The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  Bradford’s unique social and political environment was created by the speed at which it had acquired wealth. By 1914, the city felt at once rich and poor; cosmopolitan and parochial; teeming with vitality, yet yearning for reform. A newly installed tram system was the envy of other British cities. Bradford was filled with stately neo-Gothic architecture—a product of the money that had poured into its businesses in the nineteenth century—as well as the exotic Alhambra Theatre, which often sold out fourteen hundred seats for a good production. Meanwhile, many of the city’s poor still lived in disease-riddled slums. There was a burgeoning middle class, whose recreation time was spent in the parks or concert halls. There were children in the city who did not wear shoes.

  To an outsider, Bradford looked confident, modern, even brash. In 1914, it had two soccer teams playing in England’s top league: the Wilsons’ local team, Bradford Park Avenue, which had just been promoted to the first division, and Bradford City, across town. The city had its own permanent symphony orchestra—albeit one, as Priestley noted, with a weak brass section. Most unusually, immigrants were at the center of its civic life. The German community in Bradford was wildly successful, and its leaders were munificent philanthropists. So much about Bradford was infused with German culture and money: the old Jewish merchants, rich men in the worsted business, who lived in big houses, and who drank at the Schillerverein on Manor Street at lunchtimes before returning woozily to their warehouses; their children, buffered by wealth, who became artists and writers and composers; their oompah bands, who played on the park’s bandstands.

  Between 1910 and 1911, the Lord Mayor of Bradford was Jacob Moser, a beloved and generous merchant of German Jewish origin, whose money paid for hospitals, libraries, nurseries, and laboratories across the city. Even on Cecil Avenue, the Wilsons lived a few doors down from the family of Herman Rasche, a manufacturer who was born in the German province of Westphalia, but who made his money in Bradford. At the outset of the war, Herman’s sons, Ernest and John, both joined the British army to fight their father’s countrymen.

  The war soured the feeling at home. Glass broke on the German pork butcher’s shops. The Kursaal swimming baths in Great Horton were renamed the Windsor Halls. Some schools in Bradford stopped German lessons. Boche music was barred from the parks. Those merchants who wanted to stay in Bradford discreetly anglicized their names, then repainted their warehouse and shop signs. The rest shipped out on the first train or found themselves interned under the Aliens Restriction Act. Then, during the fighting itself, in France and Flanders, the Germans became one name, and a single entity—Fritz—whether they were manning a machine gun or throwing a grenade or deep below ground or flying a Fokker or caught on the wire.

  * * *

  By 1919, the city had changed forever, and so had Maurice Wilson. For one thing, the wool trade upon which Worstedopolis relied was in trouble. There had been signs of decline even before the war: a worldwide depression, more foreign competition, and tariff barriers in North America that led to a global trade war. Worsted, Bradford’s prime export, was not as popular as it once was. People wanted softer clothes. Flannel became en vogue.

  The war had masked the wider problems faced by the industry in Bradford. During the conflict, the key French textile towns of Lille and Roubaix were under German control, and huge orders for khaki were processed in Bradford for both British and French troops. (In 1917, with less than half its normal workforce, the city was producing 250,000 yards of khaki a week.) But after the Armistice, the global trends that had led to Bradford’s decline before the war started to be felt again.

  For soldiers, returning to Bradford was not only difficult because of the economic situation. Wilson felt a restlessness and anxiety common to those who had returned from the carnage. There was now a divide between men who had seen and experienced the war, and the public at home who had been fed lies and mawkish propaganda about the conflict by the newspapers. Was it possible to simply return—to work, read, dine, love—as if nothing had happened? Was it possible to forget, as many veterans wished to? Maurice Wilson may not have suffered from shell shock, as the doctors would then have understood it, but his memories from the front line would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  Wilson never wrote directly about the aftermath of his service. But when you look around at his contemporaries, you see a generation struggling for a sense of meaning and purpose in peacetime. Herbert Read won the Military Cross and Distinguished Service Order in the war. Like Wilson, Read fought in the backs-to-the-wall tumult of the Spring Offensive of 1918. He would later become a poet and an influential critic. (One of the essentials Read carried with him as he fought in the Spring Offensive was a copy of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.) Read recalled the pain he experienced in the years following the war, at having to live in a country run largely by people who had not served:

  Deep within me was a feeling that I could not speak the language of such people, much less cooperate with them. It was not that I despised them, I even envied them. But between us was a dark screen of horror and violation; the knowledge of the reality of war. Across that screen I could not communicate. Nor could any of my friends who had the same experience. We could only stand on one side, like exiles in a strange country.

