The madman and the mountain

The plan got madder still. Wilson didn’t want to have to walk from Darjeeling to the mountain and with good reason: the exceptionally well supplied expedition the year before had taken six weeks just to reach base camp. Much better, thought he, to save all that time and energy and fly to the mountain itself. When asked what he’d use instead of a runway in the frankly highly unlikely event he even got there, he said simply that his plan was to crash land on a glacier and take it from there. You can perhaps imagine why those who heard his plans struggled to take them entirely seriously. But serious he was. Deadly serious.

There was something else too. Maurice Wilson was no random nutter who could be easily ignored. He was, in fact, a bona fide war hero, just on the ground, not in the air. Born in Yorkshire in 1898 he joined the army on his 18^th birthday. By April 1918 he had reached the rank of Captain despite still being a teenager when he was involved in an action which earned him the Military Cross, the second highest order of medal that existed at the time, after the Victoria Cross. In essence after his entire unit had been killed or wounded, he single-handedly defended his machine gun post against the advancing Germans. Later that year he suffered wounds at Ypres from which he would never fully recover.

Like so many other survivors of his generation, the years after the war were not kind to Wilson. He drifted from place to place, seeking relief from the machine gun bullet that had pierced his arm, ending up founding a dress shop in Wellington, New Zealand. His physical and mental condition, however, were not good, he’d had two failed marriages and by the start of the 1930s was in a state of near mental collapse. It seems more than likely that today he’d have been diagnosed with PTSD.

He returned to England, now suffering also from what he was convinced was the onset of tuberculosis and decided to heal himself. Through the teachings of an Indian mystic who claimed a higher level of existence could be attained through a combination of fasting and prayer, he starved himself for 35 days to a point quite close to death and promptly pronounced himself cured. Whether he was or not and indeed whether he needed to or not has never been made clear, and he certainly wasn’t going to let facts like his faith healer living in considerable luxury in Mayfair distract him. He had the money from the sale of the shop and would now prove to the world that anything was possible if you just took the same approach. But he needed to bring himself to the attention of that world. And that is why the Everest plan was hatched.

His first idea made what he actually ended up doing look positively sensible. He’d piggyback on an already planned attempt to overfly Everest, ease himself out onto the lower wing of the biplane he’d be aboard and parachute onto the summit. It never got off the ground, literally or figuratively.

But he did. He bought a three-year-old De Havilland Gypsy Moth – a craft small enough to be towed by a car once its wings were folded back – and started taking flying lessons. He was a terrible student with little feel for what he was doing and prone to breaking some of the most fundamental rules of aviation, like never taking off with the wind behind you, but somehow, someone saw fit to give him a licence.

To address the other gap in his knowledge he went walking in Snowdonia and the Lake District, as if that would in some way provide meaningful preparation for conquering a mountain over eight times higher than the loftiest peak in England or Wales. During this time he did no actual climbing at all and gained no meaningful experience of tackling ice and snow, let alone the often lethal complications brought by trying to do so at extreme altitude.

Why? I think there are two reasons: firstly he did read all the reports of the three previous British expeditions (the 1933 attempt had not yet set off) and was possibly misled by the always understated tone in which they were written. But I also think he was on a mission and may even have believed it came from God. After his experiences in France and Belgium there seems little question that he did not expect to be alive and therefore probably feared death very little.

Besides, he was not a man easily deterred. Fearing yet another name was about to be added to the list of people who had died attempting Everest and rating his chances of even reaching the mountain somewhere between minute and non-existent, the British authorities, through whose empire he would need to travel, did all they could to stop him, including tipping off the Nepali authorities who banned him from using their airspace. He didn’t blink; he upended the Moth in a field on his way north to see his family and was deterred not at all. On 31 May 1933 he departed, reputedly taking off with the wind behind him one last time. Plenty expected never to see him again.

But poor pilot though he was, he was an excellent navigator. His plan had been to cross the Alps but having discovered the heavily laden Moth wouldn’t fly that high, he instead flew around them, down the length of Italy, across the Mediterranean and into Tunisia from where he turned left and flew along the coast to Cairo. All this, remember, in a tiny, flimsy bi-plane with no protection from the wind, weather, heat or cold, stopping at remote stations every 600 miles for fuel, some of which was contaminated. There officials there told him permission had been refused to let him overfly British controlled Persia so he flew on to Baghdad hoping for a different answer there, but there was none, so he decided to go around and via Bahrain.

