Kingdoms of Experience

by Andrew Greig

  The money. Raising £80,000 for a non-profit-making venture was always going to be difficult. Our public profile was so low only the tip of Mal’s nose showed. And we needed the money fast. Only the magic word ‘Everest’, coupled with ‘Unclimbed’ gave us a chance. We drew up and Mal printed at his own expense a small brochure about the Expedition as though it actually existed, and we prepared to make a list of all the possible companies and individuals worth approaching, with an accent on the Scottish ones. It was going to be a big, time-consuming, expensive job. Then Liz Duff had an inspiration: one of their old climbing friends was now working for Saatchi & Saatchi as a strategic planner …

  In his London office, Terry Dailey picks up the phone with his customary adrenalin rush. ‘Mal here, Terry. How’s things?’ Terry feels guilty because he’d intended to call Mal to congratulate him on the Mustagh Tower ascent, but had never quite got round to it. ‘Can we meet sometime today?’ Mal continues. ‘I’ve a proposition you might be interested in.’

  Terry checks his diary, shuffles some appointments and makes space for lunchtime, sensing something is up. They meet, shake hands and go through the usual pleasantries, Terry dying to ask what it’s all about but knowing Mal enjoys winding people up and will be direct enough when the time comes. Finally he grins at Terry and says simply ‘Everest, North side.’

  It is as though Mal has casually lobbed a grenade into Terry’s world. When the dust clears, his heart and mind are racing. China … Tibet … Everest! The fantasies he’d been nursing in his imagination for years, never expecting them to come to anything. And now … He tries to attend to what Mal is saying. ‘Powerful team … Jon Tinker … Sandy … oxygen for the Pinnacles, Bonington …’

  Account executive realism re-asserts itself: ‘Okay, that’s the carrot – what do you want from me?’

  ‘Fund raising. Help us find £80,000 and you come with us as Business Manager and a support climber.’

  The possible approaches open up in Terry’s mind: who to talk to, covering letters, the ‘star’ points to put in front of sponsors, a punchy selling brochure … He dimly hears Mal continue ‘… part funding from a book contract … Andy’s agent …’ That’s good, we’ve got to be able to offer publicity. Try for a newspaper deal. TV is the important one. ‘How long do we have?’

  ‘Six weeks at the most.’

  Strategy, credibility, deadlines and brinkmanship are Terry’s meat and drink and daily bread. They give him the same adrenalin as climbing, the hit that makes him feel alive. He walks back to the office in a blur of excitement, and for once finds it difficult to discipline his mind to his next appointment. A rock and ice climber of reasonable standard in Britain and the Alps, keen but definitely a weekend and holiday climber, now to be offered Everest! … He’ll have to find the right moment to talk it over with his wife Annie. How will she react? And she’d always wanted to go to Tibet …

  Only a couple of miles away, Chris Watts was going through a very similar experience. Manager of the climbing section of Alpine Sports, where Jon sometimes worked, he’d been an early suggestion for the team. Chris knew very well that he’d been asked not just because of his climbing abilities and experience but also because he was in a perfect position to plan, organize and buy gear for the entire expedition at the best possible rates. He didn’t resent that, just acknowledged it in his level-headed way; to get on a trip like this, everyone would be expected to do something in return. It was worth it. The problem was going to be his wife Sonja. She would be, to put it mildly, pissed off. She was a very talented rock climber who had been largely responsible for Chris taking up climbing after he’d given up competitive cycling and was looking for a new outlet for his energies. Now it was he who was being given all the expedition opportunities. And he’d promised her after the Pakistan trip that on the next expedition they’d go together. Oh dear.

