Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (25 page)

Vistas of unanswered questions about “man and altitude” were calling, like siren songs, to the scientist in Pugh, and he was already thinking about trying to organize his own high-altitude scientific expedition—one that would give him the freedom to do the kind of work he wanted to do. Far from being an end in itself, the ascent of Everest had merely opened the door to what Michael Ward would later describe as “this cornucopia of science.”

Once it was clear that there would be no further attempts on the summit, none of the climbers could wait to get back to civilization, and the exodus from the mountain was extremely fast. They were all down at base camp by June 2, the day of the coronation of the new Queen, Elizabeth II, when the news of their triumph was announced in London. They walked into Kathmandu on June 20. Hunt had already begun to think about their achievement in somewhat numinous terms, writing home to his wife on June 1, “I’ve felt very sure . . . of the final outcome all along, as though guided along a pre-destined track, a curious sensation of confidence answering to faith.”
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Few of the climbers, except for Hunt himself, had any concept of the avalanche of publicity that was about to engulf them.

The team arrived back in England on July 6 to a tumultuous welcome, and was immediately swept into a bewildering whirl of champagne receptions, lunches, dinners, and royal garden parties. There was much joyous speech-making and congratulation. They were feted everywhere they went; they met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, and were summoned to Buckingham Palace to be presented with special Everest medals. The spotlight was naturally on John Hunt and the climbers, but even Pugh became a bit of a celebrity, attending over forty Everest receptions and parties in the first couple of months after arriving home.

The two most important vehicles for promoting the expedition to a wider audience and raising money for future expeditions were to be the film based on Tom Stobart’s cinematography and the official expedition book by John Hunt. Both were to be brought out quickly to take full advantage of the public excitement. Three weeks after returning to England, Hunt absented himself from the parties and the razzmatazz and retired to the country to write his book in seclusion. The rest of the team was asked to send him interesting snippets of information, diary extracts, and funny stories. Five of them were also asked to contribute appendices, which would provide specialist information. Pugh was to write two: one on diet with George Band, another on physiology and medicine with Michael Ward.
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Bourdillon was to write on oxygen and Wylie on equipment and clothing. The deadline was the end of August.

The film,
The Conquest of Everest
,
came out first. Made by Countryman Films, with a commentary written by Irish poet Louis MacNeice, it had a glittering London premiere at the Warner Cinema, Leicester Square, on October 21. This was such an important national event that it merited the presence of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and several other members of the Royal Family. Naturally Hunt and the Everest team and the Himalayan Committee were there too, accompanied by their wives, all bursting with pride.

The film was widely praised for its “astonishingly vivid” photography. Stobart had brilliantly captured the vulnerability of the climbers as they grappled with the monumental chaos of the icefall, or cowered in their tiny tents on the Western Cwm, battered and threatened by screaming winds and blinding snow. Always on the watch for the human aspect of the drama, his perceptive photographer’s eye had spotted and recorded the rising tension in Hunt’s face as he waited at advanced base camp, taut as a wire, to find out if his team had succeeded in climbing the Lhotse Face.

With the help of Stobart’s stunning images, the commentary, spoken in eager, carefully enunciated tones by the well-known Welsh film actor, Meredith Edwards, emphasized the magnitude of the challenge. This was Everest, “aloof, inviolate, murderous.” High on its vast, brutal slopes the men of Hunt’s team would do battle with “the terrible problems of altitude, the unbelievably treacherous weather and, most of all, with the terrifying lack of oxygen.” As the drama of the fight for the summit unfolded, it was accompanied by a musical score of positively epic grandeur, with suites of soaring trumpets and clashing cymbals at every turn.
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The film rapidly became a huge box office success all around the world. It was named one of the ten best films of the year by both
Time
magazine and the
New
York Times
, and received a coveted British Academy Award for best documentary. The academy also gave Tom Stobart a Certificate of Merit for the photography (although all the filming above advanced base camp had been undertaken by George Lowe, because Stobart could not cope with the altitude).

