Lure of the Mountains: The life of Bentley Beetham, 1924 Everest Expedition Mountaineer

By Michael D. Lowes

Lure of the Mountains is the first published biography of accomplished photographer, ornithologist, teacher and 1924 Everest expedition member Bentley Beetham (1886-1963). Written by the late Michael D. Lowes, a pupil of Beetham's at Barnard Castle School in County Durham, and with a foreword by Graham Ratcliffe MBE, the first Briton to have summited Everest from both the North and South sides, and also a pupil of Barnard Castle School. Lure of the Mountains charts Beetham's life from childhood in Darlington, to rock climbing in the Lake District, to his selection by the Mount Everest Committee as a member of the infamous and ill-fated 1924 Everest Expedition on which George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared high on the mountain. Many of Beetham's images, including those made on the 1924 expedition, were for over 25 years curated by Michael Lowes and are reproduced in this book with the kind permission of the Bentley Beetham Trust and Durham University. His images of Tibet are 'an important historical record of Tibetan culture and a way of life that in modern times has rapidly begun to disappear'. Beetham was a highly skilled rock climber and a pioneer of new routes in the Borrowdale Valley, where he established such notable climbs as Little Chamonix on Shepherd's Crag, and Corvus on Raven Crag. The author, like many other pupils Beetham inspired, was introduced to climbing by his teacher in the Lake District on club trips, and over the years he became a valuable source of information and expert on Beetham's life and work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vertebrate Digital
• Release date: May 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781906148959

Book preview

Lure of the mountains

Lure of the mountains

The life of Bentley Beetham

1924 Everest expedition Mountaineer

Michael D. Lowes

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www.v-publishing.co.uk

– Contents –

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One Home and School

Chapter Two Birds and Books

Chapter Three Expedition that Never Was

Chapter Four Lure of the Hills

Chapter Five Challenge of Everest: The Approach

Chapter Six Everest: The Assault Begins

Chapter Seven After Everest: Teaching and Climbing

Chapter Eight Essence of ‘BB’

Acknowledgements

Select Bibliography

The man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence … upon the lives of others.

(Ruskin)

For Katherine

mr_b.jpg

Bentley Beetham

– Foreword –

My introduction to Michael Lowes, in June 1999, appeared inevitable with regards to Bentley Beetham. The occasion was the Summer Gathering in north-east England for those who’d previously attended Barnard Castle School. Beetham, a member of the legendary 1924 Everest expedition, Michael and myself were all former pupils. Beetham had attended the school from 1899 to 1903 and returned as a master in 1914, where he remained until retiring in 1949. In his later years, in the 1940s, he had taught Michael, and had mentored him in the art of climbing. I had arrived as a pupil nearly 20 years after Michael had left, and three years after Beetham had passed away.

Only a matter of weeks before I met Michael I had been on the summit of Everest, having made an ascent from Nepal. That same spring season, on the other side of the mountain, on Everest’s northern flanks, George Mallory’s preserved body had been discovered. It had been found in the place it had come to rest, after a fall 75 years earlier. The expedition had been steeped in mystery from the moment Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared into the clouds high on Everest’s North Face, on 8 June 1924, never to be seen again. Had they been the first to reach the summit of Everest? No doubt such thoughts will have passed through Bentley Beetham’s mind on many occasions in the decades that followed.

Michael, in his late sixties, and with white hair, was a polite gentleman with a warm friendly smile. The enthusiasm with which he spoke about Beetham from his personal experience of climbing with him in the Lake District; and of Beetham’s collection of prints and glass slides, had me spellbound. Descriptions of Beetham in hob nailed boots, and a hessian rope tied around his waist, leading eager schoolboys up the crags of Borrowdale conjured up images of a bygone era.

The room where Michael and I were standing was the very place that Beetham would give his lectures, projecting his glass slides of Everest onto a large screen, as he captured the imaginations of generations of schoolboys with tales of adventure and tragedy on the world’s highest mountain. The influence he’d had on Michael, the esteem in which Michael held Beetham, had not diminished, if anything they had grown through time.

‘Would you like to view the collection?’ Michael asked after we had been talking for half an hour. ‘I’d like your opinion’.

Such an invitation took no thinking about. What I could add to Michael’s extensive knowledge of the 1924 expedition I wasn’t sure.

‘I’d be delighted,’ I replied.

A few weeks later I returned to Barnard Castle to look at the Beetham Collection in the office of the Old Barnardians’ secretary, which was situated in the attics of the imposing Victorian sandstone building. Two mahogany boxes sat waiting on the desk, inside lay row upon row of tightly packed, fragile, glass slides; the smell of fustiness, of old objects stored for many years, wafted from the felt-lined interiors.

As I held the first glass slide up to the window I was immediately transported into the past. Images of the expedition members wearing trilby hats, plus fours and heavy leather boots, sat amongst canvas A-frame tents, with Everest as a backdrop, conjured up thoughts of the Empire, of brave men forging into the unknown and pushing the boundaries of human endurance and survival.

