Dan Snow's History Hit - The Forgotten Hero of Everest

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Ed Caesar joins Dan on the podcast to tell the extraordinary but largely forgotten story of World War I veteran Maurice Wilson, Britain's most mysterious mountaineering legend. Wilson served with distinction during the First World War winning the Military Cross in April 1918. However, after the war, he struggled to reintegrate into society and became severely ill. Whilst recuperating he became fascinated with the idea of climbing Mount Everest. His plan was to fly to Tibet before crashing his plane on the slopes of Everest and beginning his ascent from there. This was especially bold as at the time he could neither fly nor had any mountaineering experience. This was the beginning of an amazing but ultimately ill-fated journey as Wilson battled against the resistance of the authorities, the extremes of the Himalayas and his own inexperience in his attempt to reach the summit of Everest.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, Dan Snow here. Welcome to History It. As you know, I'm in the Antarctic at the moment looking for a lost shipwreck. So here's a favourite from our archive. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History It. I've got the brilliant journalist and author Ed Caesar on the podcast. That is a name for someone writing a history book, isn't it? Ed Caesar. He came, he saw, and he conquered this particular publishing project. He joins me on the podcast to talk about the almost forgotten story of Britain's most mysterious mountain legend, Maurice Wilson, World War I veteran, an outsider who attempted to climb Everest alone.

I mean, the story is completely ridiculous. He actually attempted to crash an aircraft into the lower slopes of Everest and begin his climb that way. Complete, completely remarkable. Ed Caesar has rescued this story really from complete obscurity. It's the subject of his new book, The Moth of the Mountain, and it was a wonderful opportunity to get this fantastic writer on the podcast to talk about an extraordinary story. Ed's a writer for the New Yorker. He's won several very prestigious awards, and it's a great pleasure to have him here on the podcast. Here is Ed Caesar. Ed, great to have you on the podcast.

Thank you so much. You've found another one of your amazing stories. Where do you find your stories? I find my stories in a variety of places, but I still believe in reading the newspaper every day. There is a brilliant serendipity about the way that newspapers are organized. They're very good technology. So I've come across stuff that I wouldn't know about otherwise. I'll be reading about something else, a spark will fly off this wheel and you will then find yourself thinking more about that little detail than you do about the story you've been reading. So that's, broadly speaking, how things go for me.

Just read papers, read books, and then all the juices start flowing. I find it's very difficult to have good ideas that no one else is having if you're just reading the internet. Maybe it's because I was born in 1980, so maybe my brain hasn't been totally rewired by phones and the internet. And obviously, I read stuff online all the time. But I find that a lot of my best ideas come when I'm reading an actual physical book because you're not distracted.

You're more concentrating. Maybe you think the answer isn't immediately linkable. So you make better connections, I think. Yeah, funny enough, there's a podcast we've got out at the moment about tucson levature in the haitian rebellion and it starts first paragraph there's a throwaway mention to a formerly enslaved african on the slave plantations the indian ocean and she was a princess and she led this kind of campaign against the french colonial overlords in the indian and one of the islands in the ocean Ocean. I'm like, hold up, buddy. That feels to me like it is a book. Yeah, exactly. There's the story,

dude. Anyway, so same thing. I was reading that and it just blew my mind. So having discussed where you get your stories, tell us about this recent one. And is there something about being a Brit, Everest, these kind of mad attempts to take on the Himalayas? We've all kind of grown up with those stories, haven't we, here in the UK? Yeah, I think they're quite a big part of our culture. I think George Mallory is maybe like the quintessential Englishman in a lot of ways, you know, a poet, an adventurer, someone who sort of strove for these noble ideals. And in fact, what I read about Maurice Wilson, the subject of The Moth on the Mountain, when I was reading a book called Into the Silence by Wade Davis,

which is an absolutely astonishingly good book if anyone is looking for a history of the early English attempts to climb Everest. And he mentions Wilson in passing as another one of these war veterans who tried his hand at climbing Everest. And that's when I first heard about it. But that would have been in 2011 when I first read about that. And so the story has lingered in my mind for a long time before I started actually doing the proper research. The thing that comes back to me about Wilson is that he's not actually a type. So most of the people who tried to climb Everest in the 20s were Oxford or Cambridge, generally Eton, you know, Balliol, you know, that kind of

