CHRIS BONINGTON: THIRTY YEARS OF CLIMBING*

An Interview

JIM CURRAN AND JOHN PORTER

Chris Bonington has been climbing on the world's highest and hardest mountains for thirty years. Bonington is now fifty-five and is the great survivor of three generations of British climbing. Over the years he has been praised, criticised and occasionally ridiculed, yet his track record speaks for itself. His boundless enthusiasm is as fresh today as it ever was. In an attempt to penetrate the public person Jim Curran and John Porter visited Chris at his Lake District home with a large bottle of wine. Far from softening him up it was the interviewers who became increasingly relaxed as the urbane Mr. Bonington dealt effortlessly with everything they threw at him...

John Porter : In a 1968 interview with Ken Wilson you said that you 'd veered away from professional climbing towards communicating matters - writing, lecturing and photography. ' 'The creative work is really, my prime drive, and as important to me as my climbing". How do you feel about that statement nowadays ?

Chris Bonington: I think I prefer climbing, but that at that time, in '68, I had veered right away from climbing, was doing a lot of photo-journalism, was very ambitious and completely wound up in it to the point I wanted to move down to London to be nearer the editors and nearer Fleet Street. Wendy wanted to stay in the Lakes, and we'd been coming back from a really miserable house hunting session in London and stopped off with Nick and Caroline Estcourt in Alderley Edge, when I came up with the compromise of living in Manchester instead. I was very aware in' 62, when I abandoned regular employment, how thin my skills were. I'd written one article in the Alpine Journal and one of the climbers' magazines and that was it. I got my first book out in 1966

* Reprinted from MOUNTAIN 130, (abridged) with the kind permission of the editor and Chris Boninqton. — Ed.

Jim Curran: Your new book Mountaineer is a very strong photographic statement. Is all your photography essentially self-taught or did you ever have any external professional advice in any formal sense at all ?

Not really, no. Going back to about that 62-63 period 1 felt then that I really had to try to learn how to take photographs. Wendy helped me and there is no doubt about that. She has a formal training as an artist but I am completely self-taught. The Eiger Direct climb gave me the break into photo-journalism and I did a good job. They gave me another assignment and then I started getting more as a kind of adventure journalist.

John: You specifically said about the Eiger climb that you were only there to photograph, that you couldn 't help the climbers out and felt very much of an outsider. Do you feel the same way when you lead an expedition ? Have you ever felt yourself pulled by commitments to the professional side of your career, the books, films, etc.

No. I feel completely part of all my major climbs. After the Blue Nile trip, I was beginning to feel that I was too much of a voyeur and I was beginning to get real withdrawal symptoms from climbing. Then Dennis Gray showed me a photograph of the South Face of Annapurna — ooh, that would be nice, and I plunged into that. But even as leader of an expedition, basically I have been with friends. On the South Face of Annapurna, the hard core of that expedition were very close friends. I was almost the leader by default. We had all been talking about it, but nobody had actually got round to organising anything. I did that just to make it happen. As a leader you are at times slightly set apart from the rest of the group but there is a private quality in me which does that anyway. I am not an immensely gregarious person so that, even when I am just part of an expedition I will probably slide off to my tent and read a book or very happily read in the middle of a general conversation.

Jim: Occasionally you have been pretty ruthless, with expediency over-riding personal friendships at times. Do you regret this in retrospect or do you think it is inevitable ?

I think it is necessary. Even within the context of a friendship, you are doing the right thing if you are making a decision about who to take or who not to take on the basis of making that group of people actually work together effectively. Taking the easy road out by saying 'Oh, he's a good mate, I must take him along and we will somehow make it work', will in the end be worse for you, and it's going to be worse for him. I think that you have got to make the decisions that are best for the expedition as a whole. They are not ego decisions. Having made these decisions you then try to recover that friendship. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Jim : Could you ever now see yourself running another big expedition, or is that a piece of your life that's definitely behind you ?

