Lapland

Home from the Himalayas, I was emotionally bruised, not made easier by visits to the bereaved. For some time I had suffered from mild asthma, nervous asthma it was said, a symptom of delayed shock, and this at a time when post-expeditions demands were placed on me: reports, articles, and in due course the expedition lectures. All the time dominating my mind, even above family responsibilities, was the need to reduce my still substantial bank overdraft, and only by more lecturing could this be achieved. Fortunately all but a few of those audiences to whom I had already spoken now engaged me for a further talk on the Himalayas and at an increased fee, essential as a percentage was returned to the Y.R.C. My agents did me well; in the following two winters I was to receive 80 lecture engagements. Some useful contacts were made which in the years ahead were to prove highly profitable – societies or libraries to which I would become a regular visitor.
I was still employed as head of geography in a school but, with a sympathetic authority and a tolerant head, I was permitted some leave from my duties. This meant I could accept engagements further afield, even the London libraries, which were to become a profitable source of income. Lecturing with all that goes with it – travel and socialisation beyond the school gates – was beginning to take over much of my life. It was evident that if I was to continue a new subject would be required, the creation of which would satisfy my need for travel and adventure.
No new expedition was likely to follow for I was not in the same league as our top high altitude mountaineers, nor in the field of scientific exploration. If travel was to be the theme, then it must be done independently and some essential requirements needed to be considered. First ,y chosen area must be relatively cheap to visit and easy of access. That would present a wide choice but I required an area having both scenic and ethnic interest, and provide an element of adventure. With the map of Europe before me, only one area seemed to fulfil these requirements: Lapland, the northern third of Norway, Sweden and Finland. It proved to be a very happy choice for it not only provided me with a popular subject but much more; I was to make two friends who in the years ahead were to much enrich my life; more rewarding but for twenty years unsought and unsuspected, a loving second wife and, with her, another road to travel and adventure. Altogether Lapland served me well.

LAPLAND
I had already learnt that more than a travelogue with pretty pictures is required to present a lecture to an intelligent and sophisticated audience. People seek to learn as well as be entertained. Essentially the speaker must present himself as a person of some authority. With this in mind, over the next three years I devoted time to much study and note-taking. The books I read are still on my shelves and in my study still are my notebooks. I sought not to pass as a major authority on the area but to have a good working knowledge sufficient to answer the questions put to me. In particular I wanted to study the way of life of the Lapps, or more correctly, the Same people. I knew it was going to take time, several years in fact.
My first trip in 1959 was by way of being a reconnaissance, but I hoped would give me a background of knowledge that could be extended with further visits. I was determined to travel alone so that I could fully concentrate on lecture material and good photographic coverage; even so I regarded it in part as a mildly adventurous holiday in a wilderness area.
Lapland, so vast an area, as great as the whole of the British Isles, is spread over three countries. It was difficult to know where to begin but mountains dominated my mind and it was a group of these behind Narvik in Norway that first attracted my attention and from where I could cross easily to a similar group in Sweden. Northern Norway was an area easy of access. Departing every night from Bergen was the Express Mail Service sailing round the North Cape to Kirkenes, which carried not only tourists on the Midnight Sun Cruises but all the mail, supplies and people going from one place to another along a thousand miles of coast. The cost of the four-day journey to Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands was a mere £6 then, but I had no cabin. Alone among the passengers I slept on the deck disturbed only by the noise and commotion of calling at some port or the early morning washing of the decks.
Svolvaer, which I was to revisit many years later, is dramatically sited beneath towering crags. Here I changed vessels for the brief crossing to Narvik, the terminus for the iron ore railway line from Sweden, a place of wartime significance. It was along that line I was shortly to travel, loaded up with a lightweight Black’s tent and a few days’ food. I got off at Katterat, a station and three houses, and made my way up the Sordalselven pursued by a million mosquitoes. A footpath was marked on the map but I saw little evidence of it. At first I pushed my way through thick birch forest with no view and only the river to guide me, then through birch and Arctic willow with silver grey satin leaves before breaking out on to the tundra. The cloud was down and it was drizzling. There was little to tell I was not in some Scottish glen. I was delightfully free, no definite plans. When I got tired I put up my tent and made my evening meal. While doing this the sky cleared. High above, a rock pinnacle appeared, poised seemingly unattached floating on a sea of cloud. Then, as the cloud cleared more mountains and glaciers reminded me after all that this was not Scotland. Dominating the scene a few miles up the valley was a mountain called Sälkeokka which, if I ignored its steep rocky ridge, seemed a safe ascent for a solo climber. I was alone in a wilderness situation, no one knew where I was; my own natural caution would dictate that whatever ascent I should make would be by the easiest route. Setting off at 5 a.m. the next morning, I did climb up a small glacier, then kicking steps up a steeper snow couloir. There was a tiny pile of stones to show that it had been climbed before; how long since the last ascent I wondered, and how long before the next? A modest peak only a little over 5,000 feet, climbed without difficulty or danger, but I was fully satisfied.
The next day I made an ascent of the Domstind, steeper, more shapely if less high, after which I needed to reprovision. At Katterat the Station Master halted the Stockholm-Narvik Express specially for me and, dishevelled and dripping, I climbed into a carriage of surprised passengers. Loaded with food for a week I returned to the same camp after which I moved south over two passes to a place of the utmost isolation and close to the Swedish frontier called Starvatn Cuno Javrre. Here, beside the torrent which fed the lake, I camped for two days hoping for an opportunity to climb one of the easier summits of Stornsteinfell, a group of fine rock peaks that dominated the area, but the clouds were down and I rarely saw the mountains. My idleness was compensated by the pleasure that for the first time since bringing back minnows in a jam jar as a boy, I did begin to catch fish. Half an hour’s work and I would land a reasonable sized trout which, fried in butter, made delicious eating. Even with this addition to my diet I could not linger long so I moved down the Norddalen. Half way down the valley a building was marked and prominently named in large letters Stations Holmens, a place of some importance I felt which must be occupied. I lengthened my march in order to reach it but found only a deserted Lapp kata, a primitive conical structure of birch branches and peat. The next day I walked down to the farms of Skjoendalen where, with only the children to interpret, I restocked my food supply.
Rested and reprovisioned, I set off on a five-day trek to Sweden’s Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in the country. It was a route that took me across a great expanse of high tundra and by many lakes, each remembered for some little incident: my first sight of a lemming, a fisherman who had flown in by seaplane and whose catch would pay for the charter, the sophisticated Same with modern mountain tent and Primus watching his reindeer herd through binoculars. On the fourth day I passed by five lakes that were not even marked on the map. I then descended into a prominent valley where for the first time I was on a well trodden track. This was the Kungsladen, the Royal Trail which extends 150 miles from Jackvik to Abisko through Sweden’s wildest and finest country and served by a chain of huts. Now for the first time I met fellow trekkers. They were long legged Swedes with enormous rucksacks and fair haired sunburnt girls, enchanting creatures who bathed naked not far away.
The next day I reached the well appointed Kebnekaise Fjellstation, an island of good food, comfort and hot showers or sauna. It was good to sit down to a well cooked meal. It was still 30 miles to Kiruna and the nearest road or railway, and I hope it still is, but it was then served by a daily helicopter service though most supplies for the season were brought up by sledge in the winter and spring. The chief attraction of the Fjellstation, but rising so steeply above it that little of it could be seen, was Kebnekaise, 7000 feet. A group of professional guides were looking for likely clients, but with my modest Alpine experience and modest funds I felt a solo ascent was within my ability.
I was away before the guided parties and from the glacier at perhaps 4000 feet could see the eastern face extending for perhaps a couple of miles below the twin summits. A mountaineer could pick our a dozen engaging routes up buttress, ridge or snow arête but these were not for me. Tracks across the snow led to a small slope where a staircase of bucket steps pointed the way. I came out on the ridge near a small hut the Topstuga. Outside were three friendly Swedes gathering their ropes and ice axes who cordially invited me to join them. The highest point, the Sydtoppen was easily reached but I was glad of their company and the security of a rope along the narrow arête to the Nordtoppen. I returned alone, cautiously descending a steep couloir to the Tarfaladen Glacier and the valley of the same name.
I had enjoyed myself doing what I like most, climbing mountains, wilderness travel; so active it was easy to forget the real purpose of my visit. Even if this first visit was only a reconnaissance, I was collecting material for a lecture. With this in mind and two new lenses to my Leica I had taken many pictures of forests, tundra and high peaks but pretty pictures don’t make a talk; human interest and serious facts are required. People like to learn and of most interest were the people native to the area, the Lapps or Same.
I was reminded of this that very night when I looked out of my tent close on midnight and saw filling much of the valley and its sides a vast herd of reindeer. Driven by no Same or their dogs they slowly moved down seeking a further feeding ground. Of course I had already learned much about the Same from study at home and more recently in conversation with local people. Of the true nomadic Same following their herds there were few in number and I was not to meet such a family for another two years, but there were others who had two homes. They would spend the winter in the lowland forests but as soon as spring was on the way the herds got restive, full of the urge to move away from the coming swarms of mosquitoes. When they have arrived among the fells in mid June, pausing on the way for the calving, the Same would repair their birch and sod katas and settle down for much of the remaining year. Their herds are left to browse while they can be busy at their crafts, and hunting and fishing.
I was anxious to meet such a family and some of the Fjellstation staff told me of such a group two days march to the south. A short journey by boat then many miles of slightly undulating trackless tundra, with views ahead to the peaks of the Sarek and I dropped down to an area of dwarf forests and lake. Smoke drifted up from a group of rough birch huts, the Lapplager of Tijuonjokk. Except for an occasional seaplane with its fishermen, few tourists passed this way and, as with all people little touched by civilisation, I was received hospitably. Before I was allowed to pitch my tent, I was taken to the head of the family, a traditionally and colourfully dressed old lady where I was seated on birch branches in the main kata, a fire on the floor, smoke rising through a hole in the roof, the whole family gathered round while I was served coffee. That night, after a meal of delicious smoked charr I slept on a pile of reindeer skins.
I now had to travel down the birch forested banks of the Kaitum Alv, a river of considerable size. Just how long it would take me to reach the railway line and civilisation I did not know for I was soon to walk off the limits of my map. Without this aid all I could do was to follow every bend and twist of the river. All too often my way was barred by swamp or bog and if I did find a track it was of elk or bear for it led nowhere. One can have too much of solitude and forest; on the third day I was really longing for the journey to end but the river stretched ahead bounded by endless forests. Late in the afternoon, weary and discouraged, I halted to make soup. I was just lighting the fire when I heard in the distance the hoot of a train. It was the same note I had heard five weeks before in Narvik. An hour or so later and I reached the small unmanned halt of Fjellasen and that night I dined well if expensively in Sweden’s iron ore boom town of Kiruna.
My feats on the mountains had been brief and modest. They were not the challenge, it was the country, its wildness, its loneliness, its wide expanses … to travel for days in such a land, alone and self supporting, was in itself sufficient reward, but not of course the real aim of the journey. The story of my travels so far would have limited appeal even with good photographic coverage. To widen my experience I travelled further north to Karasuando, where Sweden’s most northerly church overlooks the Muonio Alv which I crossed into Finland. I was later to describe this as the forgotten country in Europe but it was a country that was later to play a significant part in my life.
For the most part I travelled by bus or hitch hiked and camped at night travelling down the Arctic Highway to Rovaniemi, Finland’s Arctic capital near the Arctic Circle. Muonio was one of the small towns along the way where I waited for a bus. Also waiting was an English-speaking Finn. “An English lady is living in a hotel nearby,” he said. “She’s writing a book and learning Finnish.” This was Sylvie Nickels who many years later was to become my second wife. At Rovaniemi, Finland’s Arctic capital, rebuilt after the war to the design of Alvar Aalto, I camped by the river, a camp ground deserted but for myself. It was bitterly cold and it rained and continued to rain. Some time during the night I woke to find a river running through the tent, sleeping bag soaked. Drenched and shivering I crossed the bridge to a sleeping Rovaniemi to seek shelter in the only place where there was some sign of human life, the police station.
I returned home with some knowledge and many pictures of the three countries that formed Lapland but with insufficient material for a professional lecture. However, what was encouraging, my agents had done me well: I had a full programme of lecture engagements. I was also now the holder of a personal glossy, illustrated presentation leaflet. Now armed with the leaflet and with my modest success, I felt I could approach the Tourist Offices of the countries concerned. This was accepted practice for journalists, why not for lecturers? And so, with a degree of self inflation and modest exaggeration I approached the Swedish Tourist Office in London to be rewarded with free rail travel. Thus encouraged my next approach was to the Finnish Tourist Office, this time in person to Finland House in the Haymarket, where I met the Director. This was Birger Ek, a splendid man whom I was to meet again socially. He was a former pilot of the Finnish Air Force who had flown in JU88 in their war against Russia. The conversation went something like this: “Finnish Lapland, it’s a thousand kilometres north of Helsinki, we don’t know much about it.” It sounded as if he were speaking of another country or at least a place of little interest to tourists. “If you really want to know about Lapland,” he continued, “there’s an English lady, she spent many months up there. I’ll give you her address.”
Thus began a rather formal correspondence – “Dear Miss Nickels”, “Dear Mr Spenceley” –and the giving of much information, and so it might have ended but for my curiosity about the English lady in love with Lapland, the same lady, incidentally, about whom I had heard a year earlier in Muonio. What was she like, I wondered, young or old, I had no idea. When I found I had a free afternoon in London, I made a tentative suggestion that we might have lunch together. The fact that I took her to the prestigious and expensive Kettners implies that I was favourably impressed. It was a pleasant occasion, but no further correspondence followed, no further meeting arranged.
Perhaps starved of publicity and neglected by tourists, my interest in the far north of Finland was much welcomed. I was put in touch with Heikki Lehmusto at their tourist office in Helsinki and promptly offered free accommodation at the group of small hotels operated by the Tourist Department. But first to Sweden to take advantage of their offer of free rail travel, boat to Gőteberg and rail via Stockolm to Kiruna in the far north.. I was anxious to learn something of the iron ore industry and was given a tour of the mines that in the last war had kept Germany’s armament factories functioning so fully. I had obviously done my homework well for I also dined with the doctor who, by ski or float plane, served the Same, community scattered over a vast area.
It was Finnish Lapland that was more in my mind, the lesser known, least populated, most remote of all the Laplands, and so to Karasuando, where Sweden’s most northerly church overlooks the Muonioa Alv and the ferry which took me across to Finland. At the time of this visit Finnish Lapland, covering an area the size of England, had only two roads of any note. From Rovaniemi, Finland’s Arctic capital, there was the Arctic Highway built in 1929 stretching 300 miles, and the road west which now took me to Kilpisjärvi and the junction of the three countries, and here was the first of the several hotels operated by the Finnish Tourist Board. You see the working of my mind: free board and lodging! But I had another purpose. Rising from the hotel was one of the few mountains of the country, hardly a mountain more like a Pennine fell and equally bare of sturdy growth: tundra or tunturi we would call it. This was Saana at 1028 metres, the second highest point in Finland and the Holy Mountain of the Sami. The highest top by only a few metres is Halta Haldi, fifty miles further north, too far for me on this occasion, but Saana gave me splendid views over the trackless wilderness and the hotel gave me good company; it seemed that the Finns were arguably as at home speaking English as their own obscure language.
I returned the way I came to Muonio and then by a minor road to Pallastunturi and another of their financially convenient hotels. I had made a very good choice for my second venue for as I was at reception in walked my former adviser Sylvie Nickels, last seen in London. Neither of us could then have foreseen that many years later our friendship would become the loving partnership we were to enjoy for so many years.
Sylvie was then the dedicated writer she continued to be, a career girl working on her first book but happy to help me with my travels. I was soon introduced to Johanna Kaartinen, the manageress of the hotel, and her assistant Eva, and there was much socialising and some travel. One visit we made was to the simple wooden home of Yrjő Kokko, a distinguished Finnish writer whose classic on the Lapps, The Way of the Four Winds, became a valued addition to my library.
It was at Pallastunturi that I was introduced to what is an integral part of Finnish life, the sauna, not merely a means of keeping clean, but of rest, relaxation and a social occasion to which guests are invited. So essential is it to the Finnish way of life that it must feature, hopefully illustrated, in any lecture I was to present: not the electrically heated city sauna but in a wooden hut with birch branches and wood burning stove, followed by a plunge in the lake. Some casual remarks of mind prompted the immediate cooperation of Johanna and Eva, only Sylvie modestly declined to be part of a photograph that in future years would be projected on the screens of countless halls.
Pallastunturi outside the ski touring season has little to offer other than trekking over the barren hills with which it is surrounded, so I travelled further north on the Arctic Highway to the Tourist Hotel of Inari. The purpose of my visit was to meet the loneliest men in Europe, not Lapps but Finns living their solitary lives gold washing close to the head of the Lemmenjoki river. I took a day’s walk to Solojärvi from which the once-a-week postboat leaves. Loaded with parcels and post we passed through a chain of lakes leading to the Lemmenjoki river up which we chugged almost to its head where a group of wild looking dishevelled men eagerly awaited our arrival. These then were the lonely men, each living a solitary life in a simple cabin beside one of the tributaries that flow down to join the Lemmenjoki river. The next day I set out to walk across the tundra to visit one of the lonely men. I found him, a solitary figure, living in a small self-built cabin but seemingly self-contained and content and as with most Finns there were books around. He had a smattering of English and before showing me his method of gold washing in the stream, he opened a small container of gleaming specks of gold. A contented man he seemed fully fulfilled living here, winter and summer. In the winter he hunted the bear or wolverine during which time he was supplied by a light ski-plane landing on the flat top of the fell.
It is easy to make friends in Finland as I was soon to learn once back in the hotel at Inari. Everyone had said I must meet Sara Strengell, she knows about the Same, she will help you.. Well, there she was, staying in the hotel and an introduction was soon made. Formerly an actress by profession, trained both in Vienna and New York, now a theatre director in Vaasa but soon director of the Svenska Theatre in Helsinki. Helsinfors she would call it for she belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority.. She was older than I by a good few years but striking in appearance and personality. Heads turned when she entered a room or spoke. She had poise and a remarkable gift for languages. At our evening dinner table she could switch effortlessly from her own native Swedish to Finnish, English, German or French, all immaculately spoken and pronounced.
Among this international gathering was a young German who wanted Sara’s assistance on a long trek he proposed to make across the trackless wilderness from Inari to Enontekiő. “I’ll be the first German to make it,” he said, and so it was planned. The three of us set out the next day, the German, let us call him Hans, bent under a load almost as big as himself. A blank on the map it may seem devoid of track or dwelling but a scattering of people do live here, small fisher Same settlements and it was there we stayed, the German in his tiny tent, Sara with the Same, I in the open with a mosquito net to cover my face. Although Hans spoke adequate English he kept up a constant flow in his guttural German, a strain on my tolerance, so I was relieved when within a day of Enontekiő we left him to achieve his ambition and we parted to return by a different route.
I made further journeys in Finland as far north as Utsjoki on the border with Norway, and more trekking, before a slow journey south. It was now well into September, there was a chill in the evening, the mosquitoes had gone, but in Lapland this is the most beautiful time of all, ‘ruska’ when the tundra and birch turn into a glorious gold with splashes of russet and crimson. I saw this as I travelled south and back again through Sweden. I had collected much material, factual and photographic, but still not adequate for a professional lecture. A further visit would be required and a full winter programme of engagements and further encouragement from the tourist organisations concerned prompted me to plan a more ambitious programme beginning March 1961 in the most exciting season of all, spring.
In greater comfort this time I flew by Finnair to Helsinki and then on an internal flight to Finland’s Arctic capital Rovaniemi, landing on an ice-bound airfield. Spring it may have been in England but here in Lapland it was still a hard frozen landscape all enveloped in a covering of snow, the fastest river still frozen. At night the temperature plunged far below zero, but for the Same people this was the season to travel. With no swamps to bar their way or rivers to cross, the reindeer sledge would quickly take them wherever they wished to go. For me this was the best season of all to be in Lapland and my travel plans were much eased by meeting again with that great lover and authority on Lapland, Sara Strengell, briefly in the north in a break in her theatre work. She was happy to travel with me for part of the way and so with a pair of borrowed skis we set off from Enontekiő, I enjoying that rare thrill that filled my adventure-loving heart with joyful anticipation at the beginning of a new adventure. There was the same thrill that I had felt six years earlier as I stood on the bridge of the Albatross as it sailed along the coast of South Georgia.. It was a magical morning, the low sun bringing some colour to the scene and casting light shadows from the scattering of dwarf birch trees.
We soon crossed into Norway but with nothing to mark the border. This is Finnmark, Norway’s largest and least populated province as big as Belgium and Holland put together, 25,000 square miles of undulating barren tundra where for eight months of the year it is winter. As I write now I have a recent map marking the thin line of a road. No road then existed, we travelled on a compass course but we knew our destination was Kautokeino, the largest pure Same town in the world where we settled into the small Tourist Hotel. The only other guest was a German photographer rather to the distaste of the manageress. Memories of the war were still close. “It is my job to be courteous to all my guests,” she said, “but with the Germans I find it difficult.”
Sara had brought me to the right place at the right time for at Easter Kautokeino is the gathering place for Lapps from the north of all three countries, everyone fully dressed in their traditional colourful garb and through the streets the reindeer sledges raced wildly, no motorised skidoo as might be the case now. Easter is a traditional time for weddings and several times a day the long procession headed by bride and groom would thread its way to the little church on the hill.
I treasure the photographs I took during my few days in Kautokeino of this highly colourful spectacle of the Same wearing a variety of costumes and headgear according to the area from which they came but all bringing some life and brilliance to an otherwise drab white landscape. Tourism had yet to reach and perhaps tarnish the scene; it seems the only visitor was the German photographer, but there were other residents eager to welcome the stranger. Kautokeino contained a small Scandinavian artists and writers colony and our evenings were spent in their company where Sara’s rather striking personality sparkled. Her company was stimulating in the short term but perhaps too overpowering to live up to in a long relationship. I was not surprised to learn of the break-up of her marriage, but she spoke little of her personal life.
Our next destination was Karasjok, some 80 miles to the north-west. Between the two towns there is a weekly snowmobile service, a new type of vehicle only recently then introduced, but we set off ahead of this in the hope of seeing some reindeer herding. In this we failed but we did meet a family of real nomadic Same. Their tent appeared ahead, dark in colour, made of cloth and reindeer skins round a circle of upright birch branches. Outside was the ‘suonge’, their storeroom on a wooden platform reached by a ladder above the reach of dogs or wolverines. The head of the family came out to welcome us, a splendid character with his reindeer lasso over his shoulder. Our welcome was enhanced perhaps because Sara could respond to them in a few words of their own language. A primitive home is sometimes thought of as scene of disorder and want of design, but a Same tent is a little cosmos, the layout of which has been established by ancient tradition. Beyond a few boxes, there was no furniture, the floor of birch branches over which were reindeer skins. The wife busied herself with the fire in the centre and was soon preparing a reindeer meat stew for us; beside her, nursing two small dogs was her mother, very old you might guess from the creases, but with a face of great serenity. Permission was given to take photographs and these I still treasure, for they are pictures of a way of life that must now have long past.
The next day, or was it the day after, the snowmobile caught us up and we continued the journey in ease and comfort to the second town of Norwegian Finnmark, Karasjok. My memories have faded but we somehow made our way to Utsjoki from where we made a bold attempt to ski across to Sevettijarvi, a settlement of the Skolt Lapps who belong to the Orthodox Church, formerly living in territory ceded in 1944 to the Soviet Union. The huts had been carefully marked for us on our maps and we had adequate food if only a great lump of reindeer meat kept frozen on the top of my rucksack. We never made it, time had run out and we were advised to return by a member of the Finnish border patrol with whom we shared a rough hut. They were returning from their patrol along the border with the Soviet Union. Sara Strengell returned to her theatre work but I stayed on, more days in Utsjoki, Inari and Ivalo, hoping to find a reindeer round-up but that was a spectacular event which escaped me.
While in Helsinki paying my respects to the Finnish Tourist Board, it was suggested that I might consider making Finland itself the subject for a lecture. “We are the forgotten country of Europe,” they said. This was certainly a thought for the future, but meanwhile I had a full winter season of lecture engagements and in due course a new subject to prepare. All this on top of nearly full-time teaching. Now, in old age, I marvel at my energy.

