Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (29 page)

Later Zirganos became a regular sight in the pool in the basement of the Lansdowne Club in Mayfair, patiently swimming up and down, wearing a mask with a tube attached to the ubiquitous Douglas bag which was tied onto a fishing line carried by Pugh, who trotted along the poolside next to him. Zirganos also went to Pugh’s laboratory in Hampstead for a series of comparative experiments in a bath of cold water the same temperature as the lake. Pugh had been in the midst of the same bath experiments when Michael Ward first visited him before the Everest expedition.

Although Pugh’s experiments appeared crude, his early work with marathon swimmers was to have lasting implications. The results were well ahead of their time and proved seminal. Pugh was the first person to demonstrate properly that the fatter someone is, the better insulated they will be from the cold, and the better their bodies will tolerate the stress of exposure to cold.
⁹

At the same time, comparing the results of his experiments at Windermere with those in the bath at Hampstead, Pugh found that he lost heat more slowly while lying
still
in the bath than he had done while
swimming
in water of the same temperature in Lake Windermere.
¹⁰
This suggested that it was more advantageous to remain still in the water and conserve energy than it was to try to keep warm by swimming. Swimming and thrashing about increases the flow of cold water over the warm skin, causing further heat loss and using up vital energy. Replicated many times with larger numbers of subjects, Pugh’s findings were proved right, and the navy’s original recommendations for survival at sea proved to be correct all along.
¹¹
Many lives were saved as a result. The accepted strategy for survival in cold water—keep still and conserve energy—remains the same today.

In 1954, when Pugh discovered that the Channel-swimming competition was to be revived, he got in touch with the sponsor, Billy Butlin, and begged permission to make observations on the competitors before and during the swim.
¹²
The project raised so many interesting issues that he asked Butlin for increased access the following year. Declaring himself a staunch supporter of science, Butlin agreed. To that end Pugh recruited a small team of researchers from the MRC and persuaded the navy to provide a fast, lightweight motorboat so they could monitor the swimmers in the water and examine competitors who had to give up.

Just as he was finalizing these arrangements, his boss Otto Edholm decided to step in. As head of Pugh’s department, he was entitled to take a closer interest. Naturally the naval officials and Mr. Butlin’s secretary now began to defer to the senior man, so Pugh suddenly found himself the junior partner in his own project. I have distant memories of my mother trying to persuade—perhaps even goad—my father into doing something about Edholm “stealing” his ideas, and my father replying, “Oh, never mind—I’ve got plenty more ideas.”

Nonetheless, he was clearly resentful of Edholm’s intrusion, and his suppressed frustration about his Everest work played its part. From that moment his relationship with Edholm began to deteriorate. Talking about his Channel-swimming studies on camera thirty years later, Pugh suddenly abandoned all decorum and burst out: “Then Edholm got in the act and . . . took the whole thing over, and my name was forgotten and he didn’t do anything at all.”
¹³

In the midst of these problems, Pugh went off to the United States for a two-week trip, all expenses paid by the US Navy. The invitation came from Dr. Orr Reynolds, head of the US Office of Naval Research in Washington, who would later join NASA and involve Pugh in secret research projects connected with space travel.
¹⁴

Pugh’s first stop in America was a prestigious symposium at the University of California at Berkeley, where he gave a paper on Everest.
¹⁵
Later he was taken on a trip to the newly built White Mountain High-Altitude Research Station—a series of research huts with living quarters at between 10,050 feet and 14,250 feet—which had just been created with navy money in the Sierra Nevada.
¹⁶
It was one of the highest research stations in the world, and Pugh was impressed by the well-appointed prefabricated huts which allowed the scientists to carry out their work in comfort.
¹⁷

Pugh struck up an excellent relationship with two of his hosts, Nello Pace and Will Siri, who were both employed at Berkeley. Siri, a biophysicist from the famous Donner Laboratory (“the birthplace of nuclear medicine”), had led the American attempt on Makalu the year before, with Pace as the chief scientist carrying out high-altitude research similar to Pugh’s on Cho Oyu. Later, in 1963, Siri would become deputy leader and chief scientist on the first American expedition to conquer Everest.
¹⁸
Pace had close links with the US Navy and had been the driving force behind the setting up of the White Mountain Station.

Pugh spent his second week in California being shown around the science laboratories at Berkeley and Stanford universities, lost in wonder at what he described in his diary as the “beautiful experiments” being performed there. At Stanford he spoke about his altitude research to an appreciative audience of elite physiologists, who asked so many questions that the session lasted for nearly three hours. Pugh responded to the respect being shown him by revealing a very different persona from the irascible, intolerant character he was becoming at Hampstead. In California he was sociable, outgoing, appreciative, and considerate. He went to parties every night and seemed to find everyone he met—indeed, everything about America, even the sight of people gambling on slot machines in Reno—interesting and stimulating. His diaries give the distinct impression that he might have been happier and more fulfilled if he had made his career not in England but among the more relaxed and appreciative academics in the United States.

Later in the year Siri and Pace joined Pugh’s Channel-swimming project at Folkestone. The Channel-swimming studies resulted in several acclaimed publications—albeit with Pugh’s boss Edholm as joint author—and Pugh developed great respect and affection for Zirganos and his fellow swimmers.
¹⁹
He estimated that Zirganos expended between 9,000 and 15,000 calories crossing the English Channel, making Channel swimming “possibly the greatest feat of endurance in the world of sport.”
²⁰
But the story of Jason Zirganos ended sadly four years later, when at the age of forty-nine he died during an attempted marathon swim between Scotland and Ireland.

