Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (56 page)

15 Hunt consulted Pugh when he felt worried about physiological issues. For instance, a note from Pugh at Camp Three to Hunt at advanced base camp says that data he has collected “suggests no need to worry in case of breakdown of O[pen] C[ircuit] set high up.” Hunt was worried that the climbers might collapse if suddenly deprived of supplementary oxygen (PP 35.9).

16 PP 36.8.13: Minutes of the meeting of the MRC High-Altitude Committee, October 14, 1952, p. 3.

17 See RGS/EE/68/2, “Oxygen Apparatus for Everest in 1953.”

18 The meeting was set up by Otto Edholm on behalf of the High-Altitude Committee.TNA FD1/9042: Letter, Edholm to Hunt, October 28, 1952. Edholm explained to Hunt: “Valuable as we expect the open-circuit sets to be, closed-circuit sets, if a proper design could be provided, would be much more useful.” Afterward Hunt wrote to both Edholm and Bourdillon that “The Matthews Committee has been quite specific regarding the potential value of the closed-circuit apparatus and the consequent wisdom of having such equipment available for eventual use in the final assault.” The advice of the MRC was “conclusive” as far as he was concerned, he affirmed, so if Bourdillon could produce the sets in time, he would “most readily” experiment with them on the mountain and, if they worked well, “it may well be that the closed-circuit apparatus will be used in the assault” (RGS 75. Reports on apparatus: both letters dated November 5, 1952).

19 Charles Evans’s Diary.

20 Letter, Charles Wylie to Alfred Bridge, May 9, 1953, ACE27.

21 Hunt 1953, p. 147.

22 Noyce 1954, p. 149.

23 Camp Five was at 22,000 feet, and Camp Six at 23,000 feet.

24 A handwritten letter from Hunt at advanced base camp to Pugh at Camp Three, written on May 21, betrays the tension he was under. The letter begins “Dear Griff, Most Important. I am sending you the following two men who have failed us in the vital carry to the South Col.” Full of underlining, the letter implores Pugh “most urgently” to send up replacements for additional lifts toward the South Col (PP 35.9).

25 None of the British climbers attempted to climb the whole of the 4,000-foot Lhotse Face without oxygen. The few who managed to climb parts of this steep slope without oxygen were extremely proud of themselves. On one occasion Noyce climbed most of the last 1,400 feet without oxygen. Wylie managed to climb the top 500 feet without it when his oxygen ran out, and felt “strangely elated because I could now experience what the Sherpas had been going through.” Bourdillon, Hillary, and Noyce climbed to Camp Seven (24,000 feet) at least once without oxygen, and Lowe worked preparing the path up the face without oxygen, mostly below 25,000 feet, but did not climb very far in one day because he was cutting steps and fixing ropes. In the previous year the Swiss climbers and their Sherpas had all climbed the entire Lhotse Face virtually without oxygen—a great feat at that time.

26 This took place on May 25.

27 Morris 1958, p. 84.

28 On the basis of new measurements using GPS, Bradford Washburn has proposed revised heights for where Hunt stopped, and for the position of Hillary and Tenzing’s high camp (see Washburn 2003), but these are the historical figures.

29 RGS LJH John Hunt’s Everest Diary, p. 161.

30 Pugh and Ward 1956.

31 They only had enough for part of the night.

32 Hillary’s autobiography of 1999, p. 16 and p. 115, was the first of his books—written forty-six years after the event—to mention that it was Pugh who persuaded him to drink sufficient liquids on Everest. He wrote, “We had been warned by Pugh that dehydration was one of the greatest risks faced by climbers going high,” and “Dr. Pugh . . . strongly emphasised the need for us to improve our liquid intake and his advice played an important part in our success.”

33 Hillary,
Life
magazine, July 13, 1953, pp. 124–38.

34 Both men wore the down jackets and trousers that Pugh had helped to design. Hillary also wore Pugh’s high-altitude boots, but Tenzing opted for the reindeer boots he had been given by the Swiss the previous year, which Pugh judged to be excellent. See Ward 2003, p. 31, for Hillary’s clothing; Ullman 1955, p. 261, for Tenzing’s.

