Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (26 page)

In 1921, Francis Younghusband, chairman of the first Everest Committee, had expressed the grand expectation that “the man who first stands on the summit of Mount Everest will have raised the spirit of countless others for generations to come.”
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Hunt wanted to consummate Younghusband’s prediction. Echoing Younghusband’s words, the final sentence of his book proclaimed: “There is no height, no depth that the spirit of man, guided by a higher spirit, cannot attain.”
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The unfortunate casualty of this high-flown rhetoric was Griffith Pugh. For, unlike Lieutenant Colonel Younghusband, who thought that science and heroism could march hand in hand, Hunt was convinced that the potency of the Everest conquest’s romantic heroism would be damaged if too much attention was given to the role played by science. If it were admitted that physiological breakthroughs had made the key difference, the achievement of the climbers would appear less glorious and less significant. “No one will want to hear about the science,” he insisted to Charles Wylie shortly after the expedition. “The spotlight must be firmly on the human aspects of the achievement.”

The book must concentrate, he said, on feats such as Edmund Hillary’s courageous decision to climb the challenging “Hillary Step” just below the summit of Everest. In this ice chimney, the snow cornice on one side might have given way, causing Hillary and Tenzing to fall thousands of feet to their death. Yet they bravely ignored the danger.

While he did not deny that he had received technical and scientific support, the overriding message Hunt wanted to convey was that it is not science but “man who climbs the mountain,” and he does so by drawing “on the resources of the human spirit.” Everest had been conquered, he wanted people to see, by the human qualities of courage, skill, fortitude, teamwork, and persistence in adversity, just as Eric Shipton, Bill Tilman, Geoffrey Winthrop Young, and many other stalwarts of the Alpine Club had always hoped that it would be.

The readers of Hunt’s book were treated to an even more thorough and detailed account of the elaborate preparations for the expedition than the audience of the film. As in the film they were given the impression that everything had been done under the direction of Hunt alone. The clothing, the tents, the high-altitude boots, even the double-layered air mattresses were all described in detail. But, as in the film, there was no mention of the role Griffith Pugh played in their design. There was no hint that Pugh had influenced the way the expedition was planned, or that he had brought to the table any creative thinking on its use of oxygen, its policies on acclimatization, or the consumption of fluids. The only concrete contribution Hunt attributed to Pugh was the planning of the expedition’s diet.

What particularly stirred Josephine was that Hunt did not pass over the Everest preparations without naming names. If no one else had been given credit, then Hunt’s failure to mention Pugh’s contributions might not have troubled her. But the reverse was true. Hunt went out of his way to acknowledge the work other people had done. When he explained his team’s approach to the use of oxygen, he spoke of choosing to rely on open-circuit “partly in recognition of the advocacy of Professor George Finch.” He divulged that the experimental closed-circuit oxygen had been “constructed by Dr. R. B. Bourdillon and his son Tom,” adding that Tom “had experimented with the use of oxygen” on Eric Shipton’s Cho Oyu expedition. The readers were told about the “wise and able” Peter Lloyd, who was in charge of the “development and provision” of the open-circuit oxygen and liaising with the “High-Altitude Committee under the Chairmanship of Sir Bryan Matthews.”

The readers learned of the “immense energy and fixity of purpose” brought to bear on the packing and shipping of the oxygen by Hunt’s “old climbing companion,” the “exceptional” Alfred Bridge: “The addition of Bridge to our helpers was a great event in the history of the expedition.”
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They were told the names of Mr. Mensforth, the head of Normalair, and Sir Robert Davis, the head of Siebe Gorman, the firms that manufactured the oxygen apparatus. They were told about John Cotes’s work on the oxygen masks. Only one person’s name was missing from the long roll call of oxygen honors, and it was the name of Griffith Pugh.