c) Turkey 1964 to 1965

TURKEY 1964-65

My winter lecture programme 1963-64 had been sufficiently rewarding to consider the creation of a new subject. ‘Where are you going next?’ people would ask. Wherever it might be, the same criteria must apply: accessibility, variety and interest. With these factors in mind I came up with Turkey, not then the tourist venue it has since become. All that I had heard or read about the country indicated its interest and diversity and my intention was to devote two or three summers to its study, to travel and photograph widely.
It was a chance meeting with my friends Pat and Peter Shorter which made this a reality. They were eager to join me and besides tremendous enthusiasm for climbing, they shared between them a useful range of other skills. Pat had much medical and surgical knowledge, Peter knew all about cars and they were both superb cooks who could effortlessly rustle up the most exquisite and exotic dishes. Washing up was the only culinary task I was ever permitted.
Anatolia is ringed with mountains but at only five places do they thrust themselves up to a height sufficient to bear snow in summer and offer a real challenge to the mountaineer. Highest of all and giving a view over three countries is Noah’s mountain, Mount Ararat, rising in solitary splendour from the heart of old Armenia to over 17,000 ft. It is an ice-capped cone of lava and only good lungs and limbs are needed for its ascent so that it has been climbed more often by athletic intellectuals than by skilled alpinists. South of Ararat, beyond Lake Van, in that wedge of Turkey which separates the frontiers of Iraq and Iran, are the rugged mountains of the Hakkari, at that time the last stronghold in Turkey of the semi-nomadic Kurds. Freya Stark had travelled there and more recently Tom Weir, but from 1960 this had become a totally restricted area, for it was Government policy to insulate these unassimilated and troublesome people from contact with the foreigner. Occasionally, the ban has now been lifted but, as for anywhere else east of the Euphrates, permission may still be withheld. (Note from Sylvie: indeed decades later it has become the scene of terrible conflict and countless fleeing refugees.)
North of Ararat, following the coastline of the Black Sea, are the Pontic Alps, crowned at their eastern ends by the rocky peaks of the Kaçkar group. But here, where the climber may look into Soviet Russia – and the Caucasus – across Turkey’s most vital military frontier, again the foreigner was not encouraged. In 1964, Robin Fedden led the first British party to these mountains but they were restricted to the northern watershed. It seemed we could go to none of the best mountain ranges in Turkey. There was Erciyas Dag of course, the ancient Mount Argaeus which makes a noble background to the old Cappadocian town of Kayseri; one could travel there unhindered, but like Ararat it is only an isolate volcanic cone.
All that was left for us was the Ala Dag, a 25-mile range of mountains lying between Erciyas and the Cilicia Gates; these were certainly high enough, reaching 13,000 feet in places, reasonably accessible and still satisfyingly little known. They were not quite so enticing as the Hakkari perhaps, but they seemed the best choice for our expedition. Expedition is a word I should hardly use; if I do so it is only because it adds flavour to a journey that might otherwise suffer the indignity of being called a trip. After all, we had no pretensions to anything more serious than climbing where few had been before.
The first of the few were Germans and Austrians who between the wars made three visits; they climbed Demirkazik, 13,000 feet, the highest peak, and some 30 others. Then came the British, wartime residents in Turkey, notably E.H. Peck and R.A. Hodgkin, who again climbed Demirkazik, this time by a couloir on its west face. More recently, S.E.P. Nowill, an English businessman living in Istanbul, to whom we were much indebted for information, had made three visits and more ascents; a few weeks before our arrival an expedition from Northern Ireland had been in the area carrying out a detailed survey. We had to admit there had been quite a few visitors before us and it is possible that now the mountains still unclimbed are to the south east around Torasa Dag.
But Turkish mountains were to be only part of our plan and purpose for there was much else to interest and delay us on the 7,000 mile round journey upon which in the middle of July 1964 we set out. With determination and stamina one can motor to Istanbul in five days but in Austria we took time off for a training exercise on the Gross Venediger and again we were nearly tempted to delay our progress when, crossing into Yugoslavia by the Wurzen Pass, we saw before us the magnificent grey limestone peaks of the Julian Alps. Through Bulgaria we lingered not at all, except to taste its food and wine, but hurried on, rattling along cobbled roads all through the night, halted once by armed soldiers, muddled by endless form filling at the frontier to stretch out exhausted on Thracian sand for a few hours’ sleep before rushing on, now on earth roads in a cloud of dust, to our first swim in the Marmara Sea. It had taken us nine days to reach Turkey.
However dedicated, no mountaineer should hurry without pause through Istanbul and to stop there for a few days was part of our plan. That in the congested and chaotic turmoil of traffic in that city we survived those days without damage to the car can only be accounted for by brilliant driving – our driving that is – or was it just good luck? But we were even more alarmed on the busy Ankara road where hundreds of tottering, disintegrating buses compete with each other to offer the fastest inter-city schedule. Turkish drivers seem to believe they have some divine right of way and anyway whatever happens is the will of Allah. The many shattered wrecks on the side of the road tell their own story.
From Ankara we drove south-east by the great salt lake of Tuz Golu. From its southern shores we turned off along dusty rugged tracks to follow in the footsteps of a certain wandering French scholar who some time in the late 18th century accidentally rediscovered one of the wonders of Asia.
Here, where the land falls away from the plateau to a wide valley below, one is suddenly transported into some lunar landscape of fabulous shapes. Where once in some prehistoric upheaval a layer of volcanic debris was scattered, eroding forces have carved from the soft volcanic tufa an infinite variety of cones, columns and towers, gigantic in size, grotesque in shape. This is Göreme where man and nature have combined to create the wholly fantastic, for in this volcanic landscape, in a setting so favourable to ascetism and mysticism, dwelt hermits and monks, aspiring to ‘a better world’. Over an area of 48 square miles hundreds of these rock spires and valley slopes have been hollowed out to form cells, chapels, churches and monasteries. Almost unrecorded by history, over a period extending from St. Paul’s converts to the early 15th century, dwelt hermits and communities of early Christians, refugees seeking solitude and security from Romans, Iconoclast, Arab, Turkish or Mongol threat. And here hidden in their hewn out homes is a lost province of Byzantine art, for their walls and ceilings contain the world’s most complete collection of Christian frescoes. In such a wonderland no apology was needed for further delay and we ourselves happily became troglodytes, taking up residence in a convenient cave – the coolest camp we were ever to enjoy.
But mountains came to the fore at last and we pushed on, going south-east again, two days journey over the arid plateau. Near Nigde, we turned off to the village of Camardi on the outskirts of which, in a primitive mud and wattle hut, we found Ibrahim Saffak – poor and ragged, simple and illiterate but one of Nature’s greatest gentlemen. His name had been given us by Sydney Nowill as the best muleteer for the job. We arrived and Ibrahim and his wife, colourfully dressed in the local costume, and the whole family made us welcome and honoured guests with a cordiality which was no less for being inarticulate. Removing our shoes we sat cross-legged on mats spread out on the earthen floor of their simple home, eating with our fingers in folds of unleavened bread, food from the communal dish. We were not allowed to cook for ourselves and five times we were fed and refreshed by these good people but they would take no payment. Later when we tried to settle up for the hire of donkeys, at the mention of money there came into Ibrahim’s face a look of utter distaste. We pressed him to accept but only the exact figure would he take – not a fraction more. But this was typical of Turkey where one often found oneself doing inverse bargaining for goods or services that seemed to be too lightly valued.
That night we faced the most striking scene of our Turkish travels. Enhanced by dispersing thunder clouds the whole western range of the Ala Dag was spread before us, glowing rich orange in the evening light; giant jagged limestone peaks, they were fully Dolomitic in size and shape. Dominating all others was Demirkazik, the only peak with a history of several ascents but its height and location made it the greatest challenge. And here in our too early estimation of these mountains we made an error. Snow on the northern faces we had seen as we approached the range; here, viewed from the west, the hot evening sun seemingly warming every gully and crack of that face, not one tiny vestige of it could be seen. This was the face by which we should ascend and the south and east sides of the mountains must be equally free. It was a decision we were much to regret.
The heat of the Anatolian sun makes no start too early. We rose before dawn following Ibrahim, his son and our two overloaded donkeys. At about 7,000 feet on the upper pastures we found the camels and black tents of the ‘yuruks’. These are simple nomadic herdsmen, possibly descendants of the Seljuks those Turkish tribes who had preceded the Ottomans out of the steppes of central Asia. We were to have friendly contact with them for they needed medical care and they came with gifts of sheep’s milk yoghourt. A thousand feet higher, through the steep defile of the Narpiz Gorge, we entered the great cirque of Yalacik. Amid a meadow rich with Alpine flowers, a green oasis in a stony waste, flowed a stream. It bubbled out among the rocks but in a dozen yards was lost again, evaporated on the hot stones. A little below stood a boulder offering the only possible shade in these parts. We had brought no tents, nor indeed had need of them; we slept in the open beside the boulder and on our off days rotated round it in opposition to the sun which was now, together with thirst, to be our greatest foe.
The next day we continued up the valley through the Upper Narpiz Gorge skirting the foot of Demirkazik which rises steeply up a 5,000 foot confusion of buttresses, ribs, gullies ands towers. A climber here might be defeated by the very intricacy of this disordered face. If we were to traverse the mountain, which we hoped to do, it might well be down this face that we should have to find a route, but so complex were the crags and gullies that we could make no order of them or pick an obvious line. From above, it would be even more difficult but perhaps further to the east we should find an easier alternative. We satisfied ourselves that day by simply reaching the col by which time the hot sun and the torments of thirst did not induce further exertion. It had been a useful reconnaissance and we had gained some knowledge. If altitude had reduced the temperature this was not apparent, we were as much grilled here by the high sun as at the lower levels; water, away from the haven of our base camp boulder, was not to be found and finally the peaks were steeper, more complex and uncompromising than we had earlier judged. If there are easier ascents few were to be found in this watershed.
One peak that we considered less difficult than others was selected for a training exercise. We needed some training, not only for muscles softened by weeks of motoring but for re-acclimatisation to heat and dehydration. What name the mountain possessed, if indeed any, we did not know for the only available maps are on a scale of l : 800,000 and contain no detail or accurate information. All we had was the Esso road map for Turkey which did at least mark Demirkazik. After three hours of scree we roped up by a patch of old snow and took to the rocks following an obvious line of weakness, a dried up watercourse, which seemed to rise unbroken to the crest of the ridge. The rock was delightfully sound, but so smooth and rounded that when the angle steepened we were forced out on to the gully wall. This was steeper still but easy and we could have made rapid upward progress had we not found ourselves now on rock bountiful indeed in holds, but utterly loose. The whole mountainside was unstable, nothing could be trusted. Thus we learnt a further lesson; where easy the rock was dangerous, where safe it was impossible.
We failed to return to the watercourse so we followed this new line up the tottering face, moving one at a time, painfully slowly and with the utmost caution. A dozen alternative routes presented themselves up chimney, groove, gully or buttress but the rocks swept up to such a height that for the first time we were beginning to wonder if all the daylight hours of one day were sufficient, at least at such a pace as ours, to trace through this rock complexity a route to the summit, and return. We were even more doubtful of any justification for continuing at all on the dangerous rock and when Peter swung on the rope, the whole ledge on which he had been standing having collapsed beneath him, we knew we must retreat.
This chastening experience might have made the attainment of Demirkazik seem remote but at least there we should not be treading new ground and earlier climbers had written of no great trial or terror. Furthermore we knew the way; Sydney Nowill had briefed us well and we had brought a copy of Hodgkin’s account with us. We were to ascend by what should be known as the Hodgkin-Peck Couloir which, for almost 3000 feet cuts deep into the west face. Peter had already reconnoitred the route almost to the foot. Our only doubt was the descent.
We set off in the dark stumbling over block scree, our rucksacks heavy with water containers. We knew that we were as likely to be defeated by dehydration and heat exhaustion as by length and difficulty. After three hours or so of murderous scree we gained the foot of the couloir – the same one we thought we had seen from Camardi glowing red in the evening sun. Surprised and horrified we found it to be a long ribbon of snow which, when we came to it, was hard and consolidated, if not frozen at that hour and level. With ice-axe and crampons this would have made a speedy line of ascent and we cursed our imprudence in leaving them behind in the village. But all was not lost for like a Scottish gully in advanced spring there was a gap, a sort of chimney, between snow and bounding wall. To force our way up this would be slow and perhaps difficult but it tempted us forward at any rate to see how far we could get.
For eight hours we were in that gully squirming up between ice and rock, kicking steps at intervals where the gap narrowed, climbing cave pitches or escaping up the bounding wall to find for a time an easier route on the face. Where we could safely do so we moved together but our progress was more often one at a time. For some hours we were in blissful shade, then as the day advanced the sun struck mercilessly down. But we were not too ill prepared; we had a small petrol stove and we halted to make soup and melt snow for our flasks.
The couloir mounted to a deep notch on the summit ridge; somewhere before that we knew we must leave it and take to the face. The wrong exit and we should be defeated, lost in a confusion of buttresses and towers. Among several possibilities we fortunately found the right one and only 500 feet now separated us from the top. On iced rocks, Sydney Nowill’s party had taken four hours on this section, but although the climbing was now more serious, we completed the ascent in half that time. At 5.00 p.m. exactly 13 hours from our camp departure, we stood on the summit and on the brink of the longest steepest wall in the whole of Asia Minor. As if cut by a giant knife the north face fell away in an unbroken drop of almost 3000 feet, smooth and absolutely perpendicular.
It had been obvious for some hours that nightfall would halt us still high on our mountain. Although this was not part of our plan and we were ill prepared for it, a forced bivouac in these latitudes has few terrors. Dehydration rather than cold would be our greatest danger and discomfort but now, a little flushed with success, it seemed a small price to pay. We had no hope of finding water or, on this side, even a patch of snow, but we must get off the steeper rocks in the few remaining hours of daylight.
Nowill’s party, who had made the only previous traverse and had likewise been forced to bivouac, had started their descent by a long abseil down the south face. What we had already seen of this side was not encouraging and it seemed to us that the east ridge would follow an easier line. We followed a series of massive smooth boiler-plate slabs inclined at a fairly gentle angle, keeping the frightful edge of the north wall on our left. When the slabs steepened in a convex slope we escaped to the right into a tempting gully which lured us down for a couple of hundred feet until suddenly it changed direction and plunged into unfathomable depths. Painfully, we returned to our slabs. In truth, they were not too steep, a bold man could have walked down them with his hands in his pockets, but we were not bold and the slabs were littered with loose pebbles so that an unwary step would have caused a fall which, with no natural belays – and imprudently we wasted no time making artificial ones – would have been disastrous to the whole party. Gaining only moral support from the rope we descended, now too tired and anxious fully to appreciate the majesty of the hundred peaks bathed in the golden light of the setting sun. Just before nightfall we reached a ledge sufficient in size to accommodate us all and here we composed ourselves for the long wait for dawn, our only comfort a brew of the rum punch made with our last water and fuel.
We lay close together and shivered for ten hours, suffering now from cold as earlier we had done from heat. When at last sun and circulation returned we roped up and continued our descent. Soon we were out of difficulties and we could hurry down with little need for caution, the torments of thirst urging us to speed. But there was still a long way to go and it was nearly 11.00 a.m. before we were at camp blissfully soaking up gallons of water. We had been on the mountain almost 31 hours. That evening Ali came up with a donkey ready for an early descent the next day.
It was a warm departure from the Sufak family who had made us so welcome, and at the time it would have been difficult to imagine that forty years later I would be back again.