35 Pugh 1952, p. 36.

36 Morris 1958, p. 117.

15.
A Gulf of Mutual Incomprehension

1 Stobart 1958, p. 244.

2 Ward 1972, p. 147.

3 Lowe 1959, p. 30; letter home June 1, 1953.

4 AC D.103 Bourdillon’s diary entry for May 30, 1953.

5 Noyce 1954, p. 167.

6 Ibid., p. 237.

7 HTP Pugh’s draft book, p. 135.

8 Hunt 1993, p. 18.

9 PP 13.1.

10
The Times,
October 22, 1953.

11
New York Times,
December 10, 1953.

12
The Times,
October 22, 1953.

13 Hunt’s climbing journal, Kashmir 1931, quoted in Cranfield 2002, p. 7.

14 Noyce 1954, p. 13.

15 Hunt 1953, p. 231.

16 Brigadier General Bruce, who led the first Everest Expedition in 1921, gave a talk at the RGS which was preceded by a statement from the chairman, Younghusband (Bruce 1921, p. 15).

17 Hunt 1953, p. 232.

18 Ibid., p. 38.

19 Ibid., p. 50. C. R. Cooke had built the stoves to Pugh’s specifications.

20 Ibid.

21 Nor did Pugh’s name come up in any of the other seven appendices. In the appendix about equipment, Charles Wylie fastidiously acknowledged designers and contributors by name when describing items in which Pugh was
not
involved, such as the wireless sets. But where Pugh had played a key role, such as in the design of the high-altitude boots, the specially adapted mountain stoves, and the windproof cloth used for the clothing and tents, Wylie omitted to mention Pugh’s involvement. For example, after describing the high-altitude boots in great detail, Wylie wrote that they were “. . . an illustration of the care and thought given to all our equipment by British Industry and of the value of scientific principles boldly applied with confidence based on research knowledge.” This could only have been a nameless reference to Pugh’s input. When I challenged Wylie, he told me that Hunt had convinced him this was the right thing to do, though recently he had changed his mind.

22 Tilman 1953, p. 1488.

23 Pugh in Hunt 1953, p. 276.

24 Noyce 1954, p. 20.

25 Quoted in the
New Scientist
obituary of Peter Medawar, April 12, 1974.

26 Poets like William Wordsworth advocated taking cleansing breaks from harsh, materialistic, urban living to expose oneself to nature—to the “sublime” vast and magnificent landscapes of the Lake District, for instance, or the European Alps, where one could experience “transcendent” feelings and strong emotions, and be spiritually regenerated and uplifted by the sense of contact with a greater power evoked by nature. See, for example, “Lines Written a few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and “The Prelude,” in both of which Wordsworth writes of the restorative powers of “mountains,” “winds and sounding cataracts,” which lift him above the “little enmities and low desires” of city life. Although Wordsworth died in 1850, his ideas remained extremely influential.

27 Quoted in Rose and Rose 1969, p. 58.

28 Snow 1959 (2006 reprint), p. 4. Snow first wrote on this theme in an article for the
New Statesman
in 1956. He expanded it in his 1959 Cambridge Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” and in a follow-up essay, “The Two Cultures: A Second Look,” in 1963. The debate provoked by his lectures echoed an earlier debate in the 1880s between the influential poet and cultural thinker Matthew Arnold, who argued that literature, especially the classics, was the only form of education capable of producing the genuinely rounded person, and the scientist Thomas Huxley, who argued that a practical scientific education was just as good for many students as traditional learning.

16.
The Golden Age

1 Just as Josephine feared, it is for this scene, rather than for his contribution to the Everest success, that Pugh is remembered. For example, at a recent Wellcome witnesses seminar on
The History of the Development of Sports Medicine in Twentieth-Century Britain
(the transcript of a Witness Seminar held by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, Vol. 36, 2009, eds. Reynolds and Tansey, p. 34), one of the distinguished participants remarked of Pugh: “When you have climbed to whatever it is, 25,000 feet, staggering back to the tents, and a physiologist wants you to do a maximum-exercise test for the next half-hour, he is probably not very popular.”

2 PP 35.25.

3 RGS/EE/105.Mount Everest Committee 5.1.54.

4 RGS/EE/90.Himalayan Correspondence July–December: Note 8 of the “Notes for the Himalayan Committee Meeting of December 11, 1953,” reads: “Letter from Pugh: Extract from Film Commentary. Pugh left it for long after preview; too late to alter, as 200 copies of film have gone abroad. Anyway, cost of alteration – £15.”

5 PP 35.25.

6 PP 35.21.

7 Ibid.

8 PP 8.22: Pugh to
Lancet,
November 30, 1953.

9 PP 9.41. Odell to
Geographical Journal,
December 30, 1953.

10 Ibid., Pugh to Wordie, January 15, 1954.

11 Ibid.

12 Noyce 1954, p. 20.

13 Taped interview with Michael Ward.

14 In 1954 Pugh joined a working group set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Health and the MRC, to study and advise on methods of polio treatment (PP 14.7).

