"Everest Through The Lens" - Exhibition Review

 

Climbing Mount Everest. Under the auspices of the Mt. Everest Committee: the cinematograph record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922. EE/6/5/60 (RGS-IBG Collection)

Exhibition Review: Everest through the lens (Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), 1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR, UK: 5 October 2022-20 January 2023) - this review was originally written for the Other Everests Research Network.

Everest through the lens was an exhibition marking the centenary of the first two British attempts to climb the world’s highest mountain in 1922 and 1924. It examined the expeditions as seen through the lens of official expedition cinematographer, Captain John Noel. Focussing on the two films he made, Climbing Mount Everest (1922) and The Epic of Everest (1924), the exhibition set out ‘to unpick the uncomfortable and complex social, racial and geopolitical dynamics that shaped the expeditions – from their beginning to enduring legacy.’ Utilising a range of photographic and documentary sources, as well as a handful of well-chosen objects – such as a kinomatograph camera, similar to the one Noel used at high altitude, and Noel’s own Remington portable typewriter – exhibition visitors were guided through the various stages of the two expeditions, from their meticulous preparation, through their actual execution, to their final presentation in both print and film media.

 

As a documentary filmmaker, Noel’s lens was far from an objective one. The narrative of both films gives a distinctly colonialist view of the ‘heroic’ exploits of the British climbers, whilst the far larger entourage of local porters and other indigenous labourers who were key to enabling the endeavour are lost somewhere in the flickering side-lines, obscured by the simultaneous glare of the white snows and the reflected imperial glory bestowed upon the films’ British protagonists. Viewing the expeditions in the context of their times, this was a period when empires and nations vied to best one another in epic feats of exploration in harsh and extreme environments. Notably the British had lost out in the races to be the first to reach the North and South Poles, hence the summit of the world’s highest mountain – or the ‘Third Pole’ as it was then dubbed – represented a last chance at attaining pre-eminence. Together, the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club formed the Mount Everest Committee, which tasked itself with recruiting a team of elite mountaineers and geographers. Naturally these men were all British born and bred, privately educated and recruited through a network of mutual contacts. Letters and medical appraisals show that social considerations of class and military background counted as much as aptitude and experience in mountaineering. We are told that George Finch, as an Australian, was a lone exception to this rule, but that consequently he ‘was looked down on by some team members.’

 

A far more overtly condescending view was expressed with regard to the indigenous communities whom the expeditions encountered as they made their way through Tibet. An intertitle card from one of Noel’s films gives a clear example, stating that: ‘The men and women exist from the cradle to the stone slab, on which their dead bodies are hacked to pieces, without a wash the whole of their lives.’ The British expedition members were genuinely fascinated by the cultures they encountered in the Himalaya. Noel filmed scenes described in another intertitle as: ‘the weird and fantastic devil dances at the sacred monastery of the Rongbuk.’ A Tibetan cymbal brought back by the expedition leader, Brigadier-General Charles Bruce in 1922, included in the exhibition, shows how the British climbers were particularly struck by Tibetan music which must have seemed very different to their unaccustomed ears. Climber and surgeon, Howard Somervell transcribed Tibetan folk songs into Western musical notation, and Noel later had bands perform this music as an evocative accompaniment to the screenings of his silent films.

 

Trailer for Noel's "The Epic of Everest" (BFI)

              

Social hierarchies shaped the expeditions. Base Camp was effectively a small village, run by the British along familiar colonial lines, with clear demarcations according to social, racial and class considerations. The selection process for local porters may have been less careful to note down details, but everyone recruited – ‘from bootmakers to botanists’ – had a role with set expectations and was renumerated accordingly. Ranked highest in this hierarchy were the high-altitude porters, who were very skilled and often more adept mountaineers than the British, who nicknamed them ‘tigers.’ It is notable in many of the photographs of the expedition that there is a marked discrepancy in the size and weight of the loads which these men were charged with carrying compared to the British members of the team. Without their efforts, lugging huge quantities of supplies, equipment and oxygen tanks to the various camps ascending the mountain, the British climbers would have struggled in their attempts to reach the summit. These efforts were not without genuine risk, as a disaster in 1922 made only too apparent. Seven porters – six Sherpa, Thankay, Sangay, Temba, Lhakpa, Pasang Namgya, Pema, and one Bhotiya, Norbu – lost their lives in an avalanche. George Mallory, seen as the hero of Noel’s films, felt himself responsible. Writing to a friend, he stated that the men who died were ‘ignorant of mountain dangers, like children in our care. And I am to blame.’ However, the loss of these men’s lives was dealt with in a bureaucratic manner, with their families in Tibet, Nepal and Darjeeling being financially ‘compensated.’

