Harriet Tuckey: Everest - The First Ascent

Harriet Tuckey: Everest - The First Ascent

I was in Darwin for my niece's wedding in July 2014 and browsing a bookshop with my wife Lois when I came across this book in the bargain bin. Reading the blurb on the back cover, I knew it was a story I had to read.

Marking the 60th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest in May 1953, Everest – The First Ascent tells the story of the doctor and physiologist Griffith Pugh, without whom the successful conquest of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay would not have been possible.

Recruited as an advisor in 1952, Pugh battled for fifteen months – in the face of opposition, suspicion and ridicule – to revolutionise almost every aspect of British high-altitude mountaineering, transforming the approach to oxygen, clothing, boots, tents, air beds, fitness, hygiene, health-care, diet and acclimatisation. The results were a stunning success and opened the door to the golden age of Himalayan climbing. Pugh's techniques are still in use today, yet he has never enjoyed popular credit for his work.

In later years, he turned his attention to endurance athletics and the challenges of competing at high altitude (in the context of the 1968 Mexico Olympics) and in hot conditions. Again, his ideas were revolutionary and are still used today.

Written by Pugh's daughter, Harriet Tuckey, and published in 2013, just in time for the 60th anniversary of the conquest of Everest, the book charts the personal story of her own, and her mother's, relationship with this fiercely independent, troubled, abrasive and eccentric man, as she seeks to uncover the achievements of his controversial career.

Well, finished it and must just say - talk about an amazing bloke who led an amazing life - not the easiest person from the sounds of things but a real pioneer in physiological testing, be in the fields of mounaineering or high altitude running.

I also have two other mountaineering books which were great reads

View from the Summit -by Sir Edmund Hillary (1999)- it mentions Pugh in various places.
Memoirs of a Mountaineer - by F. Spencer Chapman (published in 1951 but written as two separate stories in 1937 and 1938).