Everest, by Harriet Tuckey

This book, as the subtitle explains, makes a bold claim: Griffith Pugh was the ‘unsung hero’ of the 1953 ascent of Everest, his achievements neglected and nearly lost to posterity. Harriet Tuckey is Pugh’s daughter, so this assertion might be little more than a kindly attempt to revive her father’s flagging reputation. Yet, Pugh was clearly no ordinary father, and Tuckey’s advocacy on his behalf is correspondingly unusual.

She casts her father as a ‘uniquely talented, turbulent man,’ ‘truly great,’ ‘difficult, bad-tempered,’ ‘rather cruel’ and ‘totally selfish’. Many pioneers are Janus-faced in this way — those fervent, half-mad, ambitious men and sometimes women who scale mountains, chart the uncharted and meanwhile terrorise or abandon their families.

Tuckey describes her account in deliberately analogous terms, as a ‘personal Everest’:

a voyage of discovery of a daughter provoked to find out about the father she hardly knew and, in so doing, attempt to banish for ever a ghost of past trouble and resentment.

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At 43, Pugh was the oldest member of the 1953 Everest team. A former soldier and world-class skier, he had graduated to a career as a scientist, working at the Medical Research Council’s Division of Physiology. Tuckey quotes Michael Ward, Everest 1953 doctor:

There had been 11 previous expeditions to Mount Everest, many of which had excellent leaders, highly skilled climbers and brilliant logistics…and they failed.

Mindful of previous deficiencies, Pugh advocated new oxygen and fluid-intake regimes and a detailed acclimatisation programme. He attended closely to matters of hygiene and diet; he redesigned the high-altitude boots, the tents, the down clothing, the mountain stoves and the airbeds. At every stage, the Everest climbers benefitted from his findings on heat loss, the mechanical needs of the body at high altitude and the physiological and even psychological effects of discomfort.