Pugh was told by an Irish doctor that Zirganos had been pulled out of the water nearly seven hours into his swim, after he had been lying on his back for some time. Saddened, Pugh asked for postmortem results, but was told there had been no postmortem, and the authorities had been unable to trace any relatives of Zirganos in Greece. Still, Pugh did not let the subject drop. He wrote a tribute to Zirganos and tried to persuade the
Lancet
to publish it, but they refused.

Pugh’s visit to the White Mountain Station in the Sierra Nevada had prompted him to suggest to Will Siri and Nello Pace the idea of jointly organizing an Anglo-American high-altitude expedition to the Himalayas. Both men expressed great enthusiasm, but before the idea got off the ground, they invited Pugh to join their own expedition to Antarctica in 1957–58.

18

“Your Natures Are So Completely Different”

Griff Pugh may have been received with open arms in America—he was enjoying a degree of celebrity in Britain, too—but, beneath the surface, things were not going quite so well. Pugh’s lack of postgraduate qualifications was already beginning to prove an obstacle to advancement.

The notoriously difficult examinations leading to Membership of the Royal College of Physicians (MRCP) were the key to becoming a senior doctor or consultant in the UK. Without this qualification, and without a PhD or an MD, the medical equivalent, Pugh’s chances of heading a department of his own or becoming a university professor would be seriously curtailed. Nor would he ever be accepted into the inner circles of the Physiological Society, of which he was elected a member in 1955.

The MRC, being a paternalistic employer, was very conscious of such issues. Successive directors had wanted the institute to be “rather a nursery for future professors than an asylum for research workers who had failed to secure academic advancement.”
¹
Talented young researchers who lacked the qualifications necessary to move onward and upward were encouraged to earn them and given every assistance to do so. When Pugh joined in 1950, he was awarded six months’ paid leave to prepare for his MRCP. He took the money and the leave, but inexplicably, when the time came, he walked out of the exam room without writing a word.

After Everest, two senior figures at the MRC encouraged him to retake the MRCP exams and get a partial exemption by submitting a thesis on his Everest and Cho Oyu research.
²
Pugh said he would, but did nothing, nor did he attempt to use his Everest work to gain a PhD or an MD.

It might have mattered less had he been, like John Hunt, politically astute, a good communicator, and an energetic networker, but he was none of these things. He always approached life with the optimistic view that “something will come up,” and wonderful opportunities always had come up, usually with little effort on his part. Greatly indulged by his absent parents as a young man, and never having had to struggle for his life chances, he lacked the motivation to struggle now. It was his work that interested him, not his career.

Perhaps the most important reason for his insouciant attitude was the change in his financial circumstances after the death of Josephine’s father in February 1953.

The loss was traumatic for Josephine, finally cutting her off from the life she had known in her youth. Her mother had died in 1947, but her father’s house and his reassuring presence had always offered sanctuary if things got too difficult. She coped with her grief and her sense of loss with little support from Griffith, who was preoccupied with his Everest work and would soon depart for the Himalayas.

Felix Cassel left his daughter a legacy that lifted her out of her dependence on her husband. Immediately Pugh stopped feeling any need to provide for his family. He had been giving Josephine a reasonable allowance of £500 a year. It continued, but he didn’t increase it for the rest of his life, leaving Josephine to support the family and pay for the children’s education. He became a kept man, using his salary for his own pleasures, treating himself to sports cars—the first, a silver-gray Austin-Healey convertible, shortly after Everest—and everyday luxuries like expensive cigars.

Being forced to be the breadwinner might have driven him to improve his prospects, but once his earning power ceased to be essential, he lost the will to climb the career ladder and focused all his energy on research. Loathing committees and finding administration intensely boring, he left these things to other people and projected himself as a latter-day gentleman scientist motivated only by the love of knowledge. Despite these positives, he was already beginning to resent his junior status, finding he lacked influence and had difficulty in getting his voice heard.

It was during the three years after Everest, when Pugh was extremely busy, that he started to display the outrageous absentmindedness that became an endless source of amusement to all who knew him. When Hillary and Lowe came to stay at Hatching Green in 1953, Pugh, in a rare effort to relieve the burden on Josephine, agreed to take me and Simon off her hands for a day. He drove us to his laboratory in Hampstead where I remember the panoramic view over London from the windows, the chemical smell, and the mysterious cold chamber.

That day, when he was summoned to MRC head office in central London, we had to go with him, and he left us locked in the car while he went to his meeting. Afterward, lost in thought, he walked out of the building and caught the tube back to Hampstead. A couple of hours later, ready to go home, he went to the parking lot. Finding his car missing, he stormed back inside, angrily demanding of his colleagues, “Where’s my bloody car?” Only when Jim Adam, an army doctor seconded to Pugh’s department, reminded him that he had driven it to the head office did it dawn on Pugh that he had left the car parked in Old Queen Street with his children locked inside.

Within a year, he did it again. Agreeing to take us to the dentist, he left us in Harley Street and went off to the Lansdowne Club to do some experiments in the swimming pool, then drove home having forgotten all about us. Simon and I waited at the dentist’s. At closing time we were still waiting. At last someone rang Josephine and an hour later our somewhat chastened father arrived to pick us up.

Josephine had quite a lot to put up with. When, in the spring of 1954, Griffith took off for his four weeks’ convalescence in Engelberg, she was left looking after the children, having not had a vacation herself for several years. In August 1955, he really excelled himself on that fabled occasion when he left his pregnant wife sitting in the car, in labor, while he “popped into” an Everest reunion party at the Café Royal in Regent Street and promptly forgot about her. This was his most famous misdemeanor—laughed about by all the Everesters. But they didn’t realize the seriousness of Pugh’s behavior.