Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (8 page)

Kirwan was won over, and he, Bourdillon, Shipton, Scott Russell, Michael Ward, and Robert McCance—a Cambridge professor who was a world expert on nutrition—met and made a snap decision to send a physiologist out to Cho Oyu with Shipton.
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With Kirwan behind it, this idea became a top priority.

Faced with the problem of funding, Kirwan made an informal application to the Royal Society for a grant, and found he was pushing at an open door.
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However, there were precious few specialists in the rarefied field of altitude physiology, and even fewer with direct experience working in the mountains, so for the third time Bourdillon suggested the only suitable candidate he could think of: Griffith Pugh of the Medical Research Council.
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Pugh had been mulling over the Everest problems since first meeting Michael Ward seven months earlier, and now an extraordinary opportunity was about to fall into his lap. Within days the training expedition received the Himalayan Committee’s formal approval. The fact that the Nepalese had not yet given permission was ignored. On January 25, 1952, Shipton rang Pugh and formally invited him to join. He accepted at once.

The Royal Society asked Professor Bryan Matthews to review the Himalayan Committee’s grant application, which had been written by Bourdillon.
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Matthews, who had advised Everest expeditions since the early 1930s, was the head of a highly successful physiology department at Cambridge University. He had gained world renown as an altitude physiologist during the war when he took charge of the RAF physiological laboratory at Farnborough, transforming it into the internationally acclaimed RAF School of Aviation Medicine. He left to return to Cambridge in 1946, but remained the institute’s influential “chief consultant.”

Matthews was regarded as a highly practical leader—the type who quickly saw what had to be done and produced the simplest and quickest solution. This was combined with a fearsome reputation for impatience with bureaucracy, and for “banging heads together.”
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He was not optimistic about the prospect of obtaining useful information on Cho Oyu, writing: “It is unfortunate that time will be so short that little provision [for oxygen research] will be possible.” However, because he thought the research project essential if there was to be “a serious attempt to climb Mount Everest next year,” he gave his support. Of Pugh he wrote: “I am afraid I know rather little of him so cannot give support or otherwise to him personally; but I would support most strongly that someone with the necessary capacities should be attached to the expedition.”
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The task facing Pugh was huge: There was little time to assemble the necessary equipment and devise experiments from scratch. He had limited contact with Matthews, and received no guidance from Shipton or Lloyd. Most of his equipment had to be ready by April 27, several days before the climbers would embark on the three-week boat trip to India. Rather than traveling by ship, Pugh wanted to fly out, thereby gaining three extra weeks to prepare.

This proved unpopular. It had been one thing for Kirwan to network among the Nobel Prize winners of the Royal Society for a grant to pay for a physiologist. It was quite another to sympathize with the difficulties facing the scientist chosen for the job, particularly when he had the temerity to expect to be flown to India, a privilege normally accorded only to the expedition leader.

After failing to persuade the MRC that Pugh should pay for his own fare, Kirwan grudgingly agreed to cover the cost of the journey.

5

In the Mountains of Lebanon

Michael Ward had come away from his first meeting with Griffith Pugh doubting whether he would learn much from the shambolic, forgetful, slightly crazy physiologist who fitted so perfectly the stereotype of the absentminded scientist. However, on his second visit, while chasing Pugh around Hampstead Heath, he became convinced that he had found the ideal person to help him tackle the problems climbers had been wrestling with on Everest. Pugh had gained the skills and experience during the war that made him the best man for the job.

British soldiers had suffered badly from cold, frostbite, and hypothermia while fighting the Axis powers in the mountains of Norway, Greece, and Italy. Pugh had seen it for himself when he was stationed in Greece in 1941. Later in his wartime career he was posted to a mountain-warfare training school in Lebanon, where he carried out the research that won him a reputation in senior British and American military and medical circles for being “someone who knows about cold.”

In 1950 when the Medical Research Council—faced with the prospect of a war in Korea, where the British army might have to fight in mountainous conditions again—created a research unit to address the problems faced by soldiers in extreme environments, Pugh was one of the first recruits.

