Everest 1922

The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World's Highest Mountain

Mick Conefrey

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781838952730
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838952723
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Biological Sciences

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 SPORTS BOOK AWARDS BEST SPORTS WRITING BOOK OF THE YEAR* Though it remains by far the world's most famous mountain, in recent years Everest's reputation has changed radically, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high altitude trash. It wasn't always like this though. Once Everest was remote and inaccessible, a mysterious place, where only the bravest and most heroic dared to tread. The first attempt on Everest in 1922 by George Leigh Mallory and a British team is an extraordinary story full of controversy, drama and incident, populated by a set of larger than life characters straight out of Boys Own and Indiana Jones. The expedition ended in tragedy when, on their third bid for the top, Mallory's party was hit by an avalanche that left seven men dead. Using diaries, letters, published and unpublished accounts, Mick Conefrey creates a rich character driven narrative, exploring the motivations and private dramas of key individuals and detailing the back room politics and bitter rivalries that lay behind this epic adventure.

1

Himalayans at Play

The Aeolian Hall on New Bond Street in London saw several uses in its first fifty years. Built as an art gallery to display the work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it then became the headquarters of a pianola manufacturer, before reinventing itself as a small, intimate venue for opera recitals and concerts. But on the evening of 10 March 1919, the audience crowded in for a very different sort of performance.

For several years, the building had also been one of the main lecture halls for the Royal Geographical Society, one of the great British institutions of the Imperial era – a learned society founded in 1830 ‘to promote the advancement of geographical science’. That March night, the assembled guests braved the wind and rain to hear a lecture by a young officer in the Machine Gun Corps, Captain John Noel. Tall and thin with striking eyes, Noel had had a very difficult war, like many in the audience, but now he was thinking about the future and a possible return to the adventurous life that he had once lived in India. His lecture took him back to 1913 and one of his most memorable escapades: ‘A Journey to Tashirak in Southern Tibet, and the eastern approaches to Mount Everest’.

John Noel, self-portrait with movie camera

A natural showman, Noel knew how to work his audience. ‘Now that the Poles have been reached,’ he began, ‘the next and equally important task is the exploration and mapping of Mount Everest. It cannot be long before the culminating summit of the world is visited and its ridges, valleys and glaciers are mapped and photographed.’

In the decade before the war broke out, Britain had been gripped with tales of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. The ‘Race to the Poles’ had made heroes of men like Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, but ultimately Britain had not come out on top. The Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten Scott to the South Pole, and the bragging rights over the North Pole had gone to the American Robert E. Peary, even though some disputed his claim. To map and photograph Everest, the so-called Third Pole, had been the lifelong ambition of Noel’s friend C. G. Rawling, he declared – invoking the memory of one of Britain’s many war heroes – but Rawling had been killed before seeing it fulfilled. ‘May it yet be accomplished in his memory!’ Noel exclaimed.

It was a sentiment that was bound to chime with many members of the audience, and especially the grand old men of the RGS. As well as Sir Thomas Holdich, the seventy-six-yearold President and esteemed author of Tibet, the Mysterious, there was Sir Francis Younghusband, the legendary soldier and explorer, Alexander Kellas, the bespectacled Scottish chemist who was probably the most experienced Himalayan traveller in Britain, and Douglas Freshfield, the geographer who, along with Younghusband, was one of the few Europeans who could claim to have set eyes on Everest. All of them had their own thoughts about future expeditions, but for the moment they were happy to let Captain Noel hold the floor.

The story he told could have come straight out of Rudyard Kipling.

In the spring of 1913, while on leave from his posting in India, Noel had decided to make a private foray into Tibet, aiming to find a route to Everest and, if possible, ‘come to close quarters with the mountain’. He knew that Tibet was off limits to all Westerners, and that over the previous decades a series of missionaries and explorers had been captured by Tibetan officials and marched straight back out of the country, but he wasn’t going to be put off. Noel had already made several trips along the Tibetan border and was familiar with the territory. He darkened his face, hoping to pass himself off as an Indian, and left his base with three servants: a Sherpa called Tebdoo; a Tibetan called Adhu; and his gun- and camera-bearer, Badri, from the Garhwal mountains of India. His target was the village of Tashirak in southern Tibet, which he thought was the ‘gateway’ to Everest.

Noel’s party travelled light: a pair of A-frame tents, blankets, medicine, a Winchester rifle, a revolver for Noel and automatic pistols for the others. To guide him, Noel brought along a crude map compiled by Sarat Chandra Das, one of the Indian ‘pundits’ – the local surveyors employed by the Survey of India in the 1880s to make clandestine journeys into the far reaches of the Himalayas, where no European dared to go.

The first part of his journey took Noel from the town of Siliguri, at the foot of the Himalayas, northwards through Sikkim to the Tibetan border. Nominally, Sikkim was a ‘princely state’ ruled over by a local maharajah, but in reality the British were in control. When Noel reached the small Sikkimese village of Lachen, just inside the frontier, he hired two yak drivers to transport a month’s worth of supplies and then split his party to attract less attention, sending the food ahead via a different route. For three weeks, Noel managed to avoid detection in the sparsely inhabited wilderness of eastern Tibet, until eventually at the tiny fort-like village of Mugk, twenty-five miles from Tashirak, he came face-to-face with an angry Tibetan official who demanded to know what he was up to. With supplies running low, and the official refusing to let them buy food or fuel, Noel was forced to turn back and return to Sikkim.

