Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (14 page)

Now, in his booming voice, Secord told the committee that the equipment on Cho Oyu had been “haphazard,” elementary hygiene had been neglected, the British climbers had been unfit, the expedition had lacked resolve and determination, useful opportunities for research had been wasted, and the mistakes of the past had been repeated.

Pugh reinforced Secord’s criticisms, pointing out that the Swiss had remained in good health on Everest, whereas the high rates of illness suffered by the British on Cho Oyu—the result of slack attitudes toward hygiene—had contributed to the failure of the expedition.
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Shipton had made a bad situation worse by failing to give proper attention to acclimatization. The British climbers were so much less fit, less skilled, and less experienced than the Swiss team of elite professionals that only the very
best
oxygen equipment would enable the British to improve on the Swiss performance. What’s more, Shipton had failed to support his research.
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Despite their trenchant criticisms, Secord and Pugh both reassured the committee that it would be possible to prepare adequately for a successful expedition in 1953 if the lessons from Cho Oyu were acted upon and work began immediately.

But where was the man who ought to be taking charge? Kirwan sent a message to Kathmandu through the Foreign Office, urging Shipton’s immediate return. Shipton still did not come back to England for another couple of weeks,
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and soon after his return, he left again for a two-week holiday in Norway.

Meanwhile, the newspapers were full of reports about where the Swiss had gone wrong. The slopes of Everest were “not of exceptional difficulty,” the Swiss climbers told journalists. Nor had they failed because of a defect in strategy or organization. They had failed, they said, purely because of their “inadequate oxygen equipment” and the physiological problems of climbing at high altitude—the shortness of breath, the exhaustion, the blunted perceptions, the cold, the wind.
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It all sounded very familiar.

In Shipton’s continuing absence, Laurence Kirwan, Basil Goodfellow, and Peter Lloyd—the three committee members who had arranged the Cho Oyu expedition—now took on the task of getting the Everest preparations under way.
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As before, it was the professional administrator, Kirwan, director of the RGS, who took the lead.

A few days after the crisis meeting, Kirwan summoned Pugh to the RGS for an informal chat about his research, which they conducted while strolling round Kensington Gardens. Kirwan came away convinced that it was essential to get Pugh working on the preparations as soon as possible. He wrote at once to Sir Harold Himsworth, the head of the Medical Research Council, pleading for Pugh to be seconded full-time to the Everest effort, because “the key to success lies in a solution to the physiology and oxygen problem.”
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If they couldn’t have Pugh, he insisted, they might as well abandon Everest altogether and hand it over to another country.

Kirwan also asked the Royal Society to encourage the MRC to accede to his request, telling them:

. . . Pugh’s help will be quite invaluable in planning the British Everest attempt next year. In fact, his discoveries have, I think, at last opened the eyes of some of our more die-hard colleagues in the mountaineering world to the need for a scientific method in tackling a problem like Everest . . . without this any hopes of reaching the summit of Everest are virtually nil.
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Networking was one of Kirwan’s greatest strengths. His next move was to engage in a whirlwind of lobbying in Whitehall to gain support and equipment from the armed services, taking Pugh along to his meetings with particularly important figures. He wrote urgent letters to the key men beforehand. To Lord Rennell of Rodd, Secretary of State for Air, he wrote: “I personally am quite convinced that unless we can produce a satisfactory oxygen equipment it really is a sheer waste of time trying to raise money and organising this expedition.”
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At the subsequent meeting he asked Rennell to put pressure on Lord Cherwell—head of the Air Ministry—to allow the RAF institute at Farnborough to work on the oxygen equipment. Farnborough was busy with rearmament and might otherwise have refused to help. Pugh was instructed to tell Rennell that the Cho Oyu research and the Swiss experience showed that “if any country were to conquer Everest it must have a proper oxygen set,” and to assert in the baldest terms that: “For our part it would probably be better to forego our concession for 1953 rather than undertake the job with inadequate scientific equipment, the failure of which would undoubtedly do much damage to our prestige.”
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By the time Shipton came home on July 17, Kirwan had the task well in hand. The Air Ministry appeared willing to make laboratory space available at Farnborough, and they were ready to lend vital oxygen equipment to the expedition. The head of the MRC had agreed to second Pugh for Everest work. Pugh was to be supported by a committee headed by Sir Bryan Matthews, who had advised on Cho Oyu and had now agreed to do the same for Everest.
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Kirwan had also persuaded the army to second the Sandhurst-educated Gurkha officer Charles Wylie to become the expedition’s “secretary-organiser,” who would undertake the daunting task of ordering, packing, and shipping the equipment and supplies.