Poached from his postwar job as a medical registrar at Hammersmith Hospital in London, Pugh joined the newly formed “Division of Human Physiology,” a division of the National Institute for Medical Research, the largest of the MRC’s network of research institutes and units. The division had strong army backing and was generously funded and lavishly equipped with a wind tunnel and an expensive cold chamber. Professor Otto Edholm, an expert on survival, was brought over from Canada to be the director because no specialist in “applied human physiology” of sufficient seniority could be found at home. Pugh himself was too junior to become the director, but had recommended Edholm.

Pugh had qualified in medicine in 1938, and entered the war as a junior doctor—a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He spent the first part of the war with a “mobile military hospital unit” in the Middle East Theater, stationed at hospital camps in Jerusalem and Greece, where he became an expert on syphilis, treating VD in soldiers and prostitutes in and around Athens. When the Germans invaded Greece, he cared for wounded Allied and enemy soldiers; in late 1941 after Greece fell and the Allied armies were evacuated, he worked in hospital camps in Bombay, Iraq, and Iran. The autumn of 1942 found him in northeast Iran, looking after Polish families—many of whom were suffering from typhus—evacuated from Russian labor camps after Stalin joined the Allies.

Life in the strategic backwater of Meshed was comfortable for Pugh. He enjoyed being his own boss in charge of the medical center. He was billeted at the luxurious British consulate, where the food was excellent. In his spare time he went walking and duck-shooting with the consul and his wife. And yet he was frustrated by what he regarded as the latest in a series of dead-end medical jobs.

For months he had been making fruitless efforts to be transferred to an army commando unit where the work would be more exciting, attempting to sell himself to headquarters on the basis of being a strong skier and mountaineer. He had kept himself extremely fit and had seized every opportunity to climb, first in Greece and later in the Alborz Mountains above Tehran.

But his efforts to impress General Headquarters (GHQ) were flatly ignored, and he often lamented his fate in his diary. After spending two months at Shuaiba Hospital Camp in the Iraqi desert outside Basra in 1941, he wrote:

How I wish I could go to the mountains in the north when there is snow or to Syria. But how to set about it? I have drafted a letter stating my experience of mountains & skiing, but to whom should I send it? Usual channels only lead to backwaters. I have not heard that there are any ski troops & doubt if the idea has yet occurred to the authorities.
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A year later, in Meshed, his wishes were answered when, out of the blue, he was ordered to go to Lebanon for what seemed like a dream job as a ski instructor.

The summons came from an old school friend, James Riddell, chief instructor of the recently established mountain-warfare training school at the resort of Cedars in the mountains above Beirut. By sheer luck Riddell was looking for ski instructors to fill an acute shortage at the school. As he searched through the lists of British army officers at Middle East Command, Pugh’s name leapt out at him. They had been in the same house at Harrow, and Riddell had been vice-captain of the 1936 Olympic ski team, of which Pugh was a member.

Pugh had learned to ski, ski-mountaineer, and climb in his early teens. His colonial family, based in Calcutta, often found it convenient to send him to Switzerland during the school holidays rather than transport him back to India. He stayed regularly at a small pension called Haldengütli in the resort of Engelberg, where he was taught to ski and climb by the son of the household, Lothar Hauthal, an expert skier and guide. Haldengütli became a home away from home for Pugh, who was a bit of a lost soul without a permanent residence in England. Returning for skiing holidays year after year and becoming a close friend of the Hauthal family, he developed into an excellent skier. He skied for the Oxford University ski team, competed for Britain in the World Championships at Innsbruck in 1935 and in Engelberg in 1937, and was selected to ski in the cross-country event in the 1936 Winter Olympic Games at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He was given time off from his medical studies to prepare, but a back injury at the last minute prevented him from taking part.

