Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (43 page)

Those who struggled on despite being tired and cold became more and more tired, ever slower and ever colder. Eventually, as hypothermia progressed, their temperatures would have sunk so low that their balance and muscular control were impaired, causing them to fall over frequently, making them even slower, and further accelerating the rate at which they were cooling. It was a vicious circle.
²⁶
The boys who died would have gradually lapsed into a stupor and have become rigid. At this point, without rescue, death would be only a short time away.

As Pugh concluded, the change in the weather, the lack of waterproof, windproof clothing, and the mistake of carrying on walking to the point of exhaustion rather than stopping and taking shelter had been a fatal combination.
²⁷

The first annual report of the Medical Commission on Accident Prevention opened with a brief letter from Buckingham Palace, written by the Duke of Edinburgh, saying he was “particularly interested in Dr. Pugh’s report” about these “inexplicable accidents.”
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The introductory essay by the commission’s scientific director, Norman Capener, also highlighted Pugh’s report. “This type of research sets the pattern for many other fields in which the Medical Commission intends to work and in which physiological and psychological factors are related to the ultimate causes of accident producing circumstances.”
²⁹

Now that Pugh had received a special mention from the duke, John Hunt asked him to help with the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. The Scout Association asked him to “look into casualties suffered by the scouts,” and Kurt Hahn invited him to visit two of his Outward Bound schools to investigate which aspects of the Outward Bound regime were predisposing the recruits to hypothermia.
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Pugh, now in his fifties, insisted on taking part in the full Outward Bound exercise himself—cold baths, long-distance hikes, and all—and came away jubilant. “I am like a boy of twenty-five. I am far fitter than most of those boys.”

Shortly after the Four Inns Walk report was published in the
Lancet
, a doctor from the Anglesey General Hospital in Wales sent Pugh a collection of twenty-seven case histories of local exposure casualties. Pugh tracked down and questioned eight of them.
³¹
He followed up new incidents as they occurred, and embarked on new controlled experiments at his laboratory and out in the countryside with groups of Rover Scouts and schoolboys.
³²
My brothers Simon and Oliver were roped in on occasion. Over the next few years he published five major academic articles and produced practical recommendations for the prevention and management of hypothermia among hill-walkers, which have been saving lives ever since.
³³

Pugh made it clear that the jeans and similar clothing typically worn by walkers at the time were quite unsuitable for walking for longer than two or three hours in wet, windy conditions. The best way to avoid hypothermia, he said, was to wear clothing that provided insulation against wind and wet—especially on the legs. Therefore walkers in remote areas should
always
carry lightweight, waterproof overgarments to be put on in the event of wind and rain, to keep the inner layers of clothing dry.
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Calling for the development of lightweight, inexpensive emergency equipment, he also suggested walkers should carry “survival bags,” and explored the idea of creating survival bags from a new, ultrathin, reflective cloth that had been developed in America for making “space blankets.”
³⁵
Today no experienced walker would set off on a long walk without lightweight, waterproof overgarments and a survival or bivouac bag.

And there was another important recommendation. “When a person shows early symptoms of exposure, the surest way of preventing disaster is to stop and camp,” Pugh said. If they are unable to get off the mountain quickly, huddling together and sheltering from the wind, before the vicious circle of cold and exhaustion can set in, would give a walking group a far better chance of survival than driving themselves to exhaustion.
³⁶
Even without waterproofs, someone caught out in the cold with wet clothes could get 50 percent more insulation from his clothes by remaining at rest than by walking on. And, if that person could get out of the wind and adopt a curled-up posture, the insulation provided by his clothes would be better still.
³⁷

Because the time between the onset of the first symptoms of hypothermia and outright collapse was often quite short, Pugh suggested that the rescue services should develop methods of on-the-spot resuscitation, rather than continuing with the usual practice of evacuating victims on stretchers, which was often dangerously slow.

