AFTER NANDA DEVI

PETER LLOYD

IT IS ALWAYS PLEASANT for an old man to be remembered by young and active friends and it was a special pleasure to me to be asked to contribute to the discussion in the Himalayan Journal of the problems of the Himalayan environment. And of course 1 applaud the Editor's decision to make this one of the central features of his 50th volume. But I belong to a generation that was fortunate to find its Himalayan objectives unsullied and uncumbered by the debris of previous expeditions. The Nanda Devi basin in 1936 was by definition virgin territory. The only vandalism we were guilty of was when the Sherpas gratuitously set fire to a bank of juniper. Everest in 1938 was not new country, but the remains of previous parties had been sufficiently cleared up by the Tibetans and by snowfall and glacier movement; the only debris I remember was an oxygen bottle at the C5 site. In the Nepalese Himalaya in 1949 Bill Tilman and I were lucky enough to be the first to see and explore the Langtang and Ganesh Himalaya.

As a result, the only environmental damage that I am familiar with Is the erosion of footpaths and the intrusion of unseemly buildings in the Scottish Highlands. The late Percy Unna, a member of the Alpine Club and past president of the, Scottish Mountaineering Club, gave Ben Lawers, parts of Glen Coe and other mountain properties to the Scottish National Trust, most important bequests, and in doing so, he set out guidelines for their future management, ruling out such things as marked paths, cairns, buildings except close to a road, find so forth. The trust is now being taken to task for its failure to adhere faithfully to these rules.

So much for the environment. But the mention of Nanda Devi has opened the gates on a flood of memories and my article now degenerates into reminiscences. For me the 1936 Nanda Devi expedition had particularly happy outcomes, most notably the lifelong friendships with all the members of our Anglo-American party, first with Bill "Tilman under whose leadership I went to Everest in 1938 and a decade later to the Nepalese Himalaya; also with Noel Odell whom I saw regularly in Cambridge, London and Scotland and who was also on Everest in 1938. My obituaries of both are in back numbers of the H.J.

I think it was a turning point in all our lives. For Charlie Houston, also a survivor, it was the start of what I can only call his love affair with India, leading to his 1938 expedition to K2, then after the war to a time in charge of American Peace Corps volunteers in India, and finally to his life's work on the physiology of high altitude. For "Ad Carter, another survivor, it led to a whole series of expeditions to the Andes, to his long and distinguished Editorship of the American Alpine Journal and his return to Nanda Devi leading the fateful expedition of 1976. He is an honorary member of the Himalayan Club as well as the Alpine Club. For Bill Tilman it was the start of his career as a writer, the authorship of six mountaineering books and six books on sea travel. These and John Anderson's admirable biography High Mountains and Cold Seas are his memorial. For me it led directly to my selection for the 1938. Everest expedition, on the way back from which I met my future wife.

Another outcome, and this is the main topic of this article, was my friendship with Tom Longstaff. He was my senior by over 30 years, indeed his famous ascent of Trisul, for many years the highest summit to have been climbed, was accomplished in 1907, the year of my birth, and in 1936 I only knew him vaguely as a distinguished senior member of the Alpine Club. But it was on his advice that we had gone to Nanda Devi, and we regarded him as the great pioneer of climbing in the Garhwal, as it were, the patron of our expedition. He for his part took the closest Interest in our doings, and when it was over he sent to each of'^us an enlargement of a photograph of Nanda Devi he took in 1905 from the NE ridge of Nanda Kot. I still have it hanging in my study. And so after the expedition we met on a different footing and this was the beginning of a long and happy friendship.

Longsfaff's life was also changing at about this time. In the committee room of the Alpine Club there is a portrait of him wearing a tweed suit and with an ice axe in his hand. It was presented to the club many years later and after his death by his daughter, Jo Sa'ncha who had commissioned it from a professional artist of her acquaintance. Despite the age difference of 32 years the sitter and the artist were quickly attracted to each another and in due course they were married. The way Tom expressed it, long after the event, was 'I ran away from home, with permission.' I remember hearing that this was in the wind on Everest in 1938 and of course we all pulled long faces and muttered .'... do hope the old boy isn't making a fool of himself.' We needn't have worried. It was a most happy marriage.

In 1939 Tom, now married to Charmian and living in London, contrived to conceal his real age and joined the army. When he was discharged in 1941, he rented Badentarbet Lodge in Wester Ross, as remote a place as you could find in mainland Britain, and he and Charmian made their home there. It was the perfect place for an explorer and countryman to retire to.

I was one of their first visitors there and went many times in the forties and early fifties. It was not an imposing house, just a shooting lodge set on the moors about a mile from the sea and with no commanding views, but the surrounding country was superb, dotted with lochs, large and small, and with occasional mountains of real character like Stac Polly and Suilven. The nearby village of Achiltibuie faced on to Loch Broom with the Summer Isles in the foreground and the blue hills of Toridon on the horizon. To the northwest the almost uninhabited Coigach peninsula reached out to the North Atlantic.

To escape there for short holidays from intensive work at Farnborough on the problems of the early jet engine was sheer heaven. Tom's reminiscences and anecdotes and forthright commentaries on his contemporaries were spell binding. He and Charmian took me fly-fishing and it was my first experience of fishing with real experts and of catching sea trout, the best of all game fish. Both were active on the hill and we explored far and wide. These were quite simply some of the happiest days of my life.

Tom died in 1964 and Noel Odell wrote an excellent obituary in H.J. Vol. XXV. Charmian lived on until 1993 and her obituary by Janet Adam Smith, to whom I am indebted for several points of importance, will appear in due course in A.J. But Tom Longstaff's real memorial is his book This My Voyage, written at Badentarbet in the later forties. It covers the whole span of his mountaineering and exploration, crystallising the experiences of a lifetime. The Himalaya naturally loom large in it, but he travelled also in many other ranges including the Caucasus, Karakoram and Hindu Kush. It is all there, observed with the seeing eye of a trained medical man and naturalist; meticulously recorded in diaries and calrnly remembered in old age. The book is long since out of print but is still in demand, awaiting the enterprise of a publisher to reprint it.

" SUMMARY "

Reminiscences of the author about Nanda Devi 1936 and Tom Longstaff. The author is an Honorary Member of the Himalayan Club.

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