It very nearly happened with the N. E. Ridge of Everest. If Harry Taylor and Russell Brice hadn't climbed the unclimbed section, I was taking a big expedition to finish it off. I think I felt a sense of relief when they did it. At the moment I can't summon much enthusiasm for organising another large expedition. When I did organise large expeditions I was probably almost as good if not a better climber than most of the people on the expedition. On the 1975 Everest expedition Doug and Dougal were going better than me, but I was going third or fourth best on that team and was a realistic summit candidate. Now I wouldn't be. On the N. E. Ridge Everest expedition I was planning to be an advance base support leader, and what's the point in that?

Jim: Or even worse, ending up like Herrligkoffer.

Well, I think there is a danger of that. When leading- an expedition you need to be very close to the front, you actually have to be capable of going out to the front when things are going slowly. When you can't do that any longer you are going to be less effective as a leader because you are just going to be a planner. When you're sitting back and planning things from base camp, the actual decision making is all happening out in front. You wouldn't have the same level of respect-acceptance. You wouldn't be imbued in the complete body of the entity; an expedition is an animal and you need everyone to be part of that animal and if you can't actually take a full part I think you have lost something. Feeling this way I would probably be unwise to try and organise a large expedition to one of the really big mountains again.

John: You were saying you needed to be part of the team but were there not times when the team view may not always have been the same as your view ?

As leader you are still slightly separate and need to be separate. On Everest in 1975, the actual division took place as a result of a psychological mistake I made by separating the team on the approach march, and I did that purely for convenience. There were about 24 people, all Europeans with the film crew all travelling together. You can't fit them into one tent to eat so it was easier to separate them into two parties. Then of course I made the classic mistake of calling them the A team and the B team and getting all the people I wanted to consult in my team. The fact is once you have divided a team, the people who are separate from the decision-making inevitably start thinking otherwise and start making plans otherwise. Even on a small expedition, if you are actually a team of 4 and you are in two tents there are two sets of plans being made. You have somehow then got to get the two plans together. There's a 'them and us' that develops in everything, much more so in a structured expedition.

John: Do you enjoy the role of expedition leader ?

Yes. I enjoy the planning side of it. I enjoy making something happen and I think I have tried to do it on a consensus basis. You listen, but you still make decisions. You still actually maintain power, if you like, but I think the power is necessary in the sense that you have got to take decisions. You give a group a vague objective, such as go out and establish C4. They will decide how they are going to do that and you leave them to it and you accept their decisions.

John: Is expedition leadership something that is self- taught or did you come in into it with preconceived ideas of how you should lead an expedition ?

I don't think so, no. I suppose you could say I had a cliched leadership training having had a military background. After leaving Sandhurst and taking over a troop of tanks I made every mistake in the book. I came in as a young Sandhurst martinet who hadn't got a bloody clue. And I did so much damage it took me 9 months to get the group together. You have got to create an atmosphere where you like them and they like you, so they actually want to do the work required of them. You really are like a small expedition and I think that helped me funnily enough, not the Sandhurst bit but actually commanding the tanks.

John: On all your expeditions you have made a real effort to get everybody together, to have periods where the team is working together, going out to the Alps in winter. Is that approach something you learned from somebody else ?

No. I don't think so. I think that was just natural. That was part of being part of the world of climbing and going out to the Alps was a good excuse to go climbing. I think this business of expedition training is the worst thing; this is the layman's perception of what climbing is all about. I don't train, I actually go climbing for fun and an expedition is an extension of that and so it should be.

John: But do you consciously bring people together, so that you can spot potential problems, personality conflicts ?

No, I hope I have learned something about human nature. I think I am a good delegator by temperament, and have always been good at actually giving people jobs and leaving them to get on with it. The job of the leader or the organiser or the co-ordinator is to keep an eye on things, so if things aren't going right you can step in and do something about it. But you must leave people to do their job even if they do it in a way different from your own. You have got to be aware of the fact that what you think is right is not necessarily right.

Jim: Looking now at the new book, it starts off with Annapurna II then Annapurna South Face and Everest S. W. Face, very much in the vanguard of expeditioning, and then on to Kongur and Everest in 1982 where you were at the forefront of Alpine-style development. Then slightly paradoxically when you climbed Everest in 1985, it was back to traditional techniques. Your overall experience of all kinds of styles is thus immense. How do you feel now about some of the issues and ethics that have arisen in Himalayan climbing, particularly in the last few years ? Things like people being abandoned, selfishness and so on, have become if not the norm then certainly not the exception. Does it worry you that the Alpine-style thing seems to have bred a kind of selfishness ?

