Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (41 page)

I became intensely critical of the way he treated her and did my best to persuade her to leave him. He got his own back by playing on my insecurities. Like my mother I thought of myself as stupid, ugly, and inefficient, and was very sensitive to his jibes, which often reduced me to tears. I found him nasty, cruel, and vicious. Soon I was in total rebellion. Playing truant, I was expelled from my third school. Longing to be someone else—a normal person from a normal family—I changed my name from Harriet Pugh, which I considered made me stand out, to plain Jackie Evans. Quitting my fourth school, St. Albans Girls’ Grammar School, after two terms, I went to work in a local shop.

Before long I moved to London to live with my aunt. When at nineteen I asked my mother to support me while I returned to school and took my A-levels, my father was strongly opposed: “She must be thrown out on the streets where she belongs,” he cried. My mother ignored him. I studied for the exams and went on to university. In all the years that followed, the grumbling hostilities between me and my father continued, and had not been put to rest when he died.

25

The Battle of the Book

If Pugh’s home life, in the eighteen months after his return from the Himalayas, was not going well, the opposite was true of his work. The Silver Hut research results were received with great acclaim, and his expedition was accepted as having achieved a giant leap forward in the field of high-altitude medicine. The Silver Hut team made successful presentations in July 1961 at the prestigious J. S. Haldane Centenary Symposium at the Oxford School of Physiology, which was attended by top physiologists from all over the world. This was followed by equally well-received appearances at conferences in Europe. Silver Hut articles were given pride of place in important scientific journals.
¹

Pugh’s young research team was invariably scrupulous about giving the fullest credit to their scientific leader, even when speaking about their own individual research topics, and helped to ensure that Pugh came to be regarded as one of the “fathers” of the burgeoning discipline of high-altitude medicine and physiology.

In the autumn of 1962, Professor Bruce Dill of Harvard, who had been scientific leader of the last truly landmark scientific high-altitude expedition in the 1930s, invited Pugh to lecture at many of the top universities in America. Dill had first taken an interest in the work Pugh had done in the war eighteen years previously, and Pugh was deeply gratified at having his itinerary organized by such a towering figure.

Throughout this time Pugh never lost his awareness that, for all the rows and disagreements, the Silver Hut expedition could not have taken place at all without Sir Edmund Hillary’s talent for raising money. He owed a great deal to Hillary, and in every article he wrote about the Silver Hut—for either academics or lay readers—he scrupulously acknowledged Hillary’s role as leader of the expedition, making it clear that it was he who had made the expedition possible.

Doey was still away in India in the summer of 1962 when Michael Ward got in touch with Pugh to tell him that Hillary’s official book about the expedition, jointly written with Desmond Doig, was about to be published, without Pugh having seen a draft beforehand. Ward had written asking to see it, but Hillary had failed to reply.

Naturally Pugh wrote to Hillary at once, asking to see the manuscript before publication, but Hillary refused to show it to him.
²
Considering that the book contained a chapter on the winter phase of the expedition, when neither of the joint authors had been present at Mingbo, it was extraordinary that Hillary did not feel morally obliged to let Pugh comment on the draft.

The book was to be published by Doubleday in America and by Hodder & Stoughton in Britain. Frustrated by Hillary’s silence, Ward persuaded Hodder & Stoughton to let him see the galley proofs, only to be infuriated by them. Hillary had written passages about Ward’s conduct during the assault on Makalu that Ward felt were so derogatory they might seriously damage his reputation. Pugh was equally incensed to find that Hillary had set about describing the scientific element of the expedition without even mentioning Pugh’s name. On the first page of the preface to
High in the Thin Cold Air,
Hillary had written: “Our primary objective, the physiological programme, was developed under the guidance of the British Medical Research Council who gave considerable aid with equipment and personnel.”
³

He was deliberately creating the impression that the Silver Hut science had been designed by Hillary, with advice from a group of unnamed professionals at the MRC. “The thread which tied the whole expedition together,” he elaborated in the main text of the book—making sure his readers recognized how important the scientific side of the expedition had been—“was the physiological research into high-altitude acclimatisation, and it was in this direction that our major effort was turned.”

