Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (16 page)

Griffith returned from the war to a very different life than the one he had gotten used to. He had to take on a regular job and the responsibilities of a family man, which were all the heavier because his son, David, born in his absence, was mentally handicapped. Having led an entirely self-involved life, pursuing his own interests and pleasures until the age of thirty-six, this was an adjustment he found hard to make. It was in this period that his characteristic self-absorption, irascibility, and impatience began to come to the fore.

He and Josephine settled near Harpenden, in a house bought for them by Josephine’s wealthy father, and had two more children in quick succession—my brother Simon, born in 1945, and me, Harriet, born in 1946. On the strength of his wartime research Griffith soon secured his research job at Hammersmith Hospital, moving on to the MRC five years later. He had been at the MRC for about eighteen months when he joined the Cho Oyu expedition.

It was largely my antipathy toward my father that held me back from beginning to research his life. Ten years had passed since the Everest anniversary lecture at the RGS before I sought out Dr. Michael Ward and had my first conversation about Griffith with a man who, I believed, had known him well. I still knew practically nothing about my father’s personal background, and even less about his work.

In mid-2003, having just watched the BBC film
The Race for Everest
, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the ascent of Everest,
I wrote a brief letter to Ward. I told him how his speech in praise of my father at the RGS ten years earlier had made such a deep impression on me that I hoped, one day, to try to write about his life. Ward replied immediately, full of encouragement, saying he thought it an “excellent idea.”

Still postponing the day when I would have to begin my project, I did not get around to visiting Ward at his home, near Petworth in West Sussex, for several months. By then I had begun to realize to my dismay that I had left the search for former friends and colleagues of my father very late indeed. Many were already dead. Some were very old and had lost their memories. Had my father lived, he would have been almost ninety-four. Kicking myself for not having begun sooner, I decided to give first priority to meeting people who had known him, leaving other forms of information-gathering until later.

With my scant knowledge of my father’s background, and only a few books about Everest under my belt, including one written by Ward himself, when I went to meet Ward I had not even thought about beginning the daunting task of delving into the major archives covering Griffith’s life and career. These included the two large Everest archives at the RGS and the Alpine Club in London; the records of Griffith’s employer, the Medical Research Council, which were kept at the National Archives in Kew; and his pension file at the MRC’s headquarters in Regent’s Park, London. Nor had I yet found and scrutinized his army records or discovered anything about his early youth. There were also the India Office files in the British Library, covering the diplomatic background to the prewar Everest expeditions, together with many other sources that I needed to consult before I could draft my book. Worst of all, despite my mother’s pleas I had failed to prevent my father’s own personal collection of papers from being taken abroad. Naturally these included a fair amount of technical, scientific material that I would have difficulty understanding, but there were also personal diaries from all his expeditions and many letters that might help to illuminate the man.

Shortly after Griffith’s death in 1994, my mother had offered to donate his papers to the archives of the RGS and the Alpine Club. Both institutions refused them. They had no particular interest in Griffith Pugh—and why should they? He was practically unknown. The papers were kept in a shed at our house at Hatching Green, the home of the Pugh family since 1955. Stored in rusting filing cabinets and overflowing cardboard boxes, they were under attack from mice and damp and did not have long to survive. In the nick of time, one of Griffith’s former colleagues, John West, an eminent professor of respiratory physiology at the University of California at San Diego, transported them safely to America, where they were placed in a special archive of high-altitude medicine he had established in the university library. It took two professional archivists a year to catalog Griffith’s papers, which now occupy ninety-four pale-gray archive boxes. The sad truth was that I now had to travel to California before I could begin to read my own father’s diaries and personal correspondence.

It was a fine day when I drove to Petworth to be welcomed by Michael Ward at the front door of his large house. Ten years earlier, from my seat near the back of the auditorium at the RGS, he had struck me as a distinguished-looking man. Noted for having been extremely handsome in his youth, he was still good-looking, with exceptionally high cheekbones, dark-brown, deep-set eyes, an olive complexion, and a tall graceful, athletic figure, with elegant, well-proportioned hands and feet—visible in his slippers. Looking and sounding much younger than his seventy-eight years, he led me into a pleasant, book-lined sitting room with a view over the garden and fields beyond. A few moments later his wife, Jane, followed us in with a tray of coffee and cakes, and treated me to some stories of my father at his most eccentric.

Jane remembered Griffith arriving at a big private party at the famous Café Royal in London, announcing that he could not stay long because he had “something very important to do.” He then fell deep into conversation. Half an hour passed before someone remarked, “Griff, I thought you couldn’t stay!” “Oh Christ!” he exclaimed, running a guilty hand through his unruly red hair. “I’d better go! Josephine’s in the car, and she’s in labor!” It was the summer of 1955, and my father had been driving my mother to St. Thomas’s Hospital to give birth to their fourth child, Oliver. The Café Royal in Regent Street happened to be en route to the hospital, so he had left her in the car outside, popped into the party to make his excuses, and promptly forgot about her.

