Hugh Ruttledge
Hugh Ruttledge (born October 24, 1884 , † November 7, 1961 in Stoke near Plymouth ) was a British mountaineer and expedition leader of two expeditions to Mount Everest in 1933 and 1936.
Childhood and youth
Ruttledge was the son of Lt. Colonel Edward Butler Ruttledge, a medic in the Indian colonial administration, and his wife Alice Dennison. Ruttledge was educated at schools in Dresden and Lausanne and then went to Cheltenham College . In 1903 he enrolled at Pembroke College of University of Cambridge one. In 1906 he received the second graduation in the Classical Honors Tripos .
India and mountaineering
Ruttledge passed the Indian Colonial Administration entrance exam in 1908 and spent a year at the University of London studying Indian law, history and languages before moving to India in 1909 .
He was initially employed as an assistant in Rurki and Sitapur , then promoted to magistrate in Agra . He played polo and took part in field sports such as big game hunts until he fell off his horse in 1915 and this accident caused him to suffer from a backbone problem ("a curved spine and a compacted hip"). In 1915 he also married Dorothy Jessie Hair Elder in Agra, with whom he had a son and two daughters.
In 1917 Ruttledge moved to Lucknow to become a city administration official. In 1921 he became deputy commissioner there. During a visit to Europe in 1921, he began climbing in the Alps .
In 1925 he went to Almora at the foot of the Himalayas as Deputy Commissioner , within sight of some of the high mountains. Despite his injuries, Ruttledge continued to mountaineering and he sharpened his senses to explore every corner of his district. Together with his wife he began to explore the glaciers and peaks on India's northern border.
The highest peak in the British Empire was the Nanda Devi , surrounded by a series of mountains higher than 21,000 feet so that it was hardly accessible. In 1925 the Ruttledges explored the area around the mountain with Colonel RC Wilson of the Indian Army and Dr TH Somervell , hoping to gain access to the mountain via Milam and the Timphu Glacier ; but they concluded that the company might be too dangerous.
Together with his wife he made the pilgrimage around Mount Kailash in July 1926 ; his wife was the first western woman to undertake this ceremony. Ruttledge was in Tibet on official matters, but because the official they hoped to see, the Elder of Garpon in Gartok , was unable to do so, Ruttledge and his wife decided to make the Mount Kailash pilgrimage called Parikrama . Meanwhile, Wilson (who accompanied her on the trip) and a Sherpa who called himself "Satan" (sic) explored the various approaches to the mountain. Ruttledge considered the 2000 meter high north side of the Kailas too steep and unclimbable ('utterly unclimbable'). He thought about climbing the mountain via the northeast ridge, but decided that he had too little time for it. On returning to Almora, he wrote that he had done about 600 miles of beautiful trekking, all of which he covered on foot, to the amazement or scandal of "right-thinking" Indians and Tibetans. Ruttledge and his wife also crossed the first known crossing of the Trail Pass between the Nanda Devi and the Nanda Kot .
In 1927 he explored the Nandakini Valley with Tom Longstaff and supported by Sherpas, and crossed the high pass between the Trishul and the Nanda Ghunti .
Although Longstaff reported that many people in Ruttledge's district had great respect for him, Ruttledge resigned from the Indian colonial administration very early in 1929. Commenting on this, Somervell said: "He was tired of making plans that he knew were right, and seeing each time that the colonial administration knew better than the local man" ("He was so tired of making plans that he knew to be right, to find that the Government always thought they knew better than the man on the spot "). By the time he left, Ruttledge and his wife had crossed twelve high passes.
Ruttledge attempted to reach the Nanda Devi three times in the 1930s and failed three times. In a letter to the Times , he wrote that "the Nanda Devi are imposing an imposition on their devotees that are still beyond their strength and endurance," adding that access to the Nanda Devi sanctuary is already more difficult than it is to come to the north pole .
Everest expedition 1933
In 1933, for the first time after 1924 , the British received permission from the authorities in Tibet to attempt further ascent on Everest. The task of the Mount Everest Committee was to find an expedition leader for the fourth expedition, which became difficult because of the inability of Charles Granville Bruce (leader of the previous British expeditions to the mountain) and the refusal of Major Geoffrey Bruce and Edward Felix Norton to take on this role. As Ruttledge wrote, "It was necessary to find someone who had experience with people of the Himalayas as well as someone with knowledge of mountaineering, and so I guess the lot fell on me."
