IN MEMORIAM

SIR JACK LONGLAND

(1905-1993)

On a crisp bright Saturday 4 December 1993 the remembrance service at All Saints Church Bakewell was well-filled. Family, friends, representatives of Local Government, educational and mountaineering worlds assembled. A well-ordered service, with characteristic lighter points, was followed by the usual half-comprehending retreat outside. Despite sadness in parting, converstion lifted, even lightened, once the congregation spilled into the sunlit churchyard. Mourning contemplates an end to so rounded a life. Yet Jack's was so full as to be celebrated by most who knew him.

For climbers he was one of the few, including Noel Odell, A.B. Hargreaves and Ivan Waller, who bridged twentieth century British mountaineering from the First World War to the present-day. His continued passion and literary and historical bent ensured that his pithy contributions always hit home. He was a personal contact with mountaineering's taproots. Like many, Jack became a climber after going to University.

Times were changing, and after a few seemingly carefree years aided by adequate income, ample academic leisure and motor car freedom, Jack settled into a full time English lecturing job at Durham University from 1930-36.

1933 was a pinnacle of his active climbing career, as an obvious candidate for Hugh Ruttledge's Everest Expedition, staffed from 'the well-to-do middle-classes, with a background of Oxbridge and a decent sprinkling of Army Officers and Government officials' {Everest, W. Unsworth)

Jack helped fix the route to the North Col for porters, and in setting up Camp V at 25,500 ft on 22 May. After going down with a sick porter he went back up to Camp V on 28 May. Next day with old, friends Wager and Wyn Harris and eight Sherpas, he established Camp VI at 27,400 ft halfway up the yellow band. This camp was higher than in 1924, and about 400 yards closer to the summit. Jack took charge of the decent, while the other two remained.

Reprinted (abridged) from High, (February 1994) with kind permission of the editor and author. Though Sir Jack Longland was not a member of the Himalayan Club, this obituary notice is printed as a special tribute — Ed.

The ascent route on the slabs of the North Face had been complex and Longland fhought and accident in descent very possible, and decided instead to descend the North Ridge.

A moment before all had been quiet and peaceful. In a few seconds Nature seemed to go mad. The far horizons vanished as the voice of the wind rose to a scream and the snow tore past in blinding sheets. The effect upon the tired men may be imagined. Their world disappeared, their goggles iced up till they had to be discarded, whereupon their eyelashes froze together, making it difficult to see at all. They were literally fighting for their lives.

It was well for them that they had a great leader and a great mountaineer at their head. Longland never faltered though, to use his own words, '...visibility suddenly narrowed to a snowswept circle of some twenty yards, and I was taking a party of porters down a ridge which I had never been on before, but which I knew to be illdefined and easy to lose, particularly in such conditions.'

Though he suffered moments of doubt, they kept close file and regular checks that all were present. He feared that they might be too close to the East Rongbuk glacier, and was not convinced even by the sight of the remains of the 1924 Camp VI. Some of the porters became exhausted in the wind and sat down and had to be urged back on their feet.

At last, over a little edge, and not a hundred feet below, appeared a green tent. It was camp V. Longland had brought his party safe through a test which even Mount Everest could hardly make more severe.

(Everest 1933, H. Ruttledge).

Though Lawrence Wager, Wyn Harris and Frank Smythe all continued, going as high as any man had ever climbed, the mountain remained unclimbed. Jack's retreat became famous, and gave him just cause to ask of later stalled efforts on the unclimbed NE ridge in the 1980s: 'Have you got up to our bit yet?'

Jack's life changed direction a little after Everest, though he played a part in the acrimonious disputes about the leadership of the expedition proposed and agreed by the Tibetans for 1935 or 1936. He supported Crawford as a new leader rahter than Ruttledge, one of a band of upstart young climbers to do so'. He thought Ruttledge too military, too little experienced as a mountaineer, and insufficiently decisive, though there was only slight evidence of this from 1933. There were other fissures in the 1933 party. Smythe disliked Longland's sharp argumentative side, and had something of an inferiority complex, and so was almost certainly glad to be rid of his group. They in turn were supported by Tom Longstaff. The consequence was that Longland, C.F. Meade, Graham Brown and Crawford resigned from the AC when the Everest Committee member Cox sought to be rid of Crawford on a. pretext. It was a sordid business. Crawford, favoured candidate of what Cox and Mason called 'The Soviet' was excluded from the 1936 team. Longland refused to go also: '...because he was not prepared to give unconditional support to the leader.'

Though the early monsoon clinched the issue, the failure of the 1936 expedition weakened the 'Old Guard' of the Everest Committee. George Ingle Finch demanded in the press: '...the leader of the next expedition... should himself be a climber — preferably the climber whose chances of getting to the summit are most fancied.'

Jack Longland now faced the dilemma of being offered a place again for 1938. He was refused leave of absence by his employers, the National Council for Social Services.

(Everest, W. Unsworth)

He compensated by an inspiration piece for the CUMC (1938) Why Climb Everest'. It was a controversy which had a curious echo in his opposition to the sacking of Eric Shipton as leader of the 1953 Expedition.

In great demand as a witty lecturer and after dinner speaker, he married, and along with his wife, in 1935 visited the Watkins Mountains of East Greenland in Shackleton's old boat The Quest where with Hountaine, the two Wagers and Courtauld he made the first ascent of Munck, 12,250 ft, Greenland's highest mountain. (ACJ May 1936.)

Jack made another career, earning the nickname 'Broadcasting Jack' among Bakewell locals. First as a regular member of the panel on BBC's 'Any Questions', then as Question Master for more than 20 years in the Radio Quiz 'My Word' he became a household name.

In mountaineering he became a ubiquitous patrician figure, with two sons who became well-known climbers and two daughters. He served ¦is president of the Mountain Training Board from 1963-78, was President of the BMC, and chaired any number of symposia and conferences in the last two active decades 1960-80, and the Peak Area Committee of the BMC for a long period when Eric Byne and his successors revamped the guidebooks to the Peak. Signs of dissatisfaction with some trends in mountaineering appeared, just as he occasionally put the knife to those in the past. Thus in the Alpine Journal under; Colonel Strutt in the 1930s he thought:'Too often appeared in the role of a shocked and censorious maiden aunt'. (AJ 1957 'Between the Wars').

Beyond the thickets of the training debates of the 1970s, and occasionally distressing exchanges with what he saw as unwise and doctrinaire oppositions. Jack's presidency of the Alpine Club from 1975-7 can be seen as another high point in a long caraeer.

He was a paradox, upper middle class in culture and social position, he lent his considerable strength and wit to the widest popularization of the outdoors that Britain had yet known. He wanted the climbing clubs to open their doors and educate in climbing's best traditions to defend them, but thought their real strength lay in affirming not in disapproving. He was one of the country's greatest rock and Alpine climbers who missed the 1936 Everest expedition on principle and 1938 because of professional commitments. He reamined opposed to 'irresponsible' and unstylish climbing to his last gasp. In the face of troublesome provocations at an age when most tire, he carried it all off with wit with and style, even disarming many who caught blasts from a sharper side which did not tolerate fools at all.

As he said on retiring from the AC Presidency:'I'd be prouder of the presidency than if I were to become Archbishop of Canterbury.'

Paul Nunn

 

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