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
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
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
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