Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jim Perrin
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Maps
Foreword: by Nick Shipton
Prologue: At the Cow’s Mouth
Introduction: Their Ordinary Selves
Chapter One: Surveying the Landscapes of these Lives
Chapter Two: Shipton in Bevis-land
Chapter Three: The Lost Domain of Lieutenant Tilman, MC and Bar
Chapter Four: Mountains-bound – Shipton’s Apprenticeship
Chapter Five: Into Africa
Chapter Six: The Widening Gyre
Chapter Seven: Vagabonds and Rishis
Chapter Eight: Proud Head of the Goddess Bowed?
Chapter Nine: On the Darkening Green
Epilogue: Knuckling the Footprint
(i) Leave-takings
(ii) The Yeti Delusion
Acknowledgements
Index
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Book
The 1930s was the great decade of British Himalayan exploration, and the two men most involved – Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman – remain worldwide icons to all those interested in mountain adventure.
Using unpublished diaries, journals, and extensive correspondence, Jim Perrin presents a portrait and re-assessment of these bold and engaging characters. He follows them through a golden era of exploration among the world’s highest peaks, to tell a story of geographical excitement among arduous and uncharted terrain, and of the challenges they presented to the mountaineering establishment of the day.
This is a warm-hearted celebration of the most subversive, stimulating and productive friendship in the history of mountain exploration.
About the Author
Jim Perrin is one of Britain’s most highly regarded travel writers and was one of the best British rock-climbers – with many new routes, significant solo ascents and free ascents at the top standards of the day. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Climber, The Great Outdoors and broadcasts regularly on radio. His biography, Menlove, was the first outright winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize, for which all of his subsequent books have been shortlisted. His previous book, The Villain, was joint winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize and winner of the Mountain History Prize at the Banff festival.
Also by Jim Perrin
Cwm Silyn & Cwellyn (with C.E.M. Yates)
Wintour’s Leap
Mirrors in the Cliffs (ed.)
Menlove: The Life & Writings of John Menlove Edwards
On & Off the Rocks
A.A./O.S. Leisure Guide to Snowdonia
Yes, to Dance: Essays from Outside the Stockade
Visions of Snowdonia
Spirits of Place
River Map
Travels with The Flea & other Eccentric Journeys
The Villain: The Life of Don Whillans
The Climbing Essays
West: A Journey through the Landscapes of Loss
Snowdon: The Story of a Welsh Mountain
List of Illustrations
1. Shipton and Tilman on board the S.S. Mahsud at Liverpool docks, outward bound for Nanda Devi in 1934 (Perrin collection)
2. Tilman the cadet, aged 15 at Berkhamsted School, 1914
3. War games, Berkhamsted 1914
4. Lieutenant H.W. Tilman 1917 (Perrin collection)
5. Shipton at the top of Batian, first ascent 1929
6. Approaching the summit of Lyskamm, 1928 (© Shipton Estate)
7. Looking up the Rishi Ganga (Perrin collection)
8. Descending from the Sunderdhunga Col after the second reconnaissance of the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, September 1934 (© Royal Geographical Society)
9. Eric Shipton climbing to the North Col of Everest, 1935 (© Royal Geographical Society)
10. Everest from the north, 1936
11. Pasang Bhotia is helped down to Camp Four, Everest 1938 (Perrin collection)
12. The Everest party of 1938, with Shipton and Tilman at centre.
13. Noel Odell, wearing a protective face-mask, nearing the summit of Nanda Devi, 1936.
14. H.W. Tilman, Art Emmons and T. Graham Brown, Nanda Devi 1936 (Perrin collection)
15. Michael Spender, Shaksgam 1937. (© Royal Geographical Society)
16. Shipton the joker, Shaksgam 1937. (Perrin collection)
17. Penitentes on the Trango Glacier (© Royal Geographical Society)
18. Tilman at Bodowen in 1977
19. Tilman at his typewriter – taken having drunk two pints of his potent home-brew (Perrin collection)
20. Tilman at the age of 79, still seeking the margins of ‘that untravelled world’ (W.G. Lee, Perrin collection)
21. A ‘Yeti’ footprint, as improved by Shipton, Menlung glaciers 1951 (© Royal Geographical Society)
Maps
1. Central Garhwal Himalaya
2. Karakoram, 1937
3. Nanda Devi Sanctuary: an artist’s impression (Sphere Magazine, 1934)
To Bill Bowker, Martin Boysen, Paul Ross, Tony Shaw,
climbing friends of my youth.
And for another companion of memorable days on the rock
Ken Wilson
who has done more than anyone to keep Shipton’s and Tilman’s names current over the last thirty years.
Thanks to all of you for the times and projects we have shared.
‘Of what avail are forty freedoms
without a blank spot on the map?’
Aldo Leopold
Prologue
At the Cow’s Mouth
Dry, writhing branches of resinous, sweet-scented deodar spit and fume on a raised fire-slab in the dhaba. Spurts of yellow flame illuminate the shadows within. The wood has been carried here along a thrilling path through the gorge for twenty kilometres from forest-slopes above Gangotri, on porters’ backs in huge lashed bales. Alongside the stone and canvas shelter in its wilderness of rocks these now lie stacked, to be used most sparingly. There are government regulations, environmental prohibitions on gathering fuel around this holiest site of Hindu pilgrimage. Soldiers are a frequent patrolling presence here. They beat with heavy latis any hill people who transgress. Little enough grows in all conscience across this wide acreage of blanched boulders, sparse grazing and bare gravel.