After a few more tales of that ilk, Jane left me to question Michael about his own memories of my father. Our conversation lasted for almost the whole day, with a short break for lunch. Speaking animatedly and fluently, he described their first meeting, when he had helped to rescue my father from the ice-cold bath in his laboratory. He told me about their early experiments, emphasizing that Griffith was probably “the only person in England” at the time with the necessary skills to tackle the perennial problems faced by climbers attempting Everest. Michael spoke of the “extreme” difficulties he experienced at first in “getting on the same wavelength” as Griffith. There was a “vast intellectual gulf” between them, Griffith being “at the cutting edge of his subject,” while Michael, the younger man, had only a “basic” understanding. Patiently, he attempted to convey to me how my father’s skills were able to contribute to the solution of the Everest problems.

He and Griffith had both appreciated that the early Everest pioneers were “excellent observers,” describing their experiences in such graphic detail that it was possible to build a preliminary “pathological story of cold and altitude.” Seeing many reports of Everest climbers feeling desperately thirsty and drinking fifteen or more cups of tea after climbing at high altitude, they both saw that “[i]t was perfectly obvious that everybody was terribly dehydrated.” Griffith knew from his research at Cedars that dehydration could be an urgent problem. He and Michael had contacted early Everesters Charles Warren and Raymond Greene, who recalled rarely passing urine at high altitude, and that it had been dark and concentrated when they did urinate—obvious signs of dehydration.

“Whereas I could make the observation,” Michael explained, “Griff could quantify. He could work out how much water you lost from your lungs each minute, and from that you could work out how much fluid you needed each day to stop getting dehydrated.”
²

As I would later learn from his expedition diary, this crucial issue was one that Griffith took up and studied on Cho Oyu, and his ideas about how to resolve it would be a central plank of his recommendations for success on Everest.

While Michael did not go to Cho Oyu, he recounted stories of other expeditions he had shared with Griffith, and much else besides. As he spoke, his eyes occasionally flashed, and I realized he was deeply passionate about climbing, and medicine. His memory for the details of events that had happened long ago seemed extraordinary. I came away with an audio recording that was 13,000 words long, packed with information.

After hearing Michael’s factual history of his adventures with Griffith, I took the opportunity to explore more-personal territory. “What was Griffith like to work with?” I ventured.

“I found him absolutely fine to work with,” Michael replied. “I had no trouble with him at all. He was pretty obsessional about his work, but you have to be. To get anywhere, you have to be obsessional.”

My father was indeed obsessive about his work, yet without such a single-minded, determined approach, and without the intellectual rigor and meticulous attention to detail he brought to it, he could never have carried out successful pioneering research in the hostile and difficult conditions he faced high on the Menlung La on the Cho Oyu expedition.

From this point on, however, Michael’s description of my father’s work persona became less and less flattering. Griffith, he said, was quite capable of working in a group as long as he was the dominant figure: “He was a team player, providing it was a small team and he was in charge.”

“Did he listen to other people’s views?” I asked.

“He was quite happy to have suggestions—all sorts of suggestions—but he would brush them aside . . . he would brush people aside if he felt they were talking nonsense . . . I have come across people who found [that] very putting off.”

Yet Michael insisted that he personally had not been intimidated by Griffith’s intolerance: “I didn’t mind at all, (a) because I have a thick skin, and (b) because I knew that he had the answers to my questions, and it was just a question of plugging on and getting them. I was prepared to do this, and he accepted me.”

Emboldened, I tried being even more direct. “I thought my father was sometimes rather cruel,” I said, somewhat tentatively.

“I am sure he was,” Michael answered with perceptible relish. “He was totally self-obsessed, but that didn’t trouble men as much as it does women. It certainly didn’t trouble me. I accepted he was like that . . . When he wasn’t interested, he wasn’t interested. As a teacher he was terrible. I would have thought as a father he would have been dreadful.”

He went on to reiterate that Griffith was “totally selfish” and “completely self-obsessed,” concluding, “I would have thought he would have been absolutely dreadful to have been married to. I don’t know how your mother survived.”

All this was meat and drink to me. It seemed to validate the hostility toward my father that had prevented me from beginning my project, his comments coming as they did without my having disclosed anything about my own difficult relationship with Griffith. Michael just seemed intuitively to have sensed it. At the end of our meeting, he encouraged me to write about my father’s failings as well as his achievements. His final words were: “If you are doing something like this, you want to do it, warts and all.”

It was only when I transcribed the interview that a remark Michael had made during our conversation struck me forcibly, though at the time it had passed me by. “Apart from sharing your work interests, did you find Griffith good company?” I had asked him, to which he had replied: “That didn’t really come up. I mean, I really knew very little about his life other than what he told me, and what we were involved with. It was extraordinarily difficult to get under his skin.”

Though he had spoken at length about my father’s negative qualities, here was an admission from Michael that revealed he did not understand my father as a person. And yet he had freely criticized his character to me—the questing daughter—in terms that most people would have regarded as positively damning.

I was sure that he meant well and had no intention of hurting my feelings. He clearly felt great admiration for Griffith, and had spent many years loyally trying to win public recognition for his achievements. But his blunt, emphatic way of communicating criticism was strangely reminiscent of Griffith’s own forthright behavior, which seemed to pay no regard to the impact he might be having on the recipient of his message.

My first encounter with Michael confirmed my negative views of my father’s dismissive and self-centered character. When, later, I saw how he had annoyed Shipton and the other climbers on Cho Oyu, and heard from Jennifer Bourdillon of the insensitive way he had treated her, I was only further convinced that he had been a difficult and unpleasant person. And yet, as I was soon to discover, the personal diaries he kept over many years told a rather different story.

10

“It’s a Wonderful Life”