Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

List of Illustrations

Map

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction: the anniversary lecture

1 The man in the bath

2 Gallant failures

3 Mountain of destiny

4 Turf wars

5 In the mountains of the Lebanon

6 Excess baggage

7 Miserable failure

8 An infusion of strong blood

9 Warts and all

10 ‘It’s a wonderful life’

11 All possible steps

12 Opposition and suspicion

13 The trek from Kathmandu

14 The triumphant ascent

15 A gulf of mutual incomprehension

16 The golden age

17 Braving the cold

18 ‘Your natures are so completely different’

19 A man in a hurry

20 Everest without oxygen

21 ‘Only if I have complete control’

22 Winter in the Silver Hut

23 Disaster on Makalu

24 ‘Gone to India. Your dinner’s in the oven’

25 The battle of the book

26 The Four Inns Walk

27 ‘Good science and bad science’

28 The ‘boffin’ and the altitude Olympics

29 Going for gold

30 The restless sharpshooter

31 Expecting the lion’s share

Notes

Picture Section

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Copyright

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About the Book

On 29 May 1953, the summit of Mount Everest was finally climbed. The achievement brought fame and honours to many involved – except the man who made the ascent possible.

Now, for the first time, drawing upon previously unseen diaries and letters, rare archive material and interviews, Everest – The First Ascent tells the remarkable story of Griffith Pugh, the forgotten team member whose scientific breakthroughs ensured the world’s highest mountain could be conquered.

An Olympic skier, doctor and physiologist, Griffith Pugh revolutionised almost every aspect of high-altitude mountaineering. He transformed the climbers’ attitude to oxygen, the clothes they wore, their equipment, fluid intake and acclimatisation. yet, far from receiving the acclaim he was due, he was met with suspicion and ridicule. His scientific contributions were, quite simply, at odds with old-fashioned notions of derring-do and the gentlemanly amateurism that dogged the sport.

This insightful biography shows Pugh to be troubled, abrasive, yet brilliant. Eight years in the writing, closely researched, and told with unflinching honesty by Pugh’s daughter, Harriet Tuckey, Everest – The First Ascent is the compelling portrait of an unlikely hero.

About the Author

Harriet Tuckey has a first-class honours degree in English Literature and an MA in the Sociology of Literature from the University of Essex, as well as a postgraduate diploma in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute. She has worked for the policy think tank PEP, the UK Department of Employment and the Manpower Services Commission in various research capacities. She lives in London.

For Netia, Lizzie and Rosie

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Map of the three expedition routes

Griffith Pugh

BLACK AND WHITE PLATES

Some of the pictures are the author’s own, with details of exceptions listed below.

INTRODUCTION

THE ANNIVERSARY LECTURE

Seldom since Francis Drake brought the Golden Hind to anchor at Plymouth Sound has a British explorer offered to his Sovereign such a tribute of glory as Colonel John Hunt and his men were able to lay at the feet of Queen Elizabeth for her Coronation Day.

The Times, 2 June 1953,
commenting on the recent ‘conquest’
of Mount Everest

ONE EVENING IN May 1993, I found myself struggling to push my father, in a borrowed wheelchair, into the crowded lecture hall of the Royal Geographical Society with my mother following close behind. Forcing through throngs of people, we moved him towards a row of seats near the front that had been reserved for the members of the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest. My father, Dr Griffith Pugh, had been the oldest member of the expedition. The lecture we were about to hear was a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the ‘conquest’ of Everest.¹

I was only six in 1953, but I can still remember the euphoric public reaction to the news of the British triumph. Everest was climbed on 29 May. The story was rushed home in the greatest secrecy, but then held back and released on 2 June in a blaze of nationalistic publicity on the morning of the coronation of the youthful Queen Elizabeth. It seemed as if the Everest prize was being laid at the feet of our new Queen to remind her of the underlying greatness of her loyal subjects crushed by post-war austerity and the loss of empire. Young boys felt surging pride and patriotism. It was a cheering, uplifting moment, and now it was being celebrated, forty years on, with an illustrated lecture given by members of the expedition, to be followed by a glittering reception, at which Queen Elizabeth would be the guest of honour.

The members of the 1953 expedition had been allocated seats in the second row, directly behind the Queen and other members of the Royal Family. There was an air of tension among the officials, who were trying to make sure that the large audience would be in their seats in time to rise, respectfully, at the royal entrance. Suddenly it occurred to them that my father’s wheelchair might be an obstruction if it was allowed to remain near the front and, after much dithering and chopping and changing, they resolved to leave my mother at the front and shunt my father to the very back of the lecture hall where he would be out of the way. There I left him, sitting alone in his wheelchair in the back aisle, a diminutive, hunched figure who had once been so tall, strong and athletic. His unruly red hair, which had faded to the colour of ripe corn but betrayed no trace of grey to testify to his eighty-three years, was plastered down with Trumper’s Oil, and his thick spectacles drooped, slightly askew, on his nose.

