still a safer sport than motoring, and the risk of unavoidable disaster is so slight as to be negligible. There is, in other words, just enough risk in the game to make it attractive without being foolhardy. It may appear to some that an undue number of risks are related in this book ; but it must be remembered that risky days make more interesting reading than those when every­thing goes according to plan. Out of scores of climbs I can think of only one not related in this book during which I ran any appreciable risk of injury.

I climb—the Man in the Street will still shake his head- but I follow my masters and try to explain—for many reasons, some obvious, some not, all blending and playing their part in this urge which takes people to the hills. The urge defies analysis ; but many of its components are within the range of ordinary human experience, as, for example, the attraction of beauty and unexpected strangeness which may lie round any corner on a mountain.

One may climb through dense mist and emerge above a sea of clouds stretching endlessly and unbroken to the horizon ; or find a green translucent pool, warm as milk and made for bathing, among the rocks ; or see a boulder-strewn hillside converted by the magic of mist into a petrified forest more terrible than the fears of childhood, yet friendly because it is understood. And again, climbing is a sport demanding skill, and as such is satisfying. And again, it gives one friends of a peculiarly intimate kind : one does not put one's life in the hands of an acquaintance.

But to my mind it finds its chief justification as an antidote for modem city life, where we live on wheels and use our bodies merely as receptacles for our brains. Many people rate against city life ; but I must confess that it suits me very well. It exercises my brain. It also fills my brain, as it fills the brains of everyone, with a multitude of petty worries, agile little fellows who even during my leisure prick my memory and conscience.

One cannot sweat and worry simultaneously. The mountain resolves itself into a series of simple problems, unconfused by other issues. Abstractions are foreign to it : its problems are solid rock, to be wrestled with physically ; and in the sheer exuberance of thinking through his fingers and toes as his primaeval fathers did before him the climber's worries vanish, sweated from his system, leaving his brain free to appreciate beauty, which is never petty and never troubled anyone who understood it.

 

And so it is, to a greater or lesser degree, with the hikers and the cyclists, for how else can be explained the miles which spin behind wheels and crawl from dusty shoes ? Something of value is on the roads and hills, and thousands set out each Saturday to find it. Each one sees it differently. I have only described what I have found.

Alastair Borthwick 1939: From 'Always a little Further' Available from Baton Wicks publishing