Chapter Three -Childhoods and the Alps – Cheshire and Surrey 1886--1910

If friends are made by the measure of alliance in society, then George and I could not have been more different. His father Herbert was a Low Church, rather casual vicar, from a long line of vicars near Birkenhead in Cheshire, where the Leighs and Mallorys had also been landlords for upwards of two-hundred years. His mother, Anne Beridge Jebb, daughter of the Rev. John Beridge Jebb, scion of an old Derbyshire family, was successful as a vicar’s wife in the fulfilment of those duties, not to say with a missionary zeal; but she was a casual and sympathetic, rather than, instructive, mother. Both George and his sister Avie, whom I afterwards knew well, attested to the wild rudeness in which the children were allowed to live, and George’s wife Ruth remarked on more than one occasion that it was remarkable that he learned anything in that house, so vague were the parental injunctions. Of the four children, George was the eldest, followed by Mary, Avie (Anne Victoria), and Trafford. Traff became a flier and served with distinction in both World Wars; in 1944 he and his wife were both killed when their plane crashed into a mountainside in the Pyrenees – he was an Admiral then, travelling to a new assignment in Burma. A film was afterwards made of his exploits in the Second War, and it was quite odd to see an actor up on the screen, portraying a man one knew well.

My family was not nearly as well-rooted. My mother’s family, the Days, had emigrated from Devon to the American colonies in the 17th century, where they lived first in New England, and afterwards in New Orleans. During the American Civil War, they were trapped by circumstances in the North, an excruciating experience for my poor mother, Marie. She was the youngest child of seven, with older sisters, my aunts, already grown women then. After the war, Captain Day and his little family returned to New Orleans, where Marie met my father James Sanders, who was in town on a business trip. The Sanderses were an old Sussex family, but we never stayed in one place long. My father was an engineer, and so travelled a good deal, and by a series of reverses we lived in three houses before I was twelve. My father was a strong Presbyterian, my mother a Quaker, like night and day in temperament; they were always minutely aware of our doings, if not our hearts and minds in my father’s case. We prayed before every meal and after breakfast, had strict curfews, and small duties suited to our age; our house was well-run and well-organised. It had to be, with nine of us: Therese (Tiss), Cora, Helen, Grace, Jenny, Harry, myself, Jack, and Bobby.

George and I were similar, however, in one thing: we both, from the earliest time, climbed anything capable of being climbed. We were very athletic as children, and completely fearless, known in our families for climbing round the outside of our respective houses, up rain gutters and across roofs at no provocation. George once escaped thus when sent to his room for some naughtiness, and when caught on the ridge of the deanery adjacent, defended that he had gone to his room – to fetch his cap! Avie likes to tell the story of when during one holiday at the seashore, George wanted to know what it would be like to be completely surrounded by water, so swam out to a rock which, unfortunately, was underwater at high tide. Mrs. Mallory, unable to swim, was desperate when she discovered him, up to the ankles in the fast-rushing tide, and collared a passer-by to rescue him. George was completely unconcerned on being rescued, not in the least shaken. He was eight or nine at the time.

Later, visiting relatives in Derbyshire, George and Avie were climbing on some stone walls, each trying to keep the other from jumping across. Avie firmly decided to stay put on her wall, which was about four feet high, whether by stubbornness or fear, and George came after her to get her down. They tumbled off and George broke his arm. After a brief repair home, they set out again to explore a stream they thought quite safe; Avie fell in and George had to rescue her with his good arm.

Another time, at Mother’s suggestion, they went exploring the sea-cliffs. They were expected in the late afternoon for a picnic. The way was very long. The tide came in as they continued. Never thinking to climb straight up the cliff, but continuing on the traverse, they pushed on in the growing dark. George made himself a bridge between two far-spaced rocks, with the others using his shoulders as stepping-stones. When they finally arrived at the picnic, well after dark, a search party had been out for them for some time; they were only worried that they had missed their tea.

As Avie says, ‘I think we were rather exceptionally unruly children.’ The word then was ‘naughty’, and it was applied to my brothers and myself especially also. This is a curious, Victorian word. Children are never naughty; they have acidosis or fixations, and are treated for these complaints by doctors. But the English storybooks of my early youth were full of the same misdeeds and punishments which defaced our childhood, showing that naughtiness, now nonexistent, was common form in those days. But a good deal of naughtiness was surely simply relieving the boredom of nursery life.