I had agreed to go to the RGS reluctantly, only because my mother had persuaded me to help with transport for this prestigious occasion. My father had become partially disabled from a series of accidents, and my mother, who was not strong, felt unable to handle the wheelchair herself. He had been a remote and irascible parent. I didn’t get on with him, and I had never asked him about his work and knew little about it, though I had always been vaguely aware that my mother felt he hadn’t received fair credit for his achievements. It crossed my mind that his current position at the back of the lecture theatre seemed to underline this point rather acutely, since the organisers had known for a long time about Griffith’s infirmity. Still, I found a spare aisle seat a few rows in front of him and prepared to watch the lecture, expecting to be bored.

As the lecture progressed, however, I became captivated. Magnificent slides showed a chaotic mass of huge ice boulders barring the way up Everest’s infamous ‘Icefall’. The climbers were tiny specks in a vast and threatening landscape. Members of the expedition spoke about the brilliant leadership of Sir John Hunt, about the peerless logistical support given by George Band, the consummate organisational abilities of Charles Wylie, and the skill and determination of Sir Edmund Hillary and his climbing partner Tenzing Norgay. Then a tall man with thick greying hair, whom I had never seen before, stood up to speak. He was introduced as the expedition doctor, Dr Michael Ward. His opening words took the audience by surprise:

We have been hearing a great deal this evening about the extraordinarily brilliant leadership provided by Sir John Hunt on the 1953 Everest expedition, but there had been eleven previous expeditions to Mount Everest many of which had excellent leaders and they failed.

We have been hearing about the great skill of our climbers but there had been many highly skilled climbers on previous Everest expeditions yet they failed to get to the summit.

We have been hearing about the brilliant logistics, but there had been other well organised, well planned expeditions which all failed.

What I want to talk about tonight is the most important reason why the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest succeeded where all its predecessors failed, and that is the work of the unsung hero of Everest …²

At this point he paused for effect, and a perceptible hush descended as the audience gave him their full attention. Then he spoke the name emphatically: ‘Dr Griffith Pugh’.

I felt a jolt of surprise. As the speaker began to describe the series of scientific innovations that had played a pivotal part in the success of the expedition, a few unexpected tears came into my eyes. Turning back to look at my father, I saw his chin rising with pleasure and pride.

The audience remained in thrall until Dr Ward had finished speaking, and, at the prestigious party afterwards, Griffith Pugh became the centre of attention, the celebrity of the evening. The Queen spent several minutes bent over his wheelchair talking to him; Rebecca Stephens, the first British woman to reach the summit of Everest (and a renowned beauty), stooped down to take his hand and gaze into his eyes; he was surrounded by attentive people. On the way home afterwards, he said, with great satisfaction, that the Queen had been ‘very gentle’ and made no further comment.

Within a few months he was bedridden and demented after a series of small strokes; a year later he was dead.

Not long afterwards, I read the official book about the Everest expedition of 1953, The Ascent of Everest, written by the leader John Hunt, and I was mystified to find that Hunt had chosen not to reveal the true extent of my father’s role in the expedition. Michael Ward had explained how Pugh had designed the all-important oxygen and fluid-intake regimes, the acclimatisation programme, the diet, the high-altitude boots, the tents, the down clothing, the mountain stoves, the airbeds. He claimed that Pugh’s work had been crucial to the expedition’s success. Why, then, had Hunt only mentioned my father’s part in designing the Everest diet? Had Ward been exaggerating? The book was full of elaborate praise for all the many people who had helped the expedition, right down to the ‘indefatigable’ efforts of ‘the committee on packing’ and the ‘wonderful work’ of the ladies who sewed the climbers’ name tapes into their expedition clothing. But details of my father’s practical and scientific work had been shunted to the back of the book in the appendices – indeed behind six earlier appendices. No wonder the general public had no idea about his real contribution.

My father never promoted himself. Even his own children were unaware of his true role. However, if Sir John Hunt feared he would be criticised for having failed to sing the praises of one of the heroes of his incomparably famous expedition, perhaps he was relieved when, a few days later, he received a letter from the Queen’s private secretary, full of thanks and effusive praise for a most excellent lecture which the Queen had found ‘riveting’.³

The evening at the Royal Geographical Society made a profound impression on me and kindled the first small thought that I might one day try to tell my father’s story. But the relationship between us was so bad and, rightly or wrongly, I felt so let down by him as a parent that it was another ten years before I found the emotional strength to focus my mind on him and begin.