d) Turkey 1966

TURKEY 1966

My 1966 journey really was a bona fide expedition with all that goes with it – a proper name, headed writing paper, suitably lettered vehicles, a press write-up and, much more important, the support of the Royal Geographical Society; all combined to add status to an otherwise very modest enterprise. I had been asked by the Yorkshire Schools Exploring Society to lead an expedition and since this could give me an opportunity of visiting the now de-restricted area of the Kaçkar Mountains of Lazistan, I was glad to accept. We would be the first British expedition to the southern watershed.
We were a party of seven; my very knowledgeable deputy was Alastair Allen, recently returned from his second Northern Afghanistan Expedition. Alan Radermacher was the highly qualified geologist and botanist and the surveyor was a civil engineer from Leeds, Ian Salkeld. In addition we had three 18-year-old boys, all selected from the VIth forms of Yorkshire schools. From Ankara we hoped to have the services of a Turkish mountaineer to act as liaison officer. The Vauxhall Motor Company lent us two Bedford vehicles and we managed to obtain 500 man-day rations at a cost to us of less than £10. We did very well out of this because we sold our surplus food to the British Embassy in Ankara for £40, so that on our return we were able to dine and wine at good restaurants in half the capitals of Eastern Europe.
To travel as an expedition is rarely as much fun as to travel as an individual, nevertheless our enjoyment was enhanced by avoiding tourist centres and organised camp sites. Actually we never camped in the sense that we put up tents for, as on all my other Turkish trips, we simply slept in the open beside the vehicles. Our policy was to drive off into the country away from the main road, seeking some sanctuary close to a village. Of course in Communist countries such behaviour was then forbidden to western travellers but we considered it worth the risk and indeed it never failed to be rewarding – particularly in Eastern Europe where contact with the west was eagerly sought. No officials ever disturbed us and our friendly relations with the simple people of many lands gave us some of our most lasting and pleasant memories. We made good progress and seven days out from Dunkirk we were swimming in the Sea of Marmara; two days later we were in Ankara.
In spite of doubts in high official places no hindrance was put in the way of our access to the mountains of the Soviet border. Officially all eastern provinces were now de-restricted but we had been able to obtain no written confirmation of this, only vague assurance. Actually some other parties travelling to frontier areas were not so favoured and we wondered afterwards if our good fortune was perhaps due to the addition to our party of Gűrol Tan. He purported to be a Turkish mountaineer but in fact, as we later discovered, he was an officer in the Secret Police. He always slept with a loaded automatic under his pillow, whether to defend himself against us or brigands we could not decide.
Now grossly overloaded we trundled east for another four days to Erzerum and through the highly spectacular Tortem Gorges to Yusufeli and the last town of any importance. The arrival of seven strange Englishmen caused a stir among the population of this remote mountain stronghold and we were no doubt the topic of conversation in the coffee houses for many days. The ‘Vali’ or Principal Governor entertained us, we registered with the police, the military offered us an escort, but our greatest claim to fame or notoriety was the purchase of the town’s entire stock of ‘Raki’, a potent national drink.
Beyond Yusufeli we drove on tortuous roads up the bed of a gorge too confined for habitation but after a dozen miles and just short of the last village of Barhal we could go no further. Our horsemen came the next morning; they were handsome swarthy Georgians, the Islamised descendants of a Caucasian Christian people. It was a long and tiresome task sorting out a mountain of equipment and loading the six horses, so the sun was high before we set out; as yet unfit and unacclimatised to exertion in the heat, we were to suffer for this delay.
We climbed up well watered slopes rich with grapes, cherries, apples, pears and plums all in fruit. On the upper outskirts of the village of Barhal we came to Tamara Church, its gabled roof protruding above the foliage. It is a beautiful basilica of smooth grey stone built by Georgian Christians 800 years ago. For several hours we walked through orchards and forest, and even above the tree line it was lush and green and in remarkable contrast to the arid slopes of the Ala Dag. On the upper pastures we found no tents and camels of nomads but sturdy stone or timbered ‘yalas’ occupied during the summer months. Great herds of sheep and goats grazed on the mountain slopes. Above the last of the ‘yalas’ at a height of 7,260 feet, we made a camp on a pleasant green spur. It had taken seven hours to ascend from Barhal which was more a measure of our unfitness than of height or distance.
Our purpose here was to work, to make a map and to make some small contribution of knowledge in an area which we were the first to study seriously. To justify the support we had received we must fully utilise our limited time in the field so we were to have little relaxation; climbing mountains just for the fun of it would be secondary to other tasks. Early every morning Salkeld led his party off, first to measure a Base Line, later to the summit of vital peaks, while under the skilled direction of Radermacher, others collected and pressed rare flowers and geologised over a wide area.
Our camp lay at the foot of Kaçkar Peak, 11,750 feet, too close for us to admire its full majesty, but we could see something of the steep wall that formed its eastern face. To the north lay the great cwm of Hansaret Dere entirely bounded by steep rock peaks of considerable distinction. Most imposing perhaps was Büyük Kapi at the head of its northern branch. This was a great rock monolith rising in a vertical wall a full 2000 feet from the scree. A mile of lesser summits separated this summit from the six rock needles of the Altiparmak (the Six Finger Group), not unlike Chamonix Aiguilles, and the complete traverse of them would give the mountaineer his greatest challenge in these parts. According to the leading Turkish authority none of them had yet been climbed. This was confirmed when Allen with Gürol Tan climbed the most easterly of the Altiparmak which they did by tracing a route directly up one of the long buttresses of the south-east face. They saw no cairn or other evidence of earlier ascent. This was a useful reconnaissance for they found the rock, which was metamorphic, excellent climbing material and basically sound; it also indicated that Gürol Tan was no mountaineer and he returned a little shaken from this excursion, never to climb again.
Work on the Base Line completed, mountains had now to be selected for survey stations. When a heavy theodolite and tripod had to be lugged up, as well as plane table, we wished to avoid serious rock climbing and sometimes an earlier reconnaissance was advisable. All these peaks had steep intimidating crags but most possessed an easy route if it could be found. It was so for instance with the Kaçkar Peak which from camp appeared so frightening, but we ascended by way of Karagol where, close to a glacial lake, in a rough stone shelter hidden among the crags, dwelt a turbaned shepherd and his wife. Long boulder slopes led upwards to the ridge and the final rocks of the summit pyramid presented few problems. In a book below the cairn we found a record of earlier ascents, a German Austrian party and two Turkish parties; all we could claim, for what it was worth, was a first British ascent.
But one peak more difficult and rewarding than the others which we were certainly the first to climb was a further summit of the Altiparmak group ascended by Salkeld and two of the boy surveyors. While they were on this ridge Allen and I were engaged on the monolith-like peak of Büyük Kapi which offered us at least the most dramatic challenge. Gürol Tan firmly declared it impossible. The evening before this climb we had carried a bivouac up the Hansaret Dere almost to its foot. We slept in the open by a patch of melting snow, disturbed only by the passing of some heavy-footed beast, probably a bear, up the scree beside us. We looked at the eastern end of the wall where, except by artificial means, no route seemed possible and walked back to the middle where the angle relented. At first diagonally left and then directly up a series of cracks and chimneys, we climbed for 1,000 feet on good sound rock, quite steep but so amply furnished with holds that there was no great difficulty. We had so far made good progress but the final tower seemed less promising for it was a great upthrust of steeper and smoother rock, possessing few stances or any natural line of weakness. To commit ourselves to such an unbroken stretch of virgin rock, without knowing of an easier line of descent, was however a challenge we were not called upon to accept, for having reached a shoulder we were able to see round the back of the monolith.
Here lay the key to the problem for we found a gully into which we could easily descend. If it were climbable it would give us half our height. It seemed like cheating to leave this exposed and exhilarating face but we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that after all we were mountaineers seeking the easiest line up what we certainly believed was a virgin peak. Like all gullies it was loose and when we were able to we escaped on to the wall now climbing up a series of awkward scoops directly for the summit.
This, the most improbable of all the Kaçkar peaks, was ours and as we stood together on its confined top we hoped the others, now occupying our bivouac site a vertical 2,000 feet below, would see us and be suitably impressed; they were not to know that we had cheated and gone round the back. But alas we had again been forestalled for on the topmost rock stood a cairn, small as if in apology, but undoubtedly of human origin. The bold line of Büyük Kapi must have been as compelling an attraction to our German-Austrian predecessors as to us. Anyway they left an imbedded piton which gave us a line for our first abseil.
There remained now only one major peak for the surveyors to ascend and the map would be complete, that is within the limits we had set ourselves. Much more remains to be done to the east a little and to the west for another 15 miles, but our watershed, containing perhaps a third of the major peaks, was fixed with sufficient detail and we hoped a reasonable degree of accuracy. No doubt by now the Turks themselves will have surveyed the whole range with a thoroughness that we could not hope to match, but at least it had been interesting and creative activity and for the boys an admirable exercise. Time was now running out and all that could now be done was to return to a lower level by the most interesting possible route. With this in mind Allen and I were to return to Barbal with the heavy equipment while the remainder of the party made a three days’ trek over the mountains to the village of Ayder to which we would take the vehicles. It was understood a good road connected this place with the coastal town of Pazar.
Allen and I, suffering delays from two landslides (the catastrophic Erzerum earthquake had occurred less than a week earlier) and three punctures drove round the eastern end of the range to Hopa and the humid heat of a sunless Black Sea. From the coastal tea plantations we returned through a curtain of perpetual clouds to the mountains, on the worst roads of the whole expedition where a ten mile section took half a day. Through well watered slopes dense with forests of beech, hornbeam, alder, Spanish chestnut and spruce we drove, following the steep sided valley of the Firtina, a torrent fed by the melting snows and glaciers of the Kaçkar Dag and crossed here and there in its lower reaches by beautifully proportioned Genoese bridges. It seemed impossible that this fearful steep and stony track could lead to anything more than a few hovels but suddenly we emerged from the forest into the busy little community of Ayder. In almost perpetual cloud and drizzle a spartan holiday spa flourishes here, incredibly ramshackle but offering the therapy of natural hot springs and relief from the coastal heat.
The two parties joined, we returned to the Black Sea which we were to follow for the first two days of the long haul back to England, this time travelling through Romania and Hungary.
Our return journey is memorable in my mind for the few days passing through Romania, a country that was in years ahead to be of some significance in my life. As on our outward journey we chose to camp in rural areas far from main roads and towns ignoring, as earlier, the illegality of such conduct. We suffered no impediment, indeed quite the contrary. Our unexpected arrival if close to a village was received with great joy and profound interest to them; visitors from the West were as if from another world, a world from which they felt so unwillingly cut off. But their interest in us as strangers from the affluent West was fully matched by my interest in them, for in spite of poverty and shortages there still existed a real living peasant culture fully displayed in craftwork, needlework and costumes. Was it here that I took off my back an old nylon shirt in exchange of a beautiful hand embroidered runner which graced our hall chest for many years? Was it on this brief visit that I felt that Romania might make the subject for a new lecture? Amidst much poverty and suffering as well as corruption there lived a people surprisingly smiling and friendly, but they were to change with the coming to power of that absolute tyrant, Nicolai Ceausescu.

e) Turkey – Postscript 2004

Forty Years On …..
It was the summer of 2004 and, as had been our habit for some years, my second wife Sylvie and I were touring the remoter parts of East Europe and beyond in our camper van. In earlier years we had crossed the former Yugoslavia in one great uninterrupted swoop. This year it was delayed by borders and more borders: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and so to Greece. Iran had been our planned final destination but we were defeated by bureaucracy and we settled for Turkey. Of course we returned to the lunar landscapes of Cappadocia. Where earlier it was bereft of visitors, it was now disfigured by hotels and camp sites, tourists and guides. From there, where else but a return to the Ala-Dag Taurus. At one time little known, rarely visited, they now form the chief attraction of a National Park.
We deviated to stop at what we considered to be the Park’s centre. A young man approached us to ask if we spoke English. “I am a mountain guide,” he said. “Can I help?” Indeed he could. By amazing coincidence he was one of the family I had hoped to meet: Ibrahim Safak’s grandson, Basar.
Much excitement followed and we were guided to the well-built stone house to meet his father Ali, the young donkey boy who so long ago had guided us and our gear to a high bivouac site through the Nerpiz Gorge into the cirque at Yalacik. Then a young boy of little education, now speaking good English, he is a retired schoolmaster running with his son Basar, a small pension for trekkers and for those who come to see the unusual birds of these parts, the Wallcreeper and the Caspian Snowcock.
It was a highly emotional reunion; tears of joy ran down his face, there were kisses and embraces. “I am so happy,” he kept repeating. It felt like the return of a much-loved, long lost relative, and remarkable was his memory. “Your car was blue,” he said, “and you sent my father an electric torch,” Sadly his father had died some years earlier, although his mother was still alive but too old to visit. Fatima, the coquettish one, had married and, the mother of several children, was now living in Mersin.
And so we were welcomed as of old, well fed but now in comfort at a table, and there were showers, beds and, of course, as before, to offer payment would have been offensive. Such are the laws of hospitality in the East.

g) Romania 1968

I now considered a return to Romania in order to fulfill the need for a new lecture subject. It would be an initial solo visit of six or seven weeks. My two recent journeys through that country followed by some study had aroused my interest in a country then little visited by western travellers. That it had a rural and colourful peasant culture I already knew and that its people were open and easy to approach I had recently experienced. Its political system, offensive to western travellers, may have deterred many and indeed in the earlier years of communist rule the Party discouraged international fraternisation. A law had been brought in which required every Romanian to report to the appropriate State authority any contact with a foreigner from a non-socialist country.