Nanny Yah – Harriet – and later our governess, Fräulein Bé, used to say that ‘Miss Cottie is more trouble than all the rest put together.’ As there were nine of us, this was a considerable achievement. To illustrate my own naughtiness: at a similar age to George and Avie’s adventure above, I gulled the sewing maid to help me run up a decent replica of the Boer flag – this was during the war and my family were keenly pro-Boer – which I proceeded to nail to the mast of the tallest tree by our house with the aid of a broom handle. It was perfectly visible for miles around and caused such great consternation in the neighbourhood that the constables called round requesting it to be removed. No one could, as the tree was some twenty-feet high without the broomstick, so I was called in to shimmy up the tree again and fetch it down to the disapproving tutting of the constabulary.

My sister Grace could do little, and I no right, but Jack, as a boy, could do no wrong. I hated the injustice of it, though I loved Jack, and revenged myself on him with a deadly use of wit, which drove him mad. I teased him – to the point of murderous onslaughts on my person – or led him into crimes like climbing all round the outside of the house from balcony to balcony, transacting the gaps by ivy or rain gutters.

My contrary ways were noted, if not appreciated, by others outside our family. Anne Ross, the wife of one of my father’s millionaire railroad friends, was visiting my mother when I was about aged ten. I came running in, with filthy hands and a torn frock, where she sat in all her elegance chatting with my mother, pouring out to my mother a long tale of having climbed a tree and found a magpie’s nest. My mother was genuinely interested in the magpie; not so Mrs. Ross. She said, ‘My dear Marie, that child will have to become a writer to relieve herself of her flow of language.’ The prophecy, as well as the disapproving tone in which is was delivered, amuses me now.

With my own three children I often despair of managing them, and wonder how my mother did it with nine. Of course, she had servants, which helped, but it was still very difficult to manage
nine very strong personalities. I used to wonder how Anne Mallory managed, until Ruth told me flatly that she didn’t. The very opposite to my own mother, she was untidy, had no concern for dress, and possessed a ready sympathy for the unconventional; she was always doing the unexpected. She had grown up virtually an only child, being much younger than her half-brother, and being a spirited child, would often ride alone on the moors. With this experience, she left her children pretty much to themselves. All this goes a far way in explaining why George was so odd. With the exception of my mother, who was devoted to him, my family certainly thought he was, in every regard. But they were, apart from my brother Jack, very conventional people.

George went to several prep schools before entering Winchester College: West Kirby until he was ten, then Glengorse, as the Head at West Kirby had died. Glengorse, in Eastbourne, must have been a shock to him, at least compared to home life, for tidiness was required of the boys. But he never complained of it. He loved Glengorse, and the only misadventure he had there was agreeing to run away with another boy because the latter was too frightened to do so alone. As luggage on this foray into the great world he took his geometry books – evidence enough that it was not a serious attempt on his part. But they were caned anyway.

At Winchester, George was expected to prepare for Woolwich and an Army career, but he hated the idea and so failed – purposely, one thinks – the examinations. His tutor there, Robert Lock Graham Irving, said of him later that at Winchester he was ‘just a very attractive, natural boy, not a hard worker and behind rather than ahead of his contemporaries in College, a boy thoroughly at home and happy in his milieu.’ This same attitude to study, George’s preference to pursue his own course rather than the curriculum, is reflected in the results of his History Tripos at Cambridge, where he took a Third, rather than a First as he could easily have done. He was disappointed at this, but I doubt very much it would have deterred him from his own course of reading if he had to do it all again. He was of a very independent mind, always.

He still climbed unlikely things. With Avie he went to Winchester Cathedral, and, finding an unlocked door, crept up the narrow stone stairs to the rafters. Up in this eyrie, the caretaker was about to wind the clock – and he let them do it.

It was at Winchester that George seriously took up gymnastics. He excelled at the horizontal bars. No one else in the school was able to get the knack of the great swing, which he did after almost two years’ trying. His friend Eddy Morgan said, ‘his eye is single, and his whole body full of grace.’ In 1905 George won a Silver Metal at the annual school games for his gymnastics.
He also played football and cricket, and learned to shoot, and won the Public Schools Shooting prize for Winchester at Bisley in 1904, a great triumph. But the greatest impact on his athletic life at Winchester came in the person of R.L.G. Irving, the English Tutor. A member of the Alpine Club since 1902, Irving was an aficionado of guideless climbing – then thought quite reckless – and a fine mountaineer, with much Alpine experience. He had spent the Easter hols of 1904 climbing in the Sierra Nevada, where his had lost his climbing partner in a fall, and was something at loose ends; the other mountaineers at Winchester – C.H. Hawkins, Frederick Morshead, and Trant Bramson – were all rather long in the tooth, and Irving was looking for new climbing partners, when it struck him that some of the Wykehamists – the Winchester young men – might be just the thing. It wasn’t hard to convince them. As he said in the Alpine Journal later, the very persons he wanted were living in rooms adjacent to his: Harry Gibson and George Mallory. Irving described George then as I met him later in the Alps: ‘tallish, with long limbs, supple and not overmuscled as gymnasts are apt to be.’

