Cumbria will feature prominently in a series of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the historic 1975 British Everest expedition, led by Sir Chris Bonington and remembered for Doug Scott’s achievement as the first Englishman to reach the summit via the southwest face.
Doug was the eldest of three brothers. When Doug Scott’s mum was a teenager, a fortune teller told her she would have three sons. The eldest would end up in trouble in a shelter very high up and the whole world would be watching. Whether or not you believe prophesies, this one certainly bore a strong element of truth.
This year, the 25th of September marks the date 50 years ago when he and fellow climber, Scottish-born Dougal Haston, made history on the world’s highest mountain. On reaching the summit at 6pm, they were forced to spend the night without sleeping bags or down suits in a hand-dug cave in the snow just below the summit before attempting their descent.
The achievement, in an expedition led by Sir Chris Bonington – Doug’s fellow Cumbrian resident – came nearly two decades and hundreds of climbs into a lifelong passion for the mountains that first gripped Doug as a young teenager. He went on to pioneer many routes on mountains around the world and to share his experiences not only in books, lectures and photographs but also by shining a spotlight on and caring for communities in the wild places he visited.
He wrote in his 2015 autobiography Up and About: “This link between climbing in the mountains and a respect for nature and the people who live there has been significant to me.”
In 1994, he founded the Cumbria-based charity Community Action Nepal, which continues today five years after his death. Events to commemorate his and Haston’s achievement in September are focused on raising more funds for the charity’s work among some of the most remote communities in the Nepalese Himalaya where it delivers life-changing education, healthcare, agriculture and livelihood programmes.
A programme of events in August and September in the Lake District and London, sponsored by British outdoor brand Berghaus, will commemorate the achievement. A summit suit worn by Doug on Everest in 1975 will be sold in an online auction with funds going to Community Action Nepal and a new, 50th anniversary edition of Everest the Hard Way by Sir Chris will be printed.
Doug founded CAN to give back to the communities that helped him to achieve his mountaineering goals. In 2015, the Sherpa Heritage House, in the village of Khumjung in the Khumbu region of Nepal, was badly damaged in a devastating earthquake that hit the area. The house is the ancestral home of Pertemba Sherpa, who was a member of the 1975 expedition. Following the disaster, Doug promised Pertemba that CAN would raise funds to rebuild it and increase its support for local people in other ways. Doug was unable to complete the project before he died, but Sir Chris promised to continue the work when he turned 90 last year.
CAN has raised more than £150,000 for the house and completed the construction of the complex religious wing, but more is needed to complete phase two, which includes a museum, photography gallery and tea house to help raise income for the local community.
Berghaus, which has had a formal relationship with Sir Chris for over 40 years, has also supported the work of CAN, often responding to requests for help from Doug by donating kit for communities in Nepal, raising awareness and actively supporting other fundraising campaigns.
Sir Chris says: ‘The 1975 Everest expedition was a pivotal moment in my climbing career and my life, and of course it has a cherished place in British mountaineering history and wider culture. The expedition itself was a mammoth undertaking and was of its time. Achieving a new route by the southwest face was a huge achievement, albeit affected by the tragedy of the deaths of Mick Burke and Mingma Nuru.
‘In an era before 24-hour rolling news, social media or even mobile telephones, the traditional media operation that updated the rest of the world was not instant and added to the drama and anticipation. Everest the Hard Way was my attempt to capture all of that, and I hope that the new edition appeals to a new generation of readers and that the exhibition brings the climb to life even more for those who visit.
‘I am so excited to be meeting up with team members who are still with us and telling the story again to a packed room at the Royal Geographical Society. Doug, Dougal, Mick, Mingma and others who we have lost won’t be there in person, but they will certainly be very present nonetheless and we will all be doing our best to help fulfil Doug’s promise to Pertemba.”
Even before his historic ascent of Everest, Doug was respected among mountain climbers with a reputation for physical stamina and had appeared in numerous press articles and on television.’
Born less than two years into the Second World War to doting parents in Nottingham, his dad George, a policeman, had been a European and British Army boxing champion with sights set on the Olympics, a footballer, swimmer and later an official in Nottingham Amateur Athletics Association. Sport ran in the family’s DNA; Doug’s grandad was secretary of Notts County FC.
