Last Hours on Everest: The gripping story of Mallory and Irvine’s fatal ascent

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est

Pro patria mori.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Wilfred Owen, the author of this poem, was losing his Christian faith by the time he was killed, just a week before the end of the war. Arthur Wakefield, another Lake District surgeon at the Somme who experienced the same horrors as Somervell, and who also went to Everest, completely lost his faith. So did another Everester, Odell, who was also at the Somme. Many others lost their confidence in the solidity of things, and perhaps those first attempts to climb Mount Everest tried to put things right for an empire that had taken such a grievous battering.

For Howard Somervell, however, the horrific work somehow made his faith stronger, not weaker. His sons both said to me that it was the most important thing about him; it was the key to his character.

After the war Somervell resumed climbing. He went to Skye in June 1920 and made the first solo traverse of the Cuillin Ridge, from Sligachan to Gars Bheinn at the south end. I have done this route – but not all in one day – and it is a tough proposition. Like others of Somervell (and Mallory’s) climbs that I have repeated, it is surprisingly extended and sometimes poorly protected – that is to say, the rope running out behind the leader goes a long way back to an attachment to the rock, and those attachments are not very secure.

We modern climbers like to think we are better than our predecessors because we do harder climbs, but when we strip out the technology we realise they were probably tougher and braver. They lived harder lives in unheated houses, and maybe just walked more than we do.

After Skye, Somervell returned to the Alps in 1921, where he climbed nearly 30 Alpine peaks in one holiday. Here he was accompanied by Bentley Beetham, who went to Everest in 1924. He climbed in the Alps with Noel Odell and Frank Smythe a couple of years later, and these trips were a way of testing climbers for an Everest expedition. Some modern pundits tell us that these men formed an exclusive upper-class clique devoted to keeping colonials and the lower classes out of their club, but I think they just chose to climb with congenial people they knew, just as the rest of us do. Later on, Irvine was selected, because he also knew Odell. Then Somervell thought his big chance had come:

Everyone who is keen on mountains … must have been thrilled at the thought – which only materialised late in 1920 – that at last the world’s highest summit was going to be attempted. And by no means the least thrilled was myself … I had at least a chance of being selected to go on an expedition which was then being planned for 1921.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Somervell applied to join the 1921 reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest, but was not chosen. However George Mallory was taken, as he was considered the foremost alpinist of the day. They did not know each other well at that stage since Somervell had gone up to Cambridge after the older man. So, for the moment Howard Somervell had to stand on the sidelines and watch.

4

Galahad of Everest (#u06d386a6-a3b9-55cb-b70d-5a5c09aa74c9)

Brothers till death, and a wind-swept grave,

Joy of the journey’s ending:

Ye who have climbed to the great white veil,

Hear ye the chant? Saw ye the Grail?

Geoffrey Winthrop Young, 1909

How to approach an understanding of George Mallory? On the face of it he was a somewhat unfulfilled teacher who died trying to climb a mountain. However, if we go by the sheer number of words written about him he is one of the most studied characters in British history, about whom there are at least a dozen biographies. Other, more conventionally successful members of his Everest expeditions, such as Norton or Somervell, do not even rate one published biography. How can this be?

After all these books that have been written about Mallory, it is hard to say much about him that is unclouded by them. There is a strong whiff of hero-worship about much of what has been written, and so an objective view of the man is elusive. Most of the books avoid any mention of his sexuality, some misunderstand it, and some misrepresent the circumstances of the finding of his body. That said, a book of this sort depends heavily on its predecessors, and it was far easier to learn about Mallory than Somervell.

I have met Mallory’s son John (now deceased), and I know his grandson George (who has climbed Mount Everest himself) and his granddaughter Virginia. I have followed his climbs in Wales, Scotland, the Alps and on Mount Everest itself, and I have read a fair few of his writings. Yet I still do not feel that I know the man. All I can do is struggle towards an understanding.

His first biographer was David Pye, whose George Mallory was published in 1927. Pye was his constant friend and fellow-climber, and knew his subject almost better than anyone. Like many of Mallory’s friends he became eminent in his own field, the development of aircraft engines, a science that led to the need for oxygen sets for the pilots who were being propelled to higher and higher altitudes. Then in 1969 David Robertson, who was married to Mallory’s daughter Beridge, wrote a biography – or rather a hagiography – in which our hero disappears like Sir Galahad. Mallory’s heroic status has hardly faltered since. An early death does wonders for your career; and this might be one clue to his appeal.

In 1981 Walt Unsworth’s magisterial Everest was published, which was rather less complimentary about Mallory, followed by Dudley Green’s 1990 illustrated biography, and Because It’s There in 2000, prompted by the finding of Mallory’s body. Audrey Salkeld, the foremost Mount Everest researcher, wrote a series of books on the subject, including the larger part of The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine and Last Climb. Then Peter and Leni Gillman’s book The Wildest Dream (2000) mined the vast number of letters between George and his wife Ruth, and turned up innumerable documents from other sources. They depicted Mallory’s life in painstaking detail. Even more detail on the expeditions and their participants appeared in Wade Davis’s Into the Silence (2011), which among other things examined the experience of the First World War and how it might have shaped the characters of the climbers. There will be more books about Mallory, I am sure, as his life seems to hold endless fascination for all kinds of writers. There are also a number of films that have been made about him, one or two of which I have had a hand in making. But who was he, and why does he have such a hold on our imaginations?

I found answers to these questions by looking at him through the eyes of those who have been influenced by him. These include his student contemporaries, his climbing companions, his pupils, and the theorists who try to work out what might have happened to him on his last climb. On the way we may also find answers to the question ‘Why climb Everest?’

The bare bones of George Mallory’s life are well known. He was born the eldest son of a rector in 1886 in the village of Mobberley on the Cheshire plain, which, ironically, is one of the flattest parts of England. He roamed the countryside as children do, and climbed walls and the family house roof, as well as his father’s church. His sister Avie recalled that he was completely fearless:

He climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb. I learned very early that it was fatal to tell him that any tree was impossible for him to get up. ‘Impossible’ was a word which acted as a challenge to him. When he once told me that it would be quite easy to lie between the railway lines and let a train go over him, I kept very quiet, as if I thought it would be a very ordinary thing to do; otherwise I was afraid he would do it. He used to climb up the downspouts of the house, and climb about on the roof with cat-like surefootedness.

He 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 ar?te 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 ar?te 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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-si?cle 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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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 (#litres_trial_promo)