direction. That was the highly born or the highly educated. And that was the type of person who was in the Royal Geographical Society or the Alpine Club. And Maurice Wilson is the son of a mill owner from Bradford. So he's aspirant middle class. He was a temporary gentleman in the First World War, which meant that he entered as a soldier and then was given a commission when so many subalterns were killed on the front line in the first couple of years

that they needed to swell the ranks of second lieutenants and became a temporary gentleman. That's roughly where he sits class-wise. He's coming from a very different spot and the British authorities did not want him to undertake this journey. And he thinks that a lot of it is to do

with class. He thinks it's okay if you're the Marquess of Clydesdale, you can go and fly a plane to Everest. But if you're Maurice Wilson, son of Mark Wilson, mill owner from Hometown Mill in Bradford, you know, you're not welcome in this particular club of adventurers. He may have been misplaced on that count, actually, but that's how he feels. He has a huge chip on his shoulder. What do we know about his wartime experience? I mean, every time I go back and look at these war veterans now, I start thinking about trauma that they've suffered, the things that their wartime experience made them do after the war. Had he had a quite, quite good war, it'd have been a traumatic war.

He had an outstanding war, but it was a short one. So he first went to France at the end of 1917. So he was joining his battalion, the 1st 5th West Yorkshire's, just at the end of the Battle of Passchendaele, then spots in the front line with men from nearby West Yorkshire battalions, and didn't actually see any real action until the day on which he won his military cross, which was this astonishing day on the 25th of April in 1918, when he held his post in advance of rapidly retreating frontline as machine guns took out positions to his right and his left. And out of his battalion, 500 odd people were killed, 150 were taken prisoner. The roll call the next day, there were 72 men in the first fifth left.

And, you know, it's astonishing that he survived and astonishing that he was able to do so when he was in such an exposed spot. And I don't think he ever got over how lucky he'd been. It's a strange thing to survive something like that. He later got shot again in quite a lucky way. You know, he got shot across the back and the left arm just near Hellfire Corner in Ypres in July of 1918. And again, a bullet goes one way or goes an inch the other way and you're not coming home. Instead, he just has a slightly lame left arm for the rest of his life. So I think the

really instructive things that I read about the post-war experience were actually not from Wilson himself, but were from contemporaries. You know, people like J.B. Priestley, who grew up near him and fought in the West Yorkshires, wrote amazing, vivid descriptions of going back to a city and to a place that they didn't understand anymore. Herbert Reid, who became a brilliant critic, an art critic, who'd fought in the spring offensive. And he talks about this dark screen of horror and violation that you can't penetrate. The people who've seen action on the front line and the people who haven't. And it's not to do with, I guess, you know, you can medicalize it and say a lot of these men were suffering from PTSD. But you could also just say that it's a normal response to seeing something horrific and experiencing something horrific as someone that most people

will never see. It's a normal response to feel that alienation from normal people, because how could they possibly understand? So I think, you know, a lot of the early Everest projects in the 1920s was born out of wanting something noble and pure to strive for, which those Mallory certainly felt that Everest was. And Wilson's comes out of a similar impulse, that Everest could redeem him in some way. And his plan for climbing it was rather extraordinary. Tell us what it was. He was going to fly his gypsy moth biplane in stages. So you couldn't fly all the way to Everest. So he had to fly in stages through Europe, through North Africa,

Middle East, crucial states, around Persia and into India. Then finally he was going to get to Purnia in northern India. He was going to fly across Nepal and he was going to crash land his gypsy moth biplane on one of the plateaus surrounding Everest. At which point he was going to get out of his biplane and then walk to the top of the mountain. He had all his climbing equipment, his wimper tents, his oxygen, his windproof clothing. So he was going to climb alone for the final part. It's an extraordinary idea. And he does actually get a huge part of the journey done.

