how serious this was, but one gains the impression that the naive but beautiful Mallory was inveigled into the relationship by a scheming John Maynard Keynes. It was around this time that Mallory took to dressing in black shirts and garish ties, and grew his hair long.
I have a copy of The Yellow Book, with drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, the fin-de-siècle publication from the 1890s that so influenced this group. A glance inside at Beardsley’s arch, pen-and-ink gothic figures conveys something of the look of these young men. The kind of impression Mallory made is conveyed in this passage from Lytton Strachey. His high-camp squawk gives a hint of the febrile atmosphere of Cambridge at the time:
Mon Dieu! George Mallory! When that’s been written, what more need to be said? My hand trembles, my heart palpitates, my whole being swoons away at the words – oh heavens, heavens! I found of course that he had been absurdly maligned – he’s six foot high, with a body of an athlete by Praxiteles, and a face – oh incredible – the mystery of Botticelli, the refinement and delicacy of a Chinese print, the youth and piquancy of an imaginable English boy. I rave, but when you see him, as you must, you will admit all – all! … He’s going to be a schoolmaster, and his intelligence is not remarkable. What’s the need?3
Notions of sexuality change over the ages, and that Cambridge concept of male friendship was not the same as what we now call ‘gay’. It was more along the lines of Platonic love, and perhaps we have lost something by our assumptions about same-sex friendships. The comradeship forged in mountaineering can be closer than a romantic relationship, but among the hundreds of climbers I have met I cannot remember one who has come out as gay. They must be there, but it is a robustly macho pursuit. Mallory’s later relationship with his wife Ruth certainly seems to have been a straightforwardly conventional one, and many of his contemporaries married after experimenting with same-sex friendships.
His climbing career certainly benefited from his attractiveness to men. Charles Sayle was a founder member of the Climbers’ Club and took him climbing in North Wales, introducing him to an older mentor, Geoffrey Winthrop Young. This was a significant meeting. Winthrop Young was a colourful character, an educationalist and a brilliant writer. It was he who conferred the name ‘Galahad’ upon Mallory. He was vigorously homosexual, and visited clubs that catered to his tastes in Berlin and Paris. He was attracted to the young Mallory at once. Winthrop Young was the leading climber of his day and organised the legendary Pen-y-Pass meets in Snowdonia. Every year he gathered around him a coterie of bright young things, and tackled increasingly difficult routes on the Welsh crags. George was soon part of the scene, impressing Winthrop Young with his lithe climbing style and inventive approach to routes. Here is Winthrop Young’s assessment of him as a climber:
He was the greatest in fulfilled achievement; so original in his climbing that it never occurred to us to compare him with others or to judge his performance by ordinary mountaineering standards. Chivalrous, indomitable, the splendid personification of youthful adventure; deer-like in grace and power of movement, self-reliant and yet self-effacing and radiantly independent. On a day he might be with us; on the next gone like a bird on the wing over the summits, to explore some precipice between Snowdon and the sea; whence he would return after nightfall to discuss climbing or metaphysics in a laughing contralto, or practise gymnastics after his hot bath, on the roof beam of the old shack, like the youngest of the company.4
After several more seasons in the Alps, Mallory was considered as one of the best British climbers of his day. His writing style was developing, too, and he made a serious stab at explaining why we climb in a long article in the Climbers’ Club Journal entitled ‘The mountaineer as artist’. He compares a long alpine climb to a symphony, with separate movements for each section of the climb. This might today be considered pretentious, but he makes the point that mountaineering has a spiritual dimension that other sports perhaps lack. It certainly attracts poets and writers. In another piece, written in the trenches, he remembers the joy of reaching the summit of Mont Maudit, and this quotation for me sums up the modest delight of the man:
We’re not exultant; but delighted, joyful; soberly astonished … Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves.5
Just before the outbreak of the First World War he met and married the love of his life, Ruth Turner, the daughter of Hugh Thackeray Turner, a wealthy architect who had worked closely with William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement. Their letters reveal that Ruth, although not the clearest of writers, was a wonderful soul-mate, with an unerring ability to get to the nub of things.
In 1910 George had taken a position as a teacher at Charterhouse School in Godalming, Surrey, and attempted to settle down into married life with Ruth. With the outbreak of war, however, he became restless and guilty, feeling that he ought to join up, and obtained a commission as an artillery officer. He was off to war. This was the beginning of many absences from his beloved Ruth, but they wrote to each other nearly every day for the rest of his life.
Mallory survived the war, unlike so many of his climbing peers. Artillery officers had a better chance of survival than ‘the poor bloody infantry’ as they spent less time on the front line, although they were hardly safe. On Mallory’s very first day with his battery, a bullet passed between him and a man walking a yard ahead. On another occasion two men walking with him were killed feet away from him as they laid out a telephone wire.
Of course, if that bullet had swerved a fraction of a degree, the history of Mount Everest would have been different. My father had a torpedo pass right under his ship during the liberation of the Netherlands in the Second World War, and he and his future family were thus inches away from oblivion. Such is the contingency of life, and during dangerous climbing one is well aware that possibilities such as this are multiplying before your eyes. That stone melting out of the ice a thousand feet above you might have your name on it.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young also survived the First World War, although he lost a leg. When he and Mallory organised another of the Pen-y-Pass parties, it was noted that out of 60 climbers mentioned in the diaries from before the war, 23 had died and 14 had been injured.
The more I studied that little band of men in the black and white photographs of the 1921 expedition to Mount Everest, the more I saw the ghosts of the First World War.
Today it is hard to imagine the degree of disconnection between the general public and the soldiers engaged in the slaughter. Now we have live television feeds from journalists embedded on the battlefields, and the death of even one soldier in Afghanistan is headline news. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, however, when Somervell was operating at his field hospital, 19,000 of the British forces were killed: 20 per cent of their total fighting strength. That is over six times the number killed during the 9/11 attacks on the US in 2001, and yet General Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander, felt able to write in his diary the next day: ‘This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked.’
During the First World War heavy guns were heard in Kent, but successful propaganda duped the British public into believing that all was going well, with the press reporting only light casualties. And the fact that the conflict was so localised and so immovable meant that life could go on in Berlin or London without non-combatants realising what horrors were being perpetrated in their name. One result was that the participants felt disconnected from life at home, even when they returned, and in some cases effectively became walking ghosts.
One such was Mallory’s pupil Robert Graves, who was badly injured by shellfire at the Somme on 20 July while leading his men through the churchyard cemetery of Bazentin-le-Petit. His injuries were so severe that it was reported to his