In spite of the ever watchful eye of the Securitate this ruling seemed to have been largely ignored for I was to enjoy many friendly contacts with the Romanian people. Politically too it was of some interest. Nicolai Ceauşescu had come to power as President of the Republic in 1965, described by the Ministry of Information as the greatest Romanian in history. He was to become the ultimate tyrant before being disposed of by his own people and executed, but at the time of this visit he was displaying a sturdy independence of the Soviet Union in foreign affairs while at the same time imposing on his own people a rigid domestic reign. Somewhere I had read Ceauşescu was walking a tightrope suspended between east and west. At Comecon meetings the Romanian delegation was often in opposition to the Soviet Union. This independence was to be fully demonstrated later in the year when Romania failed to participate in the occupation of Czechoslavakia.

I left England in mid-July driving fast across Europe in my Cortina Estate loaded with full camping gear and equipped with my Leica, a battery of lenses and a stack of Kodachrome. I entered Romania at Oradea and drove on to Cluj to meet the first of their important minorities, Hungarians. This was Transylvania, a much disputed territory with much ill feeling between the two races. Wherever the one or the other, Romanian or Magyar, was dominant they would discriminate against the minority. I travelled east through Sibiu and Braşov, two towns in what is called the province of Siebenbürger or the Seven Castles, occupied by people of another race, Germans; they call themselves Saxons and Swabians. They arrived here in the early Middle Ages to act as frontier guards. By their industry and clannishness the German minority came to dominate the trades. In later visits to Romania I was to explore other of their cities, among them Bistriţa and Sighisoara and while there, noted in both villages and towns that the buildings were cleaner and more sturdy; also that, unlike the Romanian houses which were spread wider apart, the German houses formed an unbroken line along the main street.

On this occasion I had little need to meet this German minority, nor did they take notice of an unusual British visitor. Perhaps this was to be expected. During the last war it is recorded that seventy thousand Saxons served in the S.S. rather than the Romanian army. Perhaps I am prejudiced but somewhere I read of an English lady, Emily Gerard, travelling two centuries ago writing of the spontaneous friendship and hospitality of the Romanian people but never to receive the smallest sign of courtesy from the Saxons.

The detailed journal I must have kept is now lost as are many of my memories of this first long introductory visit to Romania. In spite of the Party’s policy of restriction I must have met the same friendly curiosity as on my two earlier visits and I remember a postcard being furtively handed to me on which was written ‘Welcome from a lover of the English language’, and a lady who went to endless trouble to find me a pot of honey for which no payment would be accepted. At one of my campsites someone gave me a bottle of home made palinka, fearsome stuff, and he only left me when the bottle was nearly empty and he in a sorry state.

And so, still on the main asphalt road to Bucharest, I camped in the forest of Bãnasa, close to the airport and the zoo. At an earlier time in its history, Bucharest was called the Paris of the East (east of Europe of course). The only evidence of this I saw was on the drive to my camp site along the once famous boulevard Soseava Kiseleff where once the carriages of the wealthy must have passed on the way to the houses of pleasure. I could still see fine villas half concealed at the head of poplar-bordered drives, perhaps then the homes of important Party members.

Bucharest was dreary with empty shops, peeling facades, ill lit streets and graceless blocks of flats. It was in this city that I first began to recognise the price the Romanians were having to pay for Communist orthodoxy, which I learnt in discreet conversations with some of its citizens, who were eager to speak when unobserved by the ever watchful Securitate. They spoke of fatigue, long working hours, inadequate public transport, the daily chore of shopping, long queues, censored news, barriers to travel.

I did travel east to Constanta and north through the coastal resorts soon to offer cheap beach holidays for western visitors, but my main aim was much further north to Suceava and the painted churches of Moldavia. The journey took longer than I thought. You could not then make a hurried journey and such was the variety and richness of life along the way that to hurry would make it less rewarding. Ox and horse carts dawdled along the main road as if safely along a farm track, lorries in a varied state of decrepitude with much honking wove in and out, while flocks of sheep and goats grazed by the roadside watched over by peasant women or children.

Slowly and with many halts to photograph and delight the curiosity of the locals, perplexed at the sight of a foreigner in what to the peasant was a splendid car, I made my way to Suceava. This was the former capital of Moldavia, once an independent principality reaching its glory under Steven the Great. Steven is famous in Romanian history, not only for his resistance against the Turks but as a patron of the Orthodox church and the arts. It was under his reign and that of his son Petru Rareş there developed a remarkable culture, the finest monument of which are the painted churches and monasteries. To see these was the chief purpose my visit.

These masterpieces were created in the late 15^th and 16^th centuries and they remain today as Romania’s greatest achievement in art and architecture. Their most characteristic feature are the exterior paintings, the walls from ground to roof being covered in historical or biblical pictures. It must be remembered that at the time these were being built the ordinary peasant was not allowed inside a consecrated building and that it was a time of almost general illiteracy. These walls then were painted for the illiterate peasant, who couldn’t go into the church anyway, as an easy form of religious education, each wall being like an illustrated Bible open at several pages at the same time. Little is known about the artists but the paintings are still fresh after centuries of exposure.

I must have visited most of the painted monasteries over several years, Suceviţa, Moldaviţa, Humor, Putna, but of these Voronet remains the most outstanding, partly for its location. It is by itself above the village with no wall round it so it stands out against the forested hills behind. Its great splendour is the western wall with a magnificent illustration of the Last Judgement. At the time of my first visit to their monasteries I was made particularly welcome by the priests and nuns in their black habits, eager to show off their treasure to the rare western visitor. Later they were to become part of the officially designated tourist zone, patronised by the more discriminating visitor eager to escape from the package-holiday crowds at Mamaia on the coast. It is difficult to realise that when Sachaverell Sitwell visited Romania in 1937 you could travel by train to Constanta on the Black Sea but the last stretch of road linking the country with western countries had not been completed.

From Moldavia I was to drive over the Prislop Pass into what was to become my favourite corner of Romania, Maramures. Enter Maramures and you go back to the Middle Ages or earlier, a place seemingly bypassed by the main stream of human progress. This of course was 1968 when travelling tourists were a rarity and the arrival or a car, and a foreign one at that, was a matter for wonder. Of course there were towns such as Baia Mare and Satu Mare, each with some industry, but beyond these are only forests, mountains and rough roads. By risking my car on such tracks, and of this I was to have much later experiences, I was to come to villages in what seemed a state of medieval isolation. The houses were all wooden, each doorway and window frame richly carved. The fenced courtyard was entered by a roofed gateway which was the key to the owner’s prosperity. The larger and more elaborately carved the gate, the richer the owner.

All this I partly expected for I had read avidly of the little that was then available and in Bucharest and elsewhere had spoken with learned Romanians. What did give some surprise were the costumes, so colourful and rich, each the creation of hours of weaving and embroidery through the winter months. Nowhere else in Europe did folk costumes persist so strongly, best seen on Sundays and market days; I was then and on later visits to spend much time and film seeking to record the richness of the scene. The other glory of Maramures are the wooden churches. They are built without foundations, large solid blocks of wood are laid on a base of rocks and stones and dovetailed together. Why wooden one may ask when in neighbouring Moldavia churches are of stone, but here we are in an area once controlled by Catholic Hungarian overlords who forbade the Orthodox Romanians to build churches of stone.

Now as I write many years later and with faded memory, I wonder how I communicated with the peasants, friendly but of very basic education. Perhaps a village schoolmaster would be summoned who spoke as I did some elementary French! But communicate we did, once made necessary by finding myself with an almost empty tank. I had not seen a petrol station for several days, nor it seemed was there any on the way I wished to travel. Somehow it was conveyed to me that the daily bus would soon arrive and this would help, and help indeed was given. The bus driver or his mate simply syphoned a few litres of petrol into my tank and no payment would they accept.

And so with many good wishes and a well filled tank I left this living museum of peasant culture. Hungary was my next country, avoiding the fast route through Budapest but on minor roads to the Zempláne Highlands, minor volcanic hills now in late summer yellow with sunflowers. I was making for the sleepy little town of Tokaj, home of the world class ‘wine of kings’. I must have been in earlier contact for I was made welcome and taken into their cellars and I departed with dusty cobwebbed bottles of their product. Another year I was to visit Eger, famous for the red wine ‘Bull’s Blood’.

Fast driving then to Prague, capital of former Czechoslovakia, the one great city of eastern Europe that I had not yet visited. It was a time of significant political change. I was not to know it as I drove into the city that night but the day following, 21^st August, was to be one of political tragedy.

Somewhere in the Old Town Square I found a modestly priced restaurant and was soon in conversation with English-speaking students all eager to speak of the recent and highly welcome reforms brought in by their new party leader Alexander Dubček. “We are still a communist country,” they said, “but the old hard liners are no longer in power; it’s communism with a human face.” I was left in no doubt that these reforms – no censorship, freedom of speech, freedom to buy western newspapers and freedom to travel – were all warmly welcome. “Enjoy our country,” they said as I left the restaurant with directions to the city campsite. “It’s near the airport, follow the signs.”

Indeed the campsite was near the airport for I was disturbed by unusual air activity throughout the night, the cause for which I learnt only as I joined the main road into Prague the next morning for I drove alongside a line of tanks of the Russian Red Army. All work had stopped and it seemed the entire population was in the street hurling abuse at the invaders. No witness of that tragic day in Prague, and no doubt throughout all other cities of the country, could have any doubt of the appalling shock and collective grief of the entire population. There were no happy faces now, no smiles, no laughter, the carefree mood of last night’s city was replaced by howls, curses, hisses and tears, only the passing of a truckload of flag waving demonstrating students caused the shaking fist to briefly wave instead. They were quite fearless those young men, the occasional rattle of automatic fire seemed only to spur on their hostile demonstration. Some were to die that day but so tense was the atmosphere, so bewildered and nervous were the Russians it seems now a miracle that the deaths were so few.

I stayed some hours in the streets of Prague and taking photographs of both Russian tanks and protesters, and some memories stand out clearly. There was the man with a bag already packed who begged me to take him out of the country and a weeping woman who clutched my arm and said ““tell England we want freedom.”” A helpful Czech guided me to the British Embassy to be met by a tearful secretary. A convoy of British cars was to be organised for that afternoon but I was not so anxious to leave. This was history in the making and I wanted to be involved. I spoke to many and took many photographs and later that night in Wenceslas Square I assisted in the distribution of hastily printed freedom leaflets.

The next day I started my home journey and back in Yorkshire was given some publicity and a TV interview.

(Note from Sylvie: there is additional material on Romania in George’s account of our canoe journey down the Danube in 1979-80.)

5. Land of the Same people

I had already learnt that more than a travelogue with pretty pictures is required to present a lecture to an intelligent and sophisticated audience.  People seek to learn as well as be entertained.  Essentially the speaker must present himself as a person of some authority.  With this in mind, over the next three years I devoted time to much study and note-taking.  The books I read are still on my shelves and in my study still are my notebooks.  I sought not to pass as a major authority on the area but to have a good working knowledge sufficient to answer the questions put to me.  In particular I wanted to study the way of life of the Lapps, or more correctly, the Same people.  I knew it was going to take time, several years in fact.

My first trip in 1959 was by way of being a reconnaissance, but I hoped would give me a background of knowledge that could be extended with further visits.  I was determined to travel alone so that I could fully concentrate on lecture material and good photographic coverage;  even so I regarded it in part as a mildly adventurous holiday in a wilderness area.

Lapland, so vast an area, as great as the whole of the British Isles, is spread over three countries.  It was difficult to know where to begin but mountains dominated my mind and it was a group of these behind Narvik in Norway that first attracted my attention and from where I could cross easily to a similar group in Sweden.  Northern Norway was an area easy of access.  Departing every night from Bergen was the Express Mail Service sailing round the North Cape to Kirkenes, which carried not only tourists on the Midnight Sun Cruises but all the mail, supplies and people going from one place to another along a thousand miles of coast.  The cost of the four-day journey to Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands was a mere £6 then, but I had no cabin.  Alone among the passengers I slept on the deck disturbed only by the noise and commotion of calling at some port or the early morning washing of the decks.

Svolvaer, which I was to revisit many years later, is dramatically sited beneath towering crags.  Here I changed vessels for the brief crossing to Narvik, the terminus for the iron ore railway line from Sweden, a place of wartime significance.  It was along that line I was shortly to travel, loaded up with a lightweight Black’s tent and a few days’ food.  I got off at Katterat, a station and three houses, and made my way up the Sordalselven pursued by a million mosquitoes.  A footpath was marked on the map but I saw little evidence of it.  At first I pushed my way through thick birch forest with no view and only the river to guide me, then through birch and Arctic willow with silver grey satin leaves before breaking out on to the tundra.  The cloud was down and it was drizzling.  There was little to tell I was not in some Scottish glen.  I was delightfully free, no definite plans.  When I got tired I put up my tent and made my evening meal.  While doing this the sky cleared.  High above, a rock pinnacle appeared, poised seemingly unattached floating on a sea of cloud.  Then, as the cloud cleared more mountains and glaciers reminded me after all that this was not Scotland.  Dominating the scene a few miles up the valley was a mountain called Sälkeokka which, if I ignored its steep rocky ridge, seemed a safe ascent for a solo climber.  I was alone in a wilderness situation, no one knew where I was;  my own natural caution would dictate that whatever ascent I should make would be by the easiest route.  Setting off at 5 a.m. the next morning, I did climb up a small glacier, then kicking steps up a steeper snow couloir.  There was a tiny pile of stones to show that it had been climbed before;  how long since the last ascent I wondered, and how long before the next?  A modest peak only a little over 5,000 feet, climbed without difficulty or danger, but I was fully satisfied.

The next day I made an ascent of the Domstind, steeper, more shapely if less high, after which I needed to reprovision.  At Katterat the Station Master halted the Stockholm-Narvik Express specially for me and, dishevelled and dripping, I climbed into a carriage of surprised passengers.  Loaded with food for a week I returned to the same camp after which I moved south over two passes to a place of the utmost isolation and close to the Swedish  frontier called Starvatn Cuno Javrre.  Here, beside the torrent which fed the lake, I camped for two days hoping for an opportunity to climb one of the easier summits of Stornsteinfell, a group of fine rock peaks that dominated the area, but the clouds were down and I rarely saw the mountains.  My idleness was compensated by the pleasure that for the first time since bringing back minnows in a jam jar as a boy, I did begin to catch fish.  Half an hour’s work and I would land a reasonable sized trout which, fried in butter, made delicious eating.  Even with this addition to my diet I could not linger long so I moved down the Norddalen.  Half way down the valley a building was marked and prominently named in large letters Stations Holmens, a place of some importance I felt which must be occupied.  I lengthened my march in order to reach it but found only a deserted Lapp kata, a primitive conical structure of birch branches and peat.  The next day I walked down to the farms of Skjoendalen where, with only the children to interpret, I restocked my food supply.

Rested and reprovisioned, I set off on a five-day trek to Sweden’s Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in the country.  It was a route that took me across a great expanse of high tundra and by many lakes, each remembered for some little incident:  my first sight of a lemming, a fisherman who had flown in by seaplane and whose catch would pay for the charter, the sophisticated Same with modern mountain tent and Primus watching his reindeer herd through binoculars.  On the fourth day I passed by five lakes that were not even marked on the map.  I then descended into a prominent valley where for the first time I was on a well trodden track.  This was the Kungsladen, the Royal Trail which extends 150 miles from Jackvik to Abisko through Sweden’s wildest and finest country and served by a chain of huts.  Now for the first time I met fellow trekkers.  They were long legged Swedes with enormous rucksacks and fair haired sunburnt girls, enchanting creatures who bathed naked not far away.

The next day I reached the well appointed Kebnekaise Fjellstation, an island of good food, comfort and hot showers or sauna.  It was good to sit down to a well cooked meal.  It was still 30 miles to Kiruna and the nearest road or railway, and I hope it still is, but it was then served by a daily helicopter service though most supplies for the season were brought up by sledge in the winter and spring.  The chief attraction of the Fjellstation, but rising so steeply above it that little of it could be seen, was Kebnekaise, 7000 feet.  A group of professional guides were looking for likely clients, but with my modest Alpine experience and modest funds I felt a solo ascent was within my ability.