He flies 5,000 miles as a very inexpert and new flyer. I mean, he's got about 40 hours of experience in an airplane at this point. You know, he doubles it in the first week that he's on his journey. in an aeroplane at this point. You know, he doubles it in the first week that he's on his journey. He is a terrible hand-fisted flyer who just about makes it to India. But at that point, the British authorities in India impound his plane. So he has to find a different way to get to the mountain. And he gets into an extraordinary situation of disguising himself as a Tibetan priest to cross illegally into Tibet. And then he walks to the foot of the mountain where he starts his attempts.

You listen to Dan Snow's history. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

So he goes up from the Tibetan side. Yeah. He walks from Darjeeling up through Sakhim, over the border into Tibet, and then the same way that all the expeditions of the 1920s did. They approach it from the Rongbuk Monastery, Tibetan side. And how does it go for him? Well, he has never climbed anything more challenging than a flight of stairs. He's done some training in Snowdonia.

He did a bit of, I think he might have climbed the Old Man of Coniston. You know, he's done some hill walking, essentially. And he's very fit. And he has no idea how to climb mountains. And so when Wilson attempts to do it the first time around, he's got some porters who have helped him

walk the 300 miles from Daljeeling to the mountain. But he tries to climb it the first time around. He's got some porters who have helped him walk the 300 miles from Daljiling to the mountain, but he tries to climb it on his own and he doesn't get to the old British Camp 3. He has to turn around because he's so exhausted and he can't find his way and he doesn't have any crampons and so on. And eventually, half dead, he makes it back to Rongbok and persuades a couple of his Bhutier porters to come with him again. And this time he makes it to the North Coal without giving too much away.

He does not back down from the challenge that he is unfit to meet at the North Coal. So it's the first piece of climbing that's really technical on Everest from the north side, and he has no way to do it. But he does not back down from it. And before him, had people made it to the North Coal? So before him, Mallory and Irvin, some people think they actually made it to the summit of Everest. So above the North Coal, that's the old Camp 4,

and then they made two more high camps, the old British expeditions on the mountain. So in 1924, Irvin and Mallory were seen having a go for the very top. And there's this disputed sighting by Noel O'Dowd, did they make it over the second step or not? And the feeling is that if they made it over the second step, then they might have made it to Everest. In any event, Mallory and Irving did not survive.

They died either on the way up or on the way down. Most likely, they didn't get to the summit, but the jury's out. But they got very, very high. And in fact, even the year before there had been an expedition in 1933, the year before Wilson tried, in which Frank Smythe got within touching distance of the summit before becoming so delirious, he tried to share his biscuits with an imaginary companion and then just about making it down. So the British teams had got really, really close. It's kind of astonishing to think of how close they got, or maybe actually did it, in the 20s that it took until 1953 for it actually to be climbed. Why do you think we find these stories of Everest so fascinating? Is it part of our

imperial nostalgia? What is it that we learn by looking at these expeditions? There's an obvious narrative to a mountain, you know, you either make it to the top or you don't. And that is, you know, we sublimate a lot of other challenges into those experiences. You know, mountaineering was a very new idea in the 1920s and 30s. You know, it only really existed as a sport since about 1860, when people started trying to bag peaks in the Alps, Grindelwald and all those places. It really hadn't existed for very long. And this idea was that you just had to conquer, you know, the idea was you bagged these peaks and eventually there's only, you know, one or two left. And the big one is Everest. There was something about the British attempt on Everest.

They felt that the world's greatest seafaring nation had been beaten to both poles by other nations. And they viewed Everest as the third pole. And they felt that it was a matter of some kind of national pride that they not be beaten to the top of Everest. As a modern reader, I think the really interesting thing is how committed these people were to this quite abstract idea. I mean, the mountain does not care if you climb it or not. People have lived near Everest for hundreds and thousands of years and have never once thought to themselves, I must climb to the very top of that enormous mountain. This is a peculiarly British,

and actually I would say a Victorian and Edwardian obsession that has become an accepted sport now. But it is quite a weird idea that in order to achieve something, you have to get to the very top of it. I also wonder if there was a spirit for about 150 years there where the world was there to be sort of tamed and conquered and you know from the moment we started burning coal and draining and canalizing rivers it just looked like this was one giant playground that we needed to sort of get on top of and we're only now coming to terms with the fact that we may have destroyed a livable climate in doing that. But I wonder if the Victorians climbing mountains was part of that drive to blast and curb and change the very earth beneath our feet.

