No picnic at The Third Pole

A century ago, the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club set the wheels in motion for one of Britain’s greatest epics of exploration – Everest

- ROBIN ASHCROFT

Everest entered the British conscious in 1856, when the Great Trigonometric Survey of India declared that the previously unremarkable Peak XV was, at 29,002ft (8,840 metres), the world’s highest mountain. Just getting the basic theodolite sights – given that the mountain was outside British India and that the closest survey station was 106 miles distant – was a remarkable feat in its own right.

Trigonometry aside, Everest would now go on to become Britain’s last great imperial adventure.

Following this ‘discovery’, it would take almost a century for the world’s highest mountain to be climbed – with the 1953 expedition remembered as an exemplar of organisation, efficiency and leadership. In contrast, the first expeditions in the 1920s have all too often been relegated in popular mythology to a caricature of eccentrics wandering around Everest dressed in tweed – more suitable for the grouse moor than the eternal snows – and tragic heroism. In large part, this was originally down to the pithy wit of George Bernard Shaw who, on seeing the first photographs from an Everest Expedition, declared, “rather like a Connemara picnic surprised by a snowstorm”. He was being wholly unfair.

The ‘discovery’ of Everest coincided with the coming of age of mountaineering. The Alpine Club had been founded in 1857; the major summits of the Alps had all, during ‘The Golden Age of Alpinism’, been climbed by 1865; and despite Queen Victoria’s caustic comments about the Matterhorn tragedy, mountaineering was becoming both established and socially acceptable. The Alpine Club was, after all, a London Gentleman’s Club.