Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (7 page)

In the years after the war, Eric Shipton had developed the habit of occasionally turning up uninvited at Griffith Pugh’s laboratory in London to ask questions about the physiology of altitude. They had first met in Iran in 1942, when Shipton, on his way home from China, stopped off at the British consulate in Meshed, where Pugh was working as a doctor. They spent several days walking together in the hills. Pugh wrote home afterward that Shipton was “the strong silent type,” a trait that “lent considerable charm to his rather stern appearance.”
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Though not a great lover of science, Shipton was intrigued by news of some daring physiological experiments, entitled “Operation Everest,” which had been carried out in America in 1946 by Charles Houston, working for the US Navy.
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The experiments appeared to demonstrate that it was possible to survive on the summit of Everest without supplementary oxygen. Four young men had spent twenty-nine days in a pressure chamber, gradually acclimatizing to increasingly high altitudes. On the thirtieth day they were rushed from 22,500 feet to a simulated altitude roughly equivalent to the summit of Everest (29,029 feet). One dropped out on the way up; another asked for oxygen, but two remained unharmed without extra oxygen for 21 minutes.

Hearing of this in 1947, Shipton urged the Himalayan Committee to take an active interest: “I do hope something is going forward to coordinate physiological research regarding high altitudes, and I would be extremely interested to hear what is being done about this . . .”
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When he began visiting Pugh, Pugh reacted unenthusiastically. In his view laboratory experiments could be no substitute for studying men in the field. “Eric didn’t get much useful information from me,” he said. “You can’t give really telling information from your laboratory chair.” Pugh told Shipton, “If you want anything from me, I’ll have to come with you.”
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The Himalayan Committee was well aware that the war had brought substantial improvements in the oxygen equipment used by RAF fighter pilots, as well as in the design of protective equipment, clothing, and rations for soldiers operating in extreme conditions, all of which could be of use to climbers.
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Three experienced men—Peter Lloyd, Dr. Raymond Greene, and Scott Russell (George Finch’s son-in-law)—were delegated in 1947 to analyze the latest developments, but they had no more success than Shipton.
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Peter Lloyd, who took on the subject of oxygen, had the distinction of being the only Everest climber to come out strongly in favor of oxygen since Finch had done so in 1922. Lloyd was an engineer in his mid-forties, educated at public school and Cambridge. Once a powerful climber, and a former president of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, he was a member of the 1938 Everest expedition led by Bill Tilman.
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On that expedition he had tried oxygen and found, “I was moving . . . much better . . . but the main difference was the absence of strain or fatigue.”
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However, since many of the most revered climbers in the Alpine Club regarded the use of oxygen as cheating and unsportsmanlike, Lloyd could seldom bring himself to speak publicly in its support without first assuring his audience that he would far prefer to see Everest climbed without it.
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Lloyd’s ambivalence was symptomatic of the traditional values of the Alpine Club—values which originated in the “public-school amateur” sporting culture that a majority of Alpine Club and RGS members, and nearly all the Everest climbers, had been exposed to at school.
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As every public school–educated British gentleman knew, competing “well” was more important than winning. Amateur sport—that is to say, gentlemanly sport, for the words
amateur
and
gentleman
were interchangeable—was not supposed to be played primarily to win, but “for the love of the game.” A British gentleman competed boldly, was not too worried about losing, and above all played by the rules. Elaborate preparation, training, and the use of scientific methods to boost performance were all viewed as a descent into professionalism, and were therefore “bad form” and ungentlemanly.
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In line with the public-school tradition, the British Everest quest was trumpeted to the world as an epic, elemental struggle between man and nature—a pure sporting challenge. As such, it was held to inhabit a superior moral sphere, above the grubby materialistic concerns of technology, science, politics, publicity, and international competition. British climbers wanted to climb Mount Everest, as Mallory so famously said, purely “because it is there.” Getting to the summit, they claimed, was much less important than getting to the summit in a sporting way.