George and Harry were very keen to go to the Alps at the summer hols and their families agreed that they should go. In their enthusiasm to train for this venture, and without Irving’s knowledge or consent, they made an expedition to Wolvesey Castle, which was a ruin, and climbed it. Very characteristic of George was his reaction when a part of the wall collapsed. Perfectly calm, he leapt away several yards, landing neatly and ready for the next attempt, as if nothing had happened. Informed of this cool response later, Irving was confident of George’s capacity in the mountains.

Their first climb in the Alps, on 5th August 1904, was Mont Vélan in the Bernese Oberland, one of the first Alpine peaks ever to be climbed. It was only 12,353 feet, but the boys suffered badly from mountain sickness, neither of them having been higher than about 1400 feet before. They made an early start, watched the sunrise on Mont Blanc, and spent the morning crossing the moraine and the glacier, ascending the hard packed slope for a thousand feet with ice-axes. The next pitch was a rock-climb, up to the arête, the latter a knife-edge with a sharp drop on either side. A perfect beginning for a mountaineer in terms of the variety and challenge, apart from the sickness. They stopped 600 feet from the summit because of it, but by the next day were feeling better. They climbed to the Valsorey Hut, intending to climb to the Grand Combin, but the weather put them off. They reached the summit the next day and George now considered himself a mountaineer.

The next was a seventeen-hour day from the Chanrion to Staffelalp, by way of the Glacier d’Otemma, over the Col de l’Eveque and the Col de Valpelline. From there they walked down into Zermatt for the first time, where they stayed at the Monte Rosa. The Gorner glacier greeted their view the next day, an intense purple colour. They stood on the summit of the Dufourspitze, the highest point of the Monte Rosa, 15,217 feet. Now the boys could call themselves mountaineers in truth.

In the next term, the Ice Club, which is still extant, was founded at Winchester. Irving was President, and the members were George, Harry Gibson, Harry Tyndale, and Guy Bullock, who was later a member of the first Everest Expedition, in the room of George Ingle Finch, who was considered unfit. Their ascents the following summer included the Dent Blanche, Evolena, Mont Blanc de Seilon, Mont Collon, and others in the Arolla.

My own introduction to the Alps was rather more ignoble. I developed ‘glands’, and had to have an operation for them; Fräulein Bé declared that Switzerland was the one place to cure glands, and so my Mother sent to Hatchard’s for a Baedecker and began to read out to us descriptions of various resorts which caught her fancy. I wanted to go to the Eiggishorn, because I had bought Tyndall’s The Glaciers of the Alps in the Everyman Edition a year or so before and had conceived an ardent desire to see those blocks of ice, fallen off the Aletsch Glacier, floating about in the Märjelen-See among meadows starred with gentians – this sounded to me one of the most wonderful conjunctions in nature, as indeed it is. But we were not as rich as Sir Ernest Cassel, and to my disgust Brunnen on the Lake of Lucerne was decided on, and so we went.

I think there must be some particular magic about a first visit to the Alps, even for people not born, as I as and George was, with an inexplicable craving for heights and getting to the top of heights. Trees, church-towers, the walls of old castles, hills – no matter what the object we were never satisfied till we had reached the top of it. But mountains surpassed everything else in this respect. That first summer in Switzerland was for me ‘all a wonder and a wild desire’, for in despite of my and Fräulein Bé’s contempt, Brunnen was a charming introduction to the Alps.

While I was not considered strong enough then to join my sisters in the long mountain expeditions which they undertook four or five days a week, my Mother attached me to the family of the hall porter at the Eden, our hotel. He had a large flock of boys and girls who spent their summers in a most agreeable and lucrative fashion, climbing the local hills to pick edelweiss and alpenrosen, the rose-red aromatically-scented dwarf rhododendron of the Alps, and then selling them to the trippers off the lake streamers from Lucerne. By now my hair had been allowed to grow, and because it was so curly and got so tangled, I wore it in two Gretchen plaits from a centre parting; I was quite amused to hear American tourists in their familiar accents say, ‘Look at that one with the long plaits! Isn’t she just a typical little Swiss girl?’