On July 28, 1952, the Himalayan Committee met to decide on the issue of the Everest leadership. The names of other potential leaders had already been raised at the crisis meeting of July 4, when it was thought that Shipton might drop out voluntarily. Three names had been “noted”—John Hunt, Charles Wylie, and Major James Roberts. Hunt’s name was put forward by Basil Goodfellow, who seriously doubted Shipton’s leadership qualities. Goodfellow had met Hunt in 1951 in Saas-Fee in Switzerland, when Hunt was on leave from a posting in Germany. A professional soldier who served in India between 1931 and 1940, he had Himalayan climbing experience and had been considered for the Everest team of 1936.
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Goodfellow spent a few days climbing with him, and found him just the type of highly organized, strongly motivated, “thrusting” character he felt was needed for Everest.

Appearing in front of the committee Shipton put on a show of diffidence, offering to back down if they wanted a fresh leader, but also making it quite clear that he was not prepared to relinquish his presumptive claim to the leadership voluntarily.
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If they wanted to replace him, they would have to ask him to stand down.

Kirwan played the key role in what followed. He was convinced that Shipton’s vast Himalayan experience and moral claim to the leadership made him the only possible choice of leader. Indeed, only a few months earlier, the Himalayan Committee had broken off negotiations with the Swiss over this very issue. It would be embarrassing to dump Shipton now and appear to acknowledge that the Swiss had been right to reject him. Kirwan was well aware of Shipton’s ambivalence toward the use of oxygen and his tendency to be disorganized, but in his view the steps he was taking to provide Shipton with sound physiological support and administrative backup would be enough to counteract these weaknesses. Arguing strongly, he swung support behind Shipton, who was formally appointed leader.
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What Kirwan and the rest of the committee could not have foreseen was that Shipton’s position was about to be seriously undermined by Griffith Pugh’s frank reports to his senior scientific colleagues, in which he vehemently criticized the management of the Cho Oyu expedition as, at best, lackadaisical and wasteful, and at worst, “catastrophic.” The committee might have been inclined to forgive Shipton his failings, but the scientific establishment was not.

The first sign of trouble appeared two days later in a letter from a “rather worried” Sir Bryan Matthews, who had just presided over a meeting in Cambridge at which Pugh had described Shipton’s conduct of the Cho Oyu expedition. Matthews made it clear in a rather sarcastic tone that before committing himself to help the Himalayan Committee, he wanted to clarify with Kirwan whether “it was intended to run an expedition to get to the top of Mount Everest, making such plans and taking such personnel as will be needed.” Or was it merely intended to indulge in one more “venture in mountaineering, taking some oxygen apparatus but hoping it will be unnecessary to use it?”
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After another meeting with Pugh a couple of days later, Matthews was no longer just worried. He was threatening to pull out. Shipton’s cavalier treatment of the Cho Oyu scientific project had been a disaster, he thundered. “After great effort by many people to assist in oxygen equipment and provision for scientific observation, the chance of obtaining major scientific results was wasted . . . To those concerned with assisting, this waste of effort appears a catastrophe,” wrote Matthews.
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Support for the coming expedition could only be justified “if there was a complete change of plan,” he continued. “Oxygen equipment . . . is the primary requisite for success.” Its use at high altitude on Everest must be “the main preoccupation of the plan.” “Trained personnel” must be included in the Everest team “to ensure its proper use.” So far there was “no suggestion” that anything of the kind was happening. If the committee was not prepared to change, they could go ahead with the 1953 expedition “as they wished, with or without oxygen, using the so far untried equipment from 1952”—in other words, without the scientists.
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For an establishment figure like Matthews to take such an extreme position, Pugh’s criticisms must have been very harsh indeed. Later Matthews would confess to Sir Harry Himsworth of the MRC that his memo had been “almost one of despair,” a last-ditch attempt to jolt the Himalayan Committee into getting their act together before it was too late.