You know, there's this subjugation element of it. I also think there is something that runs alongside this, which is about a more modern sense of the self, which is something that I dig into a little bit in the book, because Shackleton is really interesting on this. He talks about reaching the end of his incredible series of hardships for endurance. That mission goes wrong. And he talks about reaching the naked soul of men. These expeditions were always couched in sort of geographical or exploratory terms. They always had a kind of scientific drive to them. But for the people who were doing them, that wasn't why Mallory wanted to climb Everest. He wanted to reach some deep

and impenetrable part of his self. And I think this idea, you know, you see people now do triathlons or they want to, you know, swim across the channel or whatever it is. This, you know know it has taken the place of religion for a lot of people these kind of huge challenges and you see i mean now maybe more people do stuff that's like this than they've ever done stuff that's like that yeah that's

interesting isn't it and then stripping away the kind of facade of civility and fashion and all those other things because that's when i go when i do sailing or climbing you always people say what i love about it is you really you really get to know yourself on the mountain and it presumably if you were a peasant farmer in 14th century staffordshire you'd got to know yourself every bloody day like you know you didn't need an extra challenge whereas i suppose modernity we're all we're all sort of lounging about in gentlemen's clubs or now in offices and maybe we need to create things that teach us about ourselves i also think just generationally that that generation after the first world war had seen such horrific things and here was a chance to do something that was very very hard

but had a felt like a purer goal you know you're not massacring another country's young men you know you're trying to reach the top of this mountain and the language that they talked about it you know this is the sentinel in the sky this really was it felt redemptive i think just particularly in the 20s and 30s fascinating stuff we've got a question here from mark who's one of the history hit subscribers listening to this call do you spend a lot of time trying to work out exactly where people were when this happened is there enjoyment here and kind of forensically putting together the details of of what happened or is this a bigger book about mountaineering and about and about human endurance no i thought what i felt that it was really important to get this story

right i mean i feel like about every story i do. But Wilson's been written about before. Maurice Wilson's been written about before. And the more I dug into archives and found new original material, I realized that so much that had been written about him was wrong. You know, the common story about where he fought in the war, wrong. There was no way he could have been where everyone said he was. His battalion was fighting somewhere else. You look in his unit diary, there he is.

Okay, so that's all wrong. And in fact, it's much more dramatic when you know the true story. Like even up to the very last edit, I was finding things like, I realized that his altimeter was broken because he keeps on recording heights that are not where he is on the mountain.

And so I find you find yourself changing where he is on the mountain because of so I find you find yourself changing where he is on the mountain because of that. All of that was really important. So the details instruct your wider sense of what it's all about. There were little moments, for instance, when he was in Darjeeling waiting to go in disguise to the mountain, he's walking around town with this old American woman who gives him a cross. And on one side of the cross, it says Rita. And on the other, it says Amor Vincit Omnia, love conquers all. And the cross had been given to a guy that had gone to France

and died in the First World War. And this, Maurice Wilson tells this woman his story. And the woman gives him this cross that belonged to her daughter's fiance. And he takes it and he wears it to Everest. And I've never seen this in a letter that I found in a box in Germany. Someone gave it to me. Those details instruct your sense

of what the whole story is about. It's not a question of, you know what the story is and then it's a question of filling in the details. The details are the story. That was meaningful to him for a particular set of reasons. And it's what he's wearing when he dies.

And it's, you know, it's still on him now, I think, because his body is still in a high place. Yeah, it's still there, preserved, like so many other mountaineers on Everest. Well, thank you very much. It's such an exciting book, this. What's it called? It's called The Moth in the Mountain. Very exciting to have it in the world. Well, congratulations. Lots of hard work, I know.

The Moth in the Mountain, Ed Caesar, congratulations. Good luck, and thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much, Dan. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished

thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History I really appreciate listening to this podcast I love doing these podcasts it's a highlight of my career it's the best thing I've ever done and your support your listening is obviously crucial for that project

if you did feel like doing me a favor if you go to wherever you get your podcast and give it a review give a rating obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.