  He pushed aside the problem of how to tell her and began methodically drawing up lists of clothing, tentage, climbing gear. He looks like a Rolling Stone in the early phases of dissipation, but at 27 he was manager of the largest outdoor-sports shop in Britain thanks to his sheer drive, coupled with an ordered mind, attention to detail, and absolute absorption with the technical aspects of every kind of equipment. One of nature’s technicians, he would be the Expedition’s Mr Fix-it. He read Bonington’s Unclimbed Ridge and considered the problems and requirements of the North-East Ridge. This gear is going to have to be state-of-the-art: the lightest and warmest and strongest that money can buy and contacts can secure …

  I could see the doubt – are these lads serious or just jokers? – in my agent’s eyes when Mal and I went to see her. I didn’t blame her, I sometimes wondered myself. I had three chapters of a potential book about the Mustagh Tower expedition, but no contract for it; I hadn’t yet proven I could write and sell a climbing book, and here we were asking her to find a publisher for another one. All she knew about Malcolm was from my Mustagh letters. Not surprisingly, she hadn’t heard of any of the rest of the team. Mal pointed out why none of the few publicly known climbers were in the team; there was little of the ‘first division’ left, and someone had to come along and replace them. Okay, she’d do what she could, and that was the angle to take – a new generation of Himalayan climbers out to prove themselves. Make virtue out of necessity.

  But she couldn’t go far in securing a book or newspaper contract until we definitely had the money to make the Expedition happen. And as Terry was reflecting, one is not likely to attract a sponsor without being able to offer them media coverage. Sponsors want something back for their money, and what they want is good publicity and good public relations.

  So where to start? It’s a matter of confidence and credibility, of convincing certain people that you can do what you say you’ll do, that you are serious. Once the first person is committed – be it sponsor, newspaper, patron, publisher – the rest tend to follow. The problem is breaking into that magic circle. At the moment the North-East Ridge expedition existed largely in Mal’s imagination; he believed, he was absolutely convinced that we would make this Expedition happen, that we would go to Tibet in March and have a good chance of climbing the Unclimbed Ridge.

  The offices of ITN News were round the corner from Terry’s office. He went there with an outline of the Expedition and found enthusiastic interest from ITN, who have a history of covering and supporting a variety of British adventures. They agreed in principle to buy film reports of the trip. That was the first step into the magic circle of media and money; now we could offer coverage, it was time to make a pitch for major financial backing.

  The Expedition brochure Terry produced was a remarkable one, and should be essential reference material for any expedition seeking sponsorship. Terry posed the potential sponsor’s question ‘What’s in it for me?’ and answered it so persuasively and exhaustively that it had us practically reaching for our own cheque-books. And so he sent out the brightly baited hooks and we waited for a bite …

  Chris Bonington makes an accute comment on sponsorship in his book Everest the Hard Way. Financial considerations alone don’t make a company decide to sponsor a project of this sort. The notion has to fire the imagination of a few key people – and then they sit down to try to justify it financially.

  And so it was with David Wood, the Communications Manager of Pilkington Brothers, the world’s largest glass and glass-related products company. The last major route on Everest, a new young British team, Tibet, China … And it just happened that the company was rethinking its sponsorship strategy. He picked up the phone and talked to Terry: ‘We’re interested, please send us more information for a Board Meeting this Friday.’

  Terry’s proposals went before the Board Meeting, and it happened that the Company Secretary was David Bricknell, a marathon-running outdoor enthusiast and armchair climber who noticed that Terry’s sponsorship proposals included the option for a sponsor’s representative going to Everest with the team …

  ‘David W
ood here, Terry. If we can call it the Pilkington Everest Expedition, we’ll put up £80,000 and not a penny more.’

  1Everest: the Unclimbed Ridge. Hodder & Stoughton, 1983

  Putting it Together

  6TH NOVEMBER – 5TH MARCH ’85

  ‘You don’t crack an egg because you want to crack an egg …’

  Now that Pilkington had thrown their hat in the ring the rest followed in swift succession. Hutchinson made an offer for the Mustagh Tower book, then one for Everest. The Sunday Express commissioned a series of reports. BBC radio wanted us to record material for two 45-minute programmes. Now we needed a film of the Expedition proper, in addition to the ITN reports.

  ‘These days it ain’t enough to climb, you’ve got to get it down on celluloid.’ Mal and I had bumped into Kurt Diemberger and Julie Tullis on a warm, black night in Skardu, Baltistan. They had come from four months of climbing and filming, first on K2 with an expedition that eventually had to capitulate after sustained bad weather. Kurt and Julie went on to Broad Peak, where they both reached the summit and narrowly survived after being swept tumbling in an avalanche down the mountain during the descent. (‘It was very frightening,’ Julie said simply, ‘I thought, this is it.’)

