Ah, yes: 31 May — 89th anniversary of the last diary entry of the first man who tried to climb Everest solo. Mind you, his plan had been to crash land a plane 14,000 feet up and then stroll the rest of the way, so perhaps he wasn’t destined to succeed.
Maurice Wilson was one of those chaps. He’d been a captain in the army, got a Military Cross in The Great War, and not adjusted well to peacetime, when there wasn’t as much call for derring do. According to Geoff Powter’s Strange and Dangerous Dreams:
He went a little bit beyond the basic military-adventuring type, though. He was an ascetic, convinced that the world would be a much better place if everybody fasted and believed in The Beyond as much as he did. Which was perhaps why…
Wilson purchased no climbing equipment, and the only skills training he did consisted of walking several hundred miles from London to Bradford, where his family still lived.
He set off in 1933 in a Gypsy Moth he’d only recently bought and renamed Ever Wrest. He was a novice pilot, having only just learnt to fly, and he began the jaunt with a characteristic act of bravado: summoning the press to watch him tear up the Air Ministry’s letter telling him he didn’t have permission to go, saying:
The gloves are off… Stop me? They haven’t got a chance.
When he got to Cairo — and achieving that, intact, was remarkable in itself — the British Legation wouldn’t give him the permit he needed to go further, so he flew to Baghdad, navigating his way over 1,000 miles of desert using only a compass.
Once there, he started looking for maps to guide him round the Persian Gulf. When there weren’t any, he borrowed a child’s school atlas and used that to get to Bahrain. Then, thinking he’d be arrested if he went to Persia, he flew for 9.5 hours to Gwadar in India.
This feat — arriving, as he did, just as his fuel ran out — got him in the papers. Most of the coverage he’d had up to now had, not surprisingly, emphasised the eccentricity of his mission. Now, he was suddenly an
expert airman and rock-climber.
He also challenged Gandhi to a fasting competition, and informed the gentlemen of the press:
There is no stunt about it. Mine is a carefully planned expedition.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. And he still wasn’t anywhere near the mountain. When he got to India, the local magistrate and the chief of police in Purnea seized his plane. He wintered in Darjeeling, making plans to do the whole thing on foot instead.
He set off from there with three Sherpas, but still didn’t have permission, so he disguised himself as a travelling monk in a Tibetan chuba (a long robe) and
about four yards of bright red silk … a cross between the Prince of Wales and Santa Claus
The first time they encountered a policeman, Wilson crouched down under an umbrella. The second, he threw himself into a nettle-filled ditch. So, they started travelling at night, and eventually reached the Rongbuk monastery — where climbers liked to be blessed before setting out.
According to Powter, Wilson’s plan was to fast for two days and aim for the summit on his birthday, 21 April. His sign, Taurus, “would be ascendant at the end of the month”. And the portents were good, he wrote:
only another thirteen thousand feet to go!
He had no experience of climbing snow and ice, nor of altitude sickness, and his first attempt, entirely on his own, was not a success. He reached Camp II hoping to find food, and instead found crampons, which would have helped had he not “tossed them aside with disgust”.
George Band’s Mount Everest Foundation-approved Everest Exposed says he stumbled “more dead than alive, back to the monastery after nine days”. Obviously, he tried again, or in journalist A J Russell’s words:
This time, he took two Sherpas, who got him to Camp III. Here, he found the hoped-for food store, threw asceticism to the four winds, and “wallow[ed] in … a one-pound box of King George chocolates.” Whether he shared them with the Sherpas, history does not relate.
The confectionery may have built his strength up, but he next encountered a 40ft (12m) ice wall on the way to the North Col, where the Sherpas tried to persuade him to turn back. He refused, writing “I feel successful” in his diary. He may have been driven by blind faith, or just decided to die trying, unable to face going home a failure (at least in his own eyes). There is another theory, though (in Strange and Dangerous Dreams). Some months earlier, he’d met a couple, Leonard and Enid Evans, and…
A prominent facet of Wilson’s diary that has had surprisingly little attention from other writers is the fact that the entire diary is constructed as a quite personal letter to Enid Evans. There are several winking asides to “you” sprinkled throughout, and in the April 18 entry Wilson clarifies who the “you” is: “Of course,” he explains, “I’m writing all this to Enid; she’s been the golden rod from the start.” Perhaps in addition to his fasting mission, Wilson was also motivated by one of the most easily confused forces of all: an unrequited love.
Whatever was driving him, the Sherpas weren’t willing to die by his side. Wilson told them to wait for a fortnight while he went on alone. “If by then he had not reappeared they were free and could return to India.”
In the end, they waited a month before they went back to Darjeeling to confess that they had aided an unauthorised attempt on the great peak. In the meantime, on 31 May, Wilson had written his last words:
Off again, gorgeous day.
On 9 July 1935, Charles Warren, team doctor of another expedition, found a boot in the snows beneath the North Col. A few yards away, he found “a wind-shredded tent”, and next to that, a body, “lightly clothed and sockless as though the man had died in his sleep”
“I say,” Warren called out. “It’s this fellow Wilson.” They wrapped him in his tent and buried him in a crevasse. In 1980, Reinhold Messner, using far more modern gear, made it to the top on his own, and even he said:
I was in continual agony; I have never in my whole life been so tired as on the summit of Everest that day. I just sat and sat there, oblivious to everything.…I knew I was physically at the end of my tether.
As Geoff Powter points out, though, Wilson could still be considered a remarkably successful adventurer:
If Maurice Wilson’s ambition had been “to fly to India alone!” as evidence of the amazing powers of fast and prayer, we might have a different appreciation of the man’s remarkable resolve, and offer him a more honourable place in history. For not only did Wilson make it to India, he ended up doing so with only nineteen hours’ flying experience, in a style and at a pace that would have been competent for any pilot of the day-let alone a novice blocked at every stage of his flight by authorities.
