Everest: the First Ascent by Harriet Pugh Tuckey
The discoveries of physiologist Griffith Pugh on the effects of cold and lack of oxygen on the human body were unsung in his lifetime and would likely have remained so had his daughter not been inspired to put them on record long after his death. The story of his life and work also serves to remind readers of major upheavals and achievements of the twentieth century.
This riveting book by Harriet Pugh “lifts the veil on the power struggle and skulduggery behind the scenes of the British quest for Everest,” and describes her late father’s “important contributions to the 1953 expedition.”
Harriet Pugh characterizes her research into her father’s early scientific achievements and her decision to write the book as a quest “to find out about the father she hardly knew,” and “banish a troubling ghost of past conflict and resentment.”
After reading about Pugh’s life and work, it was a relief to be told that “learning about and recording his unusual life” has “banished the last vestige of umbrage” from her heart.
Brilliant as a scientist, Pugh was the polar opposite of an ideal Dad. Through Harriet’s close research and personal experience we glimpse a man dismissive of his wife his daughter, cold to all his children and repeatedly unfaithful.
Self-indulgent and oblivious of the needs of others, he routinely left his family to take skiing holidays abroad alone or with friends. In an era before there were laws against driving drunk, he smashed up a couple of his sports cars while under the influence.
On the other hand, he was devoted to his groundbreaking scientific work and ever willing to devise experiments for use on himself and other willing subjects. An experienced mountaineer, Pugh joined the party that assaulted Everest in 1953 as a scientific adviser and experimenter. He studied and measured the effects of cold weather and oxygen deprivation on climbers at high altitudes.
Initially dismissed by the establishment and his fellow climbers, Pugh’s empirical physiological discoveries paved the way for numerous important safety practices we take for granted today. It seems unimaginable now that sport and science were once treated as incompatible pursuits, and that using lifesaving oxygen to climb Mount Everest was considered tantamount to cheating.
It’s also hard to credit that many “sportsmen” approached the attempt on Everest with poor levels of fitness, and made no effort to acclimatize themselves to the thinner oxygen before attempting the major challenge of the peak. On top of that, climbers routinely wore inadequate and impractical clothing and footgear. Today nobody would dream of attempting to stroll up Mount Everest in a Norfolk jacket.
Attitudes that seem inexplicable were shared by many in the Medical Research Council as well as among the climbers. New Zealander Edmund Hillary, who got top billing for the 1953 ascent with Tenzing Norgay, lectured and wrote extensively about the expedition without once mentioning Pugh’s enormous contributions to its success. To get the great man to concede to giving him a minor acknowledgement in print, Pugh had to threaten to sue Hillary’s publisher before the book came out.
After Griffith Pugh’s work on Everest, he turned his attention to the challenges faced by long distance swimmers and Olympic athletes. Amid a craze for hillwalking and hiking, Britain suffered from a rash of deaths from exposure. These would have been easy to prevent. After all, Pugh had developed detailed protocols to keep men warm, dry and healthy in the high Himalayas.
In this new crisis, The Royal College of Surgeons formed a committee and asked for Pugh’s expertise on hypothermia. Yet even after the foundation of Britain’s Commission on Accident Prevention and Lifesaving in 1964, it took more time and effort for his findings and recommendations to be widely accepted and applied.
Respected educator Kurt Hahn of Gordonstoun School, the alma mater of Prince Phillip and King Charles, deemed Britain’s youth to be slothful, unhealthy and worse, and conceived the ambition of bringing “the character-building benefits of the public-school sporting ethos to less-privileged young people through the Outward Bound movement.” The challenges were gruelling; fortunately, Pugh was also invited to be a member of the Outward Bound Safety committee.
Reading about how Pugh developed lightweight outdoor clothing and other gear reminded me of the beginnings of MEC—originally Mountain Equipment Coop on West Fourth in Vancouver. Selling light nylon tents, boots, jackets, pants and packs for climbing and hiking, it spread across Canada as the fashion for hiking grew. Back in 1971, it never occurred to me that these innovations were quite recent, and of course, like the rest of the world, I had never heard of Pugh. But I well remember replacing my first hiking pack, a used one made of canvas on a heavy wooden frame, with a bright-coloured nylon one on an aluminum frame—from MEC of course.
As well as the many factual details about Pugh’s experiments and the recommendations developed for climbers and athletes as a result, this book gives the reader some astonishing glimpses into certain aspects of the social history and prevailing views of the twentieth century. The most shocking for me was the story of Griff’s mother and father abandoning their children, aged three and five, with a nanny they’d never met. Parking the kids, they returned to India at the outbreak of WWI and didn’t return to see their children for the next five years. As Griff’s Mum wrote in a letter, “anyone can take care of one’s children, but only a wife can take care of her husband.”