  The “dark screen of horror and violation” would have felt especially impenetrable in Bradford, where the Pals had been wiped out. Old friends from Wilson’s area, and from his school, were no longer around. Just from Cecil Avenue, the roll of the dead was chilling. James Akam, a stout son of a timber merchant, from No. 33, had died on the first day of the Somme. He was one of the only Bradford Pals to reach a German trench. William Mosley, from No. 85, was killed a few hundred yards behind him on the same day—mown down as he emerged from his trench, like most of the battalion. Cecil Ramsden Smith, from No. 17, died in a German attack near Armentières in 1917. Smith had played rugby for a local club with many of the Wilsons’ friends, including a boy named Ken Bloomer, who had fought in the same company of the First Sixth with Victor. (Bloomer himself was another victim of the first day of the Somme: killed, alongside two of his best friends from school, in the First Sixth’s suicidal attack on Thiepval in the afternoon of July 1, 1916.) Perhaps the harshest blow for the Wilsons was Johnny Lister, from No. 22, who was killed by a German shell near Ypres in 1915. From a surviving photograph, Lister appears a most unwarlike young man, with soft features and delicate round spectacles. He was dear to Maurice, Victor, and the whole family. Johnny’s father signed Victor’s army papers as a character witness.

  Bradford was a town of widows, and young women who would never have a chance to marry. But it was also a town teeming with veterans. Although many hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had died in the conflict, most survived. They now needed to find purpose, and employment, back home. Many wore their service visibly. More than a million and a half British men were wounded to some degree in the war. There were tens of thousands of blind, disfigured, or amputated veterans, to say nothing of the estimated sixty-five thousand men suffering from shell shock, and the uncounted legions who suffered mental turmoil without a diagnosis. Two of those veterans—Victor, a diagnosed neurasthenic, and Maurice, with his own struggles—now lived with each other at 18 Cecil Avenue, in a house bought for them by their father, just across the street from the family home.

  * * *

  Mark Wilson saw the situation of his own boys, and the many other injured or incapacitated ex-servicemen now back in Bradford. So he did the thing he knew best: he campaigned. In August 1919, a King’s Proclamation, supported by the Ministry of Labour, said that businesses in Britain should absorb injured ex-servicemen into their workforces. Mark Wilson spearheaded efforts to ensure the King’s Proclamation became a reality in Bradford. Later in the same year, he gave an interview to the local newspaper, urging the Lord Mayor to continue Bradford’s efforts to find employment for the many hundreds of injured soldiers in the city who were still out of work.

&n
bsp; Victor Wilson was in no position to work, whether employers wanted to “absorb” him or not. He was still a sick man. In 1920, during a series of relapses and breakdowns, he went to Blackpool, a seaside holiday town in Lancashire, to recuperate in a spa hotel under the care of a doctor. After a series of letters back and forth with the War Ministry, Victor was granted a lifelong pension on account of his injuries. He would now be paid £140 a year—a little more than £7,000, or a little less than $10,000, in today’s money. It was not enough to live on, but it was much better than nothing. Eventually, when he returned to work in the wool trade, the pension would provide him with some comfort.

  Maurice Wilson, meanwhile, had no such luck, despite several appeals to the men who doled out pensions. In his mind, his heroism had been recognized with some initials after his name, but nothing else. Maurice noted Victor’s financial award. The injustice festered. Many men who had served on the Western Front already had a low opinion of their office-bound superiors, whose unimaginative tactics led so many soldiers to their deaths. Wilson shared that view. But from the moment his wound gratuity was refused, Wilson’s sense of grievance against authority figures developed a new intensity. The anger never left him.