I was away before the guided parties and from the glacier at perhaps 4000 feet could see the eastern face extending for perhaps a couple of miles below the twin summits.  A mountaineer could pick our a dozen engaging routes up buttress, ridge or snow arête but these were not for me.  Tracks across the snow led to a small slope where a staircase of bucket steps pointed the way.  I came out on the ridge near a small hut the Topstuga.  Outside were three friendly Swedes gathering their ropes and ice axes who cordially invited me to join them.  The highest point, the Sydtoppen was easily reached but I was glad of their company and the security of a rope along the narrow arête to the Nordtoppen.  I returned alone, cautiously descending a steep couloir to the Tarfaladen Glacier and the valley of the same name.

I had enjoyed myself doing what I like most, climbing mountains, wilderness travel;  so active it was easy to forget the real purpose of my visit.  Even if this first visit was only a reconnaissance, I was collecting material for a lecture.  With this in mind and two new lenses to my Leica I had taken many pictures of forests, tundra and high peaks but pretty pictures don’t make a talk;  human interest and serious facts are required.  People like to learn and of most interest were the people native to the area, the Lapps or Same.

I was reminded of this that very night when I looked out of my tent close on midnight and saw filling much of the valley and its sides a vast herd of reindeer.  Driven by no Same or their dogs they slowly moved down seeking a further feeding ground.  Of course I had already learned much about the Same from study at home and more recently in conversation with local people.  Of the true nomadic Same following their herds there were few in number and I was not to meet such a family for another two years, but there were others who had two homes.  They would spend the winter in the lowland forests but as soon as spring was on the way the herds got restive, full of the urge to move away from the coming swarms of mosquitoes.  When they have arrived among the fells in mid June, pausing on the way for the calving, the Same would repair their birch and sod katas and settle down for much of the remaining year.  Their herds are left to browse while they can be busy at their crafts, and hunting and fishing.

I was anxious to meet such a family and some of the Fjellstation staff told me of such a group two days march to the south.  A short journey by boat then many miles of slightly undulating trackless tundra, with views ahead to the peaks of the Sarek and I dropped down to an area of dwarf forests and lake.  Smoke drifted up from a group of rough birch huts, the Lapplager of Tijuonjokk.  Except for an occasional seaplane with its fishermen, few tourists passed  this way and, as with all people little touched by civilisation, I was received hospitably.  Before I was allowed to pitch my tent, I was taken to the head of the family, a traditionally and colourfully dressed old lady where I was seated on birch branches in the main kata, a fire on the floor, smoke rising through a hole in the roof, the whole family gathered round while I was served coffee.  That night, after a meal of delicious smoked charr I slept on a pile of reindeer skins.

I now had to travel down the birch forested banks of the Kaitum Alv, a river of considerable size.  Just how long it would take me to reach the railway line and civilisation I did not know for I was soon to walk off the limits of my map.  Without this aid all I could do was to follow every bend and twist of the river.  All too often my way was barred by swamp or bog and if I did find a track it was of elk or bear for it led nowhere.  One can have too much of solitude and forest;  on the third day I was really longing for the journey to end but the river stretched ahead bounded by endless forests.  Late in the afternoon, weary and discouraged, I halted to make soup.  I was just lighting the fire when I heard in the distance the hoot of a train.  It was the same note I had heard five weeks before in Narvik.  An hour or so later and I reached the small unmanned halt of Fjellasen and that night I dined well if expensively in Sweden’s iron ore boom town of Kiruna.

My feats on the mountains had been brief and modest.  They were not the challenge, it was the country, its wildness, its loneliness, its wide expanses … to travel for days in such a land, alone and self supporting, was in itself sufficient reward, but not of course the real aim of the journey.  The story of my travels so far would have limited appeal even with good photographic coverage.  To widen my experience I travelled further north to Karasuando, where Sweden’s most northerly church overlooks the Muonio Alv which I crossed into Finland.  I was later to describe this as the forgotten country in Europe but it was a country that was later to play a significant part in my life.

For the most part I travelled by bus or hitch hiked and camped at night travelling down the Arctic Highway to Rovaniemi, Finland’s Arctic capital near the Arctic Circle.  Muonio was one of the small towns along the way where I waited for a bus.  Also waiting was an English-speaking Finn.  “An English lady is living in a hotel nearby,” he said.  “She’s writing a book and learning Finnish.”  This was Sylvie Nickels who many years later was to become my second wife.  At Rovaniemi, Finland’s Arctic capital, rebuilt after the war to the design of Alvar Aalto, I camped by the river, a camp ground deserted but for myself.  It was bitterly cold and it rained and continued to rain.  Some time during the night I woke to find a river running through the tent, sleeping bag soaked.  Drenched and shivering I crossed the bridge to a sleeping Rovaniemi to seek shelter in the only place where there was some sign of human life, the police station.

I returned home with some knowledge and many pictures of the three countries that formed Lapland but with insufficient material for a professional lecture.  However, what was encouraging, my agents had done me well:  I had a full programme of lecture engagements.  I was also now the holder of a personal glossy, illustrated presentation leaflet.  Now armed with the leaflet and with my modest success, I felt I could approach the Tourist Offices of the countries concerned.  This was accepted practice for journalists, why not for lecturers?  And so, with a degree of self inflation and modest exaggeration I approached the Swedish Tourist Office in London to be rewarded with free rail travel.  Thus encouraged my next approach was to the Finnish Tourist Office, this time in person to Finland House in the Haymarket, where I met the Director.  This was Birger Ek, a splendid man whom I was to meet again socially.  He was a former pilot of the Finnish Air Force who had flown in JU88 in their war against Russia.  The conversation went something like this:  “Finnish Lapland, it’s a thousand kilometres north of Helsinki, we don’t know much about it.”  It sounded as if he were speaking of another country or at least a place of little interest to tourists.  “If you really want to know about Lapland,” he continued, “there’s an English lady, she spent many months up there.  I’ll give you her address.”

Thus began a rather formal correspondence – “Dear Miss Nickels”, “Dear Mr Spenceley” –and the giving of much information, and so it might have ended but for my curiosity about the English lady in love with Lapland, the same lady, incidentally, about whom I had heard a year earlier in Muonio.  What was she like, I wondered, young or old, I had no idea.  When I found I had a free afternoon in London, I made a tentative suggestion that we might have lunch together.  The fact that I took her to the prestigious and expensive Kettners implies that I was favourably impressed.  It was a pleasant occasion, but no further correspondence followed, no further meeting arranged.

Perhaps starved of publicity and neglected by tourists, my interest in the far north of Finland was much welcomed.  I was put in touch with Heikki Lehmusto at their tourist office in Helsinki and promptly offered free accommodation at the group of small hotels operated by the Tourist Department.  But first to Sweden to take advantage of their offer of free rail travel, boat to Gőteberg and rail via Stockolm to Kiruna in the far north..  I was anxious to learn something of the iron ore industry and was given a tour of the mines that in the last war had kept Germany’s armament factories functioning so fully.  I had obviously done my homework well for I also dined with the doctor who, by ski or float plane, served the Same, community scattered over a vast area.

It was Finnish Lapland that was more in my mind, the lesser known, least populated, most remote of all the Laplands, and so to Karasuando, where Sweden’s most northerly church overlooks the Muonioa Alv and the ferry which took me across to Finland.  At the time of this visit Finnish Lapland, covering an area the size of England, had only two roads of any note.  From Rovaniemi, Finland’s Arctic capital, there was the Arctic Highway built in 1929 stretching 300 miles, and the road west which now took me to Kilpisjärvi and the junction of the three countries, and here was the first of the several hotels operated by the Finnish Tourist Board.  You see the working of my mind:  free board and lodging!  But I had another purpose.  Rising from the hotel was one of the few mountains of the country, hardly a mountain more like a Pennine fell and equally bare of sturdy growth:  tundra or tunturi we would call it.  This was Saana at 1028 metres, the second highest point in Finland and the Holy Mountain of the Sami.  The highest top by only a few metres is Halta Haldi, fifty miles further north, too far for me on this occasion, but Saana gave me splendid views over the trackless wilderness and the hotel gave me good company;  it seemed that the Finns were arguably as at home speaking English as their own obscure language.

I returned the way I came to Muonio and then by a minor road to Pallastunturi and another of their financially convenient hotels.  I had made a very good choice for my second venue for as I was at reception in walked my former adviser Sylvie Nickels, last seen in London.  Neither of us could then have foreseen that many years later our friendship would become the loving partnership we were to enjoy for so many years.

Sylvie was then the dedicated writer she continued to be, a career girl working on her first book but happy to help me with my travels.  I was soon introduced to Johanna Kaartinen, the manageress of the hotel, and her assistant Eva, and there was much socialising and some travel.  One visit we made was to the simple wooden home of Yrjő Kokko, a distinguished Finnish writer whose classic on the Lapps, The Way of the Four Winds, became a valued addition to my library.

It was at Pallastunturi that I was introduced to what is an integral part of Finnish life, the sauna, not merely a means of keeping clean, but of rest, relaxation and a social occasion to which guests are invited.  So essential is it to the Finnish way of life that it must feature, hopefully illustrated, in any lecture I was to present: not the electrically heated city sauna but in a wooden hut with birch branches and wood burning stove, followed by a plunge in the lake.  Some casual remarks of mind prompted the immediate cooperation of Johanna and Eva, only Sylvie modestly declined to be part of a photograph that in future years would be projected on the screens of countless halls.

Pallastunturi outside the ski touring season has little to offer other than trekking over the barren hills with which it is surrounded, so I travelled further north on the Arctic Highway to the Tourist Hotel of Inari.  The purpose of my visit was to meet the loneliest men in Europe, not Lapps but Finns living their solitary lives gold washing close to the head of the Lemmenjoki river.  I took a day’s walk to Solojärvi from which the once-a-week postboat leaves.  Loaded with parcels and post we passed through a chain of lakes leading to the Lemmenjoki river up which we chugged almost to its head where a group of wild looking dishevelled men eagerly awaited our arrival.  These then were the lonely men, each living a solitary life in a simple cabin beside one of the tributaries that flow down to join the Lemmenjoki river.  The next day I set out to walk across the tundra to visit one of the lonely men.  I found him, a solitary figure, living in a small self-built cabin but seemingly self-contained and content and as with most Finns there were books around.  He had a smattering of English and before showing me his method of gold washing in the stream, he opened a small container of gleaming specks of gold.  A contented man he seemed fully fulfilled living here, winter and summer.  In the winter he hunted the bear or wolverine during which time he was supplied by a light ski-plane landing on the flat top of the fell.

It is easy to make friends in Finland as I was soon to learn once back in the hotel at Inari.  Everyone had said I must meet Sara Strengell, she knows about the Same, she will help you..  Well, there she was, staying in the hotel and an introduction was soon made.  Formerly an actress by profession, trained both in Vienna and New York, now a theatre director in Vaasa but soon director of the Svenska Theatre in Helsinki.  Helsinfors she would call it for she belonged to the Swedish-speaking minority..  She was older than I by a good few years but striking in appearance and personality.  Heads turned when she entered a room or spoke.  She had poise and a remarkable gift for languages.  At our evening dinner table she could switch effortlessly from her own native Swedish to Finnish, English, German or French, all immaculately spoken and pronounced.

Among this international gathering was a young German who wanted Sara’s assistance on a long trek he proposed to make across the trackless wilderness from Inari to Enontekiő.  “I’ll be the first German to make it,” he said, and so it was planned.  The three of us set out the next day, the German, let us call him Hans, bent under a load almost as big as himself.  A blank on the map it may seem devoid of track or dwelling but a scattering of people do live here, small fisher Same settlements and it was there we stayed, the German in his tiny tent, Sara with the Same, I in the open with a mosquito net to cover my face.  Although Hans spoke adequate English he kept up a constant flow in his guttural German, a strain on my tolerance, so I was relieved when within a day of Enontekiő we left him to achieve his ambition and we parted to return by a different route.

I made further journeys in Finland as far north as Utsjoki on the border with Norway, and more trekking, before a slow journey south.  It was now well into September, there was a chill in the evening, the mosquitoes had gone, but in Lapland this is the most beautiful time of all, ‘ruska’ when the tundra and birch turn into a glorious gold with splashes of russet and crimson.  I saw this as I travelled south and back again through Sweden.  I had collected much material, factual and photographic, but still not adequate for a professional lecture.  A further visit would be required and a full winter programme of engagements and further encouragement from the tourist organisations concerned prompted me to plan a more ambitious programme beginning March 1961 in the most exciting season of all, spring.

In greater comfort this time I flew by Finnair to Helsinki and then on an internal flight to Finland’s Arctic capital Rovaniemi, landing on an ice-bound airfield.  Spring it may have been in England but here in Lapland it was still a hard frozen landscape all enveloped in a covering of snow, the fastest river still frozen.  At night the temperature plunged far below zero, but for the Same people this was the season to travel.  With no swamps to bar their way or rivers to cross, the reindeer sledge would quickly take them wherever they wished to go.  For me this was the best season of all to be in Lapland and my travel plans were much eased by meeting again with that great lover and authority on Lapland, Sara Strengell, briefly in the north in a break in her theatre work.  She was happy to travel with me for part of the way and so with a pair of borrowed skis we set off from Enontekiő, I enjoying that rare thrill that filled my adventure-loving heart with joyful anticipation at the beginning of a new adventure. There was the same thrill that I had felt six years earlier as I stood on the bridge of the Albatross as it sailed along the coast of South Georgia..  It was a magical morning, the low sun bringing some colour to the scene and casting light shadows from the scattering of dwarf birch trees.

We soon crossed into Norway but with nothing to mark the border.  This is Finnmark, Norway’s largest and least populated province as big as Belgium and Holland put together, 25,000 square miles of undulating barren tundra where for eight months of the year it is winter.  As I write now I have a recent map marking the thin line of a road.  No road then existed, we travelled on a compass course but we knew our destination was Kautokeino, the largest pure Same town in the world where we settled into the small Tourist Hotel.  The only other guest was a German photographer rather to the distaste of the manageress.  Memories of the war were still close.  “It is my job to be courteous to all my guests,” she said, “but with the Germans I find it difficult.”

Sara had brought me to the right place at the right time for at Easter Kautokeino is the gathering place for Lapps from the north of all three countries, everyone fully dressed in their traditional colourful garb and through the streets the reindeer sledges raced wildly, no motorised skidoo as might be the case now.  Easter is a traditional time for weddings and several times a day the long procession headed by bride and groom would thread its way to the little church on the hill.

I treasure the photographs I took during my few days in Kautokeino of this highly colourful spectacle of the Same wearing a variety of costumes and headgear according to the area from which they came but all bringing some life and brilliance to an otherwise drab white landscape.  Tourism had yet to reach and perhaps tarnish the scene;  it seems the only visitor was the German photographer, but there were other residents eager to welcome the stranger.  Kautokeino contained a small Scandinavian artists and writers colony and our evenings were spent in their company where Sara’s rather striking personality sparkled.  Her company was stimulating in the short term but perhaps too overpowering to live up to in a long relationship.  I was not surprised to learn of the break-up of her marriage, but she spoke little of her personal life.

Our next destination was Karasjok, some 80 miles to the north-west.  Between the two towns there is a weekly snowmobile service, a new type of vehicle only recently then introduced, but we set off ahead of this in the hope of seeing some reindeer herding.  In this we failed but we did meet a family of real nomadic Same.  Their tent appeared ahead,  dark in colour, made of cloth and reindeer skins round a circle of upright birch branches.  Outside was the ‘suonge’, their storeroom on a wooden platform reached by a ladder above the reach of dogs or wolverines.  The head of the family came out to welcome us, a splendid character with his reindeer lasso over his shoulder.  Our welcome was enhanced perhaps because Sara could respond to them in a few words of their own language.  A primitive home is sometimes thought of as scene of disorder and want of design, but a Same tent is a little cosmos, the layout of which has been established by ancient tradition.  Beyond a few boxes, there was no furniture, the floor of birch branches over which were reindeer skins.  The wife busied herself with the fire in the centre and was soon preparing a reindeer meat stew for us;  beside her, nursing two small dogs was her mother, very old you might guess from the creases, but with a face of great serenity.  Permission was given to take photographs and these I still treasure, for they are pictures of a way of life that must now have long past.

The next day, or was it the day after, the snowmobile caught us up and we continued the journey in ease and comfort to the second town of Norwegian Finnmark, Karasjok.  My memories have faded but we somehow made our way to Utsjoki from where we made a bold attempt to ski across to Sevettijarvi, a settlement of the Skolt Lapps who belong to the  Orthodox Church, formerly living in territory  ceded in 1944 to the Soviet Union.  The huts had been carefully marked for us on our maps and we had adequate food if only a great lump of reindeer meat kept frozen on the top of my rucksack.  We never made it, time had run out and we were advised to return by a member of the Finnish border patrol with whom we shared a rough hut.   They were returning from their patrol along the border with the Soviet Union.  Sara Strengell returned to her theatre work but I stayed on, more days in Utsjoki, Inari and Ivalo, hoping to find a reindeer round-up but that was a spectacular event which escaped me.

While in Helsinki paying my respects to the Finnish Tourist Board, it was suggested that I might consider making Finland itself the subject for a lecture.  “We are the forgotten country of Europe,” they said.  This was certainly a thought for the future, but meanwhile I had a full winter season of lecture engagements and in due course a new subject to prepare.  All this on top of nearly full-time teaching.  Now, in old age, I marvel at my energy.