Doug grew up in a semi-detached rented home with no central heating. Amid rationing and frugal times, his parents carefully managed their finances, foraged, grew and preserved their own. His mother, Joyce, made cheese from the cream on the top of the milk, knitted and mended, so the young Doug never felt poor.
Drawn to the outdoors, time outside school was spent with pals. He was fit, running the two miles to his primary school and back at lunchtime, competing against himself to beat his time, and the top swimmer at his tough secondary modern school. Impressively, when Doug was 12, he cycled solo the 84 miles from Nottingham to Ingoldmells to the family’s annual seaside holiday. Restless and an attention seeker, he was able to channel his energy into the Scouts, which provided his first real taste of adventure.
In 1955 as a 13-year-old, he joined a Scout camp in Derbyshire where, hiking one day, they came across men climbing at Black Rocks. ‘I wanted to know more about these men in army anoraks and khaki trousers who were not soldiers, although they were shouting commands to each other’, Doug recalls in his autobiography.
Two weeks later, he and two friends returned to the area on their bikes, their equipment comprising his mum’s washing line and a car tow rope purloined by one of the lads from his dad. Despite their rudimentary gear, they completed a first climb rated ‘difficult’ followed by harder routes for which the tow rope was brought into service, ‘much to the amusement of regular climbers who told us the rope was only for safety and not direct help. We were supposed to be climbing the rock, not the rope’.
They learned by trial and error and emulating others. ‘I was born curious but also cautious with an inbuilt instinct for survival. We certainly didn't try to repeat everything we saw,’ wrote Doug.
Day visits progressed into weekend trips and he recalled a birthday list dominated by camping, hiking and climbing gear.
Next came a school residential to the UK’s first outdoor pursuits centre for state school children, White Hall at Buxton. ‘Jack Longland's vision was key but engaging the services of volunteer, amateur climbers and cavers was important too; they would respect the young students’ spontaneous curiosity and not stifle the joy of being out in open country with too much instruction. Volunteers were more likely than professional educators to keep the best traditions of British climbing alive.’ It was here that he learned to belay properly and to read a map and compass; skills he took on climbing trips to north Wales, although his first expedition was a disaster when he and his companion set fire to their tent!
Combining climbing with athletics and rugby, a trip to Scotland where he climbed 12 Munros in 14 hours was ‘a turning point in my life’ and the start of an insatiable urge to visit mountains everywhere. He admits he wasn’t as naturally gifted as other climbers of the time but was dedicated to learning and improving.
In 1958, Doug made his first trip to the Lake District, staying at the Outward Bound Mountain School in Eskdale. He was put in charge of a patrol of Ford workers from Dagenham and they scaled Yewbarrow, Skiddaw, Scafell and Scafell Pike. ‘That course whetted my appetite for the Lake District. What lovely country it is. I found it more beautiful and inviting than Wales,’ he wrote. Later that year he was back, arriving in Windermere and walking to Langdale and Wasdale.
His first trip abroad was as a Scout, hitchhiking to the Bernese Alps, to Chamonix, through Italy and on to Yugoslavia. Having gained his bronze, silver and gold awards in a pilot for the Duke of Edinburgh Award, he left school and headed back to Chamonix, just surviving his first Alpine climb after miscalculating the time and having to descend Requin in the dark in a storm. Undeterred, Mont Blanc came next.
Doug had considered journalism as a career, or becoming a doctor like his brother, but finally settled on a PE and geography teaching qualification which gave him long holidays in which to climb. In 1962, he married Janice Brook, a student nurse. He was 20 and she 18, and they honeymooned in north Wales so he could climb. In 1963, they became parents to Michael, who was born in Carlisle where Jan had gone to stay with her parents. On a visit while waiting for the baby to arrive, Doug got into more scrapes, crashing his bicycle on Kirkstone Pass and nearly being washed out to sea while kayaking off Silloth. By now, he was also regularly writing reports of his expeditions and, later, climbing guidebooks, which he referred to as an ‘exhibition’s afterlife’.
