Yeti: An Abominable History. Graham Hoyland

of 1953. During his national service with the Royal Army Medical Corps, he had come across a roll of 35mm film shot by an RAF Mosquito fighter-bomber during an ‘accidental’ flight over Everest.⁷ He saw at once that there was a climbable route from the Western Cwm. He helped to persuade the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society to approve the Everest reconnaissance of 1951, and joined the successful British expedition of 1953 as doctor. James Morris gave us a thumbnail sketch of Ward at the top of the icefall: ‘He was a slender, lithesome man, and it always gave me great pleasure, even in those disagreeable circumstances, to watch him in action. His balance was so sure, and his movements so subtle, that when he turned his grinning and swarthy face upon you it was as if someone had drawn in a moustache upon a masterpiece by Praxiteles.’

      Meanwhile, John Napier was making an exhaustive study of the yeti/Bigfoot phenomenon for his 1973 book on the subject, concentrating on the Shipton photograph, in particular. Napier was well qualified to pronounce on primate footprints, as before his career as a primatologist and paleoanthropologist he had worked as an orthopaedic surgeon and later became an expert on human and primate hands and feet. He was the founder of the Primate Society of Great Britain (they must have had great tea parties), and helped to name Homo habilis (‘handy man’) in the 1960s. Later, he became the Director of the Primate Biology Program at the Smithsonian Institution, where he examined the footage of an actual walking Bigfoot (the Patterson film, see Chapter Eight), and he also investigated the frozen Bigfoot specimen, the Minnesota Iceman.