I had seen photographs of the 1924 expedition in various books, but the quality of Beetham’s actual slides was breathtaking, the definition was as good as I could achieve 75 years later. Michael informed me that Beetham had developed many of the images on the Tibetan Plateau or in his tent at Everest Base Camp, at 17,000 feet. Although I had climbed Everest four years earlier, in 1995, by the same route taken by the 1924 expedition, my own ascent paled into insignificance as I waded through the collection with the eagerness of a schoolboy.

It was Beetham’s passion for wildlife, and in particular the photo-graphing of nesting birds that had brought climbing into his life, which in time would lead him to Everest. Startling images of compassion and joy, of Tibetan people prior to the Chinese taking control of Tibet, were of a culture that is now fast disappearing. The collection was a historical treasure trove, one that Michael had been meticulously cataloguing. His research into Beetham’s life was not one that was littered with a surfeit of printed material; it would take all of Michael’s undoubted skill to piece it together.

Although Beetham portrayed the image of a no-nonsense, strict schoolmaster, underneath lay a more compassionate, kindly man. In both his enthusiasm for wildlife, and of climbing, he found his confidence, and in doing so earned the respect of others that he so richly deserved.

There was one incident, more than any other, which indicated the inspiration he brought to the younger generations. It was at a time between the wars, when the school was considering its teaching staff; all were university graduates, all that is except Beetham. With the pressure on public schools to provide the best possible education it had been decided to let Beetham go. News spread through the school like wildfire. Only following a plea from the then headmaster’s son, direct to his father, on behalf of the pupils, was a reprieve granted. It was an event that should have been destined for the silver screen. Beetham remained at the school until he retired in 1950.

It would have been all too easy for this shy member of the 1924 expedition to become a footnote, a name of someone who had been there at the time. However, thanks to the dedication of Michael Lowes we have been given an insight into what took Bentley Beetham, a schoolboy at the end of the Victorian era, from the cliffs of northern England, to the Alps, to Everest, the Atlas Mountains and beyond.

To quote Sir Francis Younghusband’s description of Bentley Beetham:

He was perpetually boiling and bursting and bubbling over with keenness and enthusiasm – the kind of man that nothing less than a ton of bricks could keep down: nineteen hundred-weight would have been of no use.

Graham Ratcliffe

Chairman, The Bentley Beetham Trust

www.bentleybeetham.org

– Introduction –

Writing in 2007, Graham Ratcliffe MBE, Chairman of the Bentley Beetham 1924 Everest Trust, expressed the hope that this book would one day be published. It is to be hoped that the wait was worth the while.

Bentley Beetham was a schoolmaster at the North Eastern County School, renamed Barnard Castle School in 1924. He was a keen naturalist, a rock-climber, an ornithologist, a writer and an expert photographer. He had boundless energy and enthusiasm, all of which, without doubt, inspired generations of ‘Barney’ pupils. The vast majority of his astonishing collection of photographs is now curated by the Trust in partnership with Durham University and can be viewed online at www.bentleybeetham.org. The ornithological part of Beetham’s photographic work is held by the Hancock Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Bentley Beetham Trust was formed primarily for the long term preservation of what truly is an internationally important historical photographic archive, but also with the philosophy that ‘history belongs to everyone’ – that the collection should be accessible to all as ‘a valuable educational and informative resource to the broadest spectrum of people’.

Michael Lowes, the author of this work, died unexpectedly in March 2009. Michael had completed the text of his biography of Bentley Beetham and he was just beginning to identify those of Beetham’s photographs which would illuminate the story of this extraordinary man’s life. Michael had not only been taught by Beetham when he was a pupil at Barnard Castle but he was also part of the Goldsborough Club which Beetham would take climbing in the Lake District as often as he could.

Michael’s first encounter with Beetham’s photographic collection was as a boarding pupil in his house at Barnard Castle School where, once a year until his retirement in 1950, Beetham would present his memorable talk on the epic, but fateful, 1924 Everest Expedition, on which his friends, the legendary George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, perished. It would seem that Beetham somewhat lost interest in his slides after Everest was for certain conquered by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953. In any event the slides remained at Barnard Castle School when he retired. They subsequently came into the possession of Michael’s longstanding friend and fellow York House pupil, Kenneth King, in about 1979. At that time, Kenneth himself was house master of York House and also Secretary of the Old Barnardians’ Club. A colleague mentioned to him that almost one thousand ancient 3¼ x 3¼ plate glass slides, seemingly with links to the legendary Bentley Beetham, had been discovered in a remote corner of the science department, which was then in the process of being relocated to superior accommodation. The colleague thought that Kenneth would be interested in taking custody of the slides on behalf of the Club, which indeed he was. They were duly delivered in their heavy slide cabinets to Kenneth’s rather spartan bedroom – which coincidentally had been Bentley Beetham’s old quarters – but at the time doubled as a store room for club memorabilia. Kenneth remained custodian of the slides until, to his relief, Michael took charge of them in the early eighties.

Michael became chairman of the Club in 1981–82 and was a much respected figure. He became an invaluable source of information and spent considerable amounts of time over the next 25 years or so looking after, cataloguing and researching parts of the slide collection. The advice of A. L. Colbeck, an amateur photographer of some repute, was also sought and, realising the importance of the collection, he offered to put the entire collection onto 35mm negative film and from this produce