SIR CHRIS’S HEIGHT OF SUCCESS
Mountaineer talks about a life spent on the edge
SIR CHRIS Bonington is 83. While his knees creak a little and he is the proud owner of a new hip, the man who became the first Brit to scale the North Face of the Eiger is still climbing and three years ago notched up another first when he became the oldest person to scale the Old Man of Hoy on the Isle of Skye. So what’s his secret? Early morning yoga sessions? Gallons of coconut water? Pilates classes?
“Oh gosh I don’t believe in training,” he says. “I never had. I do training on the mountain.”
His response should perhaps not come as a surprise. Sir Chris, whose memoir Ascent is out next month, has always been a down to earth sort and while he was born to climb when he got his first taste of mountaineering as a 16 year old and it was almost his last.
“I grew up near Hampstead Heath, that was my adventure playground, but it was in Dublin where my grandfather lived that I first got the desire to climb. I was staying with him during the school holidays, we’d been out for the day and coming back on the train I saw all these valleys disappearing into the mist and I remember thinking, ‘That would be wonderful climbing’.”
Back home he persuaded a school friend to accompany him to Snowden and for their expedition the pair packed little more than the fearlessness of youth.
“I made my mum had cut down my school mac so it looked more like an anorak and I had bought a pair of hobnail boots. Poor Anton hadn’t had his mac cut down and he was also wearing his school shoes. We had no idea what we were doing, but coming out of the Youth Hostel we spotted a couple of guys with ice picks and so decided to follow them.
“It didn’t end well. We got caught in an actual avalanche. Everyone was ok, but we just got down the mountain as quickly as we could. Anton hitchhiked back to London and never went climbing again. I, however, was hooked.”
Sir Chris did well at school and in another life might have ended up at Oxford and Cambridge. However, with his father having walked out on the family when he was a baby, he knew his mother couldn’t afford to support him so he chose instead to stay closer to home and applied to UCL.
“It’s funny I have never felt anxious before a climb, but I suffered terribly from exam nerves. I ended up failing my English A-level and couldn’t face going back to resit, so I decided to go do my National Service with the RAF mountain rescue team.
“I remember one of the officers saying, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be a pilot?’ My mum didn’t even own a car and I knew I wasn’t remotely mechanically minded, but I said, ‘Yes of course, that’s what I’ve always wanted to do’.”
Sir Chris’s first hunch was right. He wasn’t pilot material and soon switched to the Army. However, it was while serving for the Royal Tank Regiment in the mid 1950s that his love of mountains really took hold and when his bosses refused him leave to go climb Nuptse in the Himalayas he left.
“I had always been a shy child, but on a mountain side I instantly felt totally at home. There I made friends very easily and there was something that kept pulling me back. When I found myself back home I didn’t know what to do. A spell in working in an Army outward bound centre had taught me that I wasn’t made for teaching – I like to climb at my own limit – so I ended up getting a management job at Unilever.”
It’s hard to imagine Sir Chris behind a desk and while Unilever indulged his early expeditions in the end he was told he had a choice – the mountains or management. He chose the former.
Freed from the nine to five routine, he spent much of his time climbing with the likes of Don Whillans who he describes as the “best climber he ever met”. Together they completed the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney on Mont Blanc in 1961, along with Ian Clough and Jan Długosz. However, it was the following year that Sir Chris, who had recently got married to freelance illustrator Wendy, became a household name. Together with Clough, the pair became the first Brits to conquer the North Face of the Eiger and they returned home to a barrage of publicity.
“It was a shock. You have to remember that back then climbing was a minority sport, but somehow the Eiger captured people’s imaginations. It was good for me. It got me a book deal and it got me on the lecture circuit.”
For the first time Sir Chris also realised that he might be able to forge a career from climbing much to his own mother’s despair, who would have preferred him to have got a ‘proper job’ to support his growing family.
“If you are an adventurer, whether it be a sailor like Robin Knox-Johntson or an explorer like Ranulph Fiennes, I’m not sure you can ever stop. There is something about risk which is very addictive, so even when Wendy and I had children I never thought I should give the mountaineering up for something less dangerous.”
In fact, climbing would see him through some of his darkest times. When he was just two years old, the Sir Chris’s first son Conrad drowned
“I was grief-struck,” he says. “It was the great Scottish climber Tom Patey who persuaded me to go with him to the Isle of Skye and climb the Old Man of Hoy. It turned out to be a great idea. Being up there was what I needed right then. I could think clearly”
It was to Skye he returned following the death of his beloved wife in 2014, who had been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease two years earlier.
“Everyone says it is a cruel disease. It is and with Wendy it advanced so quickly and horribly. There had been talk of me going back to Hoy with Leo Houlding who in 1996 had become the youngest person to climb the sea stack, but I put it off while Wendy was ill. When she died, I thought, ‘Right, let’s do this’. I was pretty unfit and slipped a couple of discs, but I got up it and it will always be a special place for me.”
In between those two climbs, Sir Chris has conquered Changabang and the West Summit of Shivlining the Himalayas, Pakistan’s Baintha Brakk, Kongur Tagh in China and Vinson Massif in Antarctica. At the age of 50 he was also briefly the oldest person to have climbed Everest.
“Ten days later Dick Bass, who was 55, took that particular title from me. I never thought about going back. The records are nice, but I’ve always got much more satisfaction from making a new route and I feel so privileged to have climbed some of those major peaks when I did.
“In the 1970s only one expedition was allowed on Everest. It meant there was a long wait to go up, but when you did it felt like you had the mountain to yourself. By the late 1980s, going up Everest had become a commercial operation and there are often queues to the summit. People moan about it, but not me. It’s good for the Nepalese economy and for everyone who makes it to the top it’s still a huge personal achievement, but I’m glad I got to see it when I did.”
Today, Sir Chris still lives in London and his love of mountains remains undiminished.
“Since my mid 60s, my failure rate has increased dramatically and I don’t have the same physical stamina as I once did. I still climb, it’s just that the peaks tend to be a little lower than they once were. The sport has changed, so much but I haven’t. In fact you know the best climbing shoes I ever had? They were the cheapest tennis shoes from Woolworths with a proper rubber sole. They just don’t make them like that anymore.”
He might equally be talking about himself.
Somehow the Eiger captured people’s imaginations. It was good for me. Chris Bonington on the time when he became a household name.