Raising a forgotten hero

IT was the end of the third round. We had taken punishment. We were retiring to a corner to recuperate. There was to be another round, or rounds, of course. The mountain could be, and would be, climbed.

That depended more upon the Fates, the vagaries of the weather, than upon the plans of men...

So wrote Bentley Beetham back in Barnard Castle. He was reflecting on his part in an extraordinary and historic attempt to conquer Mount Everest, the highest mountain on the planet.

It was an attempt that had ended in great achievement but, ultimately, in mysterious failure. Lead climbers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine had died just below the summit, leaving unanswered the question of whether they had made it to the top 30 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Bentley Beetham rockclimbing in the Lake District

Beetham’s story is told in a beautiful new book that has been lovingly published five years after the death of its author, Michael Lowes, of Shincliffe, Durham City. It contains the tantalising suggestion that, had Beetham not been struck down by illness, he may have been selected to take a leading role in the final push with Mallory.

Beetham was born in 1886 at 95 Stanhope Road North, in Darlington.

His unusual name was in fact his mother’s maiden name. At the age of eight, he joined the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School just a walk across Stanhope Green, and aged 13, he became a boarder at the North Eastern County School in Barnard Castle (in 1924, it became Barnard Castle School).

THE school inspired in him a love of the natural world, but he left in 1903, aged 16, to become an apprentice architect in Darlington. However, he returned to Barnard Castle in 1914 to become a natural history teacher, and stayed there, dedicating his career to the school, until his retirement in 1949.

Ornithology and photography were his first loves. He toured Europe taking pictures, climbing trees to record the home life of birds such as spoonbills and storks, and going to more and more extreme places to find them. Gradually he became a rock-climber, and then a mountaineer, climbing first in the Lake District and then in the Alps.

By the early 1920s, man had conquered the poles, but the highest mountain on the planet stood out like a sore thumb.

Barnard Castle School, by Bentley Beetham

In 1921, the Royal Geographical Society selected the country’s most able climbers for a reconnaissance mission to Everest. Mallory, a Charterhouse master, was among them.

In 1922, the first real attempt was made at Everest, and Mallory was on the slopes when an avalanche wiped out seven sherpas. The deaths, the first on the mountain, brought that expedition to an end.

Two years later, a third attempt was planned and Beetham was selected. He was an experienced climber, had great skill as a photographer and, more importantly, he had the right temperament. A fellow climber said: “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 hundredweight would have been of no use.”

When he sailed from Liverpool on February 29, 1924, with Mallory and Irvine, their departure made national news.

They arrived at Base Camp, at 16,500ft, on April 29 – “there is a wonderful view of Everest from here,” he wrote, “standing like a sentinel at the head of the valley”.

It was a huge expedition, 150 porters moving their equipment up to Camp I.

Andrew Irvine and George Mallory are at the left end of the back row. Bentley Beetham is second from the right on the front

There were to be six camps up Everest, and from the sixth, the climbers would strike for the summit at 29,029ft.

Unfortunately, though, the weather turned against them, whipping up the worst May storms for 30 years. Holed up under canvas at Camp II on May 4, Beetham wrote to a schoolmaster in Barney: “We are in the middle of the first attack on the mountain and have hit a bad patch of weather. At the moment, a long moment, we’ve been held up 30 hours – a blizzard is making life outside the tent almost impossible.

Inside the same it’s not too rosy – 20 degrees of frost and everything, including one’s hair and whiskers, covered in snow.”

The other climbers in the party “all agreed that he (Beetham) was the likeliest man of us all to get to the top”, but then he was struck down by sciatica. Somehow, he staggered up to Camp III and hobbled around with his camera taking pictures, before being ordered down.

“I was awfully sick for in myself I was awfully fit and felt I could have done some distance up the old heaps,” he wrote. “Sleep, or rather lying on ice with sciatica, is hell, but it was worth it, ten times over.”

At Base Camp, he was in charge of the photographs he and others were taking. “The developing, washing and drying of negatives under such conditions was a considerable feat in itself,” said The Northern Echo in 1957 when it interviewed Beetham at his retirement home in Cotherstone. “He frequently had to break through thick ice to reach the water in the bucket and on some occasions he took the developing tank into his sleeping bag to speed up the drying process.”

Base camp with Mount Everest in the distance in Bentley Beetham’s 1924 picture

ABOVE him on the mountain – where he would surely have been were it not for his affliction – his colleagues grappled towards the top, each of their parries being thwarted by the elements.

At 12.30pm, on June 8, the clouds parted to reveal Mallory and Irvine, way behind schedule, but apparently still going strong, only 600ft below the summit. Then the clouds closed in, and they were gone. “That was the last that was ever seen of Mallory and Irvine,”

Beetham wrote. “Beyond that point everything must remain a matter of conjecture and individual opinion.

All that we know for certain is that those two splendid fellows perished on the mountain they had struggled valiantly to climb.”

He knew the two men well, and he knew they only dealt in facts and certainties. He never claimed they reached the top because he knew that, on the information available, they would not have wanted him to because it was uncertain.

Beetham returned from Tibet to Teesdale in autumn 1924, and now his pupils looked up to him in awe, just as he had looked up to Everest. He was an inspirational, if rather bluff, teacher.

Ornithology was Beetham’s first hobby, as this brilliant picture of a young house sparrow illustrates. Can anyone locate the spout?

One of the pupils he inspired was Michael Lowes, the son of the Heighington village headteacher, who became a senior lecturer at St Hild’s College, Durham.

“It was in the 1980s that two mahogany boxes appeared on the study floor at home,” remembers Michael’s daughter, Anne. “These were the boxes containing Bentley’s glass slides.

“When my father retired from the university in 1984, he began to catalogue and research the slides, and with my mother, there were many visits to meet people who would help tell the story of Bentley’s life.

“I don’t think it was my father’s intention to write Bentley’s biography at the outset, but it grew out of all the correspondence, visits and material that he drew together.”

Michael set up the Bentley Beetham Trust with Durham University to look after the slides, but, after ten years of writing the book, in 2009, he died suddenly. His family have now completed it for him, in a splendid limited hardback edition, which is raising money to maintain the slides.

Their efforts somehow fit in with Beetham’s own thoughts on the 1924 expedition. Rather than be downcast, he drew inspiration from the fact that his brave colleagues had made three attempts at the mountain – or gone “three rounds of punishment” with it – and had succeeded in reaching higher than ever before.

And now they had passed on the baton to the next generation to finally conquer Mount Everest.

A Bentley Beetham picture of skating on the River Tees below Barnard Castle in February 1936

He wrote: “Surely a defeat of a kind like this is really a glorious success. In one bound they had raised man’s pedestal nearly a thousand feet – one more similar lift and Everest will be vanquished.”

As it was in 1953, and so the book of this extraordinary man’s life has finally made it into print.