The trigger was watching the BBC gala film Race for Everest, produced in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the climbing of Everest. It did not mention either Griffith’s name or his role in the expedition, forcing me to acknowledge that the fascinating part he had played in the Everest conquest had almost vanished from the historical record. Unless someone took action, it might be lost for ever and Griffith’s descendants might never find out about it.

When I began my research I knew practically nothing about Griffith – I was in the habit of thinking of him purely as my difficult, bad-tempered father, not as a person in his own right. The trouble started with the onset of adolescence. Suddenly every conversation between us seemed to descend into argument. At the age of sixteen, I left home and went to live with my aunt in London, though I still often returned home at weekends, managing an uncomfortable, uncommunicative coexistence with my father. A small but typical event some twenty years before the lecture at the Royal Geographical Society illustrates the lack of rapport between us. I was twenty-six and Griffith was in his sixties.

Griffith, a tall, thin man with untidy hair and pale skin stained by numerous sunspots, stands in the open back door of our large house at Hatching Green, a suburban hamlet, a mile to the south of Harpenden in Hertfordshire. He is naked except for a brief green loincloth, brown suede shoes and a pair of thick spectacles perched crookedly on his nose. Supporting himself on metal crutches he leans forward on the door frame and, obviously furious, shouts at me: ‘Go away and never cross my threshold again!’

The loincloth was acquired at Stanmore Orthopaedic Hospital, where Griffith had recently undergone a successful operation to replace a painful arthritic hip joint which had been damaged in a car accident eleven years earlier. The weather was very hot and he was dressed in a way he regarded as ‘physiologically appropriate’ for the exacting postoperative programme of rehabilitation he had carefully devised for himself. This included a long series of ballet exercises executed to music and frequent walks around the circumference of the large lawn at the back of our house. He wore his loincloth from morning to night that hot summer, quite oblivious to the fact that visitors to our house found his appearance a little odd – even a little unsavoury. Hatching Green was a deeply conservative neighbourhood, but what other people thought was generally a matter of total indifference to Griffith.

Like his red hair, Griffith’s temper was fiery. He was easily provoked and, when angry, he often said immoderate things. On that particular occasion I had parked my car in the ‘wrong’ place in our drive and had shown insufficient remorse for the transgression. I knew, of course, that his anger would soon subside; I would be able to return to the house a little later – nothing more would be said. But his words still made an impact and were not forgotten.

The day of real rapprochement after our years of strife did not come in my father’s lifetime. When, at last, I began to study his life, I was shocked by how little I knew about him either as a man or as a scientist.

I became a diligent researcher scouring archives and libraries and searching out Griffith’s former colleagues. I was taken aback by how kind, helpful and interested they proved to be. Many agreed that his achievements had never been fully acknowledged and said they thought he ‘deserved’ a biography. And the hunt through the archives brought with it an exciting realisation that I was unearthing facts about the British Everest quest that no one had noticed – or remarked upon – before. The Everest story was often characterised as the last ‘innocent adventure’ of the ghost of the British Empire. Few authors had taken a deeper look at the swirling conflicts behind the scenes, conflicts that embodied the political, cultural and social changes that were dragging the outdated fabric of British society into the modern age after the Second World War.

When I turned to my father’s personal life, there was one glaring gap in my knowledge that seemed insurmountable. I could find out practically nothing about his character as a young man. My knowledge was limited to sketchy family traditions, a few stories he had told my brothers, and snippets from my mother. My mother and most of Griffith’s close friends were long since dead. I visited the surviving few but found that men and women of his generation rarely articulate their emotions or talk about other people’s psyches. They helped as much as they could, but I was almost in despair about how to get beneath the opaque surface of my father’s young character to understand his complex motivations and make sense of his irascible and dismissive behaviour.

In 2006 I struck gold. For two years I had been pestering Sarah Strong, an archivist at the Royal Geographical Society and expert on the Everest papers, with frequent queries. Then, one day out of the blue, Sarah telephoned me and said: ‘I think you should come and see us. I’ve got something here that I am sure you will find interesting.’ I went at once and she walked into the reading room carrying a battered leather suitcase, held together by a strap.

Slowly, she unbuckled the strap and opened the case. Inside were bundle upon bundle of old letters – my father’s personal letters to and from his parents when he was a child, letters from youthful lovers, and letters from my mother before they were married and during the Second World War. For years the suitcase had remained hidden in the loft at our old house, which had changed hands twice since my mother died in 2000 and was being renovated for the second time when the suitcase was found. Thoughtfully, the owners contacted the RGS because they knew the house had once belonged to a member of the Everest expedition of 1953. The suitcase was brought to London and collected from Euston station by Sarah Strong.

