by Michael Gill
At the end of it all Shipton, a member of all four expeditions of the 1930s, could survey the great weight of equipment and supplies that littered the lower camps and reflect how much more easily his style of expedition could have achieved the same lack of results at a fraction of the cost. And medical officer Charles Warren noted that though the oxygen apparatus was tried once or twice, they would get no further with the oxygen problem until the climbers actually used it.
With the reputations of the Alpine Club and Royal Geographic Society suffering after repeated failures, the Mount Everest Committee appointed as leader H.W. Tilman who in 1936, with Noel Odell and Peter Lloyd, had made the first ascent of Nanda Devi, 25,646ft. Perhaps Tilman was a leader who would get his men to the top. When the expedition left Kalimpong, their four tons of baggage was carried on the backs of 55 mules, a tenth of the whole being oxygen equipment which again was under the care of Dr Charles Warren and chemist-engineer, Peter Lloyd, who broke new ground by using oxygen for three consecutive days while making a summit attempt. Tilman, without oxygen, accompanied him and conceded that Lloyd ‘went better than he did’.
Despite this reluctant endorsement, Tilman still felt that the disadvantages of oxygen outweighed its advantages. His final statement was that ‘the mountain could and should be climbed without oxygen …’6 And Shipton noted that purists agreed ‘their task was to climb the mountain by their own unaided efforts, and that to use an artificial means of breathing in the rarefied atmosphere at high altitudes would be to overcome by unfair means Everest’s principal weapon of defence’.7
Thus came to an end two decades of endeavour on the north side of Everest. The Mount Everest Committee could reflect that they were no closer to climbing Everest than they had been in 1924. The consensus seemed to be that a lightweight expedition, without oxygen, should be mounted each year, expecting to fail because of fresh snow, yet anticipating the annus mirabilis when they would find the conjunction of fine weather, no wind, and rocks dry and clean all the way to the summit.
In pursuit of this, the Everest Committee, on 14 June 1939, voted to apply for Everest expeditions in 1940, 1941 and 1942. But three months later Germany invaded Poland, and Britain found herself committed yet again to a terrible war which would consume all her resources of personnel and money for most of a decade.
Everest would have to wait.
Postscript: The Second Step
After the Second World War, the Chinese allowed only their own expeditions – strengthened by altitude-tolerant Tibetans – to attempt Everest from the north. On 24 May 1960 a summit team had reached the foot of the Second Step. Four times the lead climber fell off while making his attempt. A second climber in bare feet took his place. When this failed they formed a human pyramid, one climber standing on the shoulders of others to finally reach a line of holds at the top of the pitch. They summited in darkness, so had no photographs. The details aroused scepticism among Western climbers – the bare feet, the arrival on the summit in darkness – but eventually photos taken on the descent next day in daylight convinced sceptics that they had been taken from above the Second Step. No one could doubt the authenticity of the second Chinese ascent in 1975 by climbers who left a metal tripod on the summit. They eased the climbing of the Second Step by bolting in place a five-metre aluminium ladder which is still in use.8
– CHAPTER 12 –
Lessons on Cho Oyu, 1952
The British were in a subdued frame of mind as the news sank in that the Swiss had ownership of Everest for the whole of 1952. True, they had permission for 1953 but if they failed it was the French (merde!) who would take over. For the British, 1953 would be the last throw of the dice. As for oxygen, its ethical and moral dilemmas ceased to exist. The Swiss were known to be developing their own oxygen apparatus; the French would do the same for 1954. This was war, and the enemy was using gas.