The crew for this attempt, which took the then standard route across the North Col, consisted of a combination of military personnel and the "Oxbridge" graduates, and did not include anyone who had already been there in the 1924 attempt. The British team consisted of Frank Smythe , Eric Shipton , Jack Longland , Eugene Birnie, Percy Wyn-Harris , Edward Shebbeare , Lawrence Wager , George Wood-Johnson, Hugh Boustead, Colin Crawford, Tom Brocklebank, E. Thompson and William Maclean, with Raymond Greene (brother of Graham Greene ) as expedition doctor and William "Smidge" Smyth-Windham as radio operator.
The highest point reached was 8,570 m, but the route was found to be too difficult and the vital Camp V, which should have been set up on one of the rare days with fine weather (May 20th), was canceled due to disagreements never built up in a team. It was during this expedition that Wyn-Harris found the ice ax of Andrew Irvine at 8,500 m above sea level about 20 m below the ridge , who had disappeared near the summit on June 8, 1924 with George Mallory .
One of the Sherpas on this expedition (as with the attempt in 1936) was Tenzing Norgay , who then managed the first ascent in 1953 together with Edmund Hillary .
In 1934 Ruttledge was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society : "For his travels in the Himalayas and his expedition leadership on Mount Everest 1933". ("For his journeys in the Himalayas and his leadership of the Mount Everest Expedition, 1933.") Although the Mount Everest Committee began an investigation into the causes of the failure of this expedition, Ruttledge was found not guilty; almost all members of the expedition had expressed their admiration for him.
Everest expedition 1936
Due to the almost universal support for his guidance in the 1933 trip, Ruttledge was selected again in 1935 to undertake his second expedition (the sixth British one) to Everest, which was the largest to date to conquer Everest, together with the veterans of the 1933 expedition - Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and Percy Wyn-Harris - other team members were Charles Warren , Edmund Wigram, Edwin Kempson, Peter Oliver, James Gavin, John Morris and Gordon Noel Humphreys. William Smyth-Windham was again the chief radio operator. Even though they reached the North Col, Ruttledge called off the expedition when heavy storms and deep snow above 7000 meters indicated the early onset of the monsoon .
Tenzing Norgay wrote of Ruttledge and the 1936 expedition:
“Mr Ruttledge was too old to be a high altitude climber, but he was a wonderful man, kind and warm, and all the Sherpas were proud to be with him. This was a very large expedition, with more sahibs than ever before, and a total of sixty sherpas, five times as many as in 1935. ”(In 1935 there had been a very small, underfunded expedition marked by the notorious avarice of the leader at the time, which was unsuccessful. )
Further life
In 1932 Ruttledge planned a life as a farmer and eventually bought the island of Gometra , near the Isle of Mull . Upon returning from the 1936 expedition to Everest, he decided that life by the sea was preferable, and he bought various boats "a 42-foot Watson lifeboat and later a larger sailing cutter" to fulfill his idea. In 1950 he moved off the coast and bought a house in the Dartmoor area .
Ruttledge died in Stoke near Plymouth on November 7, 1961.
bibliography
- Hugh Ruttledge: Everest: The Unfinished Adventure , Hodder and Staughton, 1937
- Audrey Salkeld: Ruttledge, Hugh (1884–1961), mountaineer. In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of January 2011
Web links
credentials
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Audrey Salkeld: Ruttledge, Hugh (1884–1961), mountaineer. In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of January 2011, accessed March 1, 2008.
- ^ John Snelling: The Sacred Mountain: Travelers and Pilgrims at Mount Kailas in Western Tibet, and the Great Universal Symbol of the Sacred Mountain , Hounslow: East West Publications, 1983, p. 120
- ↑ The Sacred Mountain , p. 118
- ↑ The Sacred Mountain , p. 119-20
- ↑ J. Longland, TH Somervell, and R. Wilson, Hugh Ruttledge, 1884-1961 in the Alpine Journal , 67 (1962), pp. 393? 9
- ↑ Review in The Guardian online (viewed March 1, 2008)
- ^ Hugh Ruttledge: The Mount Everest Expedition, 1933 , in The Geographical Journal , Vol. 83, no. 1 (Jan. 1934), p. 1
- ↑ Quoted in Man of Everest: The Autobiography of Tenzing , James Ramsey Ullman, London: George Harrap, 1955, (1956 reprint by the Reprint Society, p. 62)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ruttledge, Hugh |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British climber |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 24, 1884 |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 7, 1961 |
| Place of death | Stoke near Plymouth |