  Wilson found work again in the textile trade, but he hated it. Business was bad. He was still living on Cecil Avenue. Then, in the early spring of 1921, his father died of a heart attack, at the age of fifty-two. Sympathetic notices were posted by the local newspapers about Mark Wilson. In one obituary, the journalist described a man who had risen “on his own account” from a factory boy to a manufacturer, and who had done much to help the town through the Cinderella Club. Maurice Wilson, in mourning, and seemingly itching to be free of so much sadness, moved away from Cecil Avenue.

  At the same time, the newspapers were full of reports that the first British expedition to Everest was on its way to the mountain. The March 22, 1921, edition of the Times noted that the king of England had given £100 to the Mount Everest Committee; that most of the men and all of their equipment had already sailed to India; and that the entire climbing party, under the command of Colonel Howard-Bury, would meet in Darjeeling on April 1. At a time of austerity and pinched circumstances at home, the idea of such a mission was powerfully exotic. Wilson was not yet in thrall to Everest, as he would become, but there can be no doubt that he felt the pull of adventure.

  * * *

  In the spring and summer of 1922, three of the Wilson boys married within weeks of one another—a flurry in which you sense the hand of their mother, Sarah, who was recently bereaved and presumably anxious for her sons to settle down. In March, Fred, who was a textiles manager, amateur photographer, and part-time special police constable, married Florence Brook, with whom he would eventually have a son and a daughter. In June, Victor—still deaf, and still troubled—married a lighthearted woman named Elsie Hartley. The couple never had children. It seems likely that Elsie was more of a caretaker than a lover to Victor.

  Then, in July, Maurice married a pretty woman named Beatrice Hardy Slater, whose father ran a gentlemen’s outfitters in the city, and whose grandfather had once been a Conservative councillor in Leeds. Beatrice lived with her father and sister in Shipley, a middle-class suburb in the north of Bradford. Her brother, Ronald, had been killed in France with the Manchester Pals, about a month before the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and her mother had died suddenly in 1914.

  If Beatrice was looking for smoothness and constancy after the rough waters of the war, she chose the wrong man in Maurice Wilson. Even as he was preparing to marry her, Wilson was already planning his escape—from the country, and, possibly, from the relationship. The economy in Britain had stagnated, and his efforts to turn his hand to textile production had been unprofitable. By 1923, he was in serious financial trouble. His mother was surely able to bail him out. She owned at least two properties and had inherited around £17,500 on her husband’s death—with a value in today’s money of around £850,000 or $1,100,000. But Wilson was evidently unwilling to ask her for help. In August 1923, his forlorn handwritten letter to the secretary for war in London, begging for a payment, gave a sense of his desperation:

  Sir,

  As I am not, as yet, in receipt of any wound gratuity for wounds received in action at Ypres on July 19th 1918, I wish to put forward my application herewith.

  The bad trade which my firm has experienced during the last 18 months makes it absolutely necessary that I should proceed to the Colonies and find a situation without delay, and for this reason I shall require what is due to me as funds for this object.

  Your early reply would be much appreciated.

  Yours obediently,

  Maurice Wilson, M.C., Lieutenant 1/5 West Yorks. Regt. 49th Division.

  The letter marked Wilson’s sixth and final attempt to secure a gratuity. Like all the others, it was unsuccessful. A secretary in the War Office wrote back to Wilson explaining that his injuries were at no time classified as “very severe,” and to tell him that no good would come of his writing again for money. Chastened and poor, Wilson decided to take a chance. He could not stay in Bradford any longer. He persuaded his little brother, Stanley, to travel with him to Wellington, New Zealand, where they would both look for work. Beatrice would remain in Bradford for the time being. The brothers bought second-class tickets on a Shaw, Savill & Albion liner called the Arawa. The ship departed from the port of Southampton on October 11, 1923.