 

In Noel’s film, the disaster was edited out of the final cut for fear of a negative backlash from viewers. A poignant memorial of this fact is embodied in a small bronze figure of the goddess Tara, which was on display in the exhibition. This was given to the British climbers on their return from Everest by Dzatrul Rinpoche, the Head Lama of Rongbuk Monastery, to commemorate the lives of the seven men who died. This action was filmed by Noel, but in the final version of his film Noel edited and placed these scenes at the start, representing the exchange as though it were a gift given to bless the expedition when it was first setting out.

 

Similarly, Noel appears to have had no qualms about appropriating an image of a deity depicted in a mural at the monastery in order to accentuate the sense of drama. A deity which the British stylised as ‘a mountain goddess angrily destroying the bodies of white climbers.’ As it is well-known, the 1924 expedition resulted in the loss of the lives of climbers, George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who disappeared from view while making a bid to reach the summit and never returned.

 

The names of Mallory and Irvine, like those of Robert Falcon Scott and his men in Antarctica, were of course duly added to the roster of ‘heroic defeats’ which now characterise the annals of British Imperial exploration. A vision of heroism and self-sacrifice which Noel’s films did much to crystallise. As the final sections of the exhibition showed, this was not without controversy however.

 

Noel very actively sensationalised Tibetan culture as a marketing ploy for his films. He was personally invested in them, having funded much of the 1924 expedition himself in order to retain the rights to his footage. He hired and brought to London a troupe of seven Tibetan dancers to perform at screenings. These ‘dancing lamas’ were in fact Tibetan novice monks rather than lamas. The publicity stunt deeply offended the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government, such that they banned all Westerners from entering Tibet to climb Everest for the next ten years. Despite the fact the British mountaineering community knew that the controversy of the ‘dancing lamas’ was the real cause of the ban, the Everest expeditions were meticulously stage-managed operations, consequently they drew ranks and found a convenient scapegoat in John Hazard, who undertook an unauthorised survey expedition in Tibet also in 1924, pinning the blame on his activities instead.

 

For a small exhibition, Everest through the lens, explored a number of less well-known faces of the two earliest attempts by British mountaineers to ‘conquer’ the world’s highest peak very effectively. It elucidated a number of often overlooked themes, incorporating a rich array of written and visual documentation; particularly Noel’s film, The Epic of Everest, which was screened on a continuous loop as part of the exhibition. Shining a light on the lives of those whose names are well-known to history, such as Mallory and Noel, but more importantly it also highlighted the indigenous team members who have stood, obscured in the background for far too long. Recovering some of those names which otherwise might have been lost to history in the panel and label texts, as well as listing them in the leaflet accompanying the exhibition. In doing so, Everest through the lens showed that there is still much to be learned about cultures of imperial exploration. By taking a closer look, information which has lain hidden in the archival shadows cast by the official record which the two British expeditions carefully created as their own legacy can begin to emerge. Much like the unnamed Sherpa who can be seen steadying the camera tripod, if one looks very carefully, at the well-known photograph of John Noel, seated on a kit box, shooting the first of his films at high altitude in 1922.

Captain Noel kinematographing the ascent of Mt. Everest from the Chang La [one of his Sherpa porters can be seen steadying the tripod] MEE22/0602 (RGS-IBG Collections)

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'Other Everests: One Mountain, Many Worlds' Edited by Paul Gilchrist, Peter Hansen & Jonathan Westaway (MUP, 2024)

For more information on my involvement with the 'Other Everests' Research Network, and my chapter in the forthcoming edited volume of essays which the network will publish in 2024, see here.

