John Noel

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John Baptist Lucius Noel (born February 26, 1890 in Newton Abbot , Devon and baptized in the name of Baptist Lucius Noel , † March 12, 1989 ) was a British mountaineer , photographer, filmmaker and non-fiction author.

Noel's lecture to the Royal Geographic Society in 1919 is considered the starting point for the three British expeditions to Mount Everest that took place between 1921 and 1924. Noel could not take part in the British exploration expedition into the region off the north flank of Mount Everest in 1921. However , Noel, who was stylistically influenced by the Italian mountain photographer Vittorio Sella and the English filmmaker Herbert Ponting , accompanied the British Mount Everest expedition of 1922 , which had to be broken off after three unsuccessful attempts at ascent, as a photographer and filmmaker. Noel is best known today for his film The Epic of Everest about the British Mount Everest Expedition of 1924 , which ended with the deaths of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine . Together with the film Climbing Mount Everest (1922), Noel shaped the cinematic representation of mountaineering with this documentary and made a major contribution to George Mallory becoming a British national hero.

Life

Family and education

John Noel was the third youngest son of Colonel Edward Noel (1852-1917), one of the younger sons of Charles Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough . Noel attended schools in Switzerland, where he discovered his love for mountaineering. For a time, however, he also accompanied his father, a historian and army officer, when he was transferred abroad as part of his military career. Noel knew Gibraltar, India and the Middle East even as a teenager. His mother was a painter and encouraged her art-loving son to study art in Florence. It is thanks to his father's influence that he decided, however, to undergo training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst . He completed this training in 1908, changed his first name to John and joined the East Yorkshire Regiment, which was stationed in Faizabad in northern India at the time . Relocations to this region were unpopular because this military post was in a very remote region of India and in the months from March to October the average daily maximum temperatures were between 32 and 42 degrees Celsius. With the transfer to this region, Noel also hoped to have enough time there for his hobby, photography, and from there to be able to travel to the Himalayan region.

Tibet exploration in 1913

Mount Everest map

Noel was able to implement his plans to travel to the Tibetan region of the Himalayas in 1913. His ultimate goal was to find out about the region around Mount Everest . Without knowing of the very similar efforts of his compatriot Alexander Mitchell Kellas , he secretly traveled to the Tibetan highlands disguised as a local, accompanied only by a Nepalese Sherpa and a childhood friend from northern India. He followed the river valley of the Tista and came within sight of Mount Everest. His masquerade as a local was exposed shortly afterwards and he was forced to return to Sikkim by Tibetan officials . Noel returned to Great Britain on home leave in 1913 or 1914, where he met Kellas personally, with whom he repeatedly compared the information he had gathered during his trip to Tibet.

First World War

Noel was still on home leave in the UK when World War I broke out. He was assigned to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and joined that battalion on August 13, 1914 in Dublin, the day before it was transferred to France. The battalion was already involved in heavy fighting in Mons on August 23, and 620 of the battalion's men were killed on August 26. Noel was also featured on the official list of those killed in the Times. However, he was actually taken prisoner of war, but was able to escape before he was transferred to a prisoner of war camp. It took him 10 days to reach the British front line again on September 5th.

Noel was evacuated to Great Britain a little later, which was normally reserved for the very seriously injured. There is a medical report from September 14, 1914, which makes it clear that there was no physical injury, but that there was a serious war trauma . He did not return to the front until two months later. He was on the section of the front where, in the so-called Second Battle of Flanders, German troops tried to push through the Allied positions on the western front in Flanders in a new offensive, using, among other things, chlorine gas . Noel was injured in the attacks and was again evacuated to the UK. His war trauma was so obvious that a medical report dated August 3, 1915 stated that it would be many months before he was restored. In fact, it took almost two years to get it back operational. He was employed as an instructor from March 1917 and did not return to a section of the front in northern Iran until February 1918.

Speech to the RGS 1919

Francis Younghusband, one of the driving forces behind Britain's Mount Everest expeditions of the 1920s

On March 10, 1919, Noel was the keynote speaker at a London evening event organized by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), which is regarded as the starting point for the three British expeditions to the immediate region of Mount Everest in 1921-1924. Guests in attendance included a number of British mountaineers: Douglas Freshfield , John Percy Farrar , John Norman Collie , Alexander Mitchell Kellas and Francis Younghusband .

In his speech to the RGS, Noel took up a basic belief of many British mountaineers:

"Now that the poles have been reached, the exploration and measurement of Mount Everest appears to be the next most important task."

As is usual at RGS events, respected members commented on his speech. Both Freshfield and Kellas supported Noel's suggestion that Mount Everest be accessible via a route that passed through Kampa Dzong . As chairman of the British Alpine Club , Farrar pledged financial support for an expedition to Mount Everest and also promised that there would be climbers in their ranks who would be able to climb Mount Everest.

The 1922 expedition

Noel was not a member of the British exploration expedition to Mount Everest in 1921 because the British War Department was unwilling to release him from his army service. However, he instructed the expedition group in the technical conditions of photography at these altitudes. The expedition, which, like all British expeditions before the Second World War, only had access to Mount Everest only from the north, returned to Great Britain with ideas for a possible ascent route. Mallory had decided that there was a manageable route from Lhakpa La to the north side of the mountain and on to the summit. This route begins at the Rongpu Glacier and then runs over the Eastern Rongpu Glacier, which flows into it, first to the North Col. From there, the north ridge and the northeast ridge allow further ascent.

