Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (27 page)

Hunt and Pugh were on opposite sides of this divide. They were on the cusp of a cultural shift, with Hunt representing a traditionally educated elite raised on the old heroic ideals associated with the past glories of the British Empire, and Pugh representing a future dominated by scientific and technological progress, professionalism, and meritocracy. C. P. Snow famously identified a destructive lack of empathy between these “two cultures”—a “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” characterized by “hostility and dislike but most of all lack of understanding.”
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An element of this distrust and lack of understanding lay at the heart of Hunt’s relationship with Pugh.

16

The Golden Age

Griffith Pugh’s wife Josephine had never attended school and knew nothing about science. Educated entirely at home by a succession of governesses, she was well read in literature and the arts, could speak French and German fluently, knew all Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart, and was a very perceptive literary critic. Modest and unassuming, she was also a very loyal wife. Feeling that her husband had been made to look foolish and his achievements deliberately underplayed, or even suppressed, it was she rather than Pugh who was furious about the film and the book.

I have a distant memory of sitting as a young child with my brother Simon in the back of our ancient Ford Popular car, on the way home from seeing
The Conquest of Everest
at the theater
.
Our mother was clearly upset. “The film was disgraceful,” she was saying, “frightful . . . so unfair about Griffith.” Neither of us could understand what she meant.

By the time John Hunt’s book was published, the Everest film was being shown to packed theater audiences throughout the country, and Josephine was being showered with telephone calls and messages from friends and family commiserating with her about the way her husband was portrayed. Wherever she went, people teased and joked about her husband’s “brutal” behavior toward the exhausted climbers on Everest. Hunt’s book was the last straw. She was furious that Hunt had failed to acknowledge most of Pugh’s work, instead claiming much of the credit for himself. That streak of determination which normally lay buried far below the surface of Josephine’s gentle personality now came to the fore. Her dander was up, and she started to egg on her unwilling husband to do something to set the record straight.

Pugh, however, belonged to a generation brought up never to blow your own horn. He wanted to ignore the film and the book, and get on with his work. But since Josephine was so upset, he agreed to take the small step of protesting about the factual error in the film—the accusation that he had imposed his experiments on busy climbers at base camp as they struggled to find a route up the icefall. Josephine regarded this scene as particularly damaging because it gave the impression that his one and only role on the expedition had been to make unreasonable demands on the climbers and get in their way.
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Pugh wrote to Countryman Films asking them to cut out the offending scene. “The commentary is, in fact, completely untrue,” he explained. “I have received so many adverse comments . . . that I believe my reputation is being damaged.”
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But with the film already in circulation, the producers, while not denying the falsehood, refused—knowing that Pugh could do nothing about it.

Turning to the chairman of the Himalayan Committee, Sir Edwin Herbert, Pugh wrote, “I was not very pleased at being shown in this light as the story was untrue and it created the wrong impression.”
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So embarrassed was he that he felt it necessary to point out—and reiterate—in his letter that it was really his wife who was upset: “I forgot about it until my wife came to me . . . saying that all sorts of people had mentioned it to her, asking whether her husband was really such a brute.” Herbert wrote back saying he would do his best. Not surprisingly, nothing came of it.
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Pugh went on trying to get the offending scene cut out, writing in January to Sir Arthur Landsborough Thomson—Harold Himsworth’s deputy at the Medical Research Council—again blaming his objections to the film mainly on his wife.
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Landsborough Thomson replied, “It seemed to me that the commentator’s remark was rather silly, slightly irritating, but not really harmful.” At last Pugh let the issue drop. Yet he was frequently reminded that most people were completely unaware of his contribution to the Everest success. Indeed, the film made them feel rather scornful about the inept behavior of the scientist on the mountain. One of the worst instances of this came from Alfred Bridge.