The following June, Stobart was made a Commander of the British Empire for his services to the film industry. Bosley Crowther, the famous film critic of the
New York Times
, admitted to having been transported into a state of “indescribable awe and thrill” by the sight and sound of “the great Everest massif, where the wind howls with banshee terror and the soul of man is naked and alone.”
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Back in London, a reviewer from
The Times
wrote, more prosaically, that he thought the commentary “strove a little too much for effect,” and complained that Arthur Benjamin’s dramatic musical score had introduced every shot of Everest “as if the mountain was a cross between King Kong and Frankenstein.”
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Pugh’s wife Josephine was with him at the royal premiere. Still pretty and slim at the age of thirty-six, she wore an exquisite blue-green floaty chiffon ball gown that she had salvaged from earlier days. Pugh must have felt very proud of her, for he told me and my brother Simon afterward, “Your mother was still the most beautiful woman in the room.” It was so unusual for him to express personal feelings, especially complimentary feelings about our mother, that neither of us has ever forgotten it.

The film gave Josephine her first chance to see how the Everest expedition would be presented to the public. The photography was wonderful and the story exciting, but the footage of her husband was far from flattering, and there was no mention of the expedition’s new strategies for coping with altitude. Nor was there any hint that Pugh had been involved in the preparations; in fact, his research project during the expedition was dismissed as an inconvenience and a burden to the climbers.

All the scientific preparations for the expedition were presented as if John Hunt alone had been responsible for them. The first image of Hunt, just called over from Germany to take charge of the Everest challenge, was of a tall, straight-backed man, dressed in a well-cut suit, the very model of a heroic leader, striding purposefully into the Alpine Club to begin planning his Everest conquest. “A project like this needs a vast amount of planning and testing,” the commentary explained. Hunt had to equip his team “with the very best possible equipment.” Most important of all was “oxygen”—“for no apparatus hitherto had fitted the bill upon Everest.” The high-altitude boots were shown being hand-made. There was footage of the vacuum-packed rations; and the fabric for the expedition tents and clothing was pictured being tested in wind tunnels at Farnborough. “Everything had to be thought of,” the narrator said, as the spotlight returned to Hunt, lacing up his Lawrie boots with a look of purposeful determination. “He will have to climb a long way in them,” the narrator declaimed, a little portentously.

In sharp contrast, the first image of Pugh was a huge, uncomplimentary close-up of his head. His eyes were closed and he was twitching and jerking unnaturally as if he was having a fit. Josephine was far from pleased. This, the narrator explained, was “Pugh, a research doctor” starved of oxygen, “using himself as a specimen in a pressure chamber.” The air pressure in the chamber had been lowered to demonstrate the impact of oxygen lack on the brain. But the impression given was deceptive. John Cotes, not Pugh, had organized the demonstration, and most of the team was involved. The others had reacted similarly to Pugh, though he was the only one shown.

Later in the film, Pugh appeared again, supposedly at base camp when the expedition was at its busiest. He was conducting an experiment on “the unfortunate George Band.” “Pugh’s experiments were not very popular,” the narrator explained pointedly. “When someone came into camp after a hard day on the icefall, Pugh would harness them into a contraption of glass and rubber and then make them work until they were exhausted.” The film footage showed Band stepping monotonously on and off a box while Pugh hovered next to him with a stopwatch. Cruelly, this was exactly the kind of obstructive behavior that Pugh had been at pains to avoid. Worse still, the experiment shown in the film had not been carried out at base camp when the climbers were busy, but a month later at advanced base camp, when they had nothing to do but wait for the outcome of the summit assaults. When challenged, John Taylor, the producer at Countryman Films who put the film together, admitted rather flippantly that he had “made the story up to provide light relief.”