I sit on a rough bench in the primitive tea shop at one of the most revered and magnificent places on earth and watch blue smoke swirl up and curl out of the open doorway to gauze an upward view towards Shivling and the Bhagirathi peaks. Here the founding myths of Hinduism are enshrined in spectacular features of landscape. Two or three hundred yards away from where I rest is Gaumukh – the Cow’s Mouth. Out of the grimy snout of the Gangotri glacier, the Bhagirathi river – main headwater stream of the sacred Ganges – bursts forth milk-white and roaring, a terrifying weight and released energy of water that races down-valley and past the temple steps at Gangotri to pour into gorges thousands of feet deep, heading on by way of Uttarkashi and Tehri to Devprayag. There it merges with the Alaknanda river, into which flow the tributaries that drain the high easterly peaks of Garhwal, Nanda Devi and Kamet among them. And so it becomes the holy river of all India – personified as the goddess Ganga, daughter of Himavan king of the mountains, flowing through Rishikesh and down on to Varanasi and the hot plains of India before seeping out beyond Calcutta along a thousand delta-channels into the Bay of Bengal.
Sky-clad, trident-brandishing and ash-smeared devotees of Shiva watch as sadhus stand thigh-deep in the out-rush from hideous caverns of grey ice, waiting to immerse brave and faithful pilgrims who, searching for short cuts to Nirvana, wade out to them. I take my own chance on soul survival and avoid the chilling ritual. Chandra the tea shop proprietor tosses a sparse handful of twigs on to the fire under a blackened kettle, takes a pinch of boiled potato from a pan and kneads it into a clunch of dough that he rolls out across an oiled skillet and sears above the flames. Soon I’m handed a grimy earthenware cup of sweet milky chai, poured straight from the kettle – no crook of the little finger and request for more sugar here. He hands across on a battered enamel plate the aloo paratha, singed and blackened, glistening with ghee, with a small spoonful of fiery lime pickle dabbed on to it. I tear a piece off, touch it to the pickle and chew. The texture is gritty. Washed down with a sip of chai, it’s the most delicious food and drink I’ve ever tasted.
There are a scant couple of hours of daylight left. Up here at above 12,000 feet, once the sun moves away the temperature plummets. Already the far wall of the valley is losing its detail, densening into shadow. I look across at my heavy rucksack, stuffed with cabbage and garlic and onions, and think of continuing on my way. The four-stone sack of potatoes I bought in the market along the alley leading to the temple in Gangotri this morning is on the back of a porter with whom I bargained to carry it up to Tapovan, giving him money to rest and eat tonight at Bhojbasa and promising him more if he arrives with his load at our Tapovan base camp on the high meadow under Shivling tomorrow. I have promised to make it there tonight, and it is time to move.
For the last month I’ve been camping with a group of friends at Tapovan as the last of the monsoon drifts away. The members of our team, if you can call it that, have formed alliances, fallen ill, fallen out, wandered to and fro on their own enterprises, established and provisioned high camps on Shivling. Some have come to take keenly anticipated pleasure in each day’s unvarying diet of cabbage curry, rice and dhal, chapattis and stuffed parathas. Others have sulked in their tents in solitude, cooking on little mountain gaz-stoves freeze-dried and processed expedition food the thought of which makes me feel bilious. Mere sight of the foil packets with their clotted-grease contents reminds me of Tilman’s snarling strictures to Charlie Houston about the food the Americans brought from Harvard to Nanda Devi in 1936: ‘Bloody chemicals – might as well eat a boiled shirt!’ I liked Tilman, found him a friendly and humorous man, agreed with him on most things and argued amiably and enthusiastically on others. This packaged stuff hasn’t improved in sixty years. You would eat it if you were starving, and never otherwise. As to what to do with that foil packaging on a mountain, most people’s answer lies plain to see. A host of ills engender here, a tainting lack of mindfulness robbing us of the world’s beauty, and its former purity too. The Sanctuary is closed to us now, and you cannot but think that it is rightly so.