Also on 'Waymarks'

'Other Everests' - A New Research Network

Himalaya - The Heart of Eurasia

Betrayal in the High Himalaya

The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas (1957)

Circumnavigating the Cornubian Batholith

 

The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey by Tim Hannigan (Head of Zeus, 2023)

Tim Hannigan's Route

This is a book which I’ve long been looking forward to reading, and, now that I have turned its last page and closed its covers, it’s a book which didn’t disappoint. In fact, it is a book which I’m tempted to begin re-reading immediately. While he was writing it, I watched Tim Hannigan posting updates on his progress as he penned The Granite Kingdom on Twitter. Tantalisingly scanning the list of chapter titles which he posted several months before it was published, I could tell that this book would touch upon an array of topics which have both intrigued and challenged me over the years: Bordering; Merlin’s Magic Land; Piskey-Led; Coasting; See Your Own Country First; Rebel Country; Looking for the Light. As the book-blurb on the inside of its dust jacket describes: “Few areas of Britain are as holidayed in, as rhapsodised over or as mythologised as Cornwall … it is a region densely laden with images, projections and tropes. But how do they all intersect with the real Cornwall – its landscapes, histories, communities and sense of identity?”

 

 

As anyone who is familiar with Tim Hannigan’s The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys In Search Of A Genre (Hurst, 2021) will know, Hannigan is an academic who writes about travel writing with admirably accessible flair. Travelling in companionable prose with him is always a joy, and in this book particularly so, because here we are on his home turf. But writing a travelogue about one’s own homeland, as Hannigan acknowledges, is perhaps a more challenging task than writing as an outsider. Most travel writing has a kind of ‘through the looking glass’ quality to it. The whole point of the travel writer’s self-appointed task is to act as the outsider looking-in, providing an interpretation of ‘the other’ for readers who (it is tacitly assumed) are similarly placed at one remove from both the place and people described. But writing as an insider looking both within whilst also attempting to present an outward-looking personal interpretation for insiders and non-insiders alike could very easily become a tautological trap set in a hall of mirrors, yet Hannigan manages to remain aware of this inherent difficulty at all times. Hence, he acknowledges his own scruples, and his at times instinctively defensive reflex in seeking to assert his non-Englishness in certain situations, rather than trying to hide it or gloss over such matters. Particularly when he encounters other people during his travels through the county/duchy with whom his interactions prompt reflections upon Cornish nationalism and questions of native identity. ‘Cornwall is not England,’ is an often-encountered assertion here, and as such this gives the book its central underlying theme. What does it mean to be (or to claim to be) Cornish? – Where exactly does Cornwall begin and England end? – How closely can Cornish nationalism align to the allied spirit of fraternal ‘Celtic’ nativism which is found in Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland and even Brittany as a region with its own language which has died out and is now being revived, along with all the attendant trappings of the recently invented St Piran flag, Cornish tartan, and other emblems designed to highlight its sense of distance from generations of Anglo-Saxon and Norman cultural appropriation?

 

Gala Day, by Stanhope Forbes

It's an intriguing proposition when Hannigan reflects that, despite being born and raised in West Penwith, his ancestry has roots outside of Cornwall. As he states, “this shouldn’t matter, doesn’t matter, but if I’m writing about Cornwall and Cornishness, I have to mention it.” – However, it does matter in the sense that Cornwall has long been a place out of kilter with the rest of the UK. Today, shamefully, it is one of the poorest regions not only in the country but also in western Europe too. As Simon Reeve has poignantly illustrated in a recent BBC television series focussing on the country’s farthest southwestern region, people living in Cornwall face huge adversity most obviously in employment and the housing market. Recent decades have seen a boom in property sales to wealthy outsiders who have bought holiday homes which have essentially hollowed out local communities, turning picturesque villages into affluently neglected ghost towns out of season. It’s little wonder that outsiders are resented by some locals. On the one hand, tourism is the industry which has supplanted the dwindling or extinct traditional industries of fishing and tin mining, which most people Romantically associate with Cornwall. In this respect, Cornwall has confounded itself in the fact that the very thing which now sustains Cornwall is also the thing which is slowly killing it. One can’t help wondering how such a detrimental trend might be reversed?

 

My family might well have been seen as part of this problem (hence one avenue of my interest in this book). My parents along with my aunt and uncle began holidaying each year in Cornwall long before I was born. My grandfather even cycled to Land’s End with his friends back in the early 1930s. But it was a small advert in Dalton’s Weekly in the early 1960s which began this collective pattern of family pilgrimage. For many years, before the recent boom in the annual invasion of “the bucket and spade brigade” (as one local Tory MP famously disparaged it in the late 1980s), throughout my childhood, we hired two sail lofts on the west pier of Newlyn harbour from the same local family, whom we came to know well through two generations. I even have very clear memories of watching Tim Hannigan’s dad’s distinctive fishing boat, the Heather Armorel, coming and going beneath our window. We were later given the opportunity to buy the sail lofts (as well as other cottages we subsequently stayed in), but my family always resisted doing so. We always thought that there was something very wrong in the idea of a property standing empty for the majority of the year simply so that we might own our own patch of paradise for those two spare weeks of the year when we could get down there.