It was a rebuff, but John Noel wasn’t finished yet. Having spent so much time dreaming of Everest, he wasn’t going to be put off by one hostile official. He reorganized his party, further reduced his equipment, and a month later crossed the border back into Tibet. This time he took more precautions, keeping away from local villages and known trade routes. It wasn’t easy though. Even if he and his men were self-sufficient for food, they still had to forage for fuel and water.

Initially Noel and his party managed to travel unhindered, but once again they were spotted at Mugk. This time, ignoring the protests of villagers, Noel pressed on towards a high pass called the Langbu La – which according to Das’s map would provide him with his first view of Everest. When he reached the top, the sky was bright and clear, and directly in front of him there was a series of striking-looking peaks covered in snow. Noel had never seen anything so spectacular or dramatic, but there was a problem: the mountains in front of him were, he estimated, around 23,000 feet high, a full 6,000 feet lower than Everest. Had he misread Das’s map? Then, gradually, the view changed. A wall of cloud behind the first range broke up and dissipated, revealing a much higher mountain behind. Noel checked his compass: it was Everest, ‘a glittering spire top of rock fluted with snow’.

It was the best of moments and the worst. Noel had entered the tiny pantheon of Europeans who had come anywhere close to the world’s highest mountain, but in doing so he had discovered that Das’s map was incorrect – the mountain range in the foreground had not been included. There was no direct approach to Everest from the east; any mountaineer who wanted to make an attempt would first have to cross the formidable chain of peaks directly in front of him.

Noel knew this was beyond the capacity of his small party and their limited equipment, but he carried on to Tashirak, a large settlement which marked the border between two regions of Tibet. He had now given up all hope of travelling unobserved, and set his sights on reaching a monastery where he had been told the Buddhist lamas worshipped Everest and Kangchenjunga, the world’s third-highest mountain.

It was not to be. The officials at Tashirak were predictably hostile, and a few days later the dzongpen, or local governor, arrived at Noel’s tent and demanded that he and his party turn back for the second time. The governor had ridden more than 150 miles in three days to confront the intruders – and to make sure they followed his orders, he left a detachment of soldiers to watch over their camp. Noel was not intimidated, even when the soldiers fired a volley of warning shots, but with his food running out and sensing that he had now pushed his luck as far as it would go without causing a diplomatic incident, he was forced to retreat.

A few weeks later, Noel was back in British territory, resting up at a government bungalow and plotting a third and final trip to the nearby mountains of Sikkim, where he would be able to travel and photograph in peace – without the interference of any hostile Tibetan officials. If all had gone according to plan, he would have attempted to return to Everest a year later, in 1914, with C. G. Rawling, but as everyone in the audience at the Aeolian Hall knew, the war had put paid to that hope.

As the lights came up, the great and geographically good prepared to speak. Noel had taken a little longer than expected, but before everyone disappeared, and most importantly before any journalists slipped off to file their copy, the RGS wanted to use the occasion to renew the case for an official British Everest expedition. The India Office still hadn’t replied to Sir Thomas Holdich’s letter from several months earlier, and the more publicity this event could generate the better – because, as Holdich understood only too well, the fundamental challenge of Everest in 1919 was not coping with the altitude or the cold or the technical climbing difficulty, but something much more basic: securing permission to go there. No one at the Society thought the Nepali government would ever allow a party to approach Everest from the south, because of Nepal’s historical distrust of foreign travellers, but the Tibetan government was enjoying better relations with Britain than it had for a long time, and so might just be amenable to a full-scale expedition from its side of the border. The RGS could not communicate with Tibet directly, however – any approach would have to be initiated by the notoriously aloof officials of the India Office.

Douglas Freshfield was first to speak. Tall and bearded with a patrician manner, he was the former President of both the Alpine Club and the RGS, and was no stranger to illegal journeys. In 1899 he had made a clandestine foray from Sikkim across the Nepali border, to photograph and survey the approaches to Kangchenjunga. Freshfield praised Captain Noel for extending their collective geographic knowledge, agreed that Tashirak was probably not the best way into Everest, and called for better roads to be built in Sikkim to make the Himalayas more accessible. He liked to claim that the Himalayas could one day become the ‘playground of India’, with a network of mountain huts and facilities for walkers and climbers – but only if the colonial authorities took a more active role.

The next speaker, the climbing chemist Alexander Kellas, was not so dismissive of the Tashirak route and thought it might well turn out to be the best way to approach Everest. He had travelled widely in the Himalayas and had thought about Everest for many years. If hostile officials could be placated, he mused, the best approach might indeed be from the East, but good scientist that Kellas was, he also suggested several other possible routes.