I don't think that Alpine-style climbing has bred selfishness as such. I think the selfishness comes within the groups, the actual nature of the people themselves. You just don't know what you would do in extreme circumstances, but I hope that I never would leave anyone, and I hope that if at the end of the day it meant you were going to die yourself I hope I'd take that step. On the Ogre, Mo Anthoine and Clive Rowlands, might have been quite pissed off in some ways with Doug Scott and myself, but there was no way they would ever have left us. We were a small group who had been on that mountain right the way through, and I think one of the dangers that has surfaced in the Himalaya at the moment is where you get lots of different expeditions on a mountain rushing up the mountain but no-one having a sense of responsibility for each other. The loyalty of saying, well, we're all in it together, and we're going to try and get out of it together, but maybe none 'of us are going to get out, but we're going to keep trying until we do is not there, if you are not part of a team and know each other as happened on K2 in 1953, on the Charlie Houston expedition. They would never ever have left Gilkie. If you go right back to where I started from, say Annapurna II in 1960, it was like one of the pre-war expeditions, and we were all servicemen steeped in the kind of morals of the Second World War and it was a very cohesive expedition. We had Jimmy Roberts who was a bloody good leader, in fact, because he wasn't a martinet, and yet he was a good planner and a good thinker and we automatically accepted his judgment. Then you had the Nuptse expedition which was in a way an amazing expedition. The south face of Nuptse in 1961 was way, way ahead of its time but the fascinating thing was that a group of disparate people who fought tooth and nail through the expedition managed somehow to retain a basic loyalty. Everyone kept together. Even so if the weather had broken right at the end when there were six people at the top without food of any kind anywhere on the mountain and with the rest of the team either knackered at base camp or gone home, there could have been the most appalling disaster.

Jim: Can I just bring you back to a point that you made about people's attitudes leading to selfishness. Is it because commercialism or the opportunities of climbing now are beginning to attract the wrong sort of people, people who are ambitious for the wrong reasons ? Is it that the opportunities of becoming famous, making their name, changes their personalities ?

I don't think so, no. One can only work within one's own experience and certainly I have been exposed to media hype. I have climbed with 'superstars' like Dougal Haston and so on, but I don't think any of them were particularly ambitious for fame's sake. I think as far as Britain goes, and I suspect the States, climbing is still a minority sport. Nobody in Britain or the States has ever made a fortune out of climbing . I think the way people behave is at times affected by ego, but is affected perhaps more by the kind of society in which they live. I mean if you take the British 1986 K2 trip, the interesting thing about it was that you had a group of top climbers coming together and having to work together to achieve an end and it fell apart.

John: think we were never together. That was our problem.

That was probably mainly because of the way the team actually was assembled; I don't think Al had thought the thing through to arrive at a group who could work together. One of the hardest things I have done, one of the things I have worried about most, is actually dropping Al from the 1982 Everest expedition. That was not so much because Al wasn't good enough to climb as because he couldn't get on with that particular group. I actually took a hard, harsh step with a friend that I was very fond of but it wouldn't have worked otherwise.The group we had at the end did work well together and it was a very happy cohesive team, and I think that's what you have got to think about. You have got to get a group of people together who are compatible, who have got the same kind of aims, the same kind of objectives. I think what goes wrong with an awful lot of expeditions is that that hasn't been done.

John: The objective becomes more important than the experience ?

I think you have got to be more clear about the objective. You want to climb the mountain, but its actually getting a group of people together who basically accept the way you are going to climb it. Getting back to this point about commercialism in climbing. I think you have got to be incredibly careful when making sweeping statements about all modern climbers being greedy, avaricious, etc. That's load of balls.

John: You seem to have ridden that storm, but there are those who believe that commercialism will spoil people.

I think if you analyse the problems that have arisen on various Himalayan expeditions I would be suprised if avarice ever came out very high. Once you are on a mountain I think the influence of sponsors vanishes fairly quickly as do most things expect your own personal ambition. But you. have got to be careful with ego - it can drive you to the top of a mountain against all odds, but it can also warp sound judgement. You've got to find a balance.