The contents proved to be entirely personal and of no interest to the RGS. If the suitcase had been found at some other time, or if Sarah Strong had not been so plagued by my questions she might have returned it and it might have ended up on a rubbish tip. Realising, however, that I would want the letters, she kindly gave me the case and its contents and it opened up the previously hidden world of my father’s youth.

The first half of this tale of Griffith’s life lifts the veil on the power struggle and skulduggery behind the scenes of the British quest for Everest, and describes the contribution Griffith made to the expedition. However, Everest was not the end but the beginning of the most fruitful period in his career when he did his most significant scientific work – work which is still saving lives and influencing the behaviour of ordinary people today, sixty years later.

The subject of this book is the expeditions, adventures and discoveries of a uniquely talented, turbulent man whom former colleagues described as ‘in his way truly great’. But it is also a voyage of discovery of a daughter provoked to find out about the father she hardly knew and, in so doing, attempt to banish for ever a troubling ghost of past conflict and resentment.

1

THE MAN IN THE BATH

IN THE SPRING of 1951, Michael Ward, a tall, handsome young doctor with a graceful, easy stride, walked into a large and forbidding building in Hampstead to keep an appointment with the physiologist Griffith Pugh. There was no receptionist at the entrance of the building, which housed the Medical Research Council’s Division of Human Physiology. Ward searched along wide, dark corridors, eventually finding Pugh’s laboratory on the second floor.¹

Entering the laboratory past crowded shelves of scientific equipment, Ward was confronted with a large, white Victorian enamel bath in the middle of the room, full to the brim with water and floating ice cubes. In the bath lay a semi-naked man whose body, chalk-white with cold, was covered in wires attached to various instruments. His blazing red hair contrasted sharply with the ghostly white pallor of his face. The phantom figure was Dr Griffith Pugh undertaking an experiment into hypothermia. Ward had arrived at the crisis point when, rigid and paralysed by cold, the physiologist had to be rescued from the bath by his technician. Ward stepped forward to help pull him out of the freezing water. So began a long, fruitful collaboration and friendship.

A recently qualified doctor in his mid-twenties, Ward was a passionate climber, drawn to visit Pugh by his frustration with the complacency and lack of drive of the British climbing establishment. The objects of his discontent were the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society (both gentlemen’s clubs founded in the nineteenth century) that had organised and financed every British expedition to Mount Everest since the early 1920s.

Between 1921 and the Second World War a voluntary committee drawn from the two had sent seven expeditions to the world’s highest mountain, all of which had failed. Six British climbers had reached 28,000ft (8,530m) – a thousand feet below the summit – but none had been able to climb higher. The altitude record of just above 28,000ft set on Everest in 1924 had never been broken.² It was as if there was a glass ceiling 1,000 feet below the summit barring further advance. And yet no one was trying to find out why.

In the thirty years of its existence, the Everest Committee had always been a conservative body, the province of former diplomats, senior civil servants, ex-army colonial types and old-guard climbers and explorers. The chairman (also president of the Alpine Club) was Claude Elliott, the Provost of Eton. Young climbers complained bitterly, but to no effect, that there were too few active climbers on the committee.

Coming fresh to the Everest question after the war, Ward suspected that the real reasons for the repeated failures were the terrible physical problems caused by Everest’s high altitude. At the beginning of 1950, not a single one of the fourteen mountains in the world above 8,000m (26,250ft) had been successfully climbed. The best efforts of the world’s finest climbers had been to no avail. Lives had been lost. It seemed increasingly obvious to Ward that altitude, rather than the technical severity of the climbing challenge, was the biggest problem, yet the difficulties of climbing at high altitude had never been seriously addressed by the committee. Everest expeditions were organised by amateurs for amateurs, and it wasn’t part of the amateur tradition to adopt a professional or scientific approach.

With his medical training Ward scoured reports written by the early Everest climbers for evidence of the impact of altitude on their health and climbing performances. He collected his findings into a table of what he described as ‘symptoms of altitude’. However, he needed specialist advice, and an acquaintance suggested that Griffith Pugh was one of the few men in Britain with the skills and experience to help.

Also a qualified doctor, Griffith Pugh had become an expert on survival in the mountains while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Lebanon during the war. He had recently joined the Medical Research Council’s human physiology division which was set up after the war to study the problems faced by soldiers and sailors operating in extreme climatic conditions. When Ward met him, he was testing his ability to tolerate immersion in cold water as part of an investigation into hypothermia. He had been in the bath for twenty-five minutes when Ward found him in a state of collapse. Earlier a hardy Channel swimmer had lain in the same ice-cooled bath quite comfortably for more than three hours eating chocolate and reading the newspapers.

