Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (2 page)

The members of the 1953 expedition had been allocated seats in the second row, directly behind the Queen and other members of the Royal Family. There was an air of tension among the officials, who were trying to make sure that the large audience would be in their seats in time to rise, respectfully, at the royal entrance. Suddenly it occurred to them that my father’s wheelchair might be an obstruction if it was allowed to remain near the front, and, after much dithering and chopping and changing, they resolved to leave my mother at the front and shunt my father to the very back of the lecture hall where he would be out of the way. There I left him, sitting alone in his wheelchair in the back aisle, a diminutive, hunched figure who had once been so tall, strong, and athletic. His unruly red hair, which had faded to the color of ripe corn but betrayed no trace of gray to testify to his eighty-three years, was plastered down with Trumper’s Oil, and his thick spectacles drooped, slightly askew, on his nose.

I had reluctantly agreed to go to the RGS, and that was only because my mother had persuaded me to help with transport for this prestigious occasion. My father had become partially disabled from a series of accidents, and my mother, who was not strong, felt unable to handle the wheelchair herself. He had been a remote and irascible parent. I didn’t get along with him, and I had never asked him about his work and knew little about it, though I had always been vaguely aware that my mother felt he hadn’t received fair credit for his achievements. It crossed my mind that his current position at the back of the lecture theater seemed to underline this point rather acutely, since the organizers had known for a long time about Griffith’s infirmity. Still, I found a spare aisle seat a few rows in front of him and prepared to watch the lecture, expecting to be bored.

As the lecture progressed, however, I became captivated. Magnificent slides showed a chaotic mass of huge ice boulders barring the way up Everest’s infamous “Icefall.” The climbers were tiny specks in a vast and threatening landscape. Members of the expedition spoke about the brilliant leadership of Sir John Hunt, about the peerless logistical support given by George Band, the consummate organizational abilities of Charles Wylie, and the skill and determination of Sir Edmund Hillary and his climbing partner, Tenzing Norgay. Then a tall man with thick, graying hair, whom I had never seen before, stood up to speak. He was introduced as the expedition doctor, Dr. Michael Ward. His opening words took the audience by surprise:

We have been hearing a great deal this evening about the extraordinarily brilliant leadership provided by Sir John Hunt on the 1953 Everest expedition, but there had been eleven previous expeditions to Mount Everest, many of which had excellent leaders, and they failed.

We have been hearing about the great skill of our climbers, but there had been many highly skilled climbers on previous Everest expeditions yet they failed to get to the summit.

We have been hearing about the brilliant logistics, but there had been other well organized, well planned expeditions which all failed.

What I want to talk about tonight is the most important reason why the 1953 expedition to Mount Everest succeeded where all its predecessors failed, and that is the work of the unsung hero of Everest . . .
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At this point he paused for effect, and a perceptible hush descended as the audience gave him their full attention. Then he spoke the name emphatically: “Dr. Griffith Pugh.”

I felt a jolt of surprise. As the speaker began to describe the series of scientific innovations that had played a pivotal part in the success of the expedition, a few unexpected tears came into my eyes. Turning back to look at my father, I saw his chin rising with pleasure and pride.

The audience remained in thrall until Dr. Ward had finished speaking, and, at the prestigious party that followed, Griffith Pugh became the center of attention, the celebrity of the evening. The Queen spent several minutes bent over his wheelchair, talking to him; Rebecca Stephens, the first British woman to reach the summit of Everest (and a renowned beauty), stooped down to take his hand and gaze into his eyes. He was surrounded by attentive people. On the way home afterward, he said, with great satisfaction, that the Queen had been “very gentle,” and made no further comment.

Within a few months he was bedridden and demented after a series of small strokes; a year later he was dead.

Not long after, I read the official book about the Everest expedition of 1953,
The Ascent of Everest,
written by the leader John Hunt, and I was mystified to find that Hunt had chosen not to reveal the true extent of my father’s role in the expedition. Michael Ward had explained how Pugh had designed the all-important oxygen and fluid-intake regimes, the acclimatization program, the diet, the high-altitude boots, the tents, the down clothing, the mountain stoves, the airbeds. He claimed that Pugh’s work had been crucial to the expedition’s success. Why, then, had Hunt only mentioned my father’s part in designing the Everest diet? Had Ward been exaggerating? The book was full of elaborate praise for all the many people who had helped the expedition, right down to the “indefatigable” efforts of “the committee on packing,” and the “wonderful work” of the ladies who had sewn the climbers’ name tapes into their expedition clothing. But details of my father’s practical and scientific work had been shunted to the back of the book in the appendices—indeed, behind six earlier appendices. No wonder the general public had no idea about his real contribution.

My father never promoted himself.
Even his own children were unaware of his true role. However, if Sir John Hunt feared he would be criticized for having failed to sing the praises of one of the heroes of his incomparably famous expedition, perhaps he was relieved when, a few days later, he received a letter from the Queen’s private secretary, full of thanks and effusive praise for a most excellent lecture which the Queen had found “riveting.”
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The evening at the Royal Geographical Society made a profound impression on me, and kindled the first small thought that I might one day try to tell my father’s story. But the relationship between us was so bad, and, rightly or wrongly, I felt so let down by him as a parent that it was another ten years before I found the emotional strength to focus my mind on him and begin.