  CHAPTER FOUR GOOD OLD DAYS OF EARLY FREEDOM

  • 1923–32 •

  Wilson sailed to New Zealand in October 1923. Eight and a half years later, in the spring of 1932, he was back in England, falling dangerously in love with Enid Evans, and on the brink of cooking up his scheme for Everest. The period between those two moments—a time in which Wilson burned through relationships and circled the globe—is perhaps the least documented part of his life, but it is crucial to understanding him. In the snapshots from those years, you find all the seeds of the grandiose adventure on which he would later embark.

  Return to Maurice and Stanley Wilson in 1923, standing at the guardrail of the Arawa, watching the English shoreline recede. Maurice’s passage was almost certainly subsidized by a government scheme to encourage ex-servicemen to resettle in other parts of the British Empire. New Zealand, a ravishingly beautiful country made up of two sparsely populated islands, seemed to offer the freshest of starts.

  The Arawa sailed across the Atlantic, via the Canary Islands; across the Caribbean Sea; through the Panama Canal; then finally across the South Pacific Ocean to Wellington, New Zealand—a passage of five weeks. The journey was memorable. In the mid-Atlantic, the Arawa responded to a distress call from a schooner named the Jean Dundonald Duff, which had been ravaged by storms while sailing from Glasgow to Newfoundland and was within hours of sinking. The Arawa dispatched a lifeboat to rescue the exhausted nine-man crew before setting the doomed four-hundred-ton schooner ablaze. The captain of the Arawa then dropped the Duff’s lucky crew members at their next port: Colón, at the Atlantic edge of the Panama Canal.

  When the Arawa arrived in Wellington—a windy harbor city on the southern tip of the North Island of New Zealand—on November 20, 1923, Wilson was about as far away from his old life as it was geographically possible to be. But he was still married to Beatrice. Early in 1924, Wilson cabled his wife, asking her to join him in New Zealand. He was hopping from place to place in his adopted country, making money as a salesman of kitchen weighing scales. The life suited Maurice, who enjoyed traveling and meeting new people, but his brother was having less fun. Stanley soon made plans to return to England.

  Beatrice, meanwhile, sailed to join her husband. She believed she was making a one-way journey. On the ship’s manifest, Beatrice stated her intended “future permanent residence” as New Zealand. But when she arrived at the dock in Wellington, where Maurice was waiting for her, she realized almost immediately that her future would not be as straightforward as she had hoped. Wilson had been living
the life of a single, traveling salesman and had not secured anywhere for the couple to live. Beatrice asked him to rent somewhere for the time being, and they took a house on the Terrace, an expensive street in the center of the city. But after three weeks of living in the rental house, Beatrice was struck by lightning. Maurice, she discovered, was in love with another woman.

  The effect of the revelation was destructive. Maurice gave up the house on the Terrace and left his wife. Beatrice was homeless, heartbroken, penniless, and eleven thousand miles from home. She had no choice but to sue Wilson for divorce in a court in New Zealand, then somehow find a way to return to England, hoping that the shame of this episode would not stick to her. In 1924, divorce still carried a social penalty, and Beatrice knew that she would struggle to marry again. Her disastrous and short-lived relationship with Wilson might have broadsided her chances of marital happiness for good.

  Meanwhile, Stanley Wilson bought a ticket home, in June 1924. The closeness that he and Maurice had felt only months previously had evaporated. Maurice’s treatment of Beatrice may have been a catalyst. Stanley had been the best man at the couple’s wedding only two years previously.

  In November 1924, in a courthouse in Wellington, a judge heard about Wilson’s behavior toward his wife. Wilson did not attend. A local newspaper reported the proceedings with glee, under the headline “Maurice malingers.” (The journalist described the case as “another sad story of desertion of a young and pretty English bride.”) Beatrice was granted her divorce, but it took her another eighteen months to save the money for the return passage to England. She was still in New Zealand in February 1926 when Wilson married his lover. Beatrice finally got home to England in July 1926. Even though she eventually remarried and had a child, she rarely spoke of Wilson again, even to her closest family, for the rest of her life.