Book review: 'Everest: The First Ascent'

Book: The Perfect Gentleman, The Untold Story of Griffith Pugh, The Man Who Made it Possible
Author: Random House
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 461
Price: Rs599

On May 29, it will be exactly 60 years since the first men stepped on the summit of Mount Everest. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s conquest of the world’s highest peak was greeted as a magnificent triumph of human spirit over “aloof, inviolate, murderous” nature. But was it just that? For while endurance and skill played a large part, the ascent of Everest would not have been possible if the expedition hadn’t used innovations arising out of new scientific understandings of the human body and how it reacts to the lack of oxygen and intense cold at high altitudes.

Griffith Pugh, as his daughter Harriet Tuckey establishes in this book, was a pioneer in this area of science, with many of his innovations and guidelines followed even today by Everest expeditions. For instance, it was Pugh who worked out, after painstaking research, the oxygen and fluid intake regimens, and that expeditions should set aside roughly four weeks for acclimatisation. He even designed a lightweight stove, modified the clothing and equipment, designed the tents and airbeds, and planned the expedition’s diet.

Everest...is Tuckey’s tribute to her father, a project to unearth and record Pugh’s contributions and set the record straight about the scientific aspect of the 1953 triumph. She succeeds in putting this personal project in a historical context, showing how the disregard shown to her father by influential members of the mountaineering community arose not just from personal animosity, but from a clash of ideas about the means and ends of mountaineering activity, which in turn was influenced by the social, cultural, political and scientific upheavals taking place in the war years.

Mountaineering had remained a “gentleman’s” activity in Britain until the middle of the 20th century. It was controlled by Britain’s Everest Committee and the Alpine Club, bodies dominated by the public school-educated upper classes who had a romantic view of climbing as an encounter between man and mountain, and fiercely opposed the use of oxygen or other scientific aids. Thus most Everest expeditions until 1953 were small in size, poorly organised with little thought to attire, food, acclimatisation or even hygiene. In addition, Britain’s domination of south-east Asia meant that until the late 1940s, when Tibet fell to China and India gained independence, thereby limiting access to the high Himalayas, the British mountaineers had little competition from other countries.

Tracing the history of the political jostling over Everest, Tuckey shows how it was the two Swiss expeditions of 1929 and 1951 that finally made the British mountaineering establishment realise that they needed to change their attitude if they wanted to get on Everest first. Pugh, as the scientist in charge of ensuring that the climbers adhered to scientific principles and used oxygen, was caught in the crossfire, and became the butt of the derision of those like Edmund Hillary and the 1953 Expedition leader John Hunt, who still held on to romantic notions.

Pugh’s own personality — eccentric, blunt, rude; a loner who did not promote himself or his work, and who nursed a sense of being persecuted by his peers — did not help.

Tuckey paints a rather unflattering picture of a selfish and impatient man who cruelly neglected his wife and four children, and was consistently adulterous. She does not hold back her punches as she narrates how he told her once, when she was about 10 and had gone to him for help with maths homework: “Oh Christ, I didn’t realize just how stupid you were!”

The story of how Tuckey comes to understand her father in the course of her research is an important parallel track. It’s a touching personal narrative, which will strike a chord with all those who’ve had difficult relationships with their parents. It helps, in the context of this book, to breathe life into the story of a man whom history had passed by.