Tapovan, where we made our base camp, is magnificent, sublime – within the same landscape as Gaumukh, but removed from the grey ruin of the glacier, its perspectives finer, the immediate texture exquisite in its detail. At two thousand feet higher than the Cow’s Mouth, and a thin-aired fourteen and a half thousand above sea-level, it’s a meadow that stretches for two or more miles behind the high lateral moraine above the west bank of the Gangotri ice-stream. ‘Grassy flats brilliant with flowers and watered by meandering streams’ is how Shipton describes it in Nanda Devi – surely the most enjoyable and exciting of all books about mountain exploration, and beyond question one of the happiest and most modest. Fireweed and sparse lemon-coloured grasses cover Tapovan’s floor, a stream winds through sand flats. Each dawn its margins are crystalline with ice. One afternoon I watch as an avocet stalks past on coppery-blue legs, upturned bill probing the silt for food, and think that I have seen the bird of paradise. Ranged in a row beyond the glacier to the south-east are the Bhagirathi peaks – soaring pinnacles of rock with delectable ridges and overhanging walls that both excite and disquiet the imagination of the climber. Above our camp is Shivling, one of the world’s defining mountains, an icy pyramid of perfect proportions and irresistible allure first climbed by an Indian expedition in 1974, but known long before then as the epitome of savage mountain beauty. The play of light and cloud across it continually entrances. You can scarcely take your eyes off it. Even in the darkness, by starlight it glimmers, a felt presence. Across this meadow of Tapovan move flocks of bharal, traversing continually among the screes. All around my tent one morning were the unmistakable pug-marks of a snow leopard, that had stopped and sniffed, only a thin layer of nylon between it and where I lay sleeping, its muzzle inches from my face.
The hardier pilgrims make their way up here to spend time at primitive huts where Mama Ji and Om Giri run their ashrams and instruct needy sophisticates in the art of simple living, asserting rigorous ritual and practice and the simplest of diets – inner laundry to remove the stains of society from brain and gut. These novices are taught to chant in counterpoint to wind and stream. Avalanches and falling seracs provide the timpani. Stones sent slithering by the bharal add in a snare drum. Trekkers who have walked up from Gangotri and beyond to Gaumukh sometimes find their way to this paradise-place. One of them is Sylvia, a woman from Dresden, statuesque and clear-hazel-eyed, a former East German Olympic swimmer with a logical and humorous take on life. When it’s time for her to start out on a journey to south India she asks me to accompany her down to the road-head at Gangotri. I go, not only at her request but also to reprovision our camp with fresh food. She and I walk laughing down the arduous trail; balance across torrents and cliff walkways; drink mango juice that trickles stickily down our chins at the dhabas; find a room in a quiet house across the river from the temple with the water surging beneath, the continual rumble of boulders carried along in its fierce flow, bells tolling through the night and prayers chanted in the dawn. I watch her dress on our last morning in lorn appreciation of this gift of closeness and time. Her skin has a pearly lustre as she moves around the room with the grace of a dancer in the dawn light. To come to this softness from a world of stone! We wave as she departs down-gorge on the ramshackle pilgrim bus that slithers and grinds over boulder fields and through mud. I head for the market to buy the provisions, and race back up the long valley pursued by regret.
At the dhaba by the Cow’s Mouth, Chandra rolls a last cigarette for us to share and urges on me the need for caution when crossing the glacier. I heft the rucksack on my back and set off lightly, without anxiety, something of the night gathering around the peaks. The slope beyond Gaumukh to gain the ice is on the east side of the valley, raked by stone-fall, and all the more so at this time of day when a westering sun warms the snowfields on a twenty-thousand-foot ridge-gable south of the Raktraran glacier. Stones whir through the air, shatter on bluffs in their descent, send shrapnel spraying across the traverse line. I hitch the rucksack high on the left shoulder to protect my head, crab across out of the fall-zone and on to the first ice. Rough paths marked by a confusion of cairns jag away in all directions. The need is to cross the ice-stream at right angles, then turn right to pick up the path climbing a loose lateral moraine alongside the outfall from the Tapovan stream. None of the myriad cairned ways seem to lead in anything like that direction. From out of a side valley in the left wall of the mountains ahead rolls a bank of dense mist, and it speeds towards me. An exhilarating calm fright upon me, I take note of landscape features in the desired direction. Within the space of a few short minutes they are annihilated. Bare feet in trekking sandals grow cold.
We think of glaciers as places of clean ice and snow and white simplicity, pure even, flagging up their crevassed dangers by wrinkle and rent, seldom deceiving us. The Gangotri glacier, one of the largest in the Himalaya, is not that kind of place. It resembles nothing so much as a huge and hideous motorway construction site, mounds of broken rock and piled-up gravel scattered across its surface, hideous rifts lipped with dull grey gravelly ice opening up on every side. I steer through the mist by hopeful instinct, following leads and brief disjunctive paths. Half an hour of nerve-racking progress with a sense filtering through of the light’s thickening and dwindling brings me to the edge of a huge chasm. It plunges down for hundreds of feet. From its depths comes the constant roaring of water. There is no way round.