Ward helped Pugh across the large room to a tiny makeshift office in a windowed turret in a far corner where they found Pugh’s diary buried beneath a jumble of papers. Their appointment was not in the diary. Even if it had been, there was no guarantee that Pugh would have seen it. His absent-mindedness was legendary among his colleagues. The latest story doing the rounds was that a few weeks earlier he had forgotten where he had parked his car in a London street, so he took a train home and informed the police that it had been stolen – the only way he could think of to get it found.

Pugh and Ward had a disjointed conversation, and Ward realised he would have to come back another day. Thinking Pugh ‘rather shambolic’, he made sure their new appointment was written into the diary.

Returning a few days later Ward found the bedraggled, shivering figure of his previous visit transformed into a tall, well-built man with striking blue eyes, a Celtic complexion and a strong, interesting face. Aged about forty, Pugh was scruffily dressed in shirtsleeves with the cuffs undone, a pair of baggy old beige trousers and scuffed, brown suede shoes. His most recognisable feature from their previous encounter was the leonine mass of wavy red hair.

Ward had come armed with photographs of a proposed route up Mount Everest he was hoping to investigate in the autumn. Pugh, who in his youth had been an Olympic skier, examined the prints and immediately endeared himself to the young climber by declaring that he thought he could ski down most of the route, so mountaineers should be able to climb up it. Better still, when Ward produced his matrix of ‘symptoms of altitude’, Pugh grasped exactly what he was talking about, having cut his physiological teeth working on similar problems. He had read the Everest histories too. As Ward put it, ‘He knew it all already.’

The young doctor and the older physiologist took a long walk on Hampstead Heath and discussed the problems of Everest. Edward Norton, the first climber to reach 28,000ft on Everest in 1924, had described the extreme exhaustion he experienced at high altitude, the penetrating cold, the seeing double, the nausea and sleeplessness, his feet as cold as stones, finding it impossible to eat enough and always feeling thirsty. Raymond Greene, the popular doctor on the 1933 expedition, wrote vividly of the ‘appalling panting’ at high altitude: ‘The air starvation, the rapid pulse, the lassitude which made of every step a struggle, the sleeplessness, irritability, mental deterioration, grinding headaches, mountain sickness and loss of appetite.’³

Pugh and Ward discussed the litany of illnesses – sore throats, persistent coughs, diarrhoea – that had weakened expedition after expedition. But the subject they talked of most was the shortage of oxygen.

At 20,000ft (6,100m) there is 50 per cent less oxygen than at sea level. At 29,029ft (8,848m) – the summit of Everest – there is nearly 70 per cent less. The human body responds to a lack of oxygen by breathing faster and panting harder when exercising so more air passes through the lungs, giving them a chance to absorb more oxygen. As the air becomes thinner and thinner higher up, the ascending climber needs to pant harder and harder to keep going. Panting uses up a lot of energy in its own right, on top of the energy needed for climbing. Eventually the climber reaches a point where he cannot climb and pant at the same time and has to keep stopping to catch his breath. ‘Our pace was wretched,’ Norton recalled. ‘My ambition was to do twenty consecutive paces uphill without a pause to rest and pant elbow on bent knee; yet I never remember achieving it – thirteen was nearer the mark.’⁴

Pugh likened progress above 28,000ft (8,530m) to ‘a series of 100 yard sprints except that instead of 100 yards only ten yards is covered at each burst’. Apart from the problem of exhaustion, this interrupted pattern of climbing was so slow that the early Everesters never had time to reach the summit from their highest camp and get back down in daylight. ‘The trouble was,’ Norton wrote, ‘that one went so miserably slowly. I only mounted something under 100ft … in my last hour.’⁵ Wearing the typical clothing of the 1920s and 1930s, they did not believe they could survive the intense cold of an overnight bivouac near the summit so they always turned back well below the top.

What puzzled Ward was that since 1921 oxygen had been taken on every Everest expedition. The supplementary oxygen should have helped the climbers to ascend faster with less effort. If they moved faster they would feel the cold less and get to the top quicker, so their chances of reaching the summit and returning to a camp before nightfall should have been substantially improved. But nearly all the climbers who tried oxygen concluded that the apparatus was so heavy and unwieldy that its weight cancelled out any benefits. ‘It didn’t seem to give them a boost,’ as Ward put it.

During their conversation, Pugh made no allowances for the fact that Ward was new to the subject of high-altitude physiology. Walking along extremely fast and speaking in physiological jargon, he expected Ward to keep up with him. Far from being irritated, Ward was flattered by this refusal to talk down to him, and rushed off afterwards to read up on altitude in the famous physiological textbook, Samson Wright. The only thing that mattered to this determined young man was that he had found the person he was looking for.