Writing in 1932, Noel Odell (who was on Everest with Mallory in 1924) abhorred the idea of climbers turning for help to engineers and scientists: “Both engineer and physiologist may be reminded that among many mountaineers the opinion prevails that if Mount Everest and other high Himalayan peaks are worth climbing at all, they should be ascended without such artificial aids as may reduce a sport to a mere laboratory experiment.”
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In 1948 the iconic Everest veteran Bill Tilman insisted: “If our end is just to plant a man on the top of the mountain then I suppose any means are justified, but if our end is mountaineering in the true sense, then we should stick by the rules.”

The main enemy of true sport in Himalayan climbing was seen to be oxygen. The idea that, however much it might help them, only “rotters” would use oxygen remained a dominant view right up to World War II.
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“It may be expedient to climb Mount Everest with oxygen apparatus,” well-known climber Frank Smythe declared in 1942, “but speaking personally I would prefer to fail on that mountain without oxygen than I would to climb it with oxygen, for to my mind the whole charm of mountaineering lies in the employment of skill and energy with the minimum of artificial aid.”
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Tilman opined, witheringly, “When a man has to start inhaling oxygen, his spirit has already been conquered by the mountain and the limit of his capacity has been very clearly defined.”
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Meanwhile, the repeated British failures on Everest were not mourned, but celebrated as “gallant failures,” revealing the manly spirit that had made the Empire. “Everest cannot add to her height; but the spirit of man heightens with each repulse,” declared Lieutenant Colonel Younghusband, the first president of the Everest Committee.
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“Man reels back again and again, but again and again he returns to the onslaught.”
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Mallory and Irvine, who died on Everest in 1924, were honored and mythologized in heroic imagery. Mallory was commemorated in the stained-glass windows of his local parish church alongside three great icons of impeccable saintliness and courtly chivalry—St. George, King Arthur, and Sir Galahad. In
the pages of
Mountain Craft
, Geoffrey Young, doyen of British mountaineering circles, reminded aspiring young climbers of their duty to live up to this “glorious” tradition. “It lies with those who are now beginning, to keep the game a good one,” Young urged, “to play it in a generous spirit according to the highest sporting tradition . . . to be observant of its rules.” Furthermore, he opined, no right-thinking British mountaineer would harbor ambitions to compete with other countries: “The hills are our opponents, not other climbers, or even other nations . . . In the mountain game, no feelings are depressed if we win, no one triumphs by our defeat.” Climbing, he insisted, should be above such petty concerns:

Every climber owes it to the great mountain past, to which he is heir, to keep climbing . . . free from international rivalries, from unsporting competitiveness, from publicity stunting, and from the fatal crowd infection of rating results above the spirit and manner of the doing.
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As long as other countries could be kept away from Everest, the British Everest quest could be celebrated as a noble, romantic struggle with nature, and British climbers could continue to boast about their great sporting principles. The Everest Committee could continue to send ill-prepared, amateurish expeditions to Everest (particularly the later expeditions of 1935 and 1938, under leaders like Tilman and Shipton) and remain content to wait for the skill, talent, and indomitable courage of gentlemen-climbers to carry a British team to the summit . . . eventually.

But now, in December 1951, the Himalayan Committee faced competition for the first time. After seven British failures on Everest, it was galling to contemplate that the Swiss might succeed in their first attempt. It would be profoundly embarrassing to the committee and a major blow to British prestige if they did.

If, on the other hand, the Swiss failed, the British would probably only get one more chance to be first to the top. Other countries had begun to jostle for their turns. France, Germany, and Russia, all rumored to be about to request permission, did not suffer from British inhibitions about seeking professional scientific advice, nor did they exclude professional climbers from their teams. If the British failed in 1953, a foreign team would almost certainly succeed.