I was delighted too that my schoolroom German was quite adequate. I picked up from my little companions the curious archaic form of German, Berner-Deutsche or Schweitzer-Deutsche, which is their native speech. It was to serve me well doing code-breaking work during the Great War, which I could hardly have known then. Like many English people with a long-standing conversance with German and Germans, I was regarded with suspicion during the war, but at least, like Ruth and George, I was never accused of being a spy!

My education was, I would say, rather neglected, compared to that of a young man, or with what I wanted. But my elder sisters went to Oxford, as I would have done also had family fortunes permitted. My sister Cora eventually became a famous scientist and a Don. I was educated entirely at home. My first governess, Munna, was a disaster. She was quite inept and had no moral fibre to keep us on our proper studies. I was ‘good’ in the Victorian sense, meaning I gave no trouble, but I would read whatever suited me rather than what I was set to if I was bored by it. I could learn anything by heart at lightning speed, and remember it indefinitely. I adored foreign languages – Fräulein started us on German when I was eight or nine. But I was hopeless at the piano – an expected ladylike accomplishment in those days. I used to prop The Ceramic Art or Mrs. Palliser’s The Great Book of Lace up in from of my music and read it eagerly, keeping up a faint tinkling going on with one hand while I turned the pages with the other. When Fräulein Bé arrived, she very soon realised that I would never learn the piano, so I was taken off music and set to learning Latin instead, which suited me much better.

I adored books, but we were never given pocket money, so we had to rely on putting them down on our lists of Christmas or Birthday ‘wishes’. And there was a question of suitability. I managed to fool my father one year by asking for The Bible In Spain, but poetry was out. Later on, after we moved to London, I dragged my governess-companion, poor Miss Metsch, through the second-hand bookshops. Not the well known ones in Charing Cross Road, but drab little places with racks of books outside, in Chelsea or at South Kensington Station or near Notting Hill Gate. Here I stood in the cold, hunting for books on mountaineering. I had read a good deal of climbing literature since I first got Tyndall’s The Glaciers of the Alps, and I was beginning to know what the plums were, and what they were worth – since I wrote for their catalogues of Alpine books to Francis Edwards and Mr. Hutt or Dutt, the great specialist, who had a dark shop somewhere off Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And gradually I began to add quite substantially to my pocket money by buying, say, a second edition of Wills’s Wanderings in the High Alps for two shillings, and selling it to Francis Edwards for seven-and-six. This was a most agreeable way of spending my time, however unrelished by Miss Metsch, and it taught me something which I was more than ready to believe anyhow – that there is usually money in specialised knowledge, if applied with sufficient diligence.

But I missed Fräulein Bé and the good hard work of her schoolroom: doing Latin proses, learning Ovid by heart, wrestling with Euripides, and skimming the cream off French and German literature under her enthusiastic direction. I insisted on learning Italian, which I did with a withered old master who came three times a week; he was a scholar and an enthusiast, and made me learn the Vita Nuova off by heart. Alas, I have forgotten his name.

It had always been taken for granted that I, like my three older sisters, should go to Oxford; my father had been greatly disappointed that Jenny and Grace refused to complete their education in this way, and wasted their time in frivolity. I was to go and do great things, as Cora had done. My poor father had a pathetic belief in my powers. Two coaches were presently engaged, one to teach mathematics and algebra, which I loathed, and the other for classics. But it went all wrong, for a curious reason:

My dear sister Cora felt that the precious youngest sister, brought up entirely in the schoolroom at home, would be at a terrible disadvantage if she tried to take her first examination without any previous experience, so suggested that I go up and sit for Responsions at Oxford a year too soon, to learn my way round examinations. My coaches agreed, and so I went. I ran in, wrote my papers light-heartedly and very fast, observing with pity the obvious agonies of some wretches who had got to pass this time, then ran out again to wait for Cora. The result might have been foreseen – I passed easily, and that was my undoing. I was only seventeen and the college did not care to take girls under eighteen. To pass the time, I started reading Italian history with Greta Robertson. But when the year was up, I decided to put off Oxford for another twelve months. My little brother had just died and I felt my mother needed my company. When another year passed I decided to wait once again, the situation at home being much the same – and presently, due to family circumstances, it was then too late. In the upshot, I never went to Oxford at all, missed altogether the mental discipline and the serious scholarship which only a University can give. Intellectually, I remained half-baked; though I afterwards found myself amongst the most incisive of intellects, I always felt inadequate to their company.