Avalanche and its aftermath

From our Base Camp there stretched ahead a long line of steep and unstable moraine which would lead to the foot of the Phurbe Chyachumbu Glacier which would become the highway to our peak.  A tedious but safe route was established along it, leading to Camp I, a noisy place with much creaking of the glacier.  It was at two points along the moraine that the terminals of the base line were established for survey was much in our mind.  It was this responsibility that occupied the time and efforts of Anderson and myself in those early days, by establishing two survey spots on the rocky ridge to the west of Base Camp overlooking the Dorje Lhakpa Glacier.  It was desperately hard work for we were far from being acclimatised to the altitude.

Meanwhile Crosby Fox, good leader that he was, had drawn up a plan of operation for the following two weeks, allowing us to move up the glacier in three parties with our Sherpas, stocking and restocking each camp up to Camp IV.  The plan of operation allowed the maximum lift to the greatest height without imposing undue strain and allowing time for acclimatisation.

Camp III, lying under the shadow of Phurbi Chyachu, was established at about 19,000 ft. by 26^th April, and through much gruelling work in the next few days was adequately provisioned.  After an earlier reconnaissance, Crosby Fox and I, with our two Sherpas Mingma Tensing and Lakpa Noorbu, set out to establish Camp IV from where we hoped to climb to the site which we hoped would be our final camp.  Dan Jones and Arthur Tallon came up in support.

It was cold as well as the altitude that in the morning numbed our senses.  It took us an hour with well gloved hands to scrape the tents free of the ice that had formed during the night and to make up the loads for the new camp.  We were away at 7.15 a.m. on two ropes of four, Jones and Tallon with their Sherpas on one rope, Lakpa Noorbu, Mingma Tensing with Fox and myself on the other.  The tracks of yesterday were almost obliterated and for the man in front it was desperately hard work.  At 8 a.m. we were out of the shadow of the frontier ridge where we removed sweaters and gloves and briefly basked in the sun.  We had gained perhaps a thousand feet of height.  The route was straight-forward but not without interest for we were now threading a way through a mass of intricate crevasses and the slope was steeper than any before encountered.  It was satisfying to look back at the two tiny specks of Camp III on the level glacier.

At last we reached ‘the Corridor’, a level and uncrevassed highway.  Now we could see the problem ahead.  Beyond the point where we would pitch Camp IV the glacier abruptly narrowed and flowed between walls of fantastic steepness – it could be described as the jaws of the glacier.  They might not be the jaws only but the fangs too, for here the glacier became steeper and more broken up, the whole area split by crevasses.  We knew then that we should be lucky to find between these walls a route free from objective danger.  But that was tomorrow’s problem;  now we had thought only for the soft snow and our overburdened backs and the release soon to come at the end of ‘the corridor’.

Another hour or so, punctuated by many halts, brought us the release.  ‘the corridor’ which had safely conducted us above the lower difficulties of the icefall had petered out and here the glacier mounted to its height.  Close by, where there was little else but seracs and great chasms, was a level bed of snow adequate for our camp.  We might have preferred a site a litte further removed from the bounding wall, but we were on a slight rise and were additionally protected by a series of open and wide crevasses.  We had little cause for fear.  Wishing us luck, our support party left us alone hurried down to Camp III.   Soon the tents were up and the Primus roaring to give us hot lemonade for which we most longed.  Already the weather was deteriorating.

The next day, April 30^th, dawned clear, gone were the troubled skies and the wind.  We were out of tents just as soon as it was light.  It did not take us long to gather the survey equipment;  on this reconnaissance we needed to take little else.  From the tents we moved round a serac more centrally into the glacier.  We could see the jaws, but standing below them, all was too foreshortened to see the problem.  We could not plan our route, we could but progress upwards hopefully, taking the least tortuous route, avoiding the bounding walls.  We were still in shadow and it was extremely cold.

For several hundred feet we mounted keeping safely in the centre of the glacier.  There were crevasses in plenty but so far they were bridged in some part of their length, although but thinly.

We were slow too for another reason;  we were higher than we had been before, there was soft snow and Fox for the first time was troubled by altitude.  It was this last that caused me to take over the lead somewhere through the icefall, a position I was to keep for the remainder of the day.  Fox now came second, to give me security over the fragile bridges. For a little way more we climbed, moving in a zig-zag pattern, but safely in the centre of the glacier.  But this was too good to last;  suddenly we came to a series of large crevasses, unbridged and unbridgeable, spanning the greater width of the glacier.

There was one way round them, easy and short on the true left bank of the glacier.  But here where we proposed to turn them, we were for perhaps ten minutes in the ascent exposed to the possibility of an ice avalanche from a series of ice cliffs high above.  We turned the crevasses and in ten minutes we were once more central in the glacier.  We did it quite casually, time was not wasted nor did we desperately hurry;  we may have cast the occasional glance up at the seat of danger but we suffered no strain or great anxiety of mind.  The odds were too heavily in our favour.  Soon we were close to the summit of the icefall, only a few crevasses remained.  What faced us now was a weary plod which was to continue for four hours.  Distance had again deceived us.  It always appeared that a few yards more and the angle would level out;  it never did.  Our pace was slow;  we were all conscious of the altitude and the soft snow did not help.  Fox remarked that never before had he suffered such a hard mountain day.  We seemed to be immensely high;  Phurbi Chyachu, which soared so majestically above the Base Camp, appeared from here quite insignificant.  Over the col to the north of it we could now look, and beyond it in Tibet, were noble unknown peaks.  In front, obscured partly by its eastern ridge was the ‘Big White Peak’.  There was nothing in its appearance to suggest defeat and no longer did it fill us with awe as when first we saw it, as an aloof, utterly remote triangle of snow.

Still we plodded on but at last the angle did relent.  If we were to survey, then we must do so while we could.  It was 11 a.m. and for half an hour we worked in this cwm of great peaks until deteriorating weather put an end to our task.  We lingered there no longer, the wind was rising and we were glad of an excuse to leave.

A few crevasses warned us when we reached the head of the icefall but we had not now the visibility to know exactly our position.  When we heard an avalanche for half a minute we stood and listened.  We were not alarmed;  it was close but not dangerously so.  It was the usual small snow avalanche of the kind that every day we heard and saw;  behind it there was no great force.  This had not the roar of the great ice avalanche that we had seen come down the face of Phubi Chyachu, there was no boom to it, just a gentle swish of slowly sliding snow.  When silence had returned we continued in our tracks.

A minute later we recognised our position.  The crevasse on our right was the one by which to turn, hazarded by icecliffs as we had noted that morning.  Now on the descent, our moments of peril, if so they could be described, would be even briefer.  We certainly gave them little thought.  Soon we were at the furthest point, the point nearest to the cliffs.  We turned the crevasse and were now walking back towards the centre of the glacier and safety, walking between two great crevasses.  Thirty seconds more and we should be free from danger, but our thoughts were of other things and nothing ominous clouded them.

Then, just as the last man on the rope had turned the crevasse we heard it:  a might roar from high above. There was no mistaking what it was or where it was coming.  It was a great ice avalanche.  We ran as fast as we could, every second the thunder swelling, but we could only make a few paces before it was on us.  We knelt down, crouched pathetically braced for the impact, as if with our muscles we could beat off its force.  In the last second I looked round.  On the upward slope was the gaping crevasse which gave a feeble hope, behind a great cloud of snow advancing and outlined against it, bent and braced as myself, three figures, Crosby Fox, Mingma Tensing and Lakpa Noorbu.  That was the last I ever saw of them.

I was in motion, pushed by an irresistible force, then almost immediately I felt myself falling.  I knew I was going into a crevasse, but my fall was not far.  A great force of snow followed me which I tried desperately to ward off with my arms.  Buried, or partly buried I must have been, for all was dark yet I could fight still with my arms.

How long I lay there I cannot say, but abruptly vision returned.  All was strangely still and quiet.  I was 25 feet down at the extreme end of the crevasse.  Where I lay it was narrow, my body almost spanned the walls.  Although still alive and apparently uninjured my position would have given me little comfort, but I could now see that in the centre of the crevasse where it was widest, the avalanche debris had formed a cone, mounting up to within a few feet of the lip of the crevasse.  At least I knew I could get out.

I was still suffering from shock and it was some time before the full horror of the situation entered my dazed mind.  I could not yet believe that Fox and the Sherpas were not just outside, unharmed as was I;  the awful alternative I refused to grasp.  When I had struggled free from the snow I tried to shout to them, but no sound could I make.  I was gasping for breath as I had never done before and for some minutes I had to lean against the wall before I could make a second attempt.  But my voice was lost, absorbed by the ice around me.  I had strength now to move and I made a few steps up the slope towards the centre of the crevasse to be halted shortly by the rope.  Before I had not thought to look for it;  the rope that tied me to my companions 20 feet apart.  It was not broken.  I followed it back to the little pit from which I had emerged.  It descended vertically into the floor.  Only a few feet could I pull free;  no portent could be more ominous.  I had now no axe and I could dig only with my hands.  At first the snow was soft and a little of the rope I cleared, but soon I came to hard compacted snow and ice in which I could make no impression.  I knew then there was no hope, below that solid floor no man could live.

I untied from the rope and climbed out.  For some time I walked around trying to orientate myself.  I peered into another crevasse, likewise filled with debris, one of the dark pits round which we had walked that morning, but I could see that no victims could be there.  The crevasse into which I had fallen was immediately below the position the whole party must have occupied at the time the avalanche struck.  All must have the same grave, yet with a fragment of hope I looked around and called out once more.  It was an awful deathlike silence into which my voice feebly penetrated.  Nothing relieved the whiteness around me.  I felt very much alone.

I need not describe my descent nor the thoughts with which I was accompanied.  Soon, a little below, I picked out our morning’s tracks which I hastily followed, now crawling over the more dangerous of the snow bridges.  I stopped at the pathetically empty tents of Camp IV and found a message from Anderson and Wilson.  They were having trouble with the Primus stove at the lower camp and had decided to return that day to Camp I.  This was a blow indeed.  I packed a rucksack with a sleeping bag and a duvet jacket;  I felt strong enough then but some sort of reaction might follow before I could go so far.  Again I set out.

Fortunately there was no difficulty and little danger.  I was in a sorry state of mind but as I came down the last slopes leading to Camp III, imagine my joy to see, standing beside the tents, a figure in red windproofs:  Anderson.  The camp after all was occupied.  Soon kindly hands were looking after me while I told my tragic tale.

Only I had seen the crevasse and knew with certainty that there was no hope, but it was necessary that this should be confirmed.  After a rest and time for reorganisation, I returned with Anderson and Tallon and Sherpas Ang Tembu and Pemba Gyalgen to the scene of the accident, but any hope of digging in the ice floor of the crevasse was shattered.

Perhaps the full force of the tragedy had not made its impact upon the Sherpas until that moment.  Our return and the sight of the empty tents brought it forcibly home.  It was natural that it should be as great a blow for them as it was for us.  They came all from the same village;  all had lost friends, some relatives.  They are simple child-like people whose faces portray their emotions and now they were as quick to tears as before they had been to laughter.  But it was not only for their own race they wept.  Fox was loved as leader and man not only by ourselves and his loss took some share of their grief.  Lhakpa Tsering, the least sophisticated and most lovable of our men, emerged weeping from the tent holding in his hands, plaintively, Fox’s few personal possessions, his face reflecting the desolation that filled all our hearts.  In these solemn moments of mutual anguish the gulf between us of race, religion, language and culture was firmly spanned and we felt a close affinity with our Sherpa friends.

I returned to Base Camp and, while others in the party continued to work on the survey, I made preparations for what was now my responsibility:  a return to Katmandu to report the accident, the saddest of all missions.

Home from the Himalayas, I was emotionally bruised, not made easier by visits to the bereaved.  For some time I had suffered from mild asthma, nervous asthma it was said, a symptom of delayed shock, and this at a time when post-expeditions demands were placed on me:  reports, articles, and in due course the expedition lectures.  All the time dominating my mind, even above family responsibilities, was the need to reduce my still substantial bank overdraft, and only by more lecturing could this be achieved.  Fortunately all but a few of those audiences to whom I had already spoken now engaged me for a further talk on the Himalayas and at an increased fee, essential as a percentage was returned to the Y.R.C.  My agents did me well;  in the following two winters I was to receive 80 lecture engagements.  Some useful contacts were made which in the years ahead were to prove highly profitable – societies or libraries to which I would become a regular visitor.

I was still employed as head of geography in a school but, with a sympathetic authority and a tolerant head, I was permitted some leave from my duties.  This meant I could accept engagements further afield, even the London libraries, which were to become a profitable source of income.  Lecturing with all that goes with it – travel and socialisation beyond the school gates – was beginning to take over much of my life.  It was evident that if I were to continue a new subject would be required, the creation of which would satisfy my need for travel and adventure.

No new expedition was likely to follow for I was not in the same league as our top high altitude mountaineers, nor in the field of scientific exploration.  If travel was to be the theme, then it must be done independently and some essential requirements needed to be considered.  First, my chosen area must be relatively cheap to visit and easy of access.  That would present a wide choice but I required an area having both scenic and ethnic interest, and provide an element of adventure.  With the map of Europe before me, only one area seemed to fulfil these requirements:  Lapland, the northern third of Norway, Sweden and Finland.  It proved to be a very happy choice for it not only provided me with a popular subject but much more.  I was to make two friends who in the years ahead were to much enrich my life;  more rewarding but for twenty years unsought and unsuspected, a loving second wife and, with her, another road to travel and adventure.  Altogether Lapland served me well.

Himalaya

The 1950s have been described as the Golden Age of Himalayan Mountaineering when, after many attempts, Everest had at last been climbed in 1953, followed two years later by Kangchenjunga.  Other countries were also active in the Himalayan ascents by men of much experience who had already proved themselves at high altitude.  But the Himalayas is a vast range with a wealth of lesser unclimbed peaks, lower in altitude if not less in difficulty.  It was at the Y.R.C. Annual Dinner of 1955 that the idea of a Club expedition took root when Charles Evans, recently returned as leader of the successful Kangchenjunga expedition, was in conversation with Crosby Fox.  With Crosby’s enthusiasm and with the full encouragement of the then President Harry Stembridge, the plan for a Y.R.C. Himalayan Expedition was formed.  It was not appreciated at the time this was to be the first Himalayan Expedition to be sponsored by a club.

The team finally selected was Crosby Fox as leader, a position fully merited.  I was appointed deputy less for my mountaineering ability, more for my recent expedition experience and glacier travel.  The team was completed by Wilfred Anderson as secretary, Dan Jones, the medical officer, and finally Arthur Tallon and Maurice Wilson.  For the objective of the expedition, Charles Evans was consulted and Jugal Himal in Nepal, a little to the east of the Langtang, was his suggestion.  It was a little known area, unclimbed and visited only once by an earlier expedition.  More interesting, among some mountains of considerable difficulty, the highest of the group, a peak of 23,240 ft. in altitude, situated on the Nepalese-Tibetan border, seemed an attainable objective.  At the time of the expedition, although its height had been calculated it lacked a name, but the Sherpas called it the ‘Big White Peak’.  It has subsequently been called Lanpo Gang and has now been climbed by a Japanese expedition.

The financing of the expedition was a major hurdle for the cost far exceeded the modest donations of the participants, but by the generosity of the club and some of its members, together with a substantial donation from the Mount Everest Foundation, a sufficient sum was raised.  Further assistance was received from a national newspaper and various industries.  Much of the food and equipment was donated free or at cost price.

On 16^th March 1957, the expedition members together with club well wishers gathered in London for an early flight the next morning from a diminutive Heathrow.  We walked out across the tarmac to our twin-engine piston B.O.A.C. aircraft for our flight to Calcutta.  To compare it with my recent jet age flights, it is well worth recording the six refuelling stops.  They were Frankfurt, Rome, Istanbul, Baghdad, Bahrain and finally Karachi where there was a change of crew.  We were an exhausted party when we disembarked thirty-six hours later in the heat and dirt of Calcutta where we were welcomed by members of the Yorkshire Society who were to be our hosts.

Time was vital for the success of the expedition for the coming of the monsoon cannot be delayed, but we were soon to suffer the ways of the east.  We were eight days in the humid heat of Calcutta, struggling to overcome barriers of red tape, bureaucracy and lethargy before our  three-and-a-half tons of food and equipment could be unloaded from the ship and carried to Hawrah Station for the first part of our train journey across India, much delayed by the barrier of the then unbridged Ganges at Makhama Ghat.  Prolonged negotiations were required to persuade porters to carry our crates the mile or more across the sandy banks to the paddle ferry steamer.  It was a delay of 22 hours before we could board another train on a different gauge for the final journey to Raxoul on the Nepalese border.  Our boredom and frustration were fortunately relieved by the kindness of the assistant traffic manager who took us to his humble home where his wife prepared for all six of us a splendid, indeed elaborate meal when we had to neglect all the rules of hygiene.  The British were still highly regarded.

After 48 hours of travel and waiting to travel we reached Raxoul on the Nepalese border where we stayed at the Indian Embassy Bungalow.  The British agent now responsible for our further journey was a fussy little Nepalese called Mr Likhey.  When we first met him he was having a pee in the middle of the street.  He was full of his own importance and when in argument with others he would seize their shirt button and twist.  The next day we booked tickets on a train running between Raxoul and Amlekganj, a distance of 28 miles which took 4½ hours.  We enjoyed the comfort of our own compartment;  others clung to the train in any way they could, on the sides, the roof, even on the front buffers of the locomotive.  We noted that the train slowed down before and after every village to allow passengers to get on and off the train without the inconvenience of having to buy a ticket.