Before he could list them in detail – and probably send the audience to sleep – Captain Percy Farrar, the noted climber and President of the Alpine Club, came forward with a direct offer. His club was willing, he said, to put up part of the funds for a future expedition, and more importantly had two or three young climbers who were ‘quite capable of dealing with any purely mountaineering difficulties as are likely to be met with on Mount Everest’.

The longest and most animated speech of the evening came from Sir Francis Younghusband, the military explorer who sixteen years earlier had led the controversial British invasion of Tibet in 1903. His travels were legendary, taking him from the Pamir mountains of Russia to the Taklamakan desert of China, and from Ladakh in northern India to the mountains of Kashmir in the far west. Short in stature, with thinning hair and a huge Kitchener-style moustache, even at the age of fifty-five Younghusband remained a force of nature. Ever since his incursion into Tibet, he had been out of favour with the British government, who thought he had been too bullish, but he was determined to regain his place in the public eye and saw Everest as one way to return to the limelight.

Younghusband began by reminding everyone that, long before Noel or C. G. Rawling had dreamt of Everest, back in 1893 he and his friend Charles Bruce had plotted the first ascent on a polo field in Chitral on the North-West Frontier. Nothing had come of it, but a decade later, when stationed at Khamba Dzong in southern Tibet, he had spent three months enjoying a stupendous view of the world’s highest mountain. The real problem facing the RGS, he said, was not the Tibetan authorities or the Indian government, but officials and ministers in London. The home government had and was continuing to oppose any travel to Tibet, but, Younghusband added diplomatically, ‘If a reasonable scheme is put before them, and it is proved to them that we mean serious business, then they are reasonable and will do what one wants.’ With an eye to the next day’s headlines, he finished on a patriotic note: ‘I hope something really serious will come of this meeting. I should like it to be an Englishman who gets to the top of Mount Everest first.’

Younghusband was genuinely convinced that the diplomatic calculus had changed significantly. Before the First World War, British officials had opposed any thoughts of an attempt on Everest, claiming that it would upset the delicate political balance of the region – and, in particular, antagonize Imperial Russia. But the war had ended with the collapse of that regime. With the Russian tsar dead and a civil war raging between the so-called White Russians and the new revolutionary government, no British diplomat could maintain that Russia was a threat to India, so there had never been a better time to ask permission from the Tibetan government. Any reasonable person would have to agree, wouldn’t they?

The press, however, proved not to be quite as enthusiastic as Younghusband might have hoped. There was a rather brief item in The Times the next morning about Captain Noel’s speech, but it focused more on his suggestion that ‘man-lifting kites’ could be used for mapping and survey work than on any plan for a British expedition. The satirical magazine Punch carried a longer piece, entitled ‘Himalayans at Play’, in which they lampooned the whole affair, poking fun at the Tibetan names used by Noel and the earnest contributors from the floor. Like The Times, Punch was intrigued by the kites, adding that trained albatrosses might also be employed for other aspects of the great work.

The ‘Himalayans’ were not discouraged. Noel’s lecture had put Everest back on the national agenda, and as if to prove their point, just over a week later, on 19 March, Arthur Hinks, the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, received a letter from a Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Howard-Bury – then staying at the Bath Club in Central London – in which he proposed to make a reconnaissance of Everest that very summer on behalf of the Society, and to negotiate directly with the Tibetan authorities for a larger expedition in the following year. He even offered to approach the Surveyor General and the Director General of Flying in India, to organize an aerial reconnaissance of Nepali territory. It was an extraordinary offer from someone who wasn’t even a fellow of the RGS, but the Howard-Burys were a well-known and well-connected aristocratic family, and his letter and offer to go to India was just the boost that Younghusband and his coterie at the RGS needed. Younghusband told Arthur Hinks to write once again to the India Office in Whitehall, to ask if a delegation from the Society and the Alpine Club could come in for a meeting.

A month later, Sir Thomas Holderness, the Under-Secretary of the India Office, finally replied. There was no need to meet face-toface, he wrote, but the diplomats in Whitehall had not been idle. His office had approached the government of India and put forward the Society’s proposal, but yet again they had said no. ‘They are of the opinion,’ he wrote, ‘that until Tibetan affairs are more settled than at present, it is not advisable to relax the restrictions hitherto laid on travel and exploration in that country.’ And so concluded the latest British proposal for an expedition to Everest – or at least, that’s what the men in Whitehall wanted everyone to believe.

Sir Francis Younghusband begged to differ. A year later he had taken over as President of the RGS, and Everest was still at the front of his mind. On 26 April 1920, he convened the RGS’s Expedition Committee and emerged with a detailed plan for a two-year programme, which would start with a preliminary reconnaissance and be followed with an ascent of the mountain itself. When he gave his inaugural address to the fellows of the RG...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dramatis Personae
• Introduction
• 1 Himalayans at Play
• 2 No Place for Old Men
• 3 The Hardest Push
• 4 Larger than Life
• 5 Oxygen Drill
• 6 News from the North
• 7 We May Be Gone Some Time
• 8 The Gas Offensive
• 9 Summit Fever
• 10 Trouble in the Sanctuary
• 11 A Terrible Enemy
• 12 2020 Hindsight
• Bibliography and Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Index