Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (15 page)

Goodfellow was as convinced as Kirwan himself of the need for scientific support and improved oxygen, but he also had severe doubts about whether Shipton, whom he regarded as “far too gentle, far too vague on organisation and detail,” possessed the organizational and leadership qualities required for success. By mid-August, having seen that Shipton was still failing to get to grips with the issues, he was sure, as he explained to John Hunt, that without “an infusion of strong blood,” the new expedition was fated to become “another damp squib.”
²⁶

Goodfellow had missed the leadership meeting of July 28 and had not been able to promote Hunt’s candidacy over Shipton’s. Just before that key meeting, John Hunt had made an effort to promote his own cause, dispatching a letter to the chairman of the committee, declaring that should he be “called upon to lead the Everest expedition” or serve in any other capacity, he “would spare no effort to encourage and assist in getting a British pair to the top.”
²⁷
It made no difference. Shipton was appointed anyway.

Goodfellow hoped that even if Hunt were not made the leader, he would be invited to join the expedition as deputy leader or secretary-organizer. But once appointed, Shipton firmly refused to take on Hunt in either role, and would accept him onto the expedition only as an ordinary climber.

With the new secretary-organizer Charles Wylie not filling his post until the beginning of September, Goodfellow, busy with his job at ICI, felt harassed by the continuing demands on his time imposed by Everest work, and became more and more frustrated at the prospect of Shipton remaining in charge. Admitting how anxious he felt—“my whole heart is in getting this show right”—but fearing the worst, he continued to lobby his fellow committee members to get Hunt included on the expedition roster in some kind of organizational capacity.

Hunt also had the support of Peter Lloyd, whose confidence in Shipton had been destroyed by the way the trial oxygen had been abandoned, unused, on Cho Oyu. Like Goodfellow, Lloyd had missed the meeting at which Shipton’s appointment was confirmed. He regarded himself as the expedition’s oxygen expert, and was miffed at the way the MRC High-Altitude Committee had been given control of the expedition’s oxygen strategy. Lloyd thought he might recapture his former influence if Hunt, a fellow climber with whom he was already friendly, became the leader. In mid-August he wrote to Hunt, complaining about the way “the physiologists” were gaining too much influence, and encouraging Hunt to try for the leadership:
“I very much hope you are going to take on Everest next year as it seems to me you are the obvious choice for it . . . the Cho Oyu fiasco makes it necessary to face things and to put our house in order.”
²⁸

Matters might have remained in that state, but for the fact that the papers for the next meeting of the Himalayan Committee, due to take place on September 11, included copies of the forceful and extremely critical communications from both Himsworth and Matthews, predicting almost certain failure for the forthcoming expedition under Shipton’s leadership and the present regime.

Goodfellow finally had his chance. “Now that I have read my papers and contacted others,” he wrote, “I find that feeling is running very high on the question of weakness in the Everest leadership.”
²⁹
Before the meeting he, Lloyd, and several other members of the committee met privately at the Alpine Club and decided that they must take decisive action to save the expedition.
³⁰

While Kirwan was on vacation, the committee took advantage of his absence and sprang on Shipton the idea that John Hunt should be appointed joint leader of the expedition, equal to him in status. Faced with such a shattering turnaround, without any prior warning, Shipton was taken completely by surprise and offered to resign. His resignation was accepted, and Hunt was designated leader in his place.
³¹

9

Warts and All

After the Cho Oyu expedition, in the midst of all the shenanigans behind the scenes, R. B. Bourdillon sent a letter to Eric Shipton apologizing for Griffith Pugh’s difficult character.

I am very glad to find that in spite of unduly hurried preparations and his own ill health, Pugh was able to bring back some useful data. I hope that their value to future expeditions will outweigh the difficulties which
his equipment
and personality must have caused. I felt very guilty for having put forward his name on his skiing record without any knowledge of his personal characteristics.
¹
[Emphasis added]

A scientist himself, Tom Bourdillon’s father was acknowledging that Pugh had collected “useful data” on the expedition, yet here he was apologizing to Shipton not simply for Pugh’s “personal characteristics,” but also for his scientific equipment.

Without his equipment, Pugh could not have undertaken his research. Nevertheless, he had irritated the Cho Oyu climbers in many different ways. They didn’t like complainers. They didn’t like being told by an outsider how to do their job. They didn’t like anyone criticizing their revered leader. Pugh had been outspoken, he had criticized Shipton, he had shown his disapproval of many of the things they did, and, rather than enjoying the expedition primarily as an adventure, he had been obsessed about getting his work done. At times he was strident; occasionally he was downright rude.

I was not surprised to learn this about my father. Since my teenage years I had regarded him as selfish, egocentric, completely preoccupied with his own interests: a man with no time for everyday life, no interest in other people’s needs, and no time for his children. Griffith was away on expeditions for much of my youth. On top of that he still went on his own skiing holidays in Switzerland every year, never allowing his children or his wife to go with him. He was an Olympic skier, but I, personally, never saw him on skis. Remote and uninvolved with me and my two brothers when we were young, Griffith rarely played with us, never read to us, and appeared to take little interest in our lives. Very occasionally, when he arrived home from an expedition, I remember him scooping us up and whirling us around, provoking shrieks of delight, but that was unusual. Once, when I was about ten years old, my mother asked him to help me with some math homework. He fired off a rapid, incomprehensible explanation and responded to my blank look by exclaiming loudly: “Oh Christ, I didn’t realise just how stupid you really were!”