In preparing a report for the MRC about the expedition’s use of oxygen, Pugh wanted to quote the total weight of the oxygen equipment sent to Everest and requested this information from the shippers. They passed his request on to Alfred Bridge, Hunt’s friend, who had been responsible for packing the Everest oxygen. Bridge’s response was scornful and dismissive: “I am really sorry Dr. Pugh is asking you for information about the gross weight of the oxygen equipment . . . for the life of me I cannot see what this has to do with Dr. Pugh.”
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The shippers forwarded Bridge’s reply directly to Pugh, who, stung by the disrespectful tone, wrote to tell Bridge in no uncertain terms that without the help given by the MRC—“which had extended over two years”—the expedition would have had “no effective [oxygen] apparatus and no adequate supply of oxygen.” The Medical Research Council’s High-Altitude Committee had had “a hard fight to get the necessary amount accepted.”
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It was hurtful that a loyal friend of Hunt’s should have formed such a disparaging view of Pugh, and also, that he did not seem to realize that Pugh had had any legitimate role in organizing the expedition’s oxygen.

Meeting this kind of curt, dismissive treatment again and again, Pugh became increasingly touchy. He was sufficiently irritated by an article in the
Lancet—
which said that “the [1953 Everest] expedition differed from its predecessors in having a physiologist who was not a mountaineer”—to fire back a letter of protest, insisting that: “The physiologist had, in fact, as much mountaineering experience as most of the climbers . . . the scientific contribution to the success of the expedition was made possible by the survey of the physiological problems carried out on Cho Oyu the previous year. This would not have been done by a physiologist who was not a mountaineer.”
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Pugh was not petty and would not usually have bothered about such things, but now he fumed. When asked by Laurence Kirwan and Sir James Wordie, the new president of the Royal Geographical Society and a veteran of Ernest Shackleton’s
Endurance
expedition of 1914–17, to comment on a letter to the
Geographical Journal
from Professor Noel Odell, denying the existence of high-altitude deterioration, Pugh lost patience completely.

Odell was an exponent of the old-guard view that “physiologists” like Pugh had no understanding of climbing and had got all their ideas wrong. “In the opinion of many who have climbed high,” Odell had written pointedly, “so-called deterioration . . . can be regarded as unproven and is probably fictitious.”
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Pugh had seen with his own eyes the effects of high-altitude deterioration—the drastic loss of weight suffered by the Cho Oyu team, and the thin, exhausted Swiss climbers just back from Everest, whom he had met in Kathmandu after the Cho Oyu expedition. That Kirwan and Wordie expected him to dignify Odell’s letter with a serious response annoyed him intensely, and he retorted in a curt note to Wordie: “I think Odell’s letter . . . is too stupid to be worth replying [to] in detail.”
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The final draft of his reply began with the words: “Professor Odell is completely out of touch with modern thought on the subject of high-altitude deterioration and, in addition, has got his facts wrong . . .”
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But, however annoyed he was, the opinions of the old-guard climbing community and the general public did not matter to Pugh nearly as much as the views of his peers in the medical world. And in medical and scientific circles he was receiving acclaim for his Everest work. He had become a bit of a star at the MRC, where he was felt to have brought credit to Otto Edholm’s division and to the MRC as a whole. Invitations to speak at prestigious institutions like the Royal Society, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Physiological Society, and to give papers at academic symposia at home and abroad, were coming in thick and fast. For a scientist of Pugh’s relatively junior status, this newfound celebrity was highly flattering.

Pugh could have enhanced his reputation by writing his own book. Wilfred Noyce and Michael Ward both expected him to do so. In 1954, commenting on the Everest climbers’ failure to acknowledge Pugh’s contribution, Noyce wrote: “I know Griff will publish something to expose the real case, and our human weakness.”
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In November 1953, the Hutchinson & Co. publishing firm invited Pugh to write a book about the Everest science, but he declined, saying he was too busy. He also refused an offer from Penguin to write a book popularizing altitude medicine, to be called
Man and Oxygen.
A couple of years later he told Hutchinson he was now ready, and even signed a contract, but never finished the book because of “pressure of work.”