At Amlekganj we negotiated for a truck to carry us and our 3½ tons of gear across the recently built road to Katmandu.  Our bearded and roguish looking driver said we could do it in one day but we had already learnt the ways of the east where you are told whatever they think you want to hear rather than the truth.  It did take us two days of slow, frightening travel perched precariously on top of the load over three mountain passes, the night being spent as guests of an Indian  Army Officer in charge of the road construction.  On the descent to Katmandu we were met by the British Ambassador who had driven out in a Land Rover to welcome us.  This was 1957 when British visitors to Nepal were unusual indeed.  My diary records that on the last 55 miles to Katmandu we were stopped several times for having a dangerous load.  As we turned into the British Embassy compound we were saluted by the Ghurka guard and met with joyful smiles by the six Sherpa porters who were to serve the expedition.

Now, with Nepal, and Katmandu in particular, serving tourists from many countries, it is difficult to realise that in a country only recently opened to the west, visitors such as ourselves were  rarities.  Without question Crosby Fox and I were guests of His Excellency Boyd-Tollington and his wife at the Embassy where we enjoyed every luxury and comfort.  The less fortunate stayed in Katmandu’s only hotel, The Royal, in an old Rhana Palace run by Boris, a retired Russian ballet dancer, a character of some note.  It was to be a few days in Katmandu before our crates could be opened and made up into 60-lb loads for our porters to carry.  This was work much assisted by our six high altitude Sherpas who were to serve the expedition.  These were under the direction of Sirdar Mingma Tenzing, son of the famous Dawa Tenzing, one of the most respected of the Sherpas who was subsequently to be made an Honorary Member of the Alpine Club.

The Sherpas have a highly honoured place for themselves in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.  They are one branch of the Mongoloid people of Buddhist faith and Tibetan speech, occupying the higher valleys above 8000 ft.  Collectively they are known as Bhotias, but the name Sherpa is given to those settled in the higher villages to the south of Everest, known as Solo-Khumba.  Their reputation and skill in the history of Himalayan mountaineering extended beyond their natural ability for it was their courtesy, their gentleness of manner, their cheerfulness that have endeared them to the hearts of those with whom they have travelled.  These then were the men who were to serve us as personal servants, load carriers and companions, each Sherpa being asked to choose their sahibs.  I was chosen by the ever smiling Lhakpa Noorbu.  A further character was Pasang, the odd job man who was to become the servant of the Sherpas taking on the most menial and tedious of tasks.  The final member of the team was Murrari Bhadhur Chetri, acting as our Liaison Officer, a requirement enforced by the Nepalese Government.  Murari, a man of some education, spoke good English and was invaluable on the trek as our interpreter.

Initial work completed on April 4^th, more than a hundred Katmandu porters gathered at the Embassy ground each seeking to find the lightest of our 60-lb loads, each also receiving his initial advance payment.  We followed later in the Embassy Land Rover to make our first camp at Sankhu Pheidi.  From here we were to cross the grain of the country, ridge following ridge, every ascent followed by an equally long descent.  On the first few days my diary records suffering much from heat and dehydration.  On the second day we descended to the Indrawati river which could be crossed safely only by linking arms.  Most marked in my memory of those days, more than my pleasure of the mountains, were the people few of whom had much contact with the western world, the Newars of the lower valleys, the Tamangs on the ridges.  To them all we were objects of pleasure and delight, all welcoming us with happy smiles and displaying fascination in all our possessions reminding us again how cut off their country had been.

On the third day we halted for the night at the village of Moolkharkha, situated on the crest of a hill at about 8,000 ft, occupied by a people different in both dress and appearance.  These were Bhotias of Buddhist faith and of Tibetan origin.  Our arrival here on this day was most appropriate for it was a day both of celebration and ceremony along with dance, music and jollity to which our unexpected presence brought an added dimension.  The Buddhist shrine or Gomba on the crest of the hill was that day to be dedicated.  Two wild horsemen cantered down the hill to the Gomba followed by a group of lamas and other dignitaries and the chief lama in colourful robes, an old man with a deeply lined face half concealed below a head dress.  Slowly now to the sound of drums and the clashing of cymbals, they danced round the Gomba.  One dancer wore the fierce-looking devil’s mask.  The celebrations went on well into the night, the men and women dancing in two groups and some separately.  In an area as yet untouched by the outside world, we felt very privileged to be the witness of such a scene.

A day to day account of our march to the mountain is not necessary.  It is sufficient to say that after some days we made a long descent to the Belephi Khola which we followed up in more days to the village of Tampatang.  Once again we were among the Bhotias and again objects of pleasure and delight.  This was an important staging point for us for our porters were too lightly clad to climb into higher altitudes.  They were all paid off while, with the assistance of Nina Lama, a gentle man with the most courtly manner, a similar number of the local Bhotias were employed.  This was a most welcome day of rest. in my case devoted to much photography, some of the results of which were to adorn our hall for many years:  faces young and old but full of character, women with the striped skirts and plate sized earrings.  Dan Jones was also busy filming and holding his twice daily sick parade, always well attended perhaps as much from curiosity as genuine complaint.

Our new porters, not the Katmandu professionals, never before having served in this capacity, set off in holiday mood, a task which was no doubt welcome for its profit but one to be thoroughly enjoyed.  It was a family occasion, too, a young boy, son or perhaps grandson, carried a load almost as big as himself which he did uncomplaining and with pride, and there were the women who, like their husbands, carried the same load but with their child perched high on the top.  For all but the last hours of the next three days it was jungle in which the track, if there was one, seemed ill-defined and blocked with much fallen timber.  The kukri was much in use.  It was only on the third day that we climbed , very steeply and very slowly, to some snow covered level ground where we established base camp at about 14,000 ft.  The clouds were down and we could see nothing.

It was someone’s exclamation of astonishment that caused us for a time to give up the struggle for sleep.  We had all been settled in for our first night at Base Camp;  the last page in our story of the approach march was written in our diaries, the last candle was blown out, when these superlatives, spoken in a tone of wonder and awe, came to us from the outside world and caused us partially to emerge from our sleeping bags and open the flap.  It was worth the effort.  Across the glacier, appearing utterly remote and aloof, its base still swathed in cloud, was our 22,000 foot neighbour Phurbi Chyachu.

We had seen it before only from the distance, still six days’ march away, as we crossed the shoulder of the Nauling Lekh before that dusty descent into Belephi Khola.  Since then we had been too deep in gorges to see anything but the lower snows of our range.  And that afternoon when we had reached the site we might as well have been on some Scottish moor, all heather – or something like it – patches of thawing snow, boulders and cold clammy mist;  only the occasional roar of an avalanche warned us of the presence of high mountains, only the features of our Sherpas told us this was Central Asia.

But now the cloud had gone and we could for the first time make out the appearance of this landscape which was to become so familiar.  Our camp was pitched on platforms levelled out of a slope which fell with increasing steepness to the snout and moraine of the Phurbi Chyachumba Glacier beyond which we could see to the east a long line of peaks, not high indeed, but bold in feature,terminating at its northern end in one mighty upthrust of snow and ice which was Phurbi Chyachu.  Above the camp to the west were a series of rock buttresses and Chamonix-style peaks which formed the ridge overlooking the Dorja Lhakpa Glacier.

The next day, 15^th April, was a day of organisation.  The Sherpas erected a kitchen – later to be much improved, while Anderson and Tallon, who almost alone understood the complexities of our stores, supervised their orderly packing.  Fox and I took time off to search for a suitable Base Line, for survey must be our first duty.

a) A New Profession

I must somehow exploit my recent experience and I was confident I had a wonderful story to tell, and one that I could fully illustrate.  All photographic material was expedition property, later to be donated to the Scott Polar Research Institute, but each member of the party was entitled to a set of duplicate slides.  This was duly organised at a gathering of the party when each selected what they required.

The selection took place at my suggestion at Harden,  Austwick, the guest house which had formerly been the headquarters for my annual potholing meets.  We all gathered there with the exception of Duncan, making it also an occasion for fresh air and exercise.  We walked over Ingleborough after which we retired to the Game Cock for drinks.  This was to become the scene of a remarkable encounter.  As we stood at the bar, what topic of conversation could there be but South Georgia, and our talk was overheard by a gentleman seated nearby.  He rose to join us with apologies.  “Excuse me,” he said, “but were you speaking of South Georgia?”  It was Bernard Stonehouse, a name well known to us, whose left-over food we had even eaten.  Stonehouse and Nigel Bonner, two British biologists, a year earlier than us had been landed in the Bay of Isles where a small hut had been erected from where a study of penguins and seals had been made.  Of course he was invited to join us that evening for the showing and selecting of slides.

Now with a selection of duplicate slides and a projector – a cheap one, not the Leica projectors I later to acquired – I was all set for a new career.  But, unknown and unpractised, it could be only in the most modest manner.  It started where more than fifty years later my lecturing career ended:  at Women’s Institutes.  The fee was two guineas and a few pence to cover the bus fare.  I consider myself by nature of a retiring nature, reluctant to speak out, except perhaps after a few wines, but in spite of these inhibitions I was modestly successful and it was a success which was to extend far beyond the nature of the story I had to tell.

I developed a technique that was to put me in great favour in the years ahead.  Now half a century on and more than 3,000 presentations later I can analyse my technique and modest success which extended beyond a good speaking voice and the craft of the classroom in which I was well practised.  As I lacked the gift of the true artist, speaking off the cuff, the ability to extemporise and meticulous preparation provided the key.  An accurate memory for the order of the slides was essential so that I could speak not on the image before the audience but build up to the one soon to appear.  Much memorising was required but to speak by rote can be tedious in the extreme.  The secret was to pause, search for a word, correct oneself, thus giving the audience the false feeling that this is all totally spontaneous.  What a remarkable command of English someone might think.

From these modest beginnings speaking to tiny audiences in village halls, I was in a few years to be invited to present my talks in some of the largest and most prestigious halls in the country to substantial audiences.  More rewarding was that in due course, as more lecture subjects were produced, I was invited to return in many cases with regularity.  No great riches came my way for I totally lacked celebrity status.  I was just a competent speaker with a well illustrated unusual subject, lecturing at a time before technology had brought more home entertainment, when every town had societies – literary, travel, philosophical – all anxious to fill their programmes.  Many public libraries throughout the country also held a winter programme of lectures.  The market was there but how to enter the speakers’ circuit, that was the problem.

I was fortunate for there was a local society of some distinction to which kind friends had given me a recommendation.  So some time in late 1956, feeling singularly apprehensive, I made my first appearance before a large audience in a substantial hall at a fee far exceeding that of the paltry offerings from my former village groups.  Careful preparation and some earlier practice must have put me in some favour for this, my first society engagement in Keswick,  was in the next thirty-three years followed by nine further engagements, speaking on nine different subjects and all at an increased fee.  I had arrived, or nearly so.

The real boost to my career came the following year and presumably at the recommendation of a committee member in Keswick:  out of the blue a booking from the Foyles Lecture Agency, the most prestigious of all agencies.  This was for the Burnley Library who held a series of such talks every winter.  This was the first of eleven further engagements, the fee rising from £21 to £200.  A further unexpected booking soon followed to speak to the Literary Society of Grange-over-Sands.  In the following years I was to speak there on six occasions, once at short notice replacing Wedgwood Benn.  I felt I should apologise for being such a feeble substitute but it seemed that in this strongly Tory constituency I was a welcome replacement.  This was the big stuff, big audiences and fairly substantial fees, but throughout the northern counties there were numerous smaller, less affluent clubs and societies, all eager to fill their programmes.  In order to tap that other market I was recommended to a local lecture agent in Manchester called Holland Ford.  I received from him many engagements speaking to smaller audiences and for a smaller fee but still worth while.  It was desperately hard work and in order  to be close to my potential audiences I switched educational authorities and accepted a geography post in what was then Westmorland.  We sold our house in Penrith and bought a similar house, No. 3 Kendal Green, Kendal, as before living in the substantial ground floor, letting off two self-contained flats above.

I was now much motivated by the need to make money and to reduce my overdraft and now as I write this in my advanced years, I marvel at my energy and dedication.  I had no car and relied entirely on public transport, often leaving school soon after it closed, returning near midnight by the last train or by the first in the morning.  I was often short of sleep and probably neglectful of my teaching duties.  With 70 lecture engagements in each of the first two winters, I felt adequately rewarded but it was evident that I could not continue to flog South Georgia indefinitely.  If I were to continue a new subject would be required.  The opportunity for this arrived more swiftly than expected and in financial terms more costly than was welcomed.

ii) Sledging and Return

Immediately after my return from sealing, we departed on the first 60-day journey.  After a boisterous passage we were landed with our three sledges and 3,000 lbs of stores at Fortuna Bay.  We were to travel by a known route to the Kohl-Larsen Plateau, an elevated snowfield in the centre of the island and just to the north-west of the main Allardyce Range.  From the Plateau we hoped to discover and follow a route more or less along the central watershed of the island until a junction could be made with the country already surveyed at the head of Brunonia Glacier.

Sledges were manhauled, an exhausting and painfully slow method of travel.  In South Georgia where distances are not great, where much time must be spent at one camp for purposes of reconnaissance and survey, and more time spent waiting for good weather, the use of dogs would hardly be economical.

The first day of travel we had gained from our camp on the beach little over a mile in distance and perhaps 500 feet in height.  Fortunately on few days was our effort so little rewarded.  Once established on the glacier and on a surface hard frozen, we had made better progress, sometimes putting a distance of twelve miles between camps.  But such days were exceptional.  Rarely were we on a level surface and when mounting to a col sledges had to be relayed.  If in an hour we made one and a half miles it was good travelling, and on unbroken snowfields and glaciers interminably long, in a landscape to which nothing gave scale, sledge hauling became not a little tedious and the order to make camp most welcome.

We sledged up the Konig and the Neumeyer Glaciers.  On the latter we camped below the 4,000 foot face of Mt. Spaarman, a face no less steep and almost as high as the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc.  It was impressive country.

Ten days after landing at Fortuna Bay we established Camp VIII on the Kohl-Larsen Plateau where the work of exploration and survey was to begin.  More than anywhere else the landscape here had a Polar aspect.  It was an extensive and elevated snowfield surrounded on all sides by mountains icy and austere.  We were camped on the plateau a week and on all but one day the weather was perfect, cold indeed, but Alpine in character, brilliant days of sun above an unbroken sea of cloud.  It was a fine setting for the opening scenes of the Expedition’s work, but later we were to see it in another mood, for the Kohl-Larsen Plateau was also the stage on which was  played the dramatic close of the enterprise.

We took full advantage of the kindly weather.  Every morning we were called at 3.0 a.m. and after a breakfast of porridge and cocoa, cooked and eaten by candlelight, we set out on skis in parties of two or three, either heavily laden with theodolite and tripod to a survey station or on a reconnaissace with only a light rucksack.  Every day first ascents were made and every day, from peak or col, we viewed country unseen before.

The mountains were not high and perforce for survey purpose, we selected for ascent the lower and least difficult peaks.  Mount Paget, the highest peak in the island, is only 9,500 feet, and there was little that exceeded 6,000 feet in height that we could see from the Plateau.  But the worth of mountains is not measured in feet.  These peaks had the form and individuality of the best in the Alps, and if the climb of an Alpine peak is measured from the hut, they had the height too.  But they were not to be climbed in the same slightly casual fashion of an Alpine peak.  Many would call for the greatest mountaineering skill; not a few might prove, if not unclimbable, certainly unjustifiable.  These southern mountains carry in summer a winter garb where ice hangs at an impossible angle, and no one can overestimate the severity and danger of the weather in South Georgia.  When you must take into consideration intense cold and frequent storms, unheralded and prolonged, liable to come with dramatic suddenness from any direction, where winds come in gusts of exceptional force and may blow without respite for many days, then no margin of safety can be wide enough and the line of retreat never too secure.

Had Stan Peterson worn his goggles when using the theodolite we should not have climbed Spaarman.  But he did not do so and when the surveying from the plateau was complete, Stan, his eyes hidden behind plastered goggles, was lying in the tent in the agony of snowblindness.  Baume stayed behind to minister to his needs while the rest of us moved camp seven miles to the west.  In the evening Keith Warburton and I skied back to the patient.

We returned not in our sledge tracks but on a more direct route and on an unknown glacier.  We skied by peaks like fancy cakes all icing sugar and whipped cream, over a mile or so of level snowfield where distance lost all meaning, to our col, reached steeply at the edge of a giant windscoop guarding a slender rock tower rich brown in the evening light.  Far below were the two tiny dots of our camp and rising majestically behind, Mount Spaarman.  Now with no surveying, we had hopes of gaining the top and so making the first major ascent.

It blew hard the next day, but the day following was all that we could have wished for.  Travelling in a slight arc to avoid a section heavily crevassed we skied to the foot of a couloir.  To our right, separated from us by a rock ridge and another arm of the snowfield, was the peak the surveyors called ‘Dimple’.  Cunningham, Baume and I had earlier made the first ascent as amateur surveyors, taking with us the lightweight theodolite.  We had not been able to take the instrument very far:  the ridge was too narrow to set up and the summit itself,gained by a steep slope of dangerous snow, proved to be a cornice of the utmost delicacy overhanging on its far side an appalling void, and barely safe as a restricted stance for one man.