  ‘Haven’t you been on Broad Peak before?’ I’d asked this balding, tubby, bumbly looking man in his fifties. ‘Yes,’ he replied in heavily accented English, ‘I first climbed it in 1957 with Herman Buhl.’ Only then did I realize who I was talking to. This was the man who made the first ascent of Broad Peak with Buhl, then went on to Chogolisa with him. As they descended from near the summit in a white-out, Buhl strayed over a cornice and disappeared forever. Kurt’s photo of the diverging lines of footprints, one weaving on and the other ending in nothing, is one of the most famous and haunting in all mountaineering.

  Later Kurt climbed Dhaulagiri, making him the only man to make the first ascents of two 8,000 metre peaks – and then Makalu, Everest and Gasherbrum II. Latterly he’d become more involved in filming and general exploration expeditions, though his astonishing repeat of Broad Peak 27 years later showed that he was far from being over the hill. Julie Tullis had become his regular partner and sound-recordist on filming trips, and now she had just become the first British woman to do a 8,000 metre peak. She looked weathered, lean, calm and strong, giving an impression of great physical and psychological toughness – which she thinks derives in part from her training in karate and aikido; she has a black belt in both. We were considerably impressed by them, and spent more time with them at Mrs Davies’s Rawalpindi.

  Our chance meeting seemed fated in retrospect, one of those things that had to happen. Now we needed a TV film to raise more money for the Expedition. So Mal found Julie’s card and phoned to ask if they’d like to come along as a film team. She in turn phoned Kurt in Italy, where he was happily putting on lost weight with pasta, and quarter of an hour later got back to Mal: ‘We’re coming.’

  Like everyone else, they found the lure of Everest from the Tibet side irresistible, near-legendary to all of us who had grown up with stories of the exploits of Shipton, Tilman, Odell, Norton, Mallory and Irvine. After all the pre-war attempts on Everest, the Tibetan side had been closed for nearly 40 years. Pilks’ Company Secretary, David Bricknell, could scarcely believe what was happening to him as he made arrangements with Malcolm to fit in an introduction to snow/ice climbing before he too went to Everest. There was little time for training now, as the company agreed to give him six weeks’ leave to accompany the Expedition as Base Camp and Advance Base Camp Manager for the initial phase. From now on every minute of his spare time was spent co-ordinating between Pilkington’s, Terry and Malcolm as, buoyed up by money, the Expedition rose like a sunken liner from the depths of Malcolm’s dream to the unlikely light of day …

  The Team. The climbing team was augmented. Rick Allen, a quiet, wiry, thin-faced Texaco chemical engineer based in Aberdeen, had heard about the Expedition when he was climbing in Nepal on Ganesh II with Nick Kekus. With the confidence of the first ascent of the South Face behind him (‘the hardest climbing I’ve ever done’), Rick wrote to Mal saying if there was a place for him, he’d be interested. He went to ask if there was a chance of somehow getting three months’ leave. Once again the magic word ‘Everest’ opened the door. ‘If you’ve got a once in a lifetime chance, the company should support you,’ he was told. That meant a lot, because while some of the climbers worked purely for cash between expeditions, Rick derived considerable satisfaction from his job. He was glad it hadn’t come to a choice between Everest and Texaco. After Pilkington’s made their offer, Mal phoned him up. ‘You’re in.’

  ‘Everest’, ‘Tibet’, the ‘Unclimbed Ridge’ – these proved to be the Open Sesame words that over and over made the unlikely possible and the possible actual. Liz Duff works for Scottish Life Assurance, and on impulse went to ask if she could add her various holiday periods past and future together to take six weeks off. Not only did they say yes, but they gave her extra unpaid holiday to cover the entire Expedition. She was very happy to be coming – partly for the adventure and partly because she was saved from the difficult position of staying at home waiting for news from the hill, which even when it comes is always out of date. ‘I’m not a great worrier about Malcolm,’ she said to me one evening in December, ‘because I’ve great faith he’ll be alright. Though this trip worries me a bit … It’s more that my being there saves him worrying about me and whether I’m paying the bills!’ It would be good having her there for her trenchant commonsense – and to keep up standards at Base and Advance Base. She’d done some rock and winter climbing in Britain, went with Mal to Nuptse, and hoped to do some load carrying on Everest if time and circumstance permitted.

