He pushed aside the problem of how to tell her and began methodically drawing up lists of clothing, tentage, climbing gear. He looks like a Rolling Stone in the early phases of dissipation, but at 27 he was manager of the largest outdoor-sports shop in Britain thanks to his sheer drive, coupled with an ordered mind, attention to detail, and absolute absorption with the technical aspects of every kind of equipment. One of nature’s technicians, he would be the Expedition’s Mr Fix-it. He read Bonington’s Unclimbed Ridge and considered the problems and requirements of the North-East Ridge. This gear is going to have to be state-of-the-art: the lightest and warmest and strongest that money can buy and contacts can secure …
I could see the doubt – are these lads serious or just jokers? – in my agent’s eyes when Mal and I went to see her. I didn’t blame her, I sometimes wondered myself. I had three chapters of a potential book about the Mustagh Tower expedition, but no contract for it; I hadn’t yet proven I could write and sell a climbing book, and here we were asking her to find a publisher for another one. All she knew about Malcolm was from my Mustagh letters. Not surprisingly, she hadn’t heard of any of the rest of the team. Mal pointed out why none of the few publicly known climbers were in the team; there was little of the ‘first division’ left, and someone had to come along and replace them. Okay, she’d do what she could, and that was the angle to take – a new generation of Himalayan climbers out to prove themselves. Make virtue out of necessity.
But she couldn’t go far in securing a book or newspaper contract until we definitely had the money to make the Expedition happen. And as Terry was reflecting, one is not likely to attract a sponsor without being able to offer them media coverage. Sponsors want something back for their money, and what they want is good publicity and good public relations.
So where to start? It’s a matter of confidence and credibility, of convincing certain people that you can do what you say you’ll do, that you are serious. Once the first person is committed – be it sponsor, newspaper, patron, publisher – the rest tend to follow. The problem is breaking into that magic circle. At the moment the North-East Ridge expedition existed largely in Mal’s imagination; he believed, he was absolutely convinced that we would make this Expedition happen, that we would go to Tibet in March and have a good chance of climbing the Unclimbed Ridge.
The offices of ITN News were round the corner from Terry’s office. He went there with an outline of the Expedition and found enthusiastic interest from ITN, who have a history of covering and supporting a variety of British adventures. They agreed in principle to buy film reports of the trip. That was the first step into the magic circle of media and money; now we could offer coverage, it was time to make a pitch for major financial backing.
The Expedition brochure Terry produced was a remarkable one, and should be essential reference material for any expedition seeking sponsorship. Terry posed the potential sponsor’s question ‘What’s in it for me?’ and answered it so persuasively and exhaustively that it had us practically reaching for our own cheque-books. And so he sent out the brightly baited hooks and we waited for a bite …
Chris Bonington makes an accute comment on sponsorship in his book Everest the Hard Way. Financial considerations alone don’t make a company decide to sponsor a project of this sort. The notion has to fire the imagination of a few key people – and then they sit down to try to justify it financially.
And so it was with David Wood, the Communications Manager of Pilkington Brothers, the world’s largest glass and glass-related products company. The last major route on Everest, a new young British team, Tibet, China … And it just happened that the company was rethinking its sponsorship strategy. He picked up the phone and talked to Terry: ‘We’re interested, please send us more information for a Board Meeting this Friday.’
Terry’s proposals went before the Board Meeting, and it happened that the Company Secretary was David Bricknell, a marathon-running outdoor enthusiast and armchair climber who noticed that Terry’s sponsorship proposals included the option for a sponsor’s representative going to Everest with the team …
‘David Wood here, Terry. If we can call it the Pilkington Everest Expedition, we’ll put up £80,000 and not a penny more.’
1Everest: the Unclimbed Ridge. Hodder & Stoughton, 1983
6TH NOVEMBER – 5TH MARCH ’85
‘You don’t crack an egg because you want to crack an egg …’
Now that Pilkington had thrown their hat in the ring the rest followed in swift succession. Hutchinson made an offer for the Mustagh Tower book, then one for Everest. The Sunday Express commissioned a series of reports. BBC radio wanted us to record material for two 45-minute programmes. Now we needed a film of the Expedition proper, in addition to the ITN reports.
‘These days it ain’t enough to climb, you’ve got to get it down on celluloid.’ Mal and I had bumped into Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis on a warm, black night in Skardu, Baltistan. They had come from four months of climbing and filming, first on K2 with an expedition that eventually had to capitulate after sustained bad weather. Kurt and Julie went on to Broad Peak, where they both reached the summit and narrowly survived after being swept tumbling in an avalanche down the mountain during the descent. (‘It was very frightening,’ Julie said simply, ‘I thought, this is it.’)
‘Haven’t you been on Broad Peak before?’ I’d asked this balding, tubby, bumbly looking man in his fifties. ‘Yes,’ he replied in heavily accented English, ‘I first climbed it in 1957 with Herman Buhl.’ Only then did I realize who I was talking to. This was the man who made the first ascent of Broad Peak with Buhl, then went on to Chogolisa with him. As they descended from near the summit in a white-out, Buhl strayed over a cornice and disappeared forever. Kurt’s photo of the diverging lines of footprints, one weaving on and the other ending in nothing, is one of the most famous and haunting in all mountaineering.
Later Kurt climbed Dhaulagiri, making him the only man to make the first ascents of two 8,000 metre peaks – and then Makalu, Everest and Gasherbrum II. Latterly he’d become more involved in filming and general exploration expeditions, though his astonishing repeat of Broad Peak 27 years later showed that he was far from being over the hill. Julie Tullis had become his regular partner and sound-recordist on filming trips, and now she had just become the first British woman to do a 8,000 metre peak. She looked weathered, lean, calm and strong, giving an impression of great physical and psychological toughness – which she thinks derives in part from her training in karate and aikido; she has a black belt in both. We were considerably impressed by them, and spent more time with them at Mrs Davies’s Rawalpindi.
Our chance meeting seemed fated in retrospect, one of those things that had to happen. Now we needed a TV film to raise more money for the Expedition. So Mal found Julie’s card and phoned to ask if they’d like to come along as a film team. She in turn phoned Kurt in Italy, where he was happily putting on lost weight with pasta, and quarter of an hour later got back to Mal: ‘We’re coming.’
Like everyone else, they found the lure of Everest from the Tibet side irresistible, near-legendary to all of us who had grown up with stories of the exploits of Shipton, Tilman, Odell, Norton, Mallory and Irvine. After all the pre-war attempts on Everest, the Tibetan side had been closed for nearly 40 years. Pilks’ Company Secretary, David Bricknell, could scarcely believe what was happening to him as he made arrangements with Malcolm to fit in an introduction to snow/ice climbing before he too went to Everest. There was little time for training now, as the company agreed to give him six weeks’ leave to accompany the Expedition as Base Camp and Advance Base Camp Manager for the initial phase. From now on every minute of his spare time was spent co-ordinating between Pilkington’s, Terry and Malcolm as, buoyed up by money, the Expedition rose like a sunken liner from the depths of Malcolm’s dream to the unlikely light