In the pre-monsoon season of 1952, the British had to console themselves with a side-show on Cho Oyu, 26,906ft, where they could combine an attempt on a mountain with preparations for 1953 if the Swiss should fail. The Himalayan Committee had to look no further than Eric Shipton for a leader, and when he chose his team he began with those he knew from the 1951 reconnaissance: Ed Hillary, Tom Bourdillon and Earle Riddiford. Missing from the list of first choices was Mike Ward who declined Shipton’s invitation because he was completing his national military service and had an examination to work for as a qualification in Surgery. These could probably have been deferred, and in retrospect he might have seen that missing out on Cho Oyu was a mistake. He could have helped with the oxygen trials and would have carried over into 1953 the residual acclimatisation that is attained by spending time at altitude. Although he was selected for Everest the following year, he never acclimatised well enough to be a candidate for the summit party – a position he coveted and indeed deserved.
There were three newcomers on Cho Oyu who would play important roles on Everest. The first was Charles Evans, a surgeon who would become Deputy Leader in 1953 and would in 1955 lead a British expedition making the first ascent of the world’s third-highest peak, Kangchenjunga. Then there was Alf Gregory, a photographer and travel agent from Blackpool who turned out to be a good acclimatiser, and George Lowe who came with a strong recommendation from his good mate Ed Hillary. Of the three remaining members, two – Campbell Secord and Ray Colledge – were climbers who did not go to Everest the following year. The third member, physiologist Griffith Pugh, came as an appointee of the Medical Research Council (MRC), where he worked in the Division of Human Physiology which studied the problems of personnel in extreme conditions such as cold or during physically demanding field operations. High-altitude climbing fitted comfortably under this umbrella.
Griff Pugh was born in Shrewsbury in 1909, the only son of a Welsh barrister in Calcutta who had a lucrative practice and a socially ambitious wife. They would return to England each summer, but when war was declared in 1914 they left Griffith, age four, and his sister Ruth, age three, in Wales, under the care of a nanny in a large country house rented for the duration of the war. For five years Griff lived in the unfettered outdoors of a country estate, with no school, no parent and no other company, apart from his biddable younger sister and Nanny Saunders who was a loving family servant.
At age nine he was packed off to boarding school. Of his formative teenage years at Harrow he said, ‘The great thing about going to an English public school is that you know that nothing as bad as that can ever happen to you again … It took me forty years to recover from my public school.’1 He went on to Oxford where, following in the footsteps of the Calcutta Pughs, he studied law. Long vacations were spent enjoying the pleasures open to the sons of well-off parents; in Switzerland he took cross-country skiing to a level where he was selected for the British Olympic team. A ‘third’ in law underlined that this was a subject without much interest for him, and he spent a further five years doing medicine. It was 1938 when he qualified; war was in the air, and when it broke out he quickly married a beautiful and wealthy young woman, Josephine Cassel. He had a varied wartime career, including training soldiers in mountain warfare in Lebanon, and studying their responses and needs, a job that suited his inquiring mind and ability to work in difficult conditions. On demobilisation he worked as a medical registrar at Hammersmith Hospital before moving to the MRC. Mike Ward had contacted him there to discuss the physiological problems of high altitude. He looked just right for field research in the Himalayas.
The expedition arrives
The Himalayan Committee, now uncomfortably aware that public expectation was building, decided to define objectives for the Cho Oyu expedition within the overarching goal of preparation for a British Everest expedition in 1953:
To develop a group of climbers who had proven ability to acclimatise and climb at altitudes above 24,000ft.
To attempt the first ascent of Cho Oyu.
To test clothing and other equipment.
To test the oxygen equi
pment that was in the process of being developed by Peter Lloyd and a group of technical experts in England.
To carry out a programme of physiological research that would lead to the informed use of oxygen at high altitude.
For all five objectives Cho Oyu seemed to be a good choice. It was on the border between Tibet and Nepal, but in 1951 Shipton and Ward had identified a route on a buttress on its south face that was comfortably in Nepal and close to the Sherpa villages of Khumbu. As the sixth-highest mountain in the world, it gave a good stretch of altitude for testing men and oxygen. On the glacier at its foot there would be a good site for a base camp where Pugh could set up his laboratory and send climbers as high as they could go while testing new oxygen apparatus.
