Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (3 page)

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 in a landfill. Realizing, however, that I would want the letters, she kindly gave me the case and its contents.

It allowed me to enter 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 skullduggery 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 rather 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 behavior 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 forever 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 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.
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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 paralyzed 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 organized and financed every British expedition to Mount Everest since the early 1920s.

Between 1921 and World War II, 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 28,000 feet—a thousand feet below the summit—but none had been able to climb higher. The altitude record of just above 28,000 feet set on Everest in 1924 had never been broken.
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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 26,250 feet 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 organized 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 had 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 Lebanon during the war. He had recently joined the Medical Research Council’s human physiology division, 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 25 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 newspaper.

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 absentmindedness 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 realized 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. 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 recognizable 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 28,000 feet 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.”
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Pugh and Ward discussed the litany of illnesses—sore throats, persistent coughs, diarrhea—that had weakened expedition after expedition. But the subject they talked of most was the shortage of oxygen.

At 20,000 feet, there is 50 percent less oxygen than at sea level. At 29,029 feet—the summit of Everest—there is nearly 70 percent 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 thus 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.”
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Pugh likened progress above 28,000 feet to “a series of 100-yard sprints, except that instead of 100 yards, only 10 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 100 feet . . . in my last hour.”
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Wearing the typical clothing of the 1920s and ’30s, 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, and 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 canceled 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 afterward 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.
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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.”
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But attitudes toward 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.”
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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.”
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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 28,000 feet without oxygen, he could manage a further 1,000 feet without. The Scottish mountaineer and writer W. H. Murray thought the same. But Charles Warren, medical officer on the 1935, 1936, and 1938 Everest expeditions, 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.”
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