2

GALLANT FAILURES

THE QUESTION OF whether Everest could be climbed without the help of oxygen equipment had been debated incessantly for thirty years by the time Pugh and Ward turned their minds to the subject. The climbers on the seven Everest expeditions between 1921 and 1938 could not agree about it – nor could the most eminent scientists.¹

Oxygen had been taken on every expedition since 1921, mainly because, as Hugh Ruttledge, the leader in 1933, explained, ‘We could not afford to dispense with anything which might contribute to success.’² But attitudes towards it were at best lukewarm, and most of the climbers did not want to use it. Bill Tilman, the charismatic leader of the 1938 expedition summed up the common view: ‘My own opinion is that the mountain could and should be climbed without, and I think there is a cogent reason for not climbing [Everest] at all, rather than climb it with the help of oxygen.’³

Yet like all previous Everest leaders, he, too, reluctantly concluded that he could not afford to refuse to take oxygen with him: ‘Whether to take oxygen or no was an open question which was finally decided in the affirmative for the rather cowardly reason that if we encountered perfect conditions on the last two thousand feet and were brought to a standstill purely through oxygen lack, not only might a great chance have been lost but we should look uncommonly foolish.’⁴ But like most of the other leaders, Tilman did not arrange for the oxygen to be used for his team’s attempts on the summit.

Many prominent Himalayan veterans were convinced that oxygen was unnecessary. Edward Norton was quite sure that if man could climb to 28,000ft (8,530m) without oxygen he could manage a further 1,000ft (304m) without. The Scottish mountaineer and writer W.H. Murray thought the same. But Charles Warren, medical officer in 1935, 1936 and 1938, drew precisely the opposite conclusions from the same evidence, writing: ‘Although climbers have already struggled to 28,000 feet there is no reason to suppose they are bound to be able to climb the last thousand feet without using oxygen.’⁵

The scientists who had been debating the issues since the early 1920s were just as divided. Oxford professor Georges Dreyer, who designed the oxygen equipment used by British fighter pilots in the First World War, believed that oxygen was necessary for a safe summit assault.⁶ The head of another Oxford department, Professor J.S. Haldane – perhaps the most eminent physiologist of his day – disagreed, declaring that there was ‘every reason to hope that, apart from the physical difficulties, men could with the help of acclimatisation get to the top [of Everest] without oxygen’.⁷ But the younger generation of academics tended to disagree.⁸

The oxygen taken to Everest in 1921 was not used.⁹ It was first tried in 1922 on the second expedition, at the instigation of George Finch, who was considered by the then president of the Alpine Club to be one of the best mountaineers he had ever seen.¹⁰ The team, led by Brigadier General Bruce, included such legendary climbers as the formidably handsome George Mallory, Edward Norton, Howard Somervell and Tom Longstaff, all stalwarts of the English Alpine Club. Finch, an outstanding chemist at Imperial College and later a fellow of the Royal Society, applied his rigorous scientific mind to the preparations for the expedition. Almost by accident he discovered the benefits of oxygen. In an effort to improve the climbers’ Primus stoves, which did not burn well at high altitude, he visited Oxford University where Professor Dreyer had one of only two pressure chambers in the country for simulating high altitude.

While working in the pressure chamber Finch breathed oxygen through a tube to compensate for the thin air and was amazed by how much better and more alert he felt with it, than without. On the back of this revelation, Dreyer convinced him that oxygen was the key to success on Everest, and a slightly reluctant Everest Committee was persuaded to provide it.¹¹ The breathing equipment was based on the standard RAF apparatus, modified by Finch with the help of Dreyer and RAF experts at Farnborough.¹²

By the time they reached base camp, many of the climbers already suspected that Finch’s heavy, clumsy oxygen sets would spoil the pleasure of climbing and unbalance them on difficult terrain. They also argued that it would be unsporting to use oxygen. Finch pointed out that they would probably view oxygen as acceptable if it came in the form of a pill, and tried in vain to persuade them that it was no more of an artificial aid to climbing than boots or Thermos flasks.¹³ When several climbers reported that the weight of the sets neutralised any perceptible benefits from the oxygen, the news was welcomed by the sceptical as evidence that oxygen was no use anyway.

Unfortunately Finch fell ill and was unable to take part in the main push for the summit in 1922, which was undertaken without oxygen by Mallory together with Norton, Somervell and Major H.T. Morshead. They reached 26,800ft (8,169m).

By the time Finch recovered, all the experienced climbers were exhausted and he was forced to make the first ever oxygen-assisted bid for the summit of Everest with a novice climbing partner, Geoffrey Bruce, the transport officer. They failed, but set an altitude record of 27,320ft (8,327m) ascending higher in bad weather than the stronger main assault team had climbed in better weather without oxygen.¹⁴ The record only lasted until 1924 when it was beaten by Norton climbing without oxygen, but the achievement made a deep impression on George Mallory.