Rows and political manouvering are nothing new : look at the ferocious, hideous arguments that flared up on some pre-war expeditions. Look at some of the skullduggery evident on some of the early Everest expeditions, the way Finch was actually squeezed out and then not invited, and he was probably the best climber of the lot at that time. Shipton and Everest in 1953 and so on. It's happened time and time again. Its nothing new. And neither is ego. If one's talking about good leadership, I think it is based on the ability to choose a compatible group. Even some of Herrligkoffer's expeditions have been very happy expeditions which have worked well when Herrligkoffer chose people who performed well within the kind of culture that he had created. An expedition is an incredibly intense microcosm of the world.

John: Do you feel occasionally that the pressure of producing the book, fronting the film and alls the rest of it actually changes your thinking—the tail wagging the dog. Is there a danger that you become manipulated by the media instead of the other way round?

I don't think that's ever happened. It can happen. With the 1975 Everest expedition, I wanted to do the expedition, so O.K. you need a book, you need a television team, you need a sponsor.I think the important things are to be honest with the sponsor and honest with yourself. I enjoy the whole thing. I suppose the closest I ever came to such compromise was on this ballooning thing. I thought it would be a bloody good thing to go up in a balloon but I think I was also slightly attracted by easy glitz. In the end I pulled out of it because I ceased to be happy with it. It did happen to some extent on the Eiger Direct. Peter Gillman phoned up and he said, 'Oh, you know, I'm coming to interview you about it' and I suddenly realised that I was unhappy. So when things have got out of control, such as with the 1971 /1972 Everest expeditions, I have always been prepared to pull out.

Jim : Which historical climber or adventurer, if any, do you feel most akin to ?

None particularly, but John Hunt was a very good role model for me on big expeditions; but within small expeditions I think I have just been myself.

Jim: But you must have a few heroes ?

Yes, okay, heroes. As a youngster when I started climbing — Bill Murray's Mountaineering in Scotland and Herman Buhl's Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage I think were the two formative books for me. Mountaineering in Scotland came out in the early 50's — as I was just beginning to go climbing in Scotland, and Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage at the start of my Alpine career. I remember feeling really disappointed, in a way, having read about the Cassin Route and the Comici Route, to find them comparatively easy, but they were still very formative reading. At the time, when you are so involved, you are not looking for role models. The people who affect you most are not so much heroes as people you actually enjoy climbing with, and can learn lots from. Certainly Don Whillans, who was much more experienced than I has taught me an immense amount. Dougal Haston was someone I enjoyed climbing with. He had a greater edge than I had and yet we always traded pitches when we climbed together. I suppose a very close friend and a really integral supporter was Nick Estcourt. Through expedition after expedition he was the guy who would end up taking on the rough job and do it very well.

Jim : Just to come back to Everest yet again, I think there is no doubt at all that since you climbed Everest you have become much more relaxed, much more laid back about life in general. Do you feel this ?

Getting to the top of Everest was important to me but it wasn't particularly logical. I had got to the top using every trick in the book. I made sure we had a superb Sherpa team, and that we used oxygen from 7000 m . We gave Sherpas a chance to get to the top of the mountain and one strapping Sherpa carried my spare bottle for me all the way up to 8400 m, so I was helped in every possible way. But still I only just made it. Had I not succeeded, I don't think I'd have got up at some subsequent stage and I don't think I'd have tried again. Being able to get there, I was much more able to accept the fact that I was 50. On Kongur I knew that Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker were much better than I was, but I really liked climbing with them. Funnily enough on Menlungtse last year, after we had burned out on the first attempt, I was able to accept the fact that my recovery rate was much slower than that of Andy Fanshawe, who of course is nearly thirty years younger than me, and therefore was even relieved at the time to stand down for the second attempt.

Jim : That's something you couldn’t 't possibly have done ten years ago.

Of course, but that's called mellowing with age, isn't it.

Jim: Have you any unfulfilled ambitions? It doesn't have to be anything to do with climbing. Do you want to go to the moon, swim the channel, score a goal in the cup final, that sort of thing?