A sudden breeze parts the mist. I see the Bhagirathi peaks high above, disconnected somehow. Beyond the monstrous crevasse is a lateral moraine guarding access to the little alp of Nandavan, a mile away from Tapovan on the opposite side of the main glacier. To my left, a long valley, the one out of which the mist streamed, leads away to the east. I’ve arrived at the convergence of the Chaturangi with the Gangotri glacier – have stumbled heedless and unwitting into a torment of grinding and fractured streams of infinitely slow-moving ice, crushed and tortured in gravity’s inexorable pull through generations. And I remember that Shipton and Tilman, Ang Tharkay, Pasang and Kusang have been here before me, had encountered this astonishing elemental disorder and calmly, competently had found their way through it: ‘… if the merit acquired is proportionate to the energy expended, ours must have been great. There was no lateral moraine on our side, and we toiled by devious ways through chaotic hills and valleys of ice strewn with gigantic boulders.’1
I sit down on a flat boulder, take a little carton of mango juice out of the sack, and search among the folds of mist that are now scouring away up the Chaturangi glacier. What I am searching for is the subject of this book. In 1934, rattling down the gruesome glacier in high spirits came the five men I’ve just mentioned, whose mountain travels that summer are the finest expression of what Eric Shipton defined as ‘delight in the purely aesthetic nature of the quest’. The passage above is how he described this exact place. But he also captures its magic, as here when he tells of seeing Shivling from Nandavan:
‘… we woke to a fine morning and looking out of the tent-flap we saw a sight which fairly made us spring from our bags. West across the Gangotri floated, high up, a silvery spire, graceful as that of Salisbury, and sparkling in the early sun. It seemed poised in mid-air, for the base on which it rested was momentarily hidden by the mists writhing upwards from the valley.’2
Remember Salisbury spire, for we will come back to it. With his four companions Shipton had just made the first crossing of the watershed between the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi rivers. I have come here to get some sense of the nature of the ground they travelled that momentous summer. The impression it has made will never leave me. As if on cue, as if in recognition of those five men and the nature and style of their achievement, Shivling’s white sheering ridges across the glacier begin to glow, suffused with an ever-deepening red. ‘As the sun sank the ice became rosy, reflecting the light in the sky; the distant Downs too were tinted the same colour.’3
I roll myself a little cigarette the better to appreciate the fantastic loveliness of it all. And laugh at the memory of coming across an account in a letter passed on to me of how Shipton himself, in his later years, had been supplied with charas from the hills of Himachal Pradesh by a woman with whom he enjoyed a long, close friendship. Did he and the Sherpas, I wonder, round their juniper fire and over their dishes of wild rhubarb gathered from the lovely alps alongside the glacier, share this aesthetically intensifying aspect of the Himalayan experience? Did he and Tilman crumble it into their ever-present pipes? As a writer you can be allowed a degree of mischievous speculation when you’re fond of your subjects, in possession of salient facts about them and desirous of defending them against the taint of being Establishment figures.
But then Shipton and Tilman were never that. Their impulse was too wayward, the manner of their achievement too rigorously uncompromised ever to align easily with all the suspect attitudes, vainglorious posturings and required show that societal authority and its corrupt mouthpiece of the press report requires. What’s admirable to me is for how long they managed to get away with the simple integrity of being themselves before the climbing establishment, in its slow and glacial way, finally realised what they were about and, in the case of Shipton – the undoubted ringleader, play-master and Lord of Misrule – sidelined him, and regressed for a sad generation or so to its own regimented code. And how Shipton and Tilman, again through being themselves, had bequeathed to their successors as initiates in the direct and unpolluted joyful engagement in mountain experience a philosophy, and a bold example. Far from fading, these have gathered force and lustre over the decades between their time and ours, so that the Shipton & Tilman style and not the martially named ‘siege approach’ is the one now seen as exemplary. They have become, in the American mountaineer David Roberts’s fine phrase, ‘retro-active heroes of mountaineering’s avant-garde’. From the oddest of friendships came the paradigm against which all informed participants in mountain activity now assess ambition and enterprise.
This book explores that revolutionary, mutually enhancing and inspiring friendship, with its lasting legacy. At heart, it’s a study of homo ludens in the mountain context; it’s about the recognition and winning through to acceptance of what Shipton and Tilman, and the approach in which they so fortuitously balanced and enabled each other, gave to the worldwide activity of mountaineering. So, having arrived at the resolution to struggle with that theme, and saluted the wraiths retreating back into the mist, I must now extricate myself from a dreamy torpor, the alpenglow brilliant on the superlative phantom spire above, cross a mile of tortured and perilous ice, and deliver a sack of cabbage and garlic and onions to base camp before the freezing onset of a rapidly encroaching dark.
1 Eric Shipton, Nanda Devi (3rd edition, Hodder & Stoughton, 1939), p.198.
2 Shipton, Nanda Devi,. p.199.
3 Richard Jefferies, Bevis: The Story of a Boy (1910. Dent, 1981), p.418. File this away with the Salisbury reference, for re-examination in Chapter Two.
Introduction:
Their Ordinary Selves
A decade that began with the Great Depression and ended with the outbreak of the Second World War – and that has become synonymous with deprivation, austerity, migrant poverty and the social problems that contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy (and to a lesser degree in England through Oswald Mosley’s Mussolini-inspired British Union of Fascists) – might not be thought one of the happier times in any sphere of human activity. For British mountaineering, however, the 1930s were halcyon days. They saw the establishment of an ethical paradigm that has remained the sport’s gold standard to this day, proudly adopted and proclaimed by its leading contemporary practitioners worldwide, from former Soviet Bloc countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia to the Americas; and from Britain and the Continent to the East. That this should have been so is in large measure through the achievements and example of Eric Shipton and H.W. Tilman, and the shared philosophy of adventure they expressed in bodies of written work that include what many acknowledge as the major classics of mountain literature. They were both English, one of them from a colonial background, the other of Liverpool’s rising mercantile stock. Shipton was the younger by nine years, already feted as one of the outstanding young British alpinists when he met the Great War veteran Tilman in Kenya colony at the decade’s outset. Tilman at the time was a novice climber, whose stature had grown by the end of the decade to the extent that he was appointed leader for Britain’s last pre-war attempt on Everest. The names of these two men are indissociably linked in mountain culture – the ‘Shipton/Tilman style’, with its qualifying tag of ‘lightweight’, its eschewing of quasi-militarism in tackling ascents, its dialectical insistence on local diet, ‘living off the land’, and keeping expeditionary scale appropriate to the interests of indigenous mountain communities, is now a set formula for all that is most admirable in exploratory activity among the world’s great mountain ranges.
