have met Mallory’s son John (now deceased), and I know his grandson George (who has climbed Mount Everest himself) and his granddaughter Virginia. I have followed his climbs in Wales, Scotland, the Alps and on Mount Everest itself, and I have read a fair few of his writings. Yet I still do not feel that I know the man. All I can do is struggle towards an understanding.
His first biographer was David Pye, whose George Mallory was published in 1927. Pye was his constant friend and fellow-climber, and knew his subject almost better than anyone. Like many of Mallory’s friends he became eminent in his own field, the development of aircraft engines, a science that led to the need for oxygen sets for the pilots who were being propelled to higher and higher altitudes. Then in 1969 David Robertson, who was married to Mallory’s daughter Beridge, wrote a biography – or rather a hagiography – in which our hero disappears like Sir Galahad. Mallory’s heroic status has hardly faltered since. An early death does wonders for your career; and this might be one clue to his appeal.
In 1981 Walt Unsworth’s magisterial Everest was published, which was rather less complimentary about Mallory, followed by Dudley Green’s 1990 illustrated biography, and Because It’s There in 2000, prompted by the finding of Mallory’s body. Audrey Salkeld, the foremost Mount Everest researcher, wrote a series of books on the subject, including the larger part of The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine and Last Climb. Then Peter and Leni Gillman’s book The Wildest Dream (2000) mined the vast number of letters between George and his wife Ruth, and turned up innumerable documents from other sources. They depicted Mallory’s life in painstaking detail. Even more detail on the expeditions and their participants appeared in Wade Davis’s Into the Silence (2011), which among other things examined the experience of the First World War and how it might have shaped the characters of the climbers. There will be more books about Mallory, I am sure, as his life seems to hold endless fascination for all kinds of writers. There are also a number of films that have been made about him, one or two of which I have had a hand in making. But who was he, and why does he have such a hold on our imaginations?
I found answers to these questions by looking at him through the eyes of those who have been influenced by him. These include his student contemporaries, his climbing companions, his pupils, and the theorists who try to work out what might have happened to him on his last climb. On the way we may also find answers to the question ‘Why climb Everest?’
The bare bones of George Mallory’s life are well known. He was born the eldest son of a rector in 1886 in the village of Mobberley on the Cheshire plain, which, ironically, is one of the flattest parts of England. He roamed the countryside as children do, and climbed walls and the family house roof, as well as his father’s church. His sister Avie recalled that he was completely fearless:
He climbed everything that it was at all possible to climb. I learned very early that it was fatal to tell him that any tree was impossible for him to get up. ‘Impossible’ was a word which acted as a challenge to him. When he once told me that it would be quite easy to lie between the railway lines and let a train go over him, I kept very quiet, as if I thought it would be a very ordinary thing to do; otherwise I was afraid he would do it. He used to climb up the downspouts of the house, and climb about on the roof with cat-like surefootedness.
He started to show his abilities at Winchester College, where he excelled at shooting, soccer and gymnastics. But he was more than just a sportsman; he was good at maths and chemistry, and was becoming a gifted writer.
The English public schools of Mallory’s time were nurseries for the military leaders and administrators of the empire, who possessed an aggressive attitude to the acquisition of new lands, and even cast covetous eyes on our nearer neighbours. We, with our post-colonial guilt, might have difficulty imagining a world in which an Englishman could legitimately make his name by conquering territory, but the young George would certainly have imbibed some of this empire spirit.
While he was at Winchester something happened that changed his life. His college tutor, Graham Irving, an Alpine Club member, took George under his wing when he heard about his talent for climbing on roofs, and in 1904 took him for his first visit to the Alps with another boy, Harry Gibson. In his obituary in the Alpine Journal, Irving wrote of Mallory:
He had a strikingly beautiful face. Its shape, its delicately cut features, especially the rather large, heavily lashed, thoughtful eyes, were extraordinarily suggestive of a Botticelli Madonna, even when he ceased to be a boy – though any suspicion of effeminacy was completely banished by obvious proofs of physical energy and strength.1
Mallory’s physical beauty impressed many of those who first met him, and this advantage gave him many opportunities. It might even have led indirectly to this offer of a climbing holiday. I do not suggest any impropriety, just that his attractiveness might have given him chances in life that were not open to others.
Harry Gibson had to return home after a week, and Irving and Mallory roamed the Mont Blanc region for a further 18 days. In our suspicious times eyebrows might be raised at this teacher–pupil pairing, but in their classically educated days such adult–child jaunts were seen as healthy and mutually beneficial.
That first Alpine season was a turning point in the young Mallory’s life; he had found something he was good at and something he loved. On his second season with Irving they tackled the Dent Blanche, a formidable peak with a bad reputation. The young George wrote to his mother in a good descriptive style, introducing some of the themes that would later become familiar: the importance of an early start, the beauty of the mountain scene and the way he would set his heart on climbing a particular mountain:
At 3:15 yesterday morning we started by moonlight across the huge snow field, on the most delightful hard crisp snow; and after the most enjoyable walk and a short scramble over easy rocks, we found ourselves on the arête of the Dent Blanche at 7:15. The sun had of course risen as we nearer the Dent Blanche; and, as we had already gone up quite a lot, the view was splendid right over the Mont Blanc range. It was altogether too inexpressibly glorious to see peak after peak touched with the pink glow of the first sun which slowly spread until the whole top was a flaming fire – and that against a sky with varied tints of leaden blue.
We had a halt and breakfast for nearly an hour on the arête and then climbed straight to the top in a little over three hours, arriving there at 10:25 … We had no difficulty coming down, but a most laborious walk across the snow field. The rest of the party were waiting tea for us at the Bertol hut as prearranged, and rejoiced with our rejoicing – the Dent Blanche was the one peak we had set our hearts upon doing.2
Going up to Cambridge in 1905, he found new male admirers: his college tutor A. C. Benson was a celibate homosexual who collected beautiful young men and who fell earnestly in love with Mallory at first sight. The son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Benson had written the Coronation Ode, including Land of Hope and Glory, which boys of my generation belted out to Elgar’s music in the school chapel. Poor Benson was a tortured individual who was not able to express the love he felt. The intense attention he lavished on Mallory helped the young student gain access to a privileged inner circle, who went on to form the Bloomsbury set. This select group of artists and writers contained talents such as the poet Rupert Brooke and the economist John Maynard Keynes. They were at the forefront of liberal thought, the Suffragette movement and socialism, and later included the writer Virginia Woolf and the painter Clive Bell. George Mallory never quite seemed to make his mark, though – until much later.
Cambridge was a hotbed of homosexual intrigue – the love that dared not speak its name – and the Gillmans’ biography uncovers an affair between George Mallory and James Strachey, the younger brother