No. I really want to get to my little range of mountains, to the N.E. of Lassa. I think that's something. That's very deep in my psyche. I have tended to have only one objective in front of me that I can actually attain and having got there I will no doubt find something else I'd like to do.

Jim : Well the next obvious question is are there any regrets, anything you feel has passed you by that you would like to have done.

No. You think of everything you have done, all the mistakes you have made and you can kick yourself for this, that and the other. I would have liked to have climbed Menlungtse but it doesn't break my heart not to have done it.

John: What's your greatest pleasure in the mountains ?

I think the fun of it. Its a combination of being amongst them, the sheer physical enjoyment of climbing, although at altitude its not fun, but its the whole impressing quality of that too. Its being and living within the mountains, even the hard parts, with people you enjoy being with.

John: Have you ever had a moment on a trip when you have said to yourself, I am never going to do this again ?

No.

John: Never. What then has been your worse moment, or closest call, your greatest moment of doubt?

When your mates are killed, but I think even then, the most agonising moment is when someone's up there, you know something's desperately wrong and there's nothing you can do about it and you just sit it out, that's the worst part of it. K2 hit me the hardest [when Nick Estcourt was killed] but even after that I never thought I'd give up expeditions. You' ve accepted the fact that someqne could be killed and you have come out to climb a mountain and therefore you should actually rationalise that. However I had a problem in that Nick was probably closer to me than anyone else on the expedition, but I still thought that there was no reason why the expedition should stop.I felt that we had to have a vote on it and I thought we should go on, and Pete did too. I wasn't sorry that we were outvoted, but I still felt that we should go on.

John: What has been your most enjoyable climb, big or small?

Oh, Shivling. Everything about it, the fact there were just two of us, it was totally spontaneous. We had, in fact, gone to climb the west face of Kedarnath Dome. We didn't even know the way down and it very quickly became obvious we weren't going to be able to get down the way we had come up. But it worked out well and I enjoyed climbing with Jim Fotheringham. It was just a brilliant climb.

John: Do you ever have any serious feelings or concerns about the impact that climbers have on Himalayan or South American peoples, to their economy, to their habitat, ecology, etc. ?

Yes, you have got to look at the impact on the people of the Himalaya and everything else. I think on the whole it is a beneficial impact. Progress, Westernisation, industrialisation, is part of the dynamic of the society in which we live. Climbers and tourists going to Himalayan areas are just a small part of that dynamic, and I think one of the traps that some environmentalists fall into is saying, there are these wonderful little quaint Sherpa people living in their little villages and gee, I don't want to see all of this change; all that horrible electricity, sewage, roads. I think'that the development that's happening, (a) needs to happen, (b) is going to happen anyway. What is important is how the individual people manage to handle it. I think the Sherpas and most of the Himalayan people are very sophisticated. Remember this is a very old civilisation, slightly older than our own. The tourists going into Sola Khumbu or into Nepal are bringing in money. Materially the people are much better off; you could say that maybe some of them are confused, as in fact an awful lot of young westerners are confused, but it's all part ot progress. I think that to say we shouldn't have big expeditions is a load of baloney because the major impact is trekkers and not expeditions. But to say we should actually reduce the numbers of people going in, the Sherpas wouldn't thank you for that because they have built up an economy around tourists and significantly they have built up the economy themselves. It's the Sherpas who are actually exploiting the tourists. I think the much greater worries should be for the aboriginal inhabitants of areas who basically cannot cope with the invasion of Western society. Demage has been done to them, an immense damage whether it's the North American Indians, the Eskimos, the Indians in the Amazon Basin and so on. But that is not a climbing problem.

John: In the 1968 interview we started with Ken Wilson hammering you about the numbers of people on the mountains and your response was: 'The more popular the sport becomes the better. I think the mountains and the country can absorb infinitely more people than are ever likely to start climbing. ' Do you still believe that ?

Yes, I believe that passionately.

John: So you believe that climbing is a growth sport and should continue to grow.