A friendship is implied by the collocation of their names, and a relationship based on respect and interdependence and leavened with a teasing humour certainly existed between the two men. Shipton even dedicated his first book to his most frequent mountain companion. Yet the very lack of intimacy and mutual knowledge in their friendship almost debars it from any definition of the term that we might recognise. There was, for example, none of the frisson of Cambridge and Bloomsbury homosexuality that followed George Leigh Mallory around wherever he chose to climb. The whole province of emotion remained unexplored between Shipton and Tilman, only that of action being relevant. This was not a friendship as we know it in the importunate and disclosing manner of the twenty-first century. Nor was it merely a connection based in expediency and convenience. For a few short years – surprisingly few, given how ubiquitous their influence has become – Shipton and Tilman orbited around each other in enabling balance, achieving much that was and is still seen as radical together, despite differences in character vast as the landscapes they traversed. To the lay observer, perhaps all mountaineers assume a standard identity. The impression, if taken thus, is a false one, and viewed as caricature by performers from within the range of activities that constitute the sport. Published commentary on mountaineering in recent years has tended to the external, and often fails to grasp the essence of the matter. If there were an annual ‘Bad Climbing’ award to parallel the ‘Bad Sex’ award, the candidates would be many, few of them from within the sport. What participants for the most part understand is that there is a rich complexity of national and local traditions within the history of approaches to mountains and rocks.
Shipton’s and Tilman’s grand project and their main achievements are not characterised by technical accomplishment or advances in achieved difficulty. Neither man was among the virtuoso performers of his day on rock or ice, however much the 1930s English mountaineering establishment sought to talk up the talents of those they wished to claim as their own. Here’s Hugh Ruttledge, for example, leader of the 1933 and 1936 Everest expeditions, writing in the foreword to Shipton’s Nanda Devi: ‘Those who read this book with understanding will realise the number of tight places this party got into, where nothing but the most brilliant technical competence could have got them out alive.’1 Good-hearted this assuredly is; decent old buffer Ruttledge certainly was; it remains nothing but bluster. Shipton and Tilman were admirable in many different ways, but no one should think to promote ‘brilliant technical competence’ as among their distinguishing qualities. The claim is one resulting from the external view mentioned above, that has bedevilled so much writing on mountains over the decades. Elsewhere Shipton himself bridled at this kind of ignorant hyperbole2 and the actual language used here. What both of this book’s subjects did develop – and Shipton in particular – was a solid, all-round competence on mountains, and a fine instinct for the best route that may well be the most important and useful of all qualities for the exploratory mountaineer. For their ambitions, which in the main were outside the usual parameters of acquisition and ‘conquest’, this was enough.
Had they been put alongside the foremost French or Italian ice-climbers, Bohemian3 or even British rock-climbers and judged on technical skills alone, they would not have been distinguished by their expertise in these aspects of mountain-craft. For all that, and for differing reasons, their names today are ranked within mountaineering history as high as or higher than other climbing stars of the 1930s: Comici and Cassin, Charlet and Gervasutti, Heckmair and Kirkus, Menlove Edwards and Frank Elliott – all these were outstanding performers within their own mountain disciplines, yet none have quite the world-wide cachet of Shipton and Tilman. On the north faces of the Eiger or the Matterhorn, Les Courtes, the Walker Spur or the Cima Ovest, Tilman and Shipton would have been hopelessly out of their depth. The harder climbs of the period on Clogwyn Du’r Arddu or Dow Crag, at Helsby Hill, Bärenbrünnerhof or Scafell were far beyond their grasp. But mountaineering is a broad church, and these venues were not where their interest lay; nor did they give scope for the approach at which they did excel. Which was other, and larger. After their initial forays together among the mountains of Africa, the Himalaya – greatest of all mountain ranges – became for the rest of the 1930s and beyond the focus of their activity. If it is erroneous to assume a single identity for mountaineering tradition, so too is it a mistake to look on the Himalaya as a single mountain range. This formidable physical barrier where all the world’s highest peaks are located, that lies between Russia and China and what was until 1947 British India, is immensely varied in its localities, atmospheres and land forms – unsurprising, given that it stretches for over 1,800 miles (if the eastern and northern extensions of the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush are, as is generally the case, included). The thorough exploration of these mountains, and the making of alliances with the states into which history had divided them, was a political necessity and a geographical obsession of the British for well over a century.
