June 26th - Celebrating Everest pioneer Howard Somervell
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I'm at the Alpine Club in Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London – where, between 11am to 3pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays to 18 July 2025, you can find a fascinating exhibition of the work of Everest pioneer Howard Somervell.
He was one of the world's best climbers – and an artist of high repute. And Graham Hoyland, who is writing a biography of Howard Somervell, provides a fascinating insight into his life and work.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Caller. It's Thursday, |
| 0:04.5 | the 26th of June and I am very excited to be at a new exhibition, which is of the work of Howard |
| 0:12.4 | some of them. It's at the Alpine Club in Charlotte Road in Shore Beach in London and I happen |
| 0:18.3 | to be with somebody who's been very heavily involved with this, |
| 0:21.7 | the writer and mountaineer Graham Hoyland, who actually has written a book, First on Everest, |
| 0:28.1 | The Life of Howard Somerville, which is going to be published in May next year. Right now, |
| 0:33.8 | though, we're looking at some spectacular pictures, taking us all the way from the Lake District to Everest. |
| 0:40.2 | That's right. And the reason the book is called First on Everest is that Howard Somerville was actually one of the first men to climb Everest, |
| 0:48.8 | or attempt to climb it, I should say, in 1922. He was with his friend George Mallory, who had wrecked the mountain the year before, |
| 0:55.4 | and Howard, who was an excellent alpine climber as well as painter and surgeon, went to Everest, |
| 1:01.0 | was chosen by the committee and armed with very little in the way of tweed clothes and some |
| 1:06.0 | Pemmican, they attempted to climb the biggest mountain in the world. And just to put people in the picture, I think it was about the 1851. |
| 1:13.9 | It was first identified as peak 15. |
| 1:16.3 | Then in the early 1920s, as you say, they sent a reconnaissance mission, just to see how to do it. |
| 1:22.8 | And the following year, there they went. |
| 1:24.3 | Everybody knows that it was 1953 coronation year for Elizabeth II when |
| 1:30.2 | Everest was finally climbed. So how well did Howard Somerville do? Well, people might wonder why |
| 1:36.9 | they made such a meal of this mountain. Knowing that a 13-year-old boy has actually climbed Mount Everest, |
| 1:42.6 | why did it take the world's best climbers |
| 1:45.1 | eight attempts to climb the mountain? Well the simple answer is they didn't know how to do it. When they went |
| 1:51.0 | first of all they thought it was an easy snow slope quote. In fact they found difficulties avalanches. |
| 1:56.4 | They didn't know about altitude. They didn't know about dehydration and they didn't know about |
... |
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