Ward, who was even more troubled than Noyce by Hunt’s failure to credit the role of science in the Everest success—“Let’s put it like this: I trusted John Hunt to tell the true story!”—was perplexed and frustrated by Pugh’s apparent lack of concern:

He seemed to have no concept of PR . . . It didn’t seem to worry him, or perhaps he felt he was above it, but he had absolutely no concept of pushing himself . . . if he had been a different chap, during the post-Everest period he would have made it absolutely certain what actually happened. I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t do it intellectually, because he had done all the work and it was not appropriate.
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However, Pugh was far less interested in publicizing his own name and achievements than he was in pursuing his ideas. And, when he said he was too busy to write a book, he meant it. In the period immediately after Everest he was overwhelmed by his work, and at the same time his health was deteriorating.

By the end of 1953, he had been toiling flat out on the Everest project for almost two years without a proper vacation. The two exacting Himalayan expeditions had taken a toll on his health, and he had failed to throw off the stomach infection he had contracted on Cho Oyu. He was spending a great deal of time traveling around the country, giving lectures and speaking about Everest at conferences and seminars, and also felt under pressure to get his Himalayan research written up in academic papers—quite a different thing from “pushing himself” in a popular book. Writing was a struggle for him, however, and he could not do it quickly. At the same time he felt an urgent need to get back to his research into Channel swimmers and hypothermia. On top of everything else he was being drawn into a time-consuming study group investigating respiratory failure in polio victims.
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By the end of December 1953, Pugh’s colleagues were beginning to notice that he was perpetually exhausted and becoming increasingly grumpy, irritable, and cantankerous. Previously, he had typically been outspoken, blunt, even sometimes strident or tactless, but only rarely intentionally rude. The MRC instructed Pugh to cut down drastically on his lecturing. Things came to such a pass that Sir Richard Bayliss, physician to the Queen, who was at a lecture Pugh gave at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School at Hammersmith, wrote to warn Edholm that Pugh had seemed “extremely tired and overwrought.” He “looks as if he is heading for a breakdown,” Bayliss wrote, and should be given sick leave to “prevent him suffering the same troubles as other members of the expedition”—a reference to John Hunt, who had been overwhelmed by stress after Everest.
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Pugh was given four weeks’ leave of absence from his job. He went to scientific meetings in Holland and Germany and undertook a short lecture tour in Austria before taking a month’s vacation in Switzerland. As ever Josephine was left behind, looking after the children.

Returning home at the end of March, Pugh regained his equilibrium. A number of things boosted his spirits. Most importantly he was gratified by the growing evidence that his ideas were having an extraordinary impact on high-altitude climbing.

While Pugh’s role in the Everest success did not enter the public mind, knowledge of the way Hunt’s expedition had addressed the problems of altitude did spread quickly to those with special interest. Pugh’s lectures and appearances at conferences at home and abroad played a part in this, as did the six articles he published in academic journals in the year after Everest. Laurence Kirwan arranged for two further articles to appear in the
Geographical Journal
, telling Pugh, “This sort of thing should be recorded in a journal read by expedition people so that they may see the contribution made by science to an expedition of this kind.”
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An article by Pugh entitled “Oxygen Apparatus on the Mountain” was printed in the
Alpine Journal
, and the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research published an extract from the Cho Oyu Report, which Pugh had given to them in 1952.
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Also Pugh occasionally welcomed climbers to his laboratory; for instance, in 1954 he was visited by the French team, who subsequently succeeded on Makalu, the fifth-highest of the Himalayan peaks. But, oddly enough, probably the single most important vehicle for disseminating Pugh’s ideas within the small world of high-altitude climbing was Hunt’s book.

A best-seller in many countries, Hunt’s book told the high-altitude climbing teams who followed on from the Everest success most of what they needed to know about how to cope with high altitude. This was particularly true of Pugh’s appendices, which had so irritated old-school climbers like Bill Tilman.