The necessity was because of inexorable Russian expansion into central Asia, and the threat thus posed to India, the most valuable and valued of all British colonies, upon which Napoleon himself had cast covetous eyes. The early history of Himalayan exploration,4 then, is an important subtext to that of the Great Game – the struggle for supremacy in the region lying between Russia and India. It takes in subjects as diverse as the history of the Survey of India, which had been founded in 1767, and the Great Trigonometric Survey inaugurated in 1802, as well as the fascinating accounts of the pundit explorers – men like Kinthup, who was sold into slavery whilst trying to establish the source of the Brahmaputra river; and Hari Ram, who made his way along the Bhote Khosi and around Mount Everest in 1871–2; and Nain Singh Rawat, who visited Lhasa in 1865, met the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, and was awarded a gold medal for his efforts by the Royal Geographical Society. Each of these resolute and highly intelligent native hill men faced great danger in carrying out work for the Survey of India, travelling disguised, with maps and papers concealed in their prayer wheels and calibrated bead necklaces to mark off distances on their charts. They laid impeccable foundations for the early ventures into the Himalaya by Western explorers. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, travellers, mountaineers and soldiers – a hundred years of ever-increasing activity having rendered the mountains of Europe as familiar as the streets of the metropolis – were probing regularly into the fastnesses of the highest of all the world’s mountain ranges.
It was with this generation that the practical and philosophical basis for Shipton’s and Tilman’s great Himalayan exploratory project of the 1930s was laid down. If we look for their forebears, among the names that come to mind are those of the Schlagintweit brothers of Munich, who travelled extensively in the Himalaya, Karakoram and Kunlun in the 1850s; of Martin Conway, eminent art historian and, in 1892, discoverer of the so-called ‘Snow Lake’ (Lukpe Lawo) – the supposed mother lode of all Karakoram ice streams; of A. F. Mummery, Victorian author of one of the most stylish and well-loved mountaineering chronicles, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, who went to Nanga Parbat on a lightweight expedition with Professor Norman Collie in 1895, and with his two Gurkha companions perished in an avalanche on the Rakhiot face of the mountain; of Francis Younghusband and his journey from Beijing to India in 1887 – a more fragrant memory, this, than his massacre of Tibetan monks at Guru in 1904 on the Mission to Lhasa; or most directly of all, that of Tom Longstaff, whose knowledge of Garhwal, Kumaon and the Tibetan border regions, gained in extensive mountain travels throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, was a crucial underpinning to that of Shipton and Tilman in 1934, and a clear model for the style they adopted. You will hear much of Longstaff and his resolute and adventurous spirit in the narrative that follows.
From the distinctly odd nature of their friendship, their relationship to the traditions and practice of mountaineering, and their possible antecedents, we might move on to consider the scale of what Shipton and Tilman achieved in the decade to which I have, with due allowance for a few glances before and after, restricted this book. The first ascent of the West Ridge of Mount Kenya, completed by them in 1930, was the high point of Shipton’s technical achievement, and comparable with the hardest alpine rock ridges of the time. Even set against those, it was more remote and at substantially higher altitude. The adventure quotient here was enormous. It was also Tilman’s first real climb, which speaks volumes for Shipton’s confidence in his companion. Shipton’s ascent of Kamet with Frank Smythe, Raymond Greene and others in 1931 established a summit altitude record that was only broken five years later by Tilman’s and Odell’s ascent of Nanda Devi – a record that itself lasted for fourteen years. Yet where our subjects are concerned, talk of successful ascents is more or less incidental, and the use of that word ‘conquest’ – loathsome in a mountain context – is wholly inadmissible. There is far more to these two than that.
There were the various pre-war Everest expeditions – 1933, 1935, 1936, 1938 – in which the pair were individually or jointly involved, and which were always augmented by adventurous reconnaissances into adjacent massifs. There was the season of 1934 – to my mind the most exciting story in the whole saga of mountain discovery – that saw them, with three Sherpa companions, make their way up the Rishi gorge into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, and hence solve one of the long-standing problems of Himalayan geography. There was Shipton’s growing interest in mapping and surveying, that led to the extraordinary Shaksgam and Karakoram venture of 1937 in which they were both involved, and which brought a significant third party into their pioneering arrangements – the poet’s brother and flamboyant character Michael Spender, through whom Shipton was linked in to an entire 1930s London cultural coterie. At the very end of the decade there was Tilman’s tragic probe into Assam, and Shipton’s vastly ambitious continuation of the 1937 Blank on the Map journeys – a project that was a summary of their work through the entire decade, to which the onset of war brought a premature close.
When the seminal French film director Jean-Luc Godard was asked by an interviewer for the meaning of his chaotic black comedy Weekend (1967), he responded with ‘Le Moral? C’est le Travelling.’ So too with Shipton and Tilman, and not just the travelling, but the entire insouciant, happy-go-lucky, minimal and self-reliant style of their mountain vagabondage. These men were exemplars wholly at odds with the consumerist bent of their own or even more markedly of our time. For that reason they are still admired, studied, praised, occasionally copied and in some quarters almost revered. We give our notional assent to their way of doing things in a way that we do to few others in the sphere of adventure. For us, they stand for something entirely authentic, stimulated by a real curiosity about the physical world around us, wholly disconnected from the modern celebrity ills of egotism, self-aggrandisement, the illusory and the making of money.