He then went on to reinforce the impression that the Silver Hut science had all been his idea: “I planned to winter a party at a height of over 19,000 feet, something that had not been done before. By the end of the expedition we hoped to know the answer to many [physiological] questions, among them (a) what is the maximum height at which men can live at high altitudes without deterioration . . . [etc.].” Consistently failing to tell his readers that Pugh—rather than Hillary—had devised the scientific program, Hillary wrote of Pugh as if he were merely the most senior of a group of physiologists sent out by the MRC to give him a hand.

For Pugh it was an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. In August 1960, Pugh had threatened to withdraw from the expedition before it began, unless Hillary stopped referring to him in public as “my senior physiologist,” which Pugh felt diminished his role as the scientific leader. Yet Hillary gave Pugh precisely that same demeaning title in the book. “My senior physiologist, Dr. Griffith Pugh, and I had discussed at some length the ideal conditions we should try to attain for setting up the physiological tests,” he wrote. Had he forgotten about Pugh’s ultimatum? Or was he, as Pugh suspected, deliberately underplaying Pugh’s role so as to take for himself the credit for the scientific side of the expedition?

Several other self-aggrandizing passages strongly suggested the latter was the case. Hillary claimed the credit, for example, for the design of the Silver Hut. Pugh had spent six months designing the hut with architect Ezra Levin. At one point they had even consulted Pugh’s friend Donald Gomme about the construction methods. As Pugh explained in his comments on the galley proofs, Hillary had been far away in New Zealand at the time, and “had virtually nothing to do with the designing and construction of the hut.”
⁴
The New Zealander, he said, had favored quite a different “wire netting and canvas structure which Pugh would not accept.” The limit of his contribution had been an exceedingly rough sketch of a possible interior that was disregarded early on. And yet, in his book, Hillary had written: “I sketched a tiny hut with eight sleeping bunks, a cooking stove, a laboratory and a snow porch entrance. Within a matter of minutes Levin had transformed this drawing into the plan of a compact hut.”

The assault rations for the Makalu phase of the expedition were designed and ordered in England by Pugh, but Hillary preferred his readers to think he alone had prepared all the expedition’s rations, writing, “I had devoted great care to the selection of food for both the assault phase and the period of high-altitude living.”

Hillary seemed to find it impossible to concede to Pugh even a modest amount of the limelight for any aspect of his role in the expedition. Even with regard to the book, Hillary wrote that he had drawn on material written by various team members involved in each phase of the expedition—naming the contributors as Gill, Hardie, Ortenburger, Nevison, and Mulgrew. But his chapter entitled “Himalayan Winter” made use of long, verbatim quotes from the dispatches Pugh had written in the winter, without crediting him.

Pugh and Ward wrote separately to Hodder & Stoughton in England and Doubleday in the United States, demanding changes to the text. Hodder & Stoughton agreed at once, but the final decision lay with Doubleday, who refused, saying publication was too far advanced.
⁵
It was only under great pressure from Ward that Pugh finally sought legal advice, and, on July 31, Pugh wrote to the expedition sponsor, Field Enterprises Corporation, to get them to force Doubleday to change course:

Ward and I have seen a proof of Hillary’s book and I am afraid there are some changes which simply must be made. We are both very upset that we have been in no way consulted about those phases of the expedition when we were in charge. If the book is allowed to go out unaltered I shall suffer serious damage to my professional reputation and so will Ward, and there will be a breach of the terms of the contract by which we were to be treated with fairness and dignity.
⁶

Pugh closed his letter with a warning that both he and Ward had instructed lawyers, who “will be writing to the corporation.”