The trigger was watching the BBC gala film
Race for Everest,
produced in 2003 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the climbing of Everest. It did not mention either Griffith’s name or his role in the expedition, forcing me to acknowledge that the fascinating part he had played in the Everest conquest had almost vanished from the historical record. Unless someone took action, it might be lost forever, and Griffith’s descendants might never find out about it.

When I began my research, I knew practically nothing about Griffith. I was in the habit of thinking of him purely as my difficult, bad-tempered father, not as a person in his own right. The trouble started with the onset of adolescence. Suddenly every conversation between us seemed to descend into argument. At the age of sixteen, I left home and went to live with my aunt in London, though I still often returned home on the weekends, managing an uncomfortable, uncommunicative coexistence with my father. A small but typical event some twenty years before the lecture at the Royal Geographical Society illustrates the lack of rapport between us. I was twenty-six and Griffith was in his sixties.

Griffith, a tall, thin man with untidy hair and pale skin stained by numerous sunspots, stands in the open back door of our large house at Hatching Green, a suburban hamlet, a mile to the south of Harpenden in Hertfordshire. He is naked except for a brief green loincloth, brown suede shoes, and a pair of thick spectacles perched crookedly on his nose. Supporting himself on metal crutches he leans forward on the door frame and, obviously furious, shouts at me: “Go away and never cross my threshold again!”

The loincloth was acquired at Stanmore Orthopaedic Hospital, where Griffith had recently undergone a successful operation to replace a painful arthritic hip joint which had been damaged in a car accident eleven years earlier. The weather was very hot, and he was dressed in a way he regarded as “physiologically appropriate” for the exacting postoperative program of rehabilitation he had carefully devised for himself. This included a long series of ballet exercises executed to music and frequent walks around the circumference of the large lawn at the back of our house. He wore his loincloth from morning to night that hot summer, quite oblivious to the fact that visitors to our house found his appearance a little odd—even a little unsavory. Hatching Green was a deeply conservative neighborhood, but what other people thought was generally a matter of total indifference to Griffith.

Like his red hair, Griffith’s temper was fiery. He was easily provoked, and, when angry, he often said immoderate things. On that particular occasion I had parked my car in the “wrong” place in our driveway, and had shown insufficient remorse for the transgression. I knew, of course, that his anger would soon subside; I would be able to return to the house a little later, and nothing more would be said. But his words still made an impact and were not forgotten.

The day of real rapprochement after our years of strife did not come in my father’s lifetime. When, at last, I began to study his life, I was shocked by how little I knew about him either as a man or as a scientist.

I became a diligent researcher, scouring archives and libraries and searching out Griffith’s former colleagues. I was taken aback by how kind, helpful, and interested they proved to be. Many agreed that his achievements had never been fully acknowledged, and said they thought he “deserved” a biography. In addition, the hunt through the archives brought with it an exciting realization: I was unearthing facts about the British Everest quest that no one had noticed—or remarked upon—before. The Everest story was often characterized as the last “innocent adventure” of the ghost of the British Empire. Few authors had taken a deeper look at the swirling conflicts behind the scenes, conflicts that embodied the political, cultural, and social changes that were dragging the outdated fabric of British society into the modern age after World War II.

When I turned to my father’s personal life, there was one glaring gap in my knowledge that seemed insurmountable. I could find out practically nothing about his character as a young man. My knowledge was limited to sketchy family traditions, a few stories he had told my brothers, and snippets from my mother. My mother and most of Griffith’s close friends were long since dead. I visited the surviving few but found that men and women of his generation rarely articulate their emotions or talk about other people’s psyches. They helped as much as they could, but I was almost in despair about how to get beneath the opaque surface of my father’s young character to understand his complex motivations and make sense of his irascible and dismissive behavior.

In 2006 I struck gold. For two years I had been pestering Sarah Strong, an archivist at the Royal Geographical Society and expert on the Everest papers, with frequent queries. Then, one day, out of the blue, Sarah telephoned me and said, “I think you should come and see us. I’ve got something here that I am sure you will find interesting.”

I went at once. When Sarah walked into the reading room, she was carrying a battered leather suitcase, held together by a strap. Slowly, she unbuckled the strap and opened the case. Inside were bundle upon bundle of old letters—my father’s personal letters to and from his parents when he was a child, letters from youthful lovers, and letters from my mother before they were married and during World War II. For years the suitcase had remained hidden in the loft at our old house, which had changed hands twice since my mother had died in 2000, and was being renovated for the second time when the suitcase was found. Thoughtfully, the owners had contacted the RGS because they knew the house had once belonged to a member of the Everest expedition of 1953. The suitcase was brought to London and collected from Euston station by Sarah Strong.