Also, our two subjects – and I will not call them heroes, whatever my personal feelings about them, that term being so debased – were both possessed of one of the finest and most levelling of human qualities: a sense of humour. In this again they differed markedly, but both of them, when I read and consider what they wrote, how they recorded what they did and what went on around them, tease a smile out of me continually. It’s a subtle humour too. Fifty or more years ago, when I was beginning my own climbing career on the gritstone outcrops of the north of England, and starting to read about mountain exploits, their texts were regarded as simple record. They were not seen as expressions of style, of elaborate fun. How the stiff were duped! How Shipton and Tilman made such monkeys of the members of that establishment along the margins of which they variously played! I love them still for the sly mischief of all that.
I have been a devotee of their writings throughout my own involvement in climbing. Thirty years ago, working as editor on the Diadem imprint for the publisher Ken Wilson, compendium volumes of their mountain titles were the first projects I argued for and saw back into print, where they have remained without a break in Britain and America5 to this day, sustaining and augmenting their authors’ long influence. I might now modify in a few small details the arguments I put forward for both men in the critical introductions to those collections. The general sense, however, would remain unchanged. My enthusiasm for the work and the example has only increased with the passage of years.
Several reasonably competent, more-or-less adequate6 biographies have been published – one for Shipton and two for Tilman (whose life in exploration carried on in the 1950s and beyond to embrace an entirely new area of interest, which was the sea, his writings about which won him a different audience, and a new kind of notoriety every bit as admirable as the old, of the austerity and simplicity of which it was a logical extension). This present book in no sense should be seen as competition for these, though it does occasionally seek to correct a few of their points. It pleads the subjects’ case in partisan fashion as mountaineers and as writers; it is not a straight and formal biography, though the element of life-writing in it is strong. This is how their favoured activity is best done, it argues, implicitly, through the medium of its subjects’ lives. Insofar as it traces the entire outline of both lives, it does so in plan, its emphasis deliberately placed on that single decade of Shipton’s and Tilman’s most significant mountain-exploratory achievements. This decision to limit the scope was taken for three main reasons. First, I wished to focus on the crucial climbs and journeys made between 1930 and 1939, because – affection for the decade apart – here, I felt, was encapsulated the essence and summation of their philosophy of mountain exploration.
Second, over the years I have collected a good deal of original material – notebooks, correspondence and the like, especially by Shipton – which relates particularly to this time. Much of this is of exceptional quality, previously unpublished or even unknown. I have quoted extensively from it here and there in the chapters that follow. To have held and read through the small journal Shipton carried with him on the first journey into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary had a feeling for me akin to the handling of a religious relic or icon. Here was the simplicity of encounter, the beauty and wonder of first experience, the central values and the directness of response – all expressed in slant, purple-pencil, legible scrawl that filled every scrap of available space. The transcriptions from that notebook alone to my mind are justification enough for this book.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, it has seemed to me that for all the interest bestowed upon Shipton and Tilman over the thirty-five years since their deaths, there has been a ghost at this feast – that of a friendship never fully addressed, which was the major enabling factor in their crucial climbing and journeying. Even where these were not jointly accomplished, its effect particularly upon Tilman – junior in mountain experience, senior in age, the durable rock to whom Shipton was anchored for most of the decade – is palpable. So this book is essentially about a friendship and its relevance to a sphere of activity. It’s about that friendship’s inception, its testing and inquisition, and ultimately the slow natural transference of allegiance away from it, though mutual respect endured lifelong on both sides.
The book also forms the third part of a biographical mountain trilogy on which I have worked over very many years. This began with Menlove (1985) about Menlove Edwards, the major figure from British rock-climbing in the 1930s and finest of all essayists on his sport; it moved on to The Villain (2005), a consideration of Don Whillans, the celebrated northern mountaineer from the 1950s; and it now concludes with the present volume, which is the story of a relationship, its achievements and its implications. My aim throughout the sequence has been to present the nature of various facets of mountain experience and affect through looking closely at individual subjects, their responses and their achievements. With the Menlove Edwards book, the psychological dimension particularly of rock-climbing was what interested me. The study was one of alienation, and its outcome was tragic. The Don Whillans biography by contrast provided objects for scrutiny in climbing’s (and by extension society’s) mythopoeic tendencies, the associated reasons for engagement in the sport, and their potential for destructive effect. The outcome here too in a sense was tragic.