Pugh also had an important recommendation for Kurt Hahn. Promoters of youth adventure training had always believed that sending out mixed-ability groups of young people on grueling training exercises was an ideal way of developing leadership qualities and team spirit. The stronger walkers would help and protect the weak, and this, in turn, would enhance the fellowship within the group.

Observing Outward Bound walking parties in action, Pugh found that in practice the stronger walkers tended to get fed up with the slower ones—particularly if the weather got worse and they needed to speed up to keep warm.
³⁸
The slower walkers, who couldn’t keep up, became cold and demoralized, and the group often made the fatal mistake of splitting up, leaving the slower walkers in danger of falling into the vicious cycle of exhaustion and hypothermia. This was made worse by the fact that hypothermia often affects people mentally, causing them to become aimless and apathetic, or aggressive and uncooperative, and to make bad judgments about how to behave—displaying the “bad mental attitudes” that many in the youth-training world believed to be the cause rather than a consequence of hypothermia.
³⁹

Pugh felt so strongly about unnecessary exposure accidents that he traveled around the country, lecturing mountain-rescue groups, adventure-training centers, Scout and youth leaders, mountain guides and police, on how to avoid and treat hypothermia. The message even got through to some vintage Everesters. A veteran of the 1933 Everest expedition—Jack Longland, Derbyshire’s director of education and chairman of the National Mountaineering Centre at Plas y Brenin—wrote to applaud Pugh for publicizing “little known facts which are of great importance to all of us.”
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Pugh was also invited to appear on radio and television programs when tragedies occurred, and became a pundit on survival. In 1973, he was positively triumphant when four sixteen-year-old boys who went missing while attempting a 50-mile walk in Snowdonia were found safe and well in their tent four days later, after the largest-ever British rescue operation. Their experiences were reenacted on a BBC Horizon program called
The Day Seemed So Good
(1974). Some commentators suggested that the boys—one of whom had become exhausted and hypothermic toward the end of the first day—ought to have made a greater effort to get off the mountain. Pugh was adamant that by sheltering in their tent and waiting to be rescued, they had behaved in an exemplary way that had kept them out of danger and had ensured their survival.

27

“Good Science and Bad Science”

In the late 1960s British trawler fishing in Icelandic waters suffered a cluster of accidents. In early 1968, three fishing trawlers from Hull sank within a week, with the loss of sixty lives. The third boat to sink—the
Ross Cleveland
—capsized suddenly in hurricane-force winds in the Icelandic fjord of Isafjordur Deep on February 4. Eight hours later a lone survivor, Harry Eddom, the “mate” of the
Ross Cleveland,
was washed ashore alongside two dead companions in a rubber lifeboat. They had drifted along the coast for 10 miles, ending up in a small fjord called Seydisfjordur.

Crawling out of the boat, Eddom pulled it ashore before setting off on foot across the boulder-strewn beach in the snow and wind. After struggling along for seven or eight hours, he spent the night sheltering in the lee of a deserted house.
¹
The next day he managed to attract the attention of a shepherd boy who helped him walk to a nearby farm, where he was given food and put to bed. He was subsequently taken to the hospital, where he was found to be well except for mild frostbite in his feet. The other eighteen members of the
Ross Cleveland
’s crew all perished.

Within a few days of the extraordinary survival of Harry Eddom, Pugh flew to Iceland to find out firsthand what had happened. Pugh interviewed Eddom in the hospital, also interviewing the casualties from another British trawler, the
Notts County
, which had gone aground in the same storm. The ship had not sunk, but one of its crew had died of hypothermia. Pugh’s report for the Medical Commission on Accident Prevention was published in the
British Medical Journal
in mid-March.

A seaman from the age of fifteen, Harry Eddom was a fit twenty-six-year-old with a good layer of subcutaneous fat. When he fell into the sea and was hauled onto the lifeboat by his two colleagues, he was wearing warm clothing under a two-piece, plastic-coated, waterproof overgarment known as a “duck suit.” He was also wearing thigh boots. Although soaked, his clothes still provided him with a degree of insulation from the wind and the cold, which in Pugh’s view was what enabled him to survive.