As I grew older, I felt increasingly that my father treated my mother badly, taking her for granted and expecting her to be at his beck and call at all times. When he came home from work, which was always quite late, he invariably went straight to his study, pausing just long enough to collect a large tumbler of whiskey and a cigar. There, sitting at the table, hardly visible through a thick fog of tobacco smoke, he would soon be surrounded by screwed-up pieces of paper, angrily cast off as he struggled with the unfinished draft of the article he was attempting to write. Being dyslexic, he wrote very slowly and with difficulty. After a while, he would decide that his anger was not caused by his writing, but by his supper being late. Tempted to have another whiskey, he would roar at the top of his voice: “Where’s my supper? Your mother’s turning me into an alcoholic!”

When supper was served, he ate it at once, very fast, sometimes finishing and leaving the table to sit by the fire in another room before my mother even sat down. He expected her to undertake tasks that most Englishmen would have felt guilty about leaving to their wives. It wasn’t just that he never washed the dishes or carved the Sunday roast; neither did he carry the wood or the heavy buckets of coal into the house for the open fires. He left this to my mother, along with all the other heavy jobs in the house. On vacation she, rather than my father, carried the suitcases and drove the children. If he came with us at all, he traveled separately in his own sports car. During their fifty-four-year marriage he never treated my mother to a meal in a restaurant, because—he claimed—he preferred “home cooking.” Worse still, he undermined my mother’s confidence by frequently calling her stupid.

Intellectually he lacked respect for women. He would often say to my mother and me, “I can’t talk to you women; you are so illogical, I have to say everything ten times.” His frankness with regard to other people’s personal characteristics could be upsetting too. I remember being profoundly embarrassed when I introduced him to a teenage friend of mine and he greeted her with the words: “Hello. You’re too fat.” Equally embarrassing was his unsolicited comment to a cousin, a girl in her mid-twenties, of whom he was supposed to be fond: “Your legs are like tree trunks.”

I can well imagine the hurtful tirade he launched upon Jennifer, the wife of R. B. Bourdillon’s son Tom, at Namche Bazar during the Cho Oyu expedition. He often said hurtful things to me too—deliberately, I thought. When I was unhappy, such as when my pet dog died, it seemed an invitation for him to utter an unkind remark, aimed—I was convinced—at increasing my misery. His behavior did not go unnoticed outside the family. One woman, who sometimes helped my mother with the cooking, told me: “I thought he was a worm.” Some people were so badly hurt by his brutally direct remarks that they had difficulty ever forgiving him. A former colleague at the Medical Research Council commented, “I wonder if Griffith realized how much some people hated him.”

Once asked to provide a testimonial on behalf of a colleague whose intellect he did not admire, Griffith inscribed the colleague’s name in capital letters at the top of a blank sheet of paper and wrote just two words underneath:
DEAD WOOD
. To my mind such cruelty was typical of him.

Born in 1909, Lewis Griffith Cresswell Evans Pugh was the son of Lewis Pugh, a Welsh colonial barrister at the Calcutta Bar in India. His mother, Adah (née Chaplin), was the daughter of an English doctor of modest origins, who rose to prominence working for a charitable mission in Jerusalem. Griffith was the only boy, with five sisters. Lewis had built up a relatively lucrative legal practice in Calcutta, but the exigencies of providing for his family in a manner pleasing to his socially ambitious wife left him constantly stretched financially.

Griffith spent most of his childhood separated from his parents receiving an English public-school education at Harrow, followed by Oxford University. As a child, Griffith had suffered emotional disruption and deprivation, abandoned in the care of the nanny on the rented estate in Wales, but as a young man he led a charmed, indulged, carefree, irresponsible life, financed by his doting, if distant, parents. He passed ten leisurely years at Oxford, studying for degrees in law and then medicine, taking advantage of the long university vacations—five months a year—to pursue his sporting passions. His winters were spent skiing while the summers were filled with travel, climbing trips, and sailing jaunts—often undertaken with his greatest friend from school, James Cassel, who owned a substantial boat, and whose younger sister Josephine, Griffith would eventually marry.

In 1939, having only recently qualified as a doctor at the age of twenty-nine, Griffith had just begun his very first proper job—a low-paid junior post at Lambeth Hospital in London—when the outbreak of war prompted him to marry in haste for fear of what the future might bring. He had known the twenty-three-year-old Josephine since she was a child. She was a lovely girl—very pretty, bright, and effervescent, with an exquisite willowy figure—but she was exceptionally innocent, having led a sheltered, sequestered life at the home of her wealthy, protective parents. She was six months pregnant when, in 1940, Griffith embarked on a long wartime tour of duty as an army doctor in the Middle East.

For him the war did not prove to be a great trial. He traveled to some wonderful places and spent the latter part of the war doing the thing he loved most, skiing at Cedars in the Lebanese mountains. Pressed by Josephine in her letters to tell her what kind of career he hoped to pursue after the war, his replies displayed a complete insouciance about the future: “I am a great lover of contrast,” he told her in one letter, “& for that reason may find it difficult to settle down to a job if it is monotonous.” And in another he insisted, “It is impossible to tell what the future is going to be like, so why worry?”