Yes but there's a big difference. That is the natural promotion of climbing that is not even commercial; it's because people like Jim and me and you enjoy talking about it and writing about it. O.K. we make our living out of it as well, but funnily enough there is a basic desire to communicate and I think that that is a completely natural form of progression. It is very different from having the big recruitment campaigns which some sports do. I wouldn't like to see that. There might be a degree of contradiction in this, but I think the sport itself has a dynamism of its own. Supposing competition climbing takes off: there'll be more and more and more indoor climbing walls built and people climbing on them like crazy and probably the crags will come in for less use. The sport is an evolutionary organism and one of the things that you can always be sure of is that we won't accept change because change always comes from the younger generation. It's coming from a different generation who are going to do things differently from how we do them. I think a completely natural set of checks and balances will evolve. Say they get immensely dependent on bolts, they get immensely dependent on plastic walls—a group will then emerge who will get fed up with all that and bounce off to do something else or get back to adventure climbing or what have you. You and I can state our own beliefs and ethics and should not be afraid to do so, but in the long run it is the action of peer groups, be it ridicule in the climbing press, bolt chopping operations or talk in the pub, that is going to adjust attitudes and change.

Any group or organisation has got to be incredibly careful about setting Itself up as the custodians of the way this is done. I thing that the organisation has got to respond to the way people are going. There will always be people who will respond in an extreme way. It is within the dialogue, the arguments, the discussion, that you are going to get a balance. But you are certainly not going to get a balance by laying down the law.

John: You use the word 'sport' for climbing. Do you feel that climbing is a sport and the evolution which is taking place is happening In a lot of other sports already, becoming more open to masses of people creating professional opportunities within that sport. Is this something that has made climbing a sport or is there something different about climbing.

I think climbing is a lifestyle and within that lifestyle there always has been an innate, sporting competitiveness, a knowledge of where you are In the pecking order. I bet it even happened with the guys sitting around Wnsdale Head in the last century. In the fashionable areas, say in Britain and in Europe and the States the best routes have been climbed. Competition climbing is a partial result of these areas being worked out. The standards of climbing have got so high that you actually introduce formal training for it and therefore you're beginning to introduce formal sport discipline. But I don't think that's healthy or unhealthy. I think It's something that's happened. The sport is going to change but for any of us to say that's wrong is to actually impose our own values on to an element of change and I don't want to do that. I think the interesting thing here is, quite apart from the stand that is made in this country against climbing competitions on natural crag—the competition climbers have found that in actual fact, artificial climbing walls are much better for competition climbing than natural rocks. And the intriguing thing is thnt Its been done not by edict or aegis, its been done by actual discovery. Thnt this is the best way of doing it.

John: Who do you feel is your most important audience ?

I'm not sure—when I write, I'm not thinking of the audience, but I try to communicate experiences as effectively and as clearly as 1 can but I don't think I pitch towards Joe Public or climbers or anyone.

John: Do you take pleasure in writing ? Do you find it as rewarding as the climbing ?

No, I find the writing desperately hard but at the same time, funnily enough, when you feel you have managed to get it right it's very satisfying. It's nothing compared to climbing, but it's an important adjunct. I don't think .I'd be happy just climbing; you'd get very bored with it. I think to do what I have done is a very satisfying way of doing it. Your pastime is providing the fuel for the living that you make. My living is to be a communicator and I can therefore enjoy my climbing to the full and then the work is sitting down writing about it.

John: Can you imagine any other career that might have given you such pleasure ?

I don't think so, no, not now. I'm still fascinated by military history but I have absolutely no desire to kill people. Interestingly the logistics of climbing mountains and fighting wars are almost identical. I suppose to a degree the beauty of climbing is that you are playing a risky game; the only person who could suffer is yourself while the unacceptable thing about a war is you are trying to hurt someone else.

John: Do you put your own survival down to good luck ?

Pure luck. Without a shadow of a doubt. With absolutely anyone that you look at, whether it's Doug or me or whoever. Both Doug and I have had the same experience in that we have been to the top of a mountain and every single person who was on the summit of that mountain with us is now dead. Now the fact that you are alive is not because you are a cannier climber. You only have to look back at the number of narrow escapes you have had to realise that you are still alive due to luck, or karma, and certainly not skill or intuitive judgement.

An interview with Chris Bonington, encompassing his views and opinions on thirty years of climbing.

 

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