There was less clarity about who would provide the leadership that would combine oxygen research with putting a route up a very big mountain. Though Shipton was the leader, he had often placed on record his opposition to oxygen, science and applying siege tactics to big mountains. Perhaps he thought it was Pugh’s job to persuade climbers to collaborate in his research, but motivating a group of individualistic mountaineers was not one of Griff’s skills.
The three New Zealanders in the party had their own objectives. Ed Hillary was determined to cement his place in the 1953 team by climbing Cho Oyu and as many of the nearby minor peaks as there was time for. George Lowe was the second on Ed’s rope, not quite as strong but determined to prove his superiority over the third Kiwi, Earle Riddiford, who had kept him out of the Everest reconnaissance the previous year. Riddiford felt he had earned his place on Cho Oyu not only as a climber on Mukut Parbat and in the Khumbu Icefall but also through his work for the present expedition in London. His friend Norman Hardie, also in London, described preparations at the Royal Geographical Society:
Earle was horrified to find that virtually nothing had been done. So he unofficially took on the duties of ordering and shipping the considerable amounts of food and equipment for Cho Oyu that had to be forwarded to Nepal. Shipton was hard to pin down and reluctant to make decisions … Oxygen supplies and physiological requirements were in hand, however, organized directly by Bourdillon and Pugh, and Peter Lloyd of the 1938 Everest expedition also did much work on the oxygen … Each day Earle kept me informed on the frustrations he was encountering … Though Shipton had been brilliant in the 1930s … he did not enjoy the large expeditions … Organizing such an event from a city office was distasteful to him. Earle did well in getting the party onto its ship.2
The expedition reached Namche on 16 April 1952, a day after the Swiss expedition had passed through on its way to Everest. By the end of the first week, Bourdillon and Riddiford had tried, unsuccessfully, to climb Khumbila, 19,000ft, unaware that this closest and most sacred of all the Khumbu peaks was the home of gods of such importance that local Sherpas thought no human should go near its summit. Shipton and Hillary, shotgun in hand, had chased thar up and among the grass-covered bluffs alongside the trail, and sardar Ang Tharkey had shot a couple of pheasants which made good eating. There is no way of knowing whether these activities made the gods restive, but certain it is that when they arrived in full view of their proposed route on the south face of Cho Oyu, the party knew immediately that the mountain was impossible for them from Nepal. Aesthetically the big buttress was superb, but it had no obvious camp sites and was relentlessly steep, particularly the bluffs at the bottom.
Thus, within a week their expedition was in disarray, their mountain without a route except perhaps from Tibet. From Namche a well-used trade route ran north to cross the Nepal border over the 19,000ft snow-covered Nangpa La Pass. The previous year Tom Bourdillon had seen a possible snow route just to the east of Nangpa La on the north side of Cho Oyu. There was a problem from the north, however: Communist China now controlled Tibet and had a military garrison at Tingri, the first occupied village after crossing the Nangpa La. A more isolated mountain might have been attempted without attracting the attention of the Chinese, but with Tibetans and Sherpas crossing the Nangpa La it would soon be known that British climbers were in Tibet and might well be using mountaineering as a cover for espionage.
The three Kiwis, believing that their tiny country made them less of a prize as captives than the British, were all in favour of carrying on with a full-scale attempt. Ed, who was by now feeling fit and acclimatised, felt sure he could outrun Chinese soldiers, if not their gunfire. Shipton, who had spent the war in diplomatic posts in Central Asia and China, was altogether more circumspect. An international incident leading to a Nepali cancellation of permission for Everest in 1953 would not go down well with the Himalayan Committee. As a grudging compromise, they finally settled on a quick lightweight attempt. In the week between 5 and 11 May, Bourdillon, Gregory, Hillary and Lowe placed two camps on the mountain and reached a height of 22,500ft before turning back on ice threatened from above by seracs. Had they had time and space to stand back and study the mountain closely, they would have found the route by which it is now climbed every year, but in 1952 there were too many uncertainties hanging over them.
