was his band of hand-picked Sherpa and Bhotia porters, seven of whom were destined to die that year.
John Noel, who had made the exploratory trip to Sikkim in 1913 and whose lecture had done much to inspire interest in Everest expeditions, was able to accompany them this year in the official role of expedition photographer and cinematographer, and eventually produced a short film, Climbing Mount Everest, released later that year.
Noel had been to school in Switzerland, where he found the teachers unconcerned about his actual presence, so he used to bunk off. ‘I used to go skating in the winter and mountaineering in the summer … I also started becoming dippy on photography.’
By 1922 Noel had combined these interests and decided to pursue expedition photography. He went no fewer than 16 times to London’s Philharmonic Hall to see Herbert Ponting’s exhibition of his photographs of Scott’s South Pole expedition. Ponting had immortalised Scott in the film 90 Degrees South, just as Noel and those of us coming after him have immortalised Mallory. Noel modelled his film equipment on Ponting’s, in the same way that the 1924 high-altitude clothing was modelled on that of the Scott expedition.
He had £1,000 to spend – a large amount of money then – as the average house in Britain cost £500. As well as a stills camera he took a Newman Sinclair 35mm cine camera with a couple of special modifications:
It was handmade in duralumin, which is as strong as steel and as light as aluminium; it weighed just 25 pounds. It also had jewel bearings, so like a watch it needed no oil – because Ponting had discovered in intense cold, oil congealed.
The back of the camera was faced with rubber because of the painful discovery by Ponting when he accidentally licked the back of the camera: ‘the tongue had immediately frozen on to the camera and he had to tear the top layer of skin off, freeing it.’ (In 1993 I had a similar experience when my face froze to my oxygen mask on my summit day, and I had to rip it off, taking a large patch of skin with it.)
Noel found that working with cameras on Everest introduced all kinds of unexpected problems. The dry air produced static discharges in the black bag he used for loading the magazines with unexposed film, which led to sparkles appearing on the film. He said the static inside his camel-haired sleeping bag was so powerful he could read his watch by the light if he rubbed hard enough. Drying the film was another problem. He brought a special light-proof tent and had to heat it with dried yak-dung ferried up to the camp by teams of men.
In the event the 1922 film was not a commercial success, but even so, before he returned in 1924 the enterprising Noel bought the rights of all photographic work on the expedition for the huge sum of £8,000. This paid for the entire trip.
Edward Norton was one of the great finds of that expedition. He had fought throughout the First World War as an artillery officer, like Mallory. ‘Norton is one of the best,’ Mallory wrote to Ruth, ‘extraordinarily keen and active and full of interest and gentle and charming withal.’ He was a natural and inclusive leader of men, and Mallory readily deferred to him when Norton took the expedition leadership over from General Bruce in 1924. Like Odell he had lost a brother in the war; like some of the others he was a naturalist; and like Somervell he was a fine painter.
Morshead had proved so popular on the first expedition and such ‘a stout fellow’ that he had been invited back by General Bruce as a climber on the 1922 trip. As we saw earlier, in 1913 he had explored the Tsangpo Gorge, demonstrating beyond doubt that the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers were one and the same, and thus confirming the work of the pundits Kinthup and Nain Singh. In 1920 he went with Kellas to Kamet, and then performed well on the Everest expeditions. However, this accomplished life came to a bizarre end. He was out riding in Burma one May evening in 1931 when he was murdered: shot dead by his sister’s Pakistani lover. He was only 49.
Somervell loved the forest country of Sikkim, and in After Everest he describes how their cavalcade set off in 1922 with 400 animal-loads and high hopes. This is often the very best part of an expedition, swinging along chatting to your new friends through beautiful country.
Soon, though, they crossed the border into Tibet. Here is Mallory, writing in the periodical Asia:
The sensation of coming up to Tibet from the Chumbi valley, from the country of flowers and butterflies, of streams and meadows, of rich greens on the hillsides and deep blue atmospheres, the regret of leaving all that has delighted the senses and exchanging it in one short march for everything that is dreary is one of the most poignant experiences that I remember.3
Some of the loads were carried by hill-women, whose strength is legendary. They heard of one woman who carried an upright piano from the Tista Valley to Kalimpong – a height difference of 5,000ft – and arrived fresh at the top (I imagine she then sat down and performed ‘Yes, we have no bananas’). Soon they crossed the Jelep La into Tibet and passed Chomolhari, one of the most beautiful peaks in the Himalaya, on their way to Phari, where Somervell was called to treat a rich young Tibetan lady who had broken her arm.
The house was a strange mixture of sumptuousness and neglect; priceless objects of Chinese and Tibetan art jostled with dirty hessian and cracked plaster … Her ladyship was clad in silk brocade, her broken arm wrapped in a brown, treacly mess. I was informed that this was bear’s bile, a cast-iron proof against devils. On removing it, I found beneath, beautifully applied by the local medicine-man, a splint on the principle invented by Gooch a few decades ago in Europe, but used probably for many centuries in Tibet. This curious mixture of periods set aside, the fracture was dealt with in accordance with modern surgical practice, and efficiently splinted – but hardly more efficiently than it had been before. A generous presentation of two carpets and a fine fox-skin ensued, after which the elite of Phari saw me courteously through their magnificent gateway into the filthy street.4
Somervell the musician was also fascinated by the country. Where his companions just heard a discordant cacophony, Somervell would be busy transcribing the music played by Buddhist monks into Western notation. He became excited when he developed the notion that jazz, just then popular in London, appeared to have its roots in Tibetan music.
After a month’s gruelling journey through Tibet the expedition arrived at Rongbuk monastery, where the head lama blessed the Nepalese and Tibetan porters. John Noel saw the subject of his film properly for the first time. I found the following descriptions of his on an obscure BBC recording:
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