Finch was an outspoken character, unpopular with the rest of the Everest team. He had consistently been refused membership of the Alpine Club, and while his record climb in 1922 finally gained him acceptance as a member he was excluded from the next Everest expedition in 1924 because of a dispute with the Everest Committee.¹⁵ In his place, the committee selected Sandy Irvine, a handsome, clubbable Oxford undergraduate. Julie Summers, Irvine’s great niece and biographer, admitted she was baffled about ‘why Sandy was ever considered as a possible candidate for the 1924 expedition. He was so much younger than any of the other expedition members … he was sorely lacking in real mountaineering experience and his height record to date was 5,800 feet, some 23,200 feet lower than the summit of Mount Everest.’¹⁶

Irvine, a third-year chemistry student, was put in charge of oxygen because he was ‘rather good with his hands’. With no real experience he made fundamental changes to the apparatus Finch had prepared for the expedition, while simultaneously writing home to a friend: ‘I really hate the thought of oxygen. I’d give anything to make a non-oxygen attempt. I think I’d sooner get to the foot of the final pyramid without oxygen than to the top with it … Still as I am the oxygen mechanic I’ve got to go with the beastly stuff.’¹⁷

As ‘climbing leader’ on the expedition, Mallory planned the summit assaults and chose which climbers would take part.¹⁸ He never admitted to being influenced by Finch, yet he decided to use oxygen for his final attempt on the summit and selected the novice Irvine as his climbing partner. ‘Irvine has done the principal engineering on the [oxygen] apparatus,’ Mallory explained to his wife, ‘so Irvine will come with me.’¹⁹ On 8 June Mallory and Irvine set out on their final climb with Irvine’s modified equipment, never to return.

There are many who hold to the romantic view that Mallory and Irvine – or Mallory alone – may have reached the summit before dying on the way down. But there are cogent reasons why this was unlikely. Mallory and his team had spent the best part of the preceding month at high altitude undertaking gruelling manoeuvres (without oxygen). As a result, Mallory told his wife, ‘the physique of the whole party has gone down sadly’.²⁰ On top of this general loss of condition, Mallory had been suffering from persistent stomach problems and a severe sore throat ‘with bursts of coughing fit to tear one’s guts … headache and misery together’.²¹ He doubted his fitness to take part in the second (oxygenless) summit attempt of 1–2 June, but joined in regardless. When that failed he went on to make his third attempt less than a week later without recuperating at lower altitude in between.

The route to the summit from the northern side is difficult even for modern professional climbers.²² Mallory was tackling it accompanied by an inexperienced partner who was suffering from ‘the prevalent throat trouble’ and ‘appalling sunburn’, and had spent the whole of the previous week at the punishing altitude of 23,000ft.²³ They had, at best, a meagre and uncertain supply of oxygen – the expedition leader, Edward Norton, suspected the equipment might have had ‘some mechanical defect’.²⁴ Without an appreciation of the need to keep the body hydrated and without modern lightweight equipment, the probability that they would succeed must have been virtually nil.²⁵ There is a complete lack of evidence that either of them did – only wishful, romantic speculation.

Following the deaths of Mallory and Irvine, oxygen was not used for a summit attempt on Everest again for twenty-eight years. Finch never returned to the Himalayas, but was always present on the sidelines, furiously castigating later Everest teams for failing to make proper use of oxygen, and for indulging in their ‘futile’ debate about the ethics of using artificial aids to climbing.²⁶

However, oxygen was not the only problem. Everest mountaineers could not agree about acclimatisation, the gradual process of adjustment to the lack of oxygen at altitude.²⁷ Many of the unpleasant symptoms of oxygen shortage such as headaches, nausea, sleeplessness, disturbed breathing, fatigue and loss of appetite are alleviated, if not entirely eliminated, by acclimatisation.

Some early Everesters believed it was essential to ascend the mountain slowly, allowing time for acclimatisation. The 1933 team, led by Hugh Ruttledge, paused for a few days at each camp on the way up. Ruttledge reported that this resulted in better fitness and improved climbing performances. But Tom Longstaff declared himself ‘an unbeliever in the fetish of acclimatisation’. ‘It is far better to try to rush the peak with men who are under-acclimatised than to lose perhaps the only chance of good weather,’ he argued.²⁸

There were further disagreements too. In the 1920s, Finch claimed with remarkable prescience that climbers continued to acclimatise up to a height of roughly 21,000ft (6,400m). However, above that – and certainly above 23,000ft (7,010m) – the advantages of adaptation were outweighed by the physical deterioration caused by the altitude: sleep would always be fitful, and it was impossible to recover from fatigue or to regain a lost appetite, resulting in a rapid decline in health and strength. Therefore time spent at or above 23,000ft, Finch argued, should be kept to an absolute minimum.²⁹