The two main routes of Mount Everest, the 1922 expedition attempted the ascent via the North-Col-North-Ridge-Route (yellow)

Noel resigned from his army service in 1921 and joined the 1922 expedition . It was the first expedition that had the express aim of the first ascent of Mount Everest and the first in which oxygen from pressurized cylinders was used as a climbing aid. Noel acted as photographer and cameraman on this expedition. Like Vittorio Sella and Herbert Ponting before, he made extensive adjustments to his equipment in order to be able to take photos and film under the specific expedition conditions. This included a tent that could be used as a darkroom and a specially developed stove for drying the negatives that could be operated with yak dung . The film camera was based on the model that Ponting had used in Antarctica . Among other things, it had a protective rubber cover that was supposed to prevent his face from freezing to the camera.

The Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatsho had obtained permits for the trip through Tibet . From Darjieling the route of the expedition led via Kalimpong to Phari Dzong and on to Kampa Dzong , which was reached on April 11th. Then it went on to Shekar Dzong , in order to first reach the Rongpu monastery from the north and then the place provided for the base camp. In order to better acclimatize and to keep warm in the prevailing cold, the participants of the expedition often alternated between horse riding and hiking. On May 1, 1922, the group reached the base camp on the edge of the Rongpu Glacier . After two failed ascent attempts, the expedition ended on June 7, 1922 with a serious accident on the third attempt. Some of the mountaineers and a larger group of porters were caught by a slab of snow. Seven of the porters were killed.

The film that Noel made during the expedition was one of the measures the RGS used to encourage the British population to climb again , along with the lecture tours of the two mountaineers involved in the expedition, George Mallory and George Ingle Finch . Climbing Mount Everest ran for ten weeks in the Philharmonic Hall in London and was a great success after a failed premiere and the subsequent addition of music.

The members of the expedition received the Prix ​​olympique d'alpinisme at the 1924 Winter Olympics for their achievements . All British participants in the expedition were personally awarded a gold-plated silver medal by Pierre de Coubertin .

The 1924 expedition

Map of Mount Everest with prominent points, the 1924 expedition attempted the ascent from the north

After the return of the expedition team to Great Britain, the preparation time and above all the financial means were no longer sufficient to send an expedition in 1923. Three attempts were made during the expedition. The first failed early due to the cooperation of the porters, the second was canceled by Edward Norton due to the late time, but it reached a new record height for mountaineers at 8,573  m . Mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine disappeared on the third and final attempt at ascent . To this day there is speculation as to whether they had reached the summit.

Noel had founded a private company in 1924, which acquired the photo and film rights to this expedition and thus also contributed to its financing. Noel had a total of 14 cameras available, including a small, pocket-sized model that the climbers should take with them to the summit. Noel accompanied the last ascent with his special camera up to the north ridge (North Col) at an altitude of 7000 meters. A brief note from George Mallory to Noel is the last contact that the expedition members who were not involved in the ascent attempt had with Mallory. Mallory wrote to Noel in his final message:

Dear Noel,
we will probably leave very early tomorrow (on the 8th) to have clear weather. It won't be too early to look out for us at 8pm, either as we cross the ledge under the summit pyramid or as we climb the ridge.
your
G Mallory

After 1924

The disappearance of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine gave the film The Epic of Everest a dramatic note, but the film was still not a commercial success.

Noel brought a group of Tibetan monks to London to dance before the performances. The appearance of these “dancing lamas” represented a violation of religious customs from a Tibetan point of view and was seen as an affront by Tibet. The so-called Affair of the Dancing Lamas strained diplomatic relations between Tibet and Great Britain for more than a decade. In Tibet, it helped the political traditionalists gain influence and undermine the reforms of the 13th Dalai Lama.

In 1927 Noel published the non-fiction book Through Tibet to Everest (Eng. Through Tibet to Everest), which had his travels in this region on the subject. He has also traveled to North America and lectured on his travel experiences. After the successful first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay , Noel again gave lectures about his experiences in this region. His film footage and photographs have been used in a large number of films and TV shows that dealt with this first ascent. In his later years, Noel devoted himself to restoring old houses. He died at the age of almost 100 on March 12, 1989.

Publications by John Noel

  • How to Shoot with a Revolver, London: Forster Groom, 1918. [Riling 1865]
  • The Automatic Pistol, London: Forster Groom, 1919. [Riling 1881]
  • Through Tibet to Everest , 1927

literature

  • Wade Davis: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. Vintage digital. London 2011, ISBN 978-1-84792-184-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 382.
  2. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 384.
  3. ^ A b Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 80.
  4. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 81.
  5. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 82.
  6. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 97.
  7. ^ A b c Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 99.
  8. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 93.
  9. John Noel in his speech to the Royal Geographic Society on March 10, 1919, quoted from Davis, p. 87. In the original Noel used the words ... now that the poles have been reached it is generally felt that the next and equally important task is the exploration and mapping of Mount Everest.
  10. ^ A b Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 127.
  11. ^ Wade Davis, Into the Silence , 144.
  12. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 383.
  13. ^ The Geographical Journal, No. 6, 1922
  14. David Breashears, Audrey Salkeld: Mallory's Secret. What happened on Mount Everest? Steiger 2000, ISBN 3-89652-220-5 .
  15. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 468.
  16. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 541. The original quote is Dear Noel, We'll probably start early tomorrow (8th) in orders o have clear weather. It won't be too early to start looking for us either crossing the rock band under the pyramid or going up the skyline at 8.0 pm Yours G Mallory.
  17. ^ Wade Davis: Into the Silence , p. 564.