Hunt heaped elaborate praise on so many people: the “generosity and selflessness” of Emylin Jones, who briefly stood in as organizing secretary; the “most important” work of that “Himalayan mountaineer of renown,” C. R. Cook, who “invented” the novel new design of the mountain stoves; the “capable hands” of Stuart Bain, who organized the shipping of equipment to India; the “fine job of work” done by Peter Fitt, who adapted some oxygen cylinders; the “splendid assistance given us by our Secretaries Ann Debenham and Elizabeth Johnson”; the “conscientious” work of the treasurer, R. W. Lloyd; the “indefatigable labours” of the committee on packing, “the wonderful work done by my wife and Mrs. Mowbrey Green in sewing many hundreds of name tapes onto our garments”; and so on and so on and so on.
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Having received little credit for his contribution, Pugh was treated as the book’s main source of light relief, just as he had been in the film. His unpopular experiments, his dirty pajamas, his coffin box, and his mango chutney were all given suitable prominence. The image of “Griff Pugh, a horrifying sight; so short of oxygen that his tongue was hanging out” in the pressure chamber at Farnborough was highlighted once again.
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Many years later Hunt admitted in his autobiography,
Life is Meeting
,
that he had failed to give due credit to Pugh for his “great contribution.” He also confessed that he had a deep distaste for science. But in
The Ascent of Everest
he did not express this distaste. He merely emphasized that he didn’t approve of conducting scientific research on a mountaineering expedition, and highlighted the reluctance he had felt about including Pugh in his expedition.

Most significantly, while Hunt was willing to admit that oxygen had played a vital role in the Everest success, he gave no clue that his team had benefited from the
new
ways of using oxygen suggested by Pugh. Nor did he admit that they had also benefited from a new approach to acclimatization, fluid intake, and diet. These innovations were simply not mentioned in his main text. The lay reader was given no sense that, apart from some basic improvements in equipment, there were any essential differences between the techniques used in 1953 and those available to the climbers who had gone before.

The science in Hunt’s book was relegated to the specialist appendices, where again Pugh’s contribution was downplayed. Writing the appendix on the expedition’s use of oxygen, Tom Bourdillon did not mention Pugh, or the fact that oxygen was used differently from before.
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Pugh’s appendix on physiology and medicine was placed near the back of the appendices, where it was unlikely to be seen by the general reader.

To rub salt in the wound, Pugh’s appendices were scornfully dismissed as worthless by Bill Tilman. Reviewing
The
Ascent of Everest
in
Time and Tide
,
he wrote that he had found all the appendices very interesting except for the two “irksome” articles by Pugh, which were notable only for their “questionable assumptions, platitudes and complacency.”
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Tilman was clearly angered because Pugh had included some trenchant criticisms of the regressive attitudes of prewar Everesters—criticisms aimed straight at iconic figures like Tilman himself—whose “futile controversy over the ethics of using oxygen” and “failure to accept the findings of the pioneers in its application” had “handicapped for more than thirty years the introduction of a method which promises to revolutionise high-altitude mountaineering.”
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This was not an observation that was likely to find merit with one of the most famous anti-science, anti-oxygen exponents of his day.

At the time, no one spoke up for Pugh. Most of the Everest climbers were either unaware that Hunt had downplayed Pugh’s contribution, or they turned a blind eye. Michael Ward had become immersed in medical exams as soon as he got home. Wilfred Noyce was the one exception. He was the least technically minded member of the team, but in his book
South Col
, published a few months after the
Ascent of Everest
, he wrote:

It is not generally known to what extent our expedition built on the physiological knowledge [Pugh] gained on Cho Oyu; much was learned about food, drink and the effects of oxygen, to mention only these. Without this knowledge Everest might never have been climbed at all. But climbers are notoriously lazy people. They accept the tools of their trade from the workshop, grumble at the inconveniences imposed by scientific gadgets and think they are getting up entirely under their own steam.
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Hunt remained convinced for the rest of his life that the human spirit must be protected from the scientific Frankenstein. “Man’s inventions would seem to bid fair to take over from Man himself!” he warned in a new introduction written in 1993 for the reissue of
The Ascent of Everest,
to mark the fortieth anniversary. “But what of us humans and the spirit which moves us? The inspiration . . . rests still, I believe, on a higher plane. People everywhere appear to feel uplifted by deeds of daring.”