Having experienced my own portion of the dark side in the years since the writing of that book, it was heartening for me to turn to a story of how the mountain environments and the activities they engaged in there, as well as their companionship, proved wholly ameliorative in the lives of Shipton and Tilman, repairing the damage that society had inflicted upon them, and making good. Here then is a happy story at last, and a good-humoured one, that places its faith in simple and timeless values and implicitly adduces through both characters a spiritual dimension to balance the psychological and temperamental ones of the earlier works. A clear expression of this is provided by the Trappist monk – Tilman would surely have related well to him, particularly given their shared taste for beer – and twentieth-century Christian mystic, Father Thomas Merton, who writes in The Wisdom of the Desert of how the ‘simple men who lived their lives out to a good old age among the rocks and sand only did so because they had come into the desert to be themselves, their ordinary selves, and to forget a world that divided them from themselves.’7
It would have been all too easy for Shipton and Tilman to have divided from themselves by celebrity and public acclaim at many stages in their lives. Had Shipton kept the leadership of the successful 1953 Everest expedition to which he was appointed – and it is beyond reasonable discussion or doubt that his leadership, buttressed by the presence as deputy leader of Charles Evans,8 would have put climbers on the summit – the consequent celebrity would have placed him in grave jeopardy. The pay-offs would have been too lavish. The quirks and foibles of his character would have been ruthlessly exposed by the intrusive press even of a more principled and private age. The mutual susceptibility between himself and women – that desire for softness to redeem the harshness of stone – would have gained him notoriety. Thank heavens, then, for the ‘unworthy device’ (to use Charles Evans’s accurate term) by which the poisoned chalice was taken from him and passed to the politic Brigadier John Hunt, who craved and welcomed it, was innately decent, suffered no devastating harm by its possession, and used it tirelessly pro bono publico. All this matter is beyond the scope of the present book, and I am glad of it. Its absence leaves me free to concentrate on example, and not the corrupting values implicit in the reception of success. Thomas Merton again: ‘… to leave the world, is, in fact, to help save it in saving oneself.’
Merton carries on to provide a gloss for this statement on the exemplary, that reflects in its turn on the exploratory paradigm Shipton and Tilman created for the community of mountaineering.
This is the final point, and it is an important one. The … hermits who left the world as though escaping from a wreck, did not merely intend to save themselves. They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.
Perhaps this is their paradoxical lesson for our time …9
The resonance here is huge, and yet the longer I have thought upon them, the more it seems to me to emanate out from what Shipton and Tilman were, and thought, and wrote, and did. They lived in a time when the potential wreckage of the world was apparent to all – another reason for restricting this book’s chronological span to the 1930s. For as long as they could, throughout that time Shipton and Tilman pursued an active course of curiosity and knowledge and hope; of fellowship; of considered values and shared experiences, their emphasis not on material gain but on heuristic and knowledge-enhancing action.
These monks insisted on remaining human and ‘ordinary’. This may seem to be a paradox, but it is very important. If we reflect a moment, we will see that to fly into the desert in order to be extraordinary is only to carry the world with you as an implicit standard of comparison. The result would be nothing but self-contemplation …10
Our modern, sponsored, media-hyped so-called explorers and adventurers might take heed of those words. Shipton and Tilman did not go to the mountains to be considered extraordinary. They went out of simple curiosity, and they moved through them in the least intrusive manner possible, with indigenous people they regarded and treated not as underlings, but as friends. So much of what they did and how they did it comes across now as strikingly modern, and informed by an evolving environmental consciousness of real integrity. Their ordinary selves have become our best examples.
A few technical points may be useful for what follows. As with the Whillans biography, I have made extensive use of footnoting rather than chapter notes or endnotes. A few readers of the Whillans book picked up on the purpose of these, which was to provide an alternative discourse in which a social history of post-war British rock-climbing was given. The footnoting in this book is not quite so extensive, its main function simple contextualisation or explanation, and if some readers are irritated by it, they are cordially invited to ignore it. I have not seen fit to provide an extensive bibliography – footnote references for quoted texts surely obviate the necessity for this, and my feeling anyway is that the device of the many-pages-long bibliography has become, in non-academic works, an assertive and inauthentic boast, and one frequently used to mask essential ignorance.
Finally, references to mountain heights, place names,11 weights and measures: these are generally given in a manner my protagonists would have approved and understood, in Imperial nomenclature or the safe hands of the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824. No slight is intended here on any country’s right to self-definition – we are simply talking historicity. Conversion tables are readily available for those who need or insist upon them for the old system of measures. The world as it was between 1930 and 1939 was rather less standardised than it is now – a subject on which, no doubt, Shipton and Tilman would have had their views. Whether or not you share them, I hope you enjoy their adventurous, invigorating and eccentric company through the next few hundred pages.
Ariège, August 2012
1 In Eric Shipton, Nanda Devi (3rd edition, Hodder & Stoughton, 1939), p.xii.
2 See the discussion of his views on leadership in Chapter Seven of the present book, for example.
3 The achieved standards of rock-climbing on outcrops in the Elbsandsteingebirge, south of Dresden along the border between Germany and the Czech Republic (in the region known as Bohemia along the river Elbe), was by far the highest in the world in the period between 1920 and 1960, and was not paralleled elsewhere probably until the late 1960s or early 1970s, when Britain and the USA began to establish a brief hegemony in the sport through a handful of rare talents – Henry Barber, John Bachar, Jim Bridwell, Ron Fawcett, John Allen and so on.
4 The two crucial books to read for detailed accounts of this period are John Keay’s When Men and Mountains Meet (John Murray, 1977) – not to be confused with Tilman’s work under the same Blakeian title; and Peter Hopkirk’s The Great GameThe Great Arc