After hearing from Pugh directly, Himsworth was also having “serious doubts” about whether “the plans being made for the expedition [were] such as to ensure it reaching high altitude in anything like the state of efficiency which would be needed.”
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The shortcomings of Shipton’s regime had been conveyed to him “with such force and evidence that I feel your society should know of them whilst there is still time to take the appropriate measures.” Without a change of approach the expedition had “little chance of success,” and, furthermore, Himsworth was not prepared to “commit personnel of the MRC to spend time on the project” unless he received “assurances” that change would be implemented.

If the committee did make the necessary changes, the MRC would consider setting up its own panel of experts to supervise the high-altitude preparations. Pugh could be released to work on the Everest preparations, but only provided that he was subsequently taken on the expedition.

Kirwan’s initial reaction to Matthews had been to try and smooth things over by assuring the eminent scientist that his concerns were groundless. The Himalayan Committee was in fact “wholeheartedly in favour of doing everything possible to get the most efficient oxygen equipment,” he wrote. Shipton was also implacably in favor of oxygen. But Kirwan was careful to warn Matthews that Shipton was “unwilling to commit himself to taking a physiologist on the expedition . . . until we know what funds are available.”

What Kirwan did not divulge was that he had sent Matthews’s note to Shipton, who had returned it with his riposte scrawled on the back, repudiating all criticism. He laid all the blame squarely on Pugh for not being sufficiently assertive or asking for greater participation. Pugh had agreed to the research site on the Menlung La, he insisted. If Pugh had asked for a higher site, or for more experimental subjects, they would have been provided. Furthermore, he accused Pugh and Secord of deserting the Menlung La unnecessarily early, abandoning their work without his permission.
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When Kirwan subsequently found that Himsworth, as well as Matthews, was threatening to withdraw, he realized that something had to be done. If he didn’t win back the cooperation of these two, the consequences for the expedition could be disastrous. Both had close connections with the armed services and with Farnborough. If they thought the expedition was hopeless, the help and the equipment Kirwan was relying on might cease to be available.

In the hope that he, Shipton, and Goodfellow would be able to change the MRC chief’s mind, he hastily set up a discreet meeting with Himsworth at the Army and Navy Club on August 12, 1952. Clearly, by then Shipton was fully apprised of the gravity of the situation, for he had changed his tune. Himsworth found that all three were, as he put it, “prepared to go to very great lengths to have our [the MRC’s] cooperation.” They professed to have fully adopted the scientists’ advice:

Kirwan and Shipton commenced by both emphatically stating that the expedition had no chance of reaching the summit of Mount Everest unless all the relevant physiological knowledge were utilised and they had the full help of Physiologists. Furthermore they admitted that hygiene and elementary medical precautions had been grossly inadequate on this year’s expedition, and that unless these are attended to and appropriate rules enforced, they might well bring next year’s expedition to nothing.
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One of their main concessions was to agree to include Pugh in the 1953 expedition as a quid pro quo
for the MRC seconding him to work on the preparations.
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They also agreed to Himsworth’s proposal that a new “Medical Research Council High-Altitude Committee” be created with the power to determine the oxygen policy of the expedition and advise on all other matters to do with altitude. This would give ultimate control to the MRC rather than the Himalayan Committee, and thus ensure that Pugh’s recommendations would be acted upon and not ignored.
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Bryan Matthews later agreed to head the new panel.