15 Edholm wrote of Pugh to Sir Charles Harington, director of the NIMR, “I feel he should have a real rest now. I have advised him to stay away for four weeks” (NIMR PF43 640/2).

16 PP 9.41.

17 Pugh 1954b.

18 Severinghaus 2004.

19 PP 35.2.

20 PP 46.14.

21 NIMR.CRH3 Dr. G. Pugh and Normalair Ltd.

22 NIMR Pugh Personal File. Norman Hardie described working on the oxygen with Pugh before the expedition, and also receiving advice from Pugh on high-altitude diet, to me in a series of interviews in 2008.

17.
Braving the Cold

1 The historical information on hypothermia and the wartime research into this subject draws on three main sources, most importantly Paton 2001, along with Keatinge 1969 and Edholm and Bacharach 1965.

2 Glaser 1950.

3 Pugh, “Medical Research Council: Physiologist’s Report, RN Cold-Weather Cruise 1949,” unpublished booklet HTP.

4 Hardy and Soderstrom 1938, p. 494. This caused a stir at the time, but it later emerged that another scientist, H. Bordier 1898, had made the same measurements much earlier using different techniques, and had found beef muscle to have thermal conductivity 1.8 times that of beef fat, which agreed with Pugh’s findings about human fat.

5 Hatfield and Pugh 1951.

6 For instance, a report on shipwreck survival by G. W. Molnar (1946) stated that at average temperatures of 60°F, people immersed in the sea did not usually survive longer than five hours even when their heads were supported above water by life jackets.

7 Rockett 1956, p. 181.

8 Zirganos finished the swim in 6 hours, 50 minutes.

9 See modern assessment of Pugh’s Channel-swimming studies in Glickman et al. 2003.

10 Pugh and Edholm 1955. As Pugh pointed out, these findings did not apply to marathon swimmers like Jason Zirganos, who were fat and well-insulated.

11 See, for example, Keatinge 1969.

12 Pugh’s observations included measuring their fat, their rectal and muscle temperatures, their oxygen consumption while swimming, their food consumption, etc.

13 Interview between Jim Milledge and Pugh, 1993.

14 Orr Reynolds was also a prominent figure in the US Physiological Society.

15
Symposium on the Problems of Mountain Altitudes,
1955,
jointly sponsored by the White Mountain Research Station and the University of California. Pugh kept a diary of this trip (HTP).

16 The other funders were the Rockefeller Foundation and the US National Science Foundation. Records held by MSCL.

17 The European hut, the Capanna Regina Margherita (15,000 feet), erected in the 1880s on a peak of the Monte Rosa, and also used for physiological research, was still higher.

18 Nello Pace (1916–1995) was an outstanding environmental physiologist at the University of California at Berkeley. William Siri (1919–2004) was a leading researcher in biophysics at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—the Donner Laboratory. He led the American attempt on Makalu in 1954, and went on to study the effects of altitude and oxygen deprivation on the human body as deputy leader of the first American expedition to Mount Everest in 1963.

19 Pugh 1955 and Pugh 1960.

20 Ibid.

18.
“Your Natures Are So Completely Different”

1 Medawar 1986 (paperback edition, 1988), p. 149.

2 MRC P28/311 Pugh, Dr., L. G. C. E., Dr. F. H. K. Green, assistant secretary at the MRC, later secretary of the Wellcome Trust, repeatedly tried to persuade Pugh to take the MRCP. In a minute to a colleague in July 1954, he wrote: “I suggested to Pugh that he should explore the possibility of presenting an account of his Everest work as a thesis for the MRCP.”

3 Sir Ernest Cassel (1852–1921) was involved in many large financial projects, including the financing of the Aswan Dam, the Mexican Central Railway, many American railway projects, gold and diamond mining in South Africa, and the Swedish iron ore industry. He gave away at least £2 million to charitable causes, including the founding of two hospitals—£2 million in 1910 would be roughly equivalent to £145 million in 2007 (see
Economic History Service,
www.measuringworth.com)—and died in 1921, leaving an estate of £7 million. In 1878 Cassel married Annette Maxwell, who died in 1881, leaving one daughter, Maud. Maud’s marriage to Wilfred Ashley produced two daughters of whom the elder, Edwina, married Lord Louis Mountbatten shortly after inheriting the lion’s share of her grandfather’s fortune. Felix Cassel’s mother, Wilhelmina (1847–1925), was married to a mysterious figure called Schoenbrunn. The history of the marriage has remained shrouded in secrecy, and no one in my family knows whether we have any ancestors in Germany (see Allfrey 1991 and Rubin 2004).