The attempt on Cho Oyu having come to its embarrassing conclusion, the group split into smaller parties. Evans, Shipton and Gregory went exploring to the west. At Shipton’s suggestion, Hillary and Lowe went east to attempt the first crossing of the Nup La to the Rongbuk Glacier in Tibet. A frustrated Riddiford went home, having developed a sore back and a high level of dissatisfaction with Shipton’s leadership.
The oxygen trials and the physiology
Where was Griff Pugh? Although the attempt to make a first ascent of Cho Oyu had been a failure, the greater importance of the mountain had been as a testing venue for climbers and oxygen apparatus at heights of up to 26,000ft. Griff’s research programme had made a slow start. The first weeks had been difficult as he discovered that he did not acclimatise well, and had been unable to avoid the fevers, sore throats and diarrhoeas that afflicted everyone to some extent. As with acclimatisation to altitude, the old hands such as Shipton had a degree of immunity to dysentery carried over from previous expeditions.
There was a realisation by now that, as a team leader, Griff the scientist had his limitations. He was full of physiological information and ideas but very much a loner. He flew separately to Nepal rather than travelling by ship with the others. On the march in he walked happily by himself, observing the local people and places around him but not getting to know his fellow expedition members. He had a tendency to be intolerant in the way he expressed his opinions. This would hardly have mattered if he had been a self-contained researcher, but his job was to use the people around him as his subjects. The oxygen story was compelling and would have been an easy sell in the mouth of the right person. Ed was hardly aware of the questions about the use of oxygen, let alone the answers, but a simple explanation that Everest was unreachable without oxygen, and that keeping the apparatus in working order would be a prerequisite for a summit team, would have had him first in the queue to learn its use.
A principal goal of the expedition was to have climbers test the open-circuit apparatus on extended climbs at the sort of altitudes that can be found only in the Himalayas. Ed’s diary for 6 May notes, ‘Cam and Tom to make an oxygen attempt’, but does not say where or on what mountain. There is no record that the apparatus was ever used except during short bursts at the Menlung La laboratory camp. A bizarre event occurred during the last weeks of the expedition. A mail-runner arrived with an urgent message. It was a telegram advising that a cylinder of the sort that held the bulk of the expedition’s trial oxygen had exploded, killing a factory worker. It instructed that all cylinders should be bled to a safer pressure. Exactly who was thought to be in charge of the oxygen, and who did what to the distrusted cylinders, remains a mystery but the outcome was that all except a few oxygen bottles were emptied completely. Ed makes no mention of this event in his diary, but by then he was on his way to the Nup La. It was a deeply frustrating outcome for Peter Lloyd, the engineer and climber who wa
s an oxygen enthusiast through having used it on Everest in 1938 and was now in London applying his expertise to developing a better apparatus for 1953.
That left the physiology tests that were to be conducted in a controlled environment on a snow slope. Late in May, Griff Pugh had three subjects, Bourdillon, Secord and Colledge, camped on the gentle snow slopes of the Menlung La Pass. At 20,000ft this was a long way short of the heights above 23,000ft where the shortage of oxygen becomes so much more of a problem, but it was much better than London. There were the usual delays as they looked for porters to carry the research equipment to the laboratory camp, but by 22 May everything was ready for a week’s intensive work.
Time was short. A measured track was stamped out for the exercise routines, and a laboratory tent set up with instruments for analysing air samples from the subjects’ lungs. Supplementary oxygen was tested at flow rates of 4 and 10 L/min delivered from an open-circuit apparatus. The effects of using oxygen while sleeping were also measured. And as a final test, in lieu of the closed-circuit apparatus under development in London, the group did work tests on the measured slope while breathing from a 300-litre bag of pure oxygen. This reduced their apparent altitude to below sea level and seductively demonstrated the wondrous benefits that would – in theory – be delivered by a perfectly functioning closed-circuit apparatus.3