Josephine reacted badly. In her own way she had invested a lot of effort in the Everest campaign, coping with her husband’s long absences from home, making few demands on him, and caring for the family like a single parent. If the film had acknowledged Pugh’s contribution in any way, however briefly, she would have felt validated and rewarded. As it was, she felt that her husband had been belittled and his work passed over without mention.

Coping on her own had been quite an ordeal for Josephine. Her father had been very wealthy, and her pampered upbringing in a grand house surrounded by servants had not prepared her for the hard work she faced as Pugh’s wife. When she first married, she had no idea how to boil an egg, and described herself as “hazy” on the subject of housework. In marrying Pugh, a penniless junior doctor, she had taken a significant step down the social ladder. Soon after their marriage, Pugh went off to the Middle East for almost five years of war service. She was six months pregnant when he left. Their son David, born in September 1940, proved to be a victim of the rubella Josephine had contracted early in the pregnancy. He was two years old before she fully realized that he was deaf and mute.

With two more children born shortly after the war, life was hard for Josephine. David suffered from bouts of frustrated rage and would often physically attack his younger siblings, so he had to be watched constantly when he was near them. Weakened by the two recent pregnancies, and by looking after the three children on her own, on a tight budget, Josephine became exhausted. In 1948 she contracted tuberculosis, affecting both her lungs, and nearly died. After six months in the hospital she recovered slowly, but never fully regained her strength.

Despite this, she had a strong sense of duty and wanted terribly to be a good wife and mother. When Pugh became utterly absorbed in his Everest work, she did her best to support him, though it was often a struggle. For nearly eighteen months Pugh had been away in the Himalayas, traveling around England, or working extremely long hours in his laboratory. That he should now be depicted as a foolish, useless scientist who had contributed nothing to the expedition struck Josephine as an insult not only to the work he had done, but also to her own efforts to support him.

Pugh was also irritated, although he refused to be provoked. He and Josephine were content to wait for John Hunt’s book to put things right by telling the true story. But when the book appeared three weeks later, it did not do so.

Written in only a month,
The Ascent of Everest
was published on November 12, 1953. It was an instant success, soon becoming a classic, translated into thirty different languages and outselling any previous book on mountaineering. Like the film, it portrayed the Everest quest as a military-style campaign, carefully planned with great attention to detail. But, above all, the book was a rousing tale of heroism and derring-do.

John Hunt was a profoundly religious man imbued with a Wordsworthian reverence for the mountains. Holidaying in Kashmir in 1931 he confided in his journal: “It is enchanting after living in surroundings that are inimical to turn back to the mountain scene, to find oneself once again face to face with the power of nature, wherein the mountaineer finds Faith.”
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On the trek to Everest in 1953 Wilf Noyce observed that Hunt “. . . believed immensely in the inspiration of Everest to the world . . . behind this was a deep religious sense. John once said round a camp-fire at Thyangboche: ‘I don’t mind admitting that the mountains make me pray.’”
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Hunt told his wife that on Everest he had carried with him a feeling that the hand of God was guiding him toward his goal. This sense of being chosen by God colored the way he framed the official history of the expedition, and it became clear that his view had set the tone of the film.

Recognizing the inspirational potential of the Everest triumph, Hunt wanted to convey what he described as a “deeper and more lasting message . . . than the mere ephemeral sensation of a physical feat.” His was to be a story of adventure and teamwork of the highest order. It was to be a beacon of inspiration capable of stimulating young people all over the world to go out and find “Everests” of their own, through which, Hunt believed, they could reach their moral, physical, and spiritual potential as human beings.

The
Ascent of Everest
was punctuated with reverential passages conveying the moral earnestness with which the author approached his subject: “For us who took part in the venture . . . we have shared a high endeavour; we have witnessed scenes of beauty and grandeur; we have built up lasting comradeship among ourselves and have seen the fruits of comradeship ripen into achievement. We shall not forget those moments of great living upon that mountain.”
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