 

The Heather Armorel entering Newlyn harbour

Consequently, we were always very aware of both the harmful effects and the negative perception of incomers. But on the other hand, it was a duality which we realised had to be reconciled in as positive and as equitable a manner as was possible. I spent so much time there each summer that Cornwall is as much a part of my identity as my native Middlesex. And there are parallels of self-perception here too in the erasure of an old Anglo-Saxon County which still actively seeks to assert its identity several decades after its County Council was dissolved and it was subsumed into the homogenising boroughs of northwest London. Questions of identity do matter, and perhaps ironically, we later came to learn that we do in fact have Cornish ancestry – with forbears hailing from the Cornish village of Menheniot – so perhaps we aren’t the invasive interlopers we always feared we were. Every summer, I used to play in and around Newlyn harbour with the local kids, we even visited out of season at Christmas too, and several generations of my family have their ashes scattered on a particular cliff along that rugged coastline of West Penwith which forms Hannigan’s personal ‘Granite Kingdom.’ The salt sea air, the scent of gorse, and the sun-baked lichen of those granite-cleft coastal paths, along with the less clement weather of squalls and drizzling thick fog, are as much a part of me as all the other places which have come to feel like home throughout the course of my life. Cornwall remains a place for me to return to whenever I need to recharge my physical and emotional batteries, a testament to how we ground ourselves and all that makes us who we are in an acute sense of place. As such, there is a lot which I can relate to in this book.

 

The West Cornwall Experience (c.1980s)

There is much to like and much to be learnt from the pages of The Granite Kingdom. Hannigan expertly weaves into his long walk a lot of careful research and insightful analysis, reflecting upon both familiar and perhaps less well-known tales of local folklore, from King Arthur to Jan Tregagle; the standard tourist-titillating tales of smugglers, wreckers, and pirates; as well as the observations made by Hannigan’s literary predecessors, in works by writers such as Daniel Defoe, Wilkie Collins, D.H. Lawrence, and Daphne du Maurier. He also looks at the so-called ‘artist colonies’ which flourished in Newlyn and Lamorna, and which continue to characterise St Ives (for better or worse) to this day, as well as the ‘Rick Stein phenomenon’ that appears to define a lingering air of unrealised expectancy in Padstow – something which Hannigan as a former chef in the kitchens of Cornwall’s tourist high season can comment upon with firsthand knowledge and experience. He also reminisces and riffs upon the ‘anthropological’ intrigue which he felt the tourist brochures and TV adverts of the 1980s conjured in his mind as a child whose grandparents ran a guesthouse in Penzance – with its elastically-stretched parallels between the Cornish and Italian Rivieras! – representing the curious exoticisation of what was for him especially just the everyday reality of life lived in his home county. And all of this is deftly told with both eloquent erudition and good humour.

 

Essentially, what The Granite Kingdom demonstrates is how all locales are shaped both by insiders and outsiders alike. There’s no stopping the waves of change which sweep in and out of the eras like tides which shape and define the landscapes we perceive to be our own homelands, especially in the British Isles. In walking a meanderingly meditative (and many a pasty fuelled) route through Cornwall, from the banks of the River Tamar to his childhood home of Morvah, Hannigan guides us through his own unique view of, and engagement with the history, folklore, and geology, as well as the physical and cultural topography of a Cornwall which as a writer he aims to reconcile within himself as much as for the reader who accompanies him on what is a very personal journey. One reviewer has very astutely and accurately described this multi-facetted, gem-like book as “an inland journey, both introspective and expansive.” – It’s often said that the point of travelling is best realised in homecoming; hence, if this book represents a new direction in an erstwhile familiar genre of travel writing, I think the kind of homeward route which Hannigan sets out to explore in The Granite Kingdom should be a welcome one for others to take and emulate. 

On The Cliff, by Eleanor Hughes

Study of a Fisherwoman, by Stanhope Forbes

I would like to thank Tim Hannigan and Jade Gwilliam at Head of Zeus Books for very kindly sending me a review copy of The Granite Kingdom.

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Also on 'Waymarks'

From Coast to Carn Euny

Seeking Solace & Sunshine

What is Place?

Between the Tides, by Walter Langley

The Shoal Fisher, Newlyn Harbour, c.1880s