  We hadn’t at first considered Tony Brindle for the trip. He’d been Mal’s partner on the Mustagh Tower and they’d developed a good mocking father-and-son relationship there – but Tony was going into his final year in Outdoor Activities at Bangor College and didn’t want to jeopardize that. But Mal wrote directly to the Principal saying that this diminutive youth was indispensable, a star, and could he possibly be granted the chance to defer the last of his courses? He could, so Tony was in.

  Tony is a small, compact Lancastrian born with an innocent butter-wouldn’t-melt face that belies his exceptional stamina. A few months older than Jon, because of his size, innocent appearance and open nature, he inevitably becomes the butt of much teasing – which as a rule he accepts with remarkable patience, though at the same time strengthening his resolve to prove himself as fast and fit as anybody. Unlike some of the climbers he never learned to hide his enthusiasm for climbing, hill-walking, fell-running, canoeing; he doesn’t go in for the customary pose of self-mockery and diffidence – which throws him open to more teasing. He was openly jubilant at having the chance to go to Everest, and Mal now had the satisfaction of having reunited the successful Mustagh team.

  Our search for a doctor was becoming pressing when Julie suggested Urs Wiget, the Swiss doctor on the 1984 K2 expedition. He had been to 7,500 metres, had a lot of Alpine climbing behind him, and was knowledgeable about all aspects of the theory and practice of mountain medicine. Conscientious without fussing, he inspired confidence and trust from climbers. He was the best they’d known.

  And so one day in late November Urs opened Mal’s letter in the surgery of an isolated village in Switzerland. ‘Merde!’ He beamed, frowned, then with a loud ‘Yahoo!’ rushed next door to see his wife Madeleine to ask if she could possibly once again handle the practice and the children alone for three months …

  Allen Fyffe I’m writing this in Peking but this is how it started. In September or October ’84 Eileen and I were driving home from Inverness; at about Slocht a green car passed and in the back was this madly waving figure – Sandy Allan. Sandy got out and we chatted for a while about his last trip, routes, etc., and eventually he announced he was going to the North-East Ridge with Mal, etc., and Bob. He then asked me if I wanted to go.
I prevaricated and said that I might see him in the Tavern for a pint that evening.

  Eileen and I then talked about it and she said she wouldn’t mind if I went, so later that night I saw Sandy, had a few pints and said yes, I was on for it if I could get off work and the money was found. Then nothing happened for a long time so I eventually phoned Malcolm to see if I was in or out – I apparently was 1st reserve depending on money. Then I asked for time off and was to my surprise told that it should be no problem. Then eventually I was told I was included, the money was found from Pilkington’s and the trip was on.

  I went to one team photocall in Glencoe which was good as for the first time I met the rest of the team and we had a chance to chat and discuss things. Only then did I get a vague feeling that it would happen …

  In truth, Mal was uncertain whether to take Allen. At 39 he was a fair bit older than the rest of the team, and being mostly bald he was inevitably cast as the ‘old man’ of the team – but that was almost certainly an asset. Many Himalayan climbers seem to be at their peak in their forties, when experience, judgement and patience outweigh any decrease in pure power. Besides, a few older hands were needed to balance out the young revvers. And only Allen had had the experience of a large expedition, on Chris Bonington’s classic 1975 South-West Face of Everest expedition. No, the problem was on that trip he’d acclimatized badly and eventually was recovered, exhausted and scarcely in his right mind, on the fixed ropes at 7,300 metres. Mal had already gambled on Andy Nisbet’s acclimatization problem – could he afford to again? In the end he took him out of respect for his enormous mountaineering experience and good expedition character.

  So that was the team completed: ten lead climbers plus a doctor who might well go high on the hill; Terry Dailey and myself to support as far as our abilities and other responsibilities would allow; Kurt and Julie to film; Dave Bricknell as Pilkington’s representative, Base and Advance Base organizer; Liz Duff playing a floating role – paying much of her own way, she was free to do as little or as much as she wanted; knowing her she’d do whatever she possibly could. And Sarah Squibb, Nick Kekus’s girlfriend, who was also paying her own way. She wanted to go to Tibet, to Everest, be with Nick, and hoped to learn something about Chinese music along the way.