Bahrain was right at the distance limit of the Moth, but he made it only to encounter an apparently insuperable problem: the aircraft would not even be allowed to refuel until Wilson agreed to go home. So he did, got his fuel and flew onto India regardless. Gwadar was 770 miles away, beyond the normal range of the Moth, but eking out every drop, he landed almost 10 hours later, reputedly with insufficient fuel left to cover the bottom of the tank. Against all possible odds, he had flown solo 5000 miles and made it to India.

He flew on, towards the great mountain, but was informed the Nepalis had not lifted their airspace ban and this time impounded the Moth until he agreed to give up and fly home. Which of course he did not do; instead he abandoned the idea of flying to the mountain, sold the Moth and retired to the Albert Hall Hotel in Darjeeling to consider his next move.

He spent the winter there and with the British still refusing to play ball, quietly hired three Sherpas and a single pony and on 21 March 1934, 10 months less 10 days after he’d left Britain, he left Darjeeling disguised as a Tibetan monk. For context, rather than a crew of just three, the previous year the British had taken 88 people to the mountain; back in 1922, some 173 had been deemed necessary.

Nine days later, his ploy undiscovered, Wilson and his barely-there crew departed the country and entered Tibet. After 25 days on foot he reached the Rongbuk Monastery which, at 16,340ft, was one of the two highest monasteries on Earth. With an average year round temperature of -17.5 deg C, it is also the coldest place with a permanent population outside Antarctica. After resting up for a few days he left his Sherpas and set out – without so much as a pair of crampons – to climb Mount Everest alone.

And was never seen again, right? Actually, no. He made it to base camp, sat down and wrote perhaps the most delusional diary entry in history. It read: ’19,200ft up – only another 10,000ft to go – sounds easy.’

It was anything but. Somehow he managed to negotiate the fearsome Rongbuk Glacier but six days after leaving the monastery, starving, snow-blind and with a terrible thirst, he returned defeated.

But by now I imagine you have some measure of the man and won’t therefore be too amazed to learn that so trifling a setback did not deter him for long. Four weeks later he left again, this time with his Sherpas and, perhaps unsurprisingly, this time made decidedly better progress. Within two days they were at around 21,000ft, at the Camp 3 left by the British the previous year which they were delighted to find was still well stocked with jam, honey, butter, cheese, chocolate, powdered milk ‘and other treasures from heaven.’

Suitably refreshed, on 21 May he set off for Camp 4, once more leaving his Sherpas behind. But although it was only 1800ft higher and still over 6000ft below the summit, the climb was physically and technically beyond him. He spent four days alone on the mountain in freezing conditions before returning to Camp 3. For two days he lay in his sleeping bag, trying to marshal the strength for another attempt. Two days later, on 29 May, he set out again.

Of what happened next very little is known. He pitched his tent somewhere, then spent the next day in his sleeping bag, perhaps due to weather conditions. On the morning of 31 May he got up and committed to his diary the last words he would ever write; ‘Off again, gorgeous day.’

His body was found the following year by a Dr Charles Warren on a small British reconnaissance mission to the mountain. It was lying on its side, surrounded by the remains of his tent and few provisions at a height of around 22,700ft, his cause of death presumed to be a combination of exhaustion and exposure. His diary was recovered and now lives in the Alpine Club’s library in London.

But even death and subsequent burial in a crevasse was not enough to stop Maurice Wilson continuing his Everest story because, ever-moving as glaciers are, his body has resurfaced numerous times in the intervening years.

So was Maurice Wilson just a lunatic with a death wish, a man on a mission from God, an entirely sane war hero who simply underestimated the job he was taking on, or some, more or all of the above?

Above all I see his story as a rather sad one, but actually not because he didn’t come back. He was one of a generation of millions who returned from war with the balance of their minds permanently altered by what they saw, experienced and were unable to forget. Of course his plan had not one chance in a million of success, but I do not like to see him so easily dismissed as some have sought to do. He was a man traumatised both mentally and physically and thousands of others who’d suffered similarly also became changed as a result.

But we know about Maurice Wilson because in an age when so many people were obsessed with aviation, mountaineering in general and Everest in particular (it was often referred to as the third pole), what he did was so very public. I prefer to see him not as some crank, but a traumatised war hero who attempted the impossible but at least went out on his own terms and, as his final diary entry would suggest, at some kind of peace with the world. ‘Off again. Gorgeous day.’ Indeed.