In 1933, Ruttledge’s team ignored Finch’s advice and spent an extended period at 23,000ft. They descended in extremely poor shape claiming they had not known ‘how long it was safe to go on acclimatising’. ‘We have learned our lesson,’ the expedition doctor, Raymond Greene, admitted.³⁰

But the lesson was not learned. The leading climber Frank Smythe, who took part in the Everest expeditions of 1933, 1936 and 1938, rejected the idea that time spent at camps above 23,000ft (7,010m) should be minimal: ‘Contrary to the belief of some, recuperation of physical energy is possible at a height exceeding 27000ft and I would go even farther and say that for a period of 2 or 3 days at least, acclimatisation more than counterbalances deterioration at this altitude.’³¹ And the Everest veteran Noel Odell – the last person to see Mallory and Irvine alive – refused to accept that the debilitating effects of extreme altitude could outweigh the benefits of acclimatisation, insisting that: ‘Acclimatisation to an altitude of 27,000ft has been demonstrated and there seems no valid reason why it should not be possible to 28,000ft or to the top of Everest.’³²

Acclimatisation aside, rations were a further problem. The leading climbing manual of its time, Mountain Craft, written by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, an influential member of the Alpine Club, recognised that, because high altitude suppressed the appetite, climbers should be provided with ‘pleasant luxuries that go down easily’.³³ ‘Food that is not palatable or eaten with pleasure is of little benefit,’ he emphasised.³⁴ This was affirmed by Raymond Greene, the Everest doctor in 1933: ‘Not only must all the food [on Everest expeditions] be of the highest quality, but the individual tastes of every member must be studied with the greatest care and without any regard for economy.’³⁵

Accordingly, the early expeditions took large quantities of food with them, including delicacies such as foie gras and truffled quails, together with supplies of wine, champagne and whisky. However, Greene complained that expedition organisers often failed to apply their own principles. In 1933, for instance: ‘There were plenty of complaints about food. The choice had been left to the secretary in London who had asked us all for our suggestions and then took no notice of them …’³⁶

In the 1930s an influential group of climbers rejected the lavish approach. Pioneering a new lightweight style of expedition, consisting of just a few skilled climbers supported by a handful of local Sherpas, the renowned climbers Eric Shipton, Bill Tilman and Frank Smythe adopted the principle of eating local food at lower and intermediate altitudes and taking supplies from England only for the high-altitude stages. But local foodstuffs were often in short supply, so the climbers frequently went hungry.

Uncharacteristically, Tilman and Shipton took professional advice on high-altitude rations from an expert in nutrition, but the advice did not take account of the fussy appetites of mountaineers at high altitudes, nor did Tilman and Shipton follow it completely.³⁷ When leading the 1938 expedition Tilman pared down the food to an absolute minimum to keep the weight of the baggage as low as possible, causing his team to complain bitterly of hunger and to blame the plague of ill-health that bedevilled the expedition mainly on the inadequacy of the food.³⁸

As early as 1923, Finch pronounced it vital to eat the right food at the highest camps and recommended that ‘high altitude food parcels’ be planned and pre-packed in England.³⁹ Again his advice was ignored. Fifteen years later, after four more unsuccessful expeditions, Frank Smythe, apparently unaware that he was only repeating what Finch had said long before, suggested that high-altitude rations should be carefully prepared in advance and taken up the mountain in ‘small, labelled boxes’. In reality, however, they were far from carefully planned: ‘The usual procedure is to plan out some food for high altitude camps and when one gets to Camp Three one lumps as much as one can remember of it into a rucksack and takes it up.’⁴⁰

Everyone recognised that diet was important, but this did not lead to concerted action. Time after time climbers descended from periods at altitude with wasted muscles and haggard faces, drained of energy and having invariably lost large amounts of weight.

Even more important than poor diet was the inadequate consumption of fluids. Tom Longstaff, medical officer in 1922, argued that: ‘The loss of body fluids by evaporation is, in my belief, a grave element in mountain sickness. Thirst is a terrible trial at great altitudes …’⁴¹ Dr Hingston, medical officer in 1924, recognised that in addition to evaporated sweat, high-altitude climbers lost large amounts of water by exhaling warm, wet air from their lungs and breathing in dry, cold, mountain air in its place.⁴² He suggested that dehydration might be one of the key causes of the high-altitude deterioration that undermined the performance of climbers.⁴³

However, it was out of tune with tradition to worry about fluids. Geoffrey Young’s Mountain Craft⁴⁴