The ascent of Spaarman presented no great difficulty:  a couloir followed by a long undulating ridge led us to the summit.  But had we not reached the top?  Beyond was a second summit, perhaps no higher – we hoped not as high – but separated from us by a deep cleft and a narrow, twisted and tortuous arete.  It was really a rock arete, guarded by many gendarmes but clothed in ice so thick that nothing of its structure could be seen.  From its base rose abruptly a 200-foot tower encrusted in pillars of vertical ice.  If that  is the true summit then Spaarman will long remain unclimbed.

The next day we joined the others at Camp XI and settled down to three days of blizzard.  We were to experience weather more typical of South Georgia.  Rarely now did we enjoy two consecutive days of fine weather and almost half our time was to be spent lying up in conditions that made either travel or survey impossible.  Yet we travelled in all but the worst weather and seized every opportunity of going to a survey station.  Often before the day had shown its hand, we had dug out theodolite and tripod, unlashed rope and ice axes and set off on skis for some neighbouring peak, hurrying to beat the onset of cloud, only a few hours later to return disappointed, anxiously searching for tracks fast disappearing in a fury of wind and snow.  Often on a morning full of promise, we broke camp, only shortly afterwards to be forced to halt, and after struggling in the rising wind with billowing tents, again seek refuge in our fabric homes.

On October 17^th, we were travelling across the narrow isthmus between King Haakon Bay and Possession Bay.  It was into the former that Shackleton had brought the James Caird after his perilous open boat journey from Elephant Island and he must have crossed this isthmus.  By a strange accident we were to follow in reverse his route more precisely than we had intended.

We were travelling in low mist.  At the foot of a steep slope we left the three sledges and skied up into the sun.  Directly ahead was the col for which we were aiming.  We returned and taking one sledge at a time laboriously hauled two of them up on to the sunny snowfield.  We would make camp here and there was time enough left for a climb.  We ran down for the other sledge.

It was some time before we realised what had happened.  We came to the bottom of the slope and were again in the cloud.  Without thinking we walked past the area of trampled snow and chocolate wrappings peering forward for the sledge.  It was not there.  Anxiously we hurried forward;  then we saw them.  Two parallel tracks veering away from the others disappearing into the mist down the glacier, lonely sledge tracks unaccompanied by ski or foot marks.  Somehow set in motion, the sledge had gone and with it two of our tents, all our Primus stoves and all but one of our sleeping bags.  The glacier, the same one up which Shackleton had toiled, descended to a maze of crevasses and ended abruptly in an ice cliff falling into the sea.  It seemed that the sledge and its load must be a total loss and with its loss, not only was there a situation fraught with hazard and hardship, but we were faced with effectual end of the expedition.

Such were our thoughts as we despondently followed the tracks, as sad and gloomy now with the bleak prospects as a short time ago we had been gay with the promise of a good climb.  Not until we had dropped below the mist did we have a glimmer of hope.  The sledge by a miracle had kept to the side of the glacier.  There were crevasses here too, but fewer in number and smaller.  For about three miles we followed the tracks until they led to a slope more of ice than snow, and very steep.  At the bottom was the moraine and there, mounted high on its side, its load widely scattered, was the sledge.  It rested but a few yards from the site of Shackleton’s “Peggotty Camp”.

I did not expect always to enjoy sledging any more than I expect to enjoy every moment of an Alpine holiday or any moment of a very hard rock climb.  I was pleasantly surprised.  There was sometimes a degree of discomfort but no hardship.  There were periods too of monotony, but the scenery when we could see it, was full of variety and the weather, more varied than the scenery, gave not only an element of uncertainty to any day, but the contrast between complete relaxation and idleness and hectic and prolonged endeavour.

Even in bad weather our camps were for the most part comfortable.  The tents were effectively sealed against wind and snow and our only enemy was condensation.  Irritating rather than uncomfortable were lying-up days in high wind when the flapping fabric caused internal draughts and made us forget our books and unwritten diary and burrow deep into our bags.  Such was the noise that conversation was impossible and lighting the Primus was wasteful of matches, Meta and temper.

We lived in sturdy two man tents whose simply laid-out interior became the scene most familiar to our eyes through long days of lying up.  Once installed in our sleeping bags we were not in the least cramped and without undue discomfort we could devote the hours of enforced leisure to reading and writing.  Thus ensconced and protected we travelled far from the stormy snowfields of South Georgia immersed in the great literary masters. And so the days passed pleasantly by.

But there came times when our peace was broken and our little sanctuary of learned and lofty thought was invaded by the insidious intrusion of snow trespassing upon our treasured space.  I do not mean that it entered the tent.  I mean the snow outside that fell and drifted and built itself up in banks around us, mounted ever higher and consolidated in solid walls so that the sides of the tent collapsed and the ridge sagged.

This invasion was never deeper and more prolonged than at Camp XII.  For seven days it snowed almost without ceasing.  The level of the snow rose until it was nearly four feet above the level of the ground sheet and close to the apex of the forward poles – the space inside grew limited.  The centre of the tents hung down under its increasing load, dividing the tent into two compartments.  With outsretched legs pinned down, restricted of movement, in hollows moulded to their shape, we sat, huddled close together in a small triangle of space.  Free now from the hammering drift and flapping fabric, inside the tent it was strangely quiet.  The wind could do its worst.  We felt safe and snug in our little hole.

High mountain ridges with unsledgeable cols cut across our route.  One such ridge took us five days to turn and we did so only by descending to the beach.  But the warmth and colour of the seashore was a refreshing change from the barren, hostile wastes in which we had so long been living.  We killed and flensed a young seal whose meat gave a welcome change of diet, and collected a store of red yolked penguin eggs.  Our camp there was a pleasant place, noisy with the cry of the tern and the Antarctic skua.

Three days later we were fully returned to the turmoil of wind and drift.  We made Camp XVIII on the side of a steep col at the head of the Glacier.  It was a bad site.  Our tents had so far stood well up to the threat of the wind, but here we were to be exposed not only to an uncommonly strong wind, but one that came from the col above in gusts of unequalled force.  We estimated their velocity at 110 knots.

The hurricane blew for sixty hours.  From the first we realised the danger.  There was little sleep for anyone;  the noise, the hammering of the drift and the constant lashing of frenzied fabric might not have prevented sleep –  we were familiar with such disturbance – but anxiety was now added to our discomfort and we felt compelled to brace the poles with our backs and with outstretched arms ease the tortured cloth.

In the early hours of the second morning Duncan Carse’s tent was ripped open and a few hours later a second tent became untenable.  With both surviving tents now sheltering their maximum number we were without a margin of safely.  In preparation for an emergency move we sat booted and in windproofs, our sleeping bags rolled into rucksacks.  And so we sat through the second day and third night and the worst hours of the blizzard, cold and cramped, fearful for the fate of our tent:  four silent shivering shapes, vaguely outlined in the occasional glow of a pipe.  There was a strange macabre atmosphere about the scene.

But by first light we could discern a reduction in the frequency of the gusts.  By 8.0 a.m. it had so far lessened that we were able to leave the tents and we moved down the glacier away from this malevolent spot.  We repaired the tents, struggled into the wet sleeping bags and fell into the long sleep of exhaustion.

Now with two tents weakened and time running short we modified our plans.  Only four men went forward to complete the junction with the known country to the north-west.  But crossing the col, an arduous backpack, was a task in which we all shared.  Of course, by the time all the loads were up it was again snowing and blowing.  Quickly we wished the others luck, ran down to the glacier and on skis raced along our fast disappearing tracks.

The next few days provided the wettest camping I remember.  This was only partly due to the fact that Louis Baume had spilled on to my sleeping bag a full pot of Pemmican.  The greatest measure of its cause was the profoundly disturbing practice which changing winds reluctantly forced upon us, of swinging tents.  Our tents were wedge shaped designed to point tail to wind.  In view of recent experience we could afford to take no risk.  When the wind changed so had we to change the direction of our tents.

When we returned from the backpack the wind had changed to the north and for forty minutes we struggled with tents perversely ungovernable before we could claim their shelter.  Twice the next day we repeated the performance.  It was devilishly annoying.  Cursing we struggled into wet windproofs and crawled out into a torrent of wind and drift.  Sledge boxes were passed out.  Other figures emerged, bent against the wind.  Only one man could be spared for digging:  the rest of us hung on to the tent.  Sledge boxes were put in new positions ready to place on the flap.  Holding tightly to each pole and to the sides, ready to fall on to the billowing cloth should the wind take control we shuffled round pivoting on one tail guy left embedded.  When both tents were again secure, bringing with us much snow, but too cold to bother, we crawled thankfully back into the chaos inside.  After a few hours, we were out again doing the same thing.

Ten days later the two parties were again reunited and we started the long trek home.  It is not necessary to give details of these events, of the weekend of lavish hospitality we enjoyed as guests of the Norwegian Whaling Station on our return, or anything but the briefest account of other journeys.

On December 13^th, two four-man parties were landed at Sunset Fjord and at Elsehul.  Carse, Paterson, Price and I were on the latter.

Elsehul, at the extreme north-west end of the island, enjoys a climate less severe than the remainder of it.  There was little snow, much vegetation and an abundance of fearless wild life.  For four weeks we camped close to the shore in a situation and scenery that reminded me much of Loch Scavaig.  It was a static camp and although the weather permitted only limited climbing and survey we thoroughly enjoyed living in this nature lover’s paradise.

We were sledging again on our third journey.  Landed at Royal Bay we crossed the Ross Pass and entered the unexplored country to the south of the Salvesen Range.  An excellent sledging route was found rising at one point to over 4,000 feet;  it took us through the finest country we had yet seen.  The surveying went well, but unfortunately bad weather and lack of time permitted only one major ascent;  an unnamed peak of 7,200 feet.

On February 22^nd we made Camp XIV at the head of the Philippi Glacier.  We were only one day’s march from Drygalski Fjord where we were to be picked up.  But here we suffered a setback.  We were entombed in our tents for eight days while it blew almost without interruption at hurricane force.  Fortunately the wind was constant and there were none of the dangerous gusts that were so damaging on the Grace Glacier, but the abrading action of the icy drift on the suffering ventile was such as almost to wear through sections of the fabric.  It had been our intention to be transported direct to a landing on the south coast but now we must return to base for repairs.

On March 1^st we sledged down the glacier.  It was a perfect day.  The mountains fell in great cliffs of rock or ice nearly 8,000 feet to the sea.  It must be amongst the finest coastal scenery in the world.  Far below, drifting among the ice debris in the black waters of Drygalski Fjord, patiently awaiting our appearance, was the sealer Diaz.

            The last journey was quite abortive.  Unable now to land on the south coast we were to travel again to the Kohl-Larsen Plateau where by crossing a high col we could reach the glaciers and snowfields that descend to the south of the main Allardyce range.  It was our earnest hope that we should be able to complete the season’s work by making an attack on Mount Paget.  But we never reached the unknown country and we got no nearer to Paget than we had been before.  Yet for five of us there was to be an experience that, at least in retrospect, we should not have liked to miss.

There was now little snow cover on the lower glacier, the crevasses were open and after landing in West Cumberland Bay we had three days of arduous backpacking before we were established on sledgeable terrain.  Camp VI was pitched on the Kohl-Larsen Plateau.  We were on familiar ground.

Mach 14^th dawned fine.  We were out of tents by first light and while three set off for a trig. Station, Carse, Warburton, Baume, Cunningham and I moved camp across the Plateau.  Soon after midday the wind freshened.  A blanket of cloud was already sweeping up from the Neumeyer Glacier and filling up the Plateau, although as yet we were above it.  We deemed it wiser to halt and pitch camp.

At 3.0 p.m. the others had not returned.  We felt some anxiety, our tracks were rapidly drifting over.  Accordingly we decided to go out and walk in line abreast on the line of their return.  And so we left the tents, not imagining we should be away for long and neglecting to take with us those items of equipment essential to our safety.

With Carse in the centre of the line, holding the compass we staggered forward half against the wind.  After thirty minutes we halted and waited, all the time the weather worsening and our line narrowing.  It was evident we must go back while we still could.  No longer now was the high ridge behind our camp visible.

Carefully we walked back on the reciprocal course, but a course in this wind was not easy to hold.  After twenty minutes it was obvious we had overshot the tents.  We turned and punched against the wind, but we could not keep it up for long.  Eyes froze up and lungs filled with fine powder snow so that we gasped for breath.  Backwards and forwards we went for two hours searching in a zig-zag pattern.

Short of finding camp our only safety lay to the north, back down the Neumayer Glacier, but that was against the wind and was not be thought of.  Downward was unexplored country and crevassed glaciers falling steeply from the Plateau.  We had no skis, no ice-axes, no rope, nothing to make travel safe.  We had no food or spare clothing, and we had left but one hour of daylight.  The position was not a pleasant one.

Then Cunningham put a foot through into a crevasse.  We peered down into black emptiness, but at one end it was shallow and friendly.  A steep slope led to a platform beyond which the crevasse opened out and plunged into greater depths.  Immensely relieved we sought its shelter.  It was quiet and peaceful, our voices absorbed by the icy walls were hushed and the wind could only be heard now like the faint rumbling of distant artillery.  We were lucky to find this refuge and our spirits were high.

We were for the moment safe, but there was little comfort.  For ten hours we stood and shivered, vigorously stamping our feet, too cold to relax, not daring to sleep.  We had little reason to believe dawn would bring relief.  The recent eight-day blizzard was vividly in our minds.  When grey light filtered through the hole above and we looked anxiously out we found no visibility and the wind still blew with fearful force.  But there was one vital change;  it blew now from the south.

We were worried for the others’ safety.  They were better equipped for it but presumably they, too, were suffering similarly.  Our physical condition was fast deteriorating and after a second night there might be little help that we could offer.  It was decided then to get out and to risk the fight back to the coast and the safety of a Whaling Station.  We knew the compass bearings and the wind would be at our backs.

Outside it seemed so impossible we wondered for the moment the wisdom of our move.  But action was better than this soul destroying inactivity which so insidiously sapped our strength.  We made rapid progress but by late morning we were again in trouble.  Off course on the slopes of Spaarman which fall steeply on to the Neumayer Glacier we had wandered into a mass of large crevasses.  Gingerly we crawled over them where bridges could be found until the slope became too steep.  Back we went, the worst moments of the whole episode, crawling, blinded and choked by drift, seeing only occasionally the feet of the man in front, fearful lest the slender link between was severed.  We could only struggle thus for a few minutes and when we found a shallow crevasse we got into it, resigned now to a second night.  But it would hold only three of the party and unexpectedly while searching for alternative shelter a way down was found.

Our hearts were immeasurably lightened.  Only one further peril remained: the maze of narrow but deep and thinly bridged crevasses that lay four miles down the glacier.  We crossed them in a line diagonal to the fissures with arms tightly linked.  At almost every step one or the other of us would go through.  Only once did the chain break.  Cunningham disappeared altogether – happily to wedge unhurt some twenty feet down.  He was able to climb out.

That was the last of our trials.  Only straightforward walking separated us from the food, comfort and safety of Husvick into which, after thirty-six hours of almost continual effort, the five exhausted explorers thankfully staggered.

There is little more to tell.  While we visited base to equip ourselves for a return to the Plateau, Carse and Warburton, thanks to the cooperation of the Captain and Flying personnel of the whaling factory ship Southern Venture, made a reconnaissance by helicopter.  Coming down the glacier, hauling two sledges were the missing men.  They had found the tents and had suffered nothing worse than anxiety.

So ended our six months of endeavour and a wealth of experience.  Virtually our work was completed.  Explorers and surveyors will find now South Georgia is a poor field for their efforts.  But for mountaineers the work had at that time hardly begun.

We sailed from South Georgia in early April on board another of Christian Salveson tankers, the Southern Garden.  I shared a cabin with Keith Warburton, the most admirable of companions, who was soon to act as the unofficial ship’s doctor;  our cabin became a surgery.  In addition to a full complement of whalers returning home, there were other passengers leaving home far behind never to return.  There were fifteen king penguins bound for Edinburgh zoo;  these seemed quite content, well fed and comfortably housed amidships with their own swimming pool.  It was a five-week voyage broken only by a brief halt to bunker in the Cape Verde Islands where we were entertained by the British community.  As on the many earlier occasions, tent bound in blizzards, the journey with no demands upon our time offered a further opportunity for reading.  The choice in the ship’s library was meagre so I turned back to rereading chapters of Macaulay’s History of England in which I had earlier become so absorbed.  A professional historian might be critical, but like Gibbons it is prose of high literary merit.  Perhaps it is little read nowadays but when it was first published in 1849 it became a best seller;  the first printing of thirteen thousand was sold out, and there were five editions in the first few years.

We docked late evening at Tilbury with just time for a pint at the nearest pub where Duncan savoured with delight the whiff of cheap scent  from the barmaid.  The next day, being briefly minor celebrities, we were invited back stage at the Windmill Theatre before taking the night train to Penrith and a warm welcome from my long suffering wife and my first glimpse of our baby son Nicholas.

The price of eight months absence from teaching was a massive bank overdraft, but re-employment with the Cumberland Education Authority had been guaranteed.  I suppose with a background of practical geography I was a golden boy and I was offered a golden post, head of geography in the Eden School, Carlisle, the best Secondary Modern of the county.  I was now on an increased salary but the considerable bank overdraft fell heavily for which I must seek an additional source of income.