The rubber lifeboat had a torn canopy that was letting in wind and water. Neither of his two companions was wearing waterproofs and therefore had little hope of survival. The temperature of the air was roughly 46°F, and the water, 35°F. One of the unfortunate seamen, scantily dressed in underclothes, died of hypothermia within an hour and a half. The other, who had warm clothes but no waterproof or windproof overgarments, died after three hours. Autopsies on another five recovered bodies showed that three of the men had died of hypothermia and two had drowned.
²

Pugh was blunt with the journalists who interviewed him about the trawler tragedy. His investigation had revealed that it was common for trawler crews to go fishing in Arctic waters, taking waterproof suits for only half the men on board (on the grounds that the other half were not expected to do deck jobs). Pugh told the science reporter of
The Times
that any trawlerman sent to north Icelandic waters without protective clothing “was more or less being condemned to death.”
³

Pugh’s outspokenness did not go down well at the MRC head office, particularly as a Board of Trade inquiry into the trawler tragedies was under way, and the subject was officially
sub judice
, or officially under judicial consideration. He escaped a reprimand, however, because Sir Peter Medawar, head of the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR), intervened. Medawar wrote to Pugh, subtly indicating that the head office was displeased, but offsetting the gentle reproof with the sympathetic remark: “I know how difficult it is to try to be reserved when newspaper men are pumping you for all they can get, so believe me when I say I have every sympathy with your predicament.”
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MRC head-office staff members were more than mere day-to-day managers. They administered the MRC’s research strategies, and were the principal channel of communication between the research scientists and the governing council. It was not a good idea to upset them. Peter Medawar, who became the director of the NIMR in 1962, was Pugh’s greatest protector and his greatest champion at the MRC. Universally accepted as one of the outstanding scientists of his generation, he effectively created the science of the immunology of transplantation, for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1960.
⁵
Heart, lung, kidney, and bone marrow transplants, which are commonplace today, owe much of their success to his pioneering work. A charismatic figure with great personal charm and a terrific sense of humor, he inspired devotion in his colleagues and was showered with many honors in his lifetime.

His respected predecessor, Sir Charles Harington, had left Pugh very much to his own devices, going out of his way to praise the quality of his research.
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Pugh was unfailingly deferential to Harington, but Medawar was a man after his own heart. Pugh hailed from a line of physiologists who—like his great forebear, J. S. Haldane—devoted much of their efforts to solving practical problems. But the UK scientific establishment tended to look down on such mundane research; getting one’s hands dirty tackling practical problems was regarded as low-level subalterns’ work. It was the “pure” scientists who grappled with issues like the structure of DNA, scientists who studied fundamental issues at several levels of abstraction in the splendid isolation of their laboratories, who were regarded as the scientific elite.

Peter Medawar believed, however, that the distinction between “pure” and “applied” science was false. There were only two types of science, he said, “good science and bad science.” Practical problems often provided a crucial lead to fundamental scientific principles. His own initial muse had been the question of why skin couldn’t be grafted from one person to another. The search for the answer had led him into fundamental issues in human immunology which proved immensely fruitful. This was exactly how Pugh operated.

Medawar was renowned for his high intellectual standards, and shared Pugh’s disapproval of research that involved “the gathering of huge amounts of information hoping something useful will come out of it.”
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Pugh’s projects tended to be small, inexpensive, and focused, whereas his divisional boss, Otto Edholm, favored large, expensive projects collecting masses of data. “We had a whole aeroplane to ourselves in which we flew troops backwards and forwards to Aden,” a former colleague recalled of one of those giant studies—an inquiry into heat exhaustion in soldiers. “We had fifty scientists looking after sixty soldiers. How much that cost we had no idea. But money was not a problem.”
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