It was to that “higher plane” that he had aimed
The
Ascent of Everest
. His distaste for technological advance and his decision to downplay its role on Everest reflected a view endemic in British society since the nineteenth century—that science was soulless, materialistic, and amoral.

Hunt—and Pugh—had been educated in an age when British public schools had an aversion to science. Geared to producing administrators and army officers to run the Empire, most took the view that only an education in the humanities—especially the classics—could cultivate the leadership qualities, moral sense, and breadth of vision required by the elite of society. The sciences were considered to be vocational subjects, more suitable for the “training” of the socially inferior than for the “education” of the gentleman-leader. Pugh had come up against this problem after Harrow when his father had refused to allow him to study chemistry at Oxford, insisting that he read for a degree in the respectable subject of law instead.

The Nobel Prize–winning scientist Peter Medawar—later the head of the MRC institute where Pugh worked—remembered how the biology teacher at Marlborough, where he and John Hunt were both educated, “was sneered at and looked down on by all the other masters.” He was, Medawar said, “a rough and coarsely spoken man . . . appointed, as public-school science teachers sometimes were, to bring science into discredit and turn the boys rather to the study of other subjects.”
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There was, accordingly, an element of snobbery in the Everest climbers’ choice of words like
repugnant
to describe Pugh’s experiments, and in the sneering, dismissive attitudes toward him displayed by the likes of Bill Tilman.

Alpine Club members were inspired in their dislike of science by the nineteenth-century Romantic Movement, which had been so influential in the public schools. Indeed some of the key Romantic thinkers—including Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin—were also members of the Alpine Club. The Romantics bemoaned the poverty and squalor of the new industrial cities and the cruel inhumanity of modern methods of production; and men like Thomas Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin questioned the Victorian Age’s faith in the “mechanistic,” “scientific,” “objective” modes of thought that underpinned the industrialization of Britain. In the eyes of many, Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
,
published in 1859—a classic scientific text—made things worse by challenging the biblical account of creation, threatening belief in God and undermining organized religion.

John Hunt’s wish to inspire heroic achievement had its roots in Ruskin’s nostalgia for the chivalric, Christian ideals of preindustrial medieval society and in Carlyle’s call for heroes to lead and guide the populace. Hunt shared the Romantic poets’ deeply emotional responses to the grandeur of magnificent landscapes, believing—like Wordsworth—that nature at its grandest and fiercest cleanses the soul and uplifts the human spirit.
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For Hunt and many mountaineers, this emphasis on subjective experience, intense emotion, and spiritual growth went hand in hand with a strong antipathy toward the materialistic, dispassionate values of science and technology.

During World War II, Hunt and Pugh both worked as instructors for mountain-warfare training units—Pugh in Lebanon, and Hunt at Braemar in Scotland, where Frank Smythe, the prewar Everest climber famous for his commitment to small-expedition ideals and his opposition to oxygen, was the chief instructor. At Braemar Hunt focused his training regime largely on character development and motivation, and came away with a lifelong belief that arduous and exciting adventure training could morally elevate the characters of young people. Pugh, on the other hand, focused on improving the practical aspects of the training: better selection of candidates, systematic development of fitness, better protective clothing, better boots, and so on. He was unmoved by what he considered to be woolly, abstract concepts of character development through high endeavor at the expense of the practicalities of the task at hand.

Hunt’s and Pugh’s contrasting approaches were illustrative of what a member of the War Cabinet identified as early as 1941 as a fundamental problem in the British approach to the war as a whole. The establishment, Sir Stafford Cripps said, had failed to realize “sufficiently early” that the war would not be won “merely by the physical ascendancy of our race.” It was a “truly scientific war” that could only be won by “the ingenuity of those who have been trained in our schools, technical colleges and universities.”
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