In 1965, he spent two months crossing the Sahara to climb in the Tibesti mountains of Chad, completing the first human ascent of Tieroko – sheep had got there first. In Afghanistan, climbing the Hindu Kush range reaching 6,700 metres without oxygen taught him more about the challenges of high altitude climbing. There was still time for Europe though: the Dolomites, Outer Hebrides for Strone Ulladale – the highest overhanging cliff in Britain and the most demanding rock climb he had been on – and later, the Spanish Pyrenees in between teaching social studies to teenagers.
By the time he headed for big wall climbing in Yosemite, Doug had taken on the look of John Lennon and embraced a counterculture promoting peace and love. It resonated with his natural instinct for sustainable living, environmental consciousness and respect for nature. With a plan to go to Baffin Island, in Arctic Canada, and his latest request for a leave of absence from teaching rejected by the education authority, he left the security of a ‘real’ job and set up a construction company with his younger brother, Garry.
His next project was doing up the new family home in Nottingham when a call came one morning from Don Whillans asking if he wanted to go to Everest. He admitted: ‘I had never before considered going to Everest, let alone the southwest face. Of course, I had heard all about it; It had been so often in the news over the last three years. The face was the next logical step in the exploration of the mountain.’
For further information about the Everest The Hard Way 50th Anniversary events, visit: canepal.org
The high point
Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s historic ascent of Everest in 1953 had followed the least difficult southeast ridge to the summit. Chinese and Tibetans had ascended the north ridge in 1960 that others had pioneered and Americans, Tom Hornbein and Willie Unsoeld, climbed the steeper west ridge in 1963. The southwest face was the ‘prime candidate’, wrote Doug Scott in his autobiography, Up and About.
Doug’s first opportunity on the mountain came in 1972 when he was invited, along with Don Whillans, to join a German and Austrian-led, large, multi-national team. It was an unhappy mix and eventually, on the mountain, the expedition was abandoned. Nevertheless, Doug enjoyed it, thought Everest interesting and found he could cope with the altitude and intense cold.
That autumn, he got a chance to return this time with a small group led by Chris Bonington, ‘a bona fide climber of the first rank’. This time, it was the conditions that forced abandonment.
So, it was third time lucky when, in 1975, he was invited back under the leadership of Sir Chris and left for Nepal knowing Jan was expecting their daughter, Martha.
Despite their leader’s meticulous planning, the talented Pertemba to manage the sherpas and funding for the latest equipment, some wrote off their chances before they even began. Doug wrote: ‘No matter how much we might try to convince ourselves that Everest is just another mountain, reaching its summit changes everyone who does it, in one way or another it's the peak with the most history, the greatest height, the thinnest air, the lowest temperatures and the wildest storms.’
The guilt he felt when Mingma Nuru, a young sherpa died, while carrying out extra work at his behest almost saw Doug turn his back on Everest, but when Sir Chris asked him to go up into the icefall with Dougal Haston – ‘the star of the show’ – the ambition to climb returned.
‘On a big mountain expedition, especially to Everest, there is both luck and design in who gets to climb high and eventually reaches the top,’ he wrote. This time, he and Dougal were ‘the lucky lads’ chosen to go forward, with thanks and admiration for colleagues who prepared the way for them and the sherpas and other members of the expedition who followed with a tent, food, rope and oxygen for the duo before retreating.
After a second night at camp six, at dawn after a cup of tea, they set off along the ropes.
By 3.30pm, with a bitter 40mph wind, Dougal suggested bivouacking and continuing the following morning. Doug was against it, not having a sleeping bag nor his down suit that he had left at camp six because it was tight around the knees and restricted his movement whenever he lifted his legs. ‘Without it, dressed in silk, cashmere and nylon pile, I knew I'd be terribly exposed if we stopped for the night.’ They decided to continue, though Doug admitted he was near the limit of his endurance. ‘Perhaps my oxygen had run out, because I became aware of a complete shift in perspective. My mind had parted company from my body and I was looking down on myself’.
At 6pm, they found themselves walking side by side to the summit, where they hugged. The wind had dropped and all was still in the early evening. They spoke little other than to point out distant mountains. Doug took photographs. He recalled feeling ‘fulfilled, confident, on top of the game – not humbled, exactly, but aware of something much bigger than myself, of which I was merely a part. I was again a child lost in wonder.’