Pugh’s biggest passion, however, was ski-mountaineering: traveling on skis in small groups through the high Alps from mountain hut to mountain hut for several days at a time. The long Oxford summer vacations were often spent climbing in the Alps, too, giving him still more experience navigating in the mountains.

The idea for the Mountain Warfare Ski Unit at Cedars had arisen in the summer of 1941, when it dawned on the British Army that they might have to confront the Axis powers in the mountains of the Middle East, the Balkans, and Bavaria.
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Allied troops had already suffered “bitter lessons” fighting in the mountains of Norway and northern Greece. Pugh had seen some of the casualties of the Greek conflict at Kephissia, outside Athens, in 1941, writing home to his mother:

The Greeks are doing wonderful things in the Albanian mountains; almost every day bells are ringing for the capture of another village. I am afraid they have suffered terribly from the cold, and the hospitals are full of frostbite casualties. Frostbite is worse than bullet wounds as it leads to the loss of whole limbs. The Italians, judging by the prisoners, must have suffered terribly too. They come back, poor things, hobbling on dead feet still encased in the boots they were wearing when captured.
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Determined not to repeat past failures, GHQ made a snap decision to create a mountain-warfare training school in the Middle East. Riddell was chosen to set it up because he had been an Olympic skier. His less than impressive prewar background as a writer who had dropped out of Cambridge without finishing his modern languages degree proved to be no obstacle.
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He was extracted from his position as British political agent at Homs in western Syria, promoted from captain to major, and given carte blanche
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The resort of Cedars, near Bcharre in the Lebanese mountains, was a large, bowl-shaped plateau at a height of 5,741 feet, distinguished by its single isolated copse of magnificent ancient cedar trees. It was surrounded on three sides by mountains of 9,843 feet; the fourth side gave a view down to the Mediterranean, 30 miles away.

On his first morning, Pugh woke up unable to believe his luck. The posting of his dreams had dropped into his lap. He wrote to his wife: “When I woke this morning & looked out of my window a marvellous view greeted my eyes. Wonderful snow peaks all round rising 8,000 feet above the hotel. It was perfect Alpine scenery. The early sun shone on glistening white snow fields.”
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The school was based in the only building, the large, rambling, unoccupied Hôtel des Cedres. Riddell and the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry (Bunny) Nugent Head, chose to keep army bureaucracy to a minimum, yet presided over a highly disciplined organization, relying on the natural authority of their brilliance at skiing to impress and enthuse the men. Head was an excellent skier, and Pugh used to say that Jimmie Riddell was one of the most talented and graceful skiers ever to come out of Britain.

Having always disliked army hierarchy and bureaucracy, Pugh found the relaxed atmosphere as delightful as the job of teaching skiing. Within a week he was writing ecstatic letters home to his wife: “It’s wonderful to be skiing again . . . ,” he told her, repeating in another letter, “I keep thinking how lucky I am to be here . . . I’ve just had a perfect day . . .”

Naturally inclined to question the status quo, Pugh immediately began to think about how the training and selection of the ski troops might be improved. The trainees were expected to do seven and a half hours of skiing every day from the day of their arrival, which Pugh considered extremely taxing: “The men were exhausted when we returned in the evening & there wasn’t a sound to be heard from their quarters after nine o’clock.”
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After three weeks, the trainees took a formal test. Seeing that only half of them passed, Pugh concluded: “Tired men lose their appetite for skiing and make no progress. The accident rate rises. Some even strain their hearts and have to be returned to their units.”
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Realizing the schedule was too onerous, he convinced Riddell and Head to try reducing it by half. The new intakes were given three hours of skiing a day in the first week, increasing to six hours by the third. Ninety percent of the men on the new regime passed the test, having skied only half as much as the earlier groups. The accident rate was cut in half.
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With that problem solved, Pugh went on to address the high dropout rates among recruits, many of whom proved “unsuitable” for mountain training. He persuaded the medical officer to help him collect data on each intake and observe the men during their training, with a view toward identifying selection criteria. He was taking the first steps to becoming a full-time physiologist.