The threatened injunction had the desired effect. After a series of transatlantic telephone calls with the sponsors and Doubleday, most—though not all—of Ward’s and Pugh’s proposed revisions were accepted. Pugh signed off in a letter to the sponsors, pointing out that he was still not happy: “The book is still pretty ungenerous in its treatment, but it can’t be helped. I see, for instance, that Hillary still persists in claiming credit for the Silver Hut, whereas in reality he had practically nothing to do with it!”
⁷

The amendments Pugh had asked for were very limited. They amounted to a paragraph in the preface, introducing himself as the leader of the scientific team, and giving the names of the scientists, which had been left out by Hillary. He also asked for minor alterations of emphasis to make the coverage fairer, asking for Ward to be acknowledged as the leader of the successful ascent of Ama Dablam, and judiciously changing Hillary’s use of the word
I
to the word
we
in many places.

Despite the contretemps over the book, Pugh continued to treat Hillary fairly. A month later, Ward, who was due to give a talk on the Makalu rescue at the Alpine Club, mischievously asked him, “Would you like me to mention that Ed had no intention of taking rescue O2 to Makalu without your insistence?”
⁸
But Pugh begged him not to speak of it. Ward also wanted to highlight Hillary’s resistance to the rescue oxygen in an article he was submitting to the sponsors. They, of course, asked him to omit the reference.

Pugh, who had avoided telling his colleagues about his problems with Hillary during the expedition, now revealed the full story of the rescue oxygen to both Ward and to the sponsors.
⁹
But he agreed that Ward should not include mention of it in his article. Nor did he or Ward tell the other members of the Silver Hut team how they had had to threaten Hillary with two injunctions to force him to change the book.

When the battle of the book was over, Pugh and Hillary continued their relationship perfectly amicably, as if nothing had happened. Hillary came to England with his family in November 1962 to promote
High in the Thin Cold Air
and reported to his contact at Field Enterprises (the sponsors) that he had “descended on Griff Pugh for lunch and had a very pleasant couple of hours.”
¹⁰
Pugh also wrote that he had “a very pleasant reunion with Ed and his family.”
¹¹

Discreet though Pugh remained, neither he nor Ward was willing to abandon the issue of rescue oxygen. Invited by Laurence Kirwan to speak about the Silver Hut at the Royal Geographical Society, Pugh seized the opportunity to try to convince the climbing community to adopt more sensible, safety-conscious attitudes—even where the objective was to climb without oxygen. The meeting was chaired by Charles Evans and Sir John Hunt, and many other climbers were in the audience. In spite of his dry academic way, Pugh spoke with as much passion as he could muster about “the extreme danger of ascents above 27,000 feet without oxygen equipment, even by well-acclimatised men.” “All the organs of the body are working at the limit of their capacity at these heights, and there is no margin of reserve,” he told his audience: “The only safeguard against these risks is to take adequate supplies of oxygen (as was done on the present expedition) and to have them ready on the spot to meet emergencies should rescue operations become necessary.”
¹²

As the years passed and the fashion swung back toward small, lightly equipped “Alpine-style” Himalayan expeditions, and the number of deaths among elite climbers escalated, Pugh chose not to get involved in the lively debates about the rights and wrongs, which surfaced in the letters pages of newspapers such as
The Times.
No longer seeing it as his role to tell mountaineers what to do, he still couldn’t resist the odd censorious, private dig about how many lives were being lost. Such accidents, he argued, were failures of leadership, and shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

On the other hand, when interviewed by the BBC about science in mountaineering, he conceded that having been a sportsman himself, he could readily understand the climbers’ motivation. “The mountaineer is not interested in the easy way,” he said. “There’s no challenge . . . They like to do things the hard way.”
¹³

26

The Four Inns Walk

After the Silver Hut, Pugh never went to extreme altitude again, but the younger members of the Silver Hut winter team continued climbing with great enthusiasm. In the spring of 1963, Barry Bishop took part in an American Everest expedition on which Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld made a pioneering first ascent of Everest’s difficult West Ridge, descending by the conventional southern route, completing the first full traverse of an 8,000-meter peak.