At this moment the British “sporting” morality began to crumble. There was no more talk of heroics. The three dynamic members of the committee, Laurence Kirwan, Basil Goodfellow, and Peter Lloyd, were galvanized into action. Even Eric Shipton was heard calling for oxygen meetings and scientific advice.
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Urgent preparations for the putative joint expedition with the Swiss began even before Goodfellow left for Switzerland to “clarify” the situation. Since the Swiss had had their own physiologists design climbing oxygen for their team, Britain’s oxygen needs suddenly became a top priority. Peter Lloyd, who had always had trouble getting his fellow climbers to listen to him on the subject, now moved center stage.

Lloyd quickly convened a meeting to plan the British oxygen strategy. The RAF had been an important source of help and advice since Finch’s day, and Group Captain Stewart and Wing Commander Roxburgh, of the Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough, now agreed to lend a hand.
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Lloyd also approached R. B. Bourdillon, who had been following the Everest problems for several months.

Two different oxygen systems were available: the “open-circuit” system, which Finch had used in 1922, and the “closed-circuit” system, which had been developed for mining rescue and firefighting, and adapted for climbing in 1936. The open-circuit was so called because the climber, using a mask, breathed in normal air from the atmosphere, supplemented by a small proportion of oxygen piped from the cylinders on his back and breathed out directly back into the atmosphere.
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If he did not want to wear a mask, he could breathe in the oxygen through a simple tube held in his mouth, which he closed by clenching his teeth when breathing out so as not to waste the oxygen.

With the closed-circuit the climber wore a more-elaborate, airtight mask through which he was fed virtually 100 percent oxygen. He had no contact at all with the outside air. His exhaled breath was piped through a canister of soda-lime powder strapped to his body, which absorbed the carbon dioxide and recycled the remaining unused oxygen back to him. This was topped up with oxygen from the cylinders on his back.
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A few sets of both types had been sent on the last three Everest expeditions, but without definitive evidence to show which system worked best, the arguments between exponents of the respective systems were often as heated as those between pro- and anti-oxygen protagonists.

Peter Lloyd had tried both systems on Everest in 1938 and had found the closed-circuit suffocating and “unusable.” However, R. B. Bourdillon was convinced that the closed-circuit system was far superior to the open-circuit, and just needed a little further development, which he and his son were planning to undertake in time for 1953.
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Given the time constraint, Lloyd was determined to stick to one type of apparatus only: the simple, reliable, tried-and-tested open-circuit sets developed from standard RAF equipment. “I am despondent about the oxygen situation,” he confided to Laurence Kirwan. “Time is so desperately short; and industry is so fantastically bunged up with rearmament orders.”
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Basil Goodfellow’s negotiations with the Swiss soon broke down, and the committee decided to go ahead with the training expedition to Cho Oyu, an unconquered mountain of 26,906 feet, the sixth-highest in the world and 25 miles to the west of Everest, chosen mainly because two pairs of climbers on Shipton’s Everest reconnaissance thought they had spotted a feasible route to the summit.
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Preparations now swung into action. Laurence Kirwan, the forceful director of the RGS, was the driving force. Kirwan had spent most of World War II as a staff officer in the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defense. He was an energetic fixer, renowned for his “shrewd knowledge of people, their potentialities, and how they might best be employed,” and at six-foot-six, he had an air of “magisterial authority.”
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Kirwan knew from Goodfellow that the Swiss had taken expert advice about oxygen, diet, and equipment, and he was also aware, as he admitted to Lloyd, that the Himalayan Committee had achieved “precisely nothing” on any of these topics since the war.
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So he was in a receptive mood when R. B. Bourdillon contacted him to talk about getting professional help.

At Lloyd’s oxygen meeting, Bourdillon had proposed a working party to study the use of oxygen at high altitude, as well as high-altitude deterioration, diet, clothing, and equipment. And he had suggested that Griffith Pugh and his boss Otto Edholm be asked to advise.
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By lobbying Kirwan directly, he now sought to ensure that there would be no loss of momentum.
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