Tony Streather Obituary (OB 1936-1940) Soldier Who Became a Leading Figure in the Glorious Post War Years of Himalayan Mountaineering
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Tony Streather obituary (OB 1936-1940) Soldier who became a leading figure in the glorious post war years of Himalayan mountaineering. There are 14 mountains in the world higher than 8,000m, all of them first climbed in the golden age of Himalayan mountaineering that followed the Second World War. British expeditions claimed two of these – the first being Everest, in 1953 – but only on Kangchenjunga, the world’s third highest peak, in 1955, did British climbers reach the summit. Among them was Tony Streather, who has died aged 92, an able supporter to the first team of Joe Brown and George Band: he reached the summit himself a day after them. A gruffly self-deprecating soldier whose career had begun as an officer in the Indian army in the last days of the Raj, Streather inspired admiration and affection among both soldiers and mountaineers. He came to mountain climbing by chance. Staying on in the subcontinent after independence and partition between India and Pakistan, as aide-de-camp to the governor of North West Frontier Province, Streather was the last British officer serving under a Pakistani commanding officer when, in 1950, a Norwegian expedition led by the ecologist Arne Næss arrived in the region with the intention of climbing Tirich Mir (7,708m), the highest mountain in the Hindu Kush. Næss, needing local knowledge to smooth relations with porters ferrying supplies, appointed Streather as transport officer. The Norwegians, perhaps expecting a strict colonial attitude, were amazed at how Streather, who had become fluent in Urdu, would chat amiably and get instant results. So seriously did Streather take his duties that he followed the climbers all the way to the summit, wearing pyjamas under his battle dress for warmth. While he had never tied on a rope before, he had spent years crossing high passes and living in tough country. Alongside immense psychological resilience, he was also blessed physiologically: his resting heart rate was in the mid-40s. Streather’s startling performance on Tirich Mir got him noticed. He was invited to join the Alpine Club and put on the list as a prospective candidate for the 1953 British Everest expedition team. During an assessment in Switzerland, he easily outpaced a couple of more illustrious hopefuls. However, his lack of technical experience told against him, although the expedition doctor, Michael Ward, felt that because of his strength at altitude “he should really have been a member of our Everest team”. Ironically, the day his rejection letter arrived Streather received an offer from Charles Houston to join the 1953 US expedition to climb K2, the fifth attempt on the world’s second highest peak. A man judged insufficiently qualified for Everest was now on his way to attempt a much harder route on a much steeper mountain. The harmonious K2 expedition seemed close to success when a storm trapped the team just below the famous shoulder of the Abruzzi spur. After days confined to their tents at extreme altitude, one climber, Art Gilkey, developed a blood clot in his left leg. When the weather eased and they finally emerged to descend, he collapsed unconscious. Houston understood very well this was a likely death sentence, but the team were not going to leave Gilkey behind. A desperate rescue mission began, lowering Gilkey down the steep sides of the mountain, but the man Streather was tied to fell off, stumbling on frostbitten toes. Streather was in turned plucked off the mountain and became tangled with the rest of the team. Only the quick thinking of the last man, Pete Schoening, stopped them all plunging to their deaths, as he stuck his ice axe behind a boulder and looped the rope around it. Even so, several of the climbers were injured, and Houston was badly concussed. Typically laconic, Streather said: “It really was an extremely tense situation.” Gilkey’s sudden disappearance (he probably died in a small avalanche), lifted the burden on his fellow climbers, but it still took five more days to reach base camp. When Streather got back to the officer’s mess, his comrades were shocked to see his uniform hanging off his usually burly frame. Despite the hardship of K2, Streather did not hesitate when Evans invited him to join the 1955 expedition to Kangchenjunga, among the greatest unsung achievements of British exploration. Evans was, in Streather’s estimation, “a terrific leader in a very quiet sort of way”, and what had been deemed a reconnaissance soon became a push to the summit. After Brown and Band’s success, Streather and his New Zealand partner Norman Hardie set out for the top. One of Hardie’s oxygen bottles slipped out of its carrying frame and disappeared down the mountain. So Streather gave Hardie one of his and turned his regulator down to the merest trickle. In deference to local beliefs about the sanctity of the peak, they stopped a few feet short of the summit. Tony was born in Golders Green, north London. His father, Reginald Streather, was a builder and passionate horseman who taught his young son to ride. His mother, Gertrude (nee Heygate), was a housewife. As a teenager at University College School, in Hampstead, where the climber Chris Bonington was also a pupil, Tony joined the Home Guard; when a British Indian Army soldier came to talk to the boys, he was hooked and joined up. First commissioned into the Rajputana Rifles at their cantonment in Madhya Pradesh in 1945, he began training for combat in the jungles of Burma (Myanmar) before, as he put it, “the bomb was dropped and that was that”. A secondment to the Zhob militia, a Pakistani paramilitary force, in Baluchistan set him in a new direction. The North West Frontier was just the sort of place for Streather’s adventurous soul – “Kipling and the Great Game, that sort of thing” as he put it – and he was charged with visiting horse fairs to supply his unit, developing a feel for tribal border politics as independence neared. He stayed on after 1947, one of a handful of British officers in the region. It was a perilous life. Bandits liked to stake out places his troops would water their horses. But Streather was there to witness India taking control of Kashmir and the pressures on the Pakistani state following Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s death, including the removal of the Mehtar of Chitral, where Streather served with the Chitral Scouts at the end of the 1940s, before he embarked on his climbing endeavours. His success on Kangchenjunga in 1955 might have been the perfect moment to step back from mountaineering and focus on his military career. Streather also married Mary Huggan, known as Sue, in April 1956, and their first son, Charlie, soon followed. But he was tempted back to Pakistan as a wise old hand guiding a youthful team of Oxford students on a huge Karakoram peak called Haramosh. The expedition ended in tragedy as the four-man team struggled over several days to escape a series of events that ended, despite Streather’s heroic efforts, with the deaths of two young men. The other survivor suffered severe frostbite, losing fingers and toes, and Streather himself had similar injuries. Streather was by now an instructor at Sandhurst, and the army extended his posting as he endured post-traumatic stress. But in 1959 he returned to the Karakoram and climbed a peak called Malubiting not far from Haramosh. After that he focused on the army and family. Having transferred to the Gloucestershire regiment in the early 50s, he was seconded to the 6th Gurkhas in 1966 and posted to Sarawak during the “confrontation” with Indonesia, where he tried to cram Nepali into his head alongside his familiar Urdu, earning the affection of junior Gurkha officers along the way. As commanding officer of the Glosters, he served during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He played polo and rugby into his 40s. In 1976 he returned to the Himalaya as leader of an Army Mountaineering Association expedition that made the second British ascent of Everest. Streather always believed in the transformative value of adventure, taking unpaid leave to lead groups of disadvantaged young people on expeditions to far-flung corners of the globe, from Greenland to Ethiopia and Nepal, but he was mindful of the risks and always put comradeship first. He was appointed MBE in 1965 and OBE in 1977 after his Everest success. Sue died in 2005. He is survived by their children, Charlie, Peter, Phil and Sally, two granddaughters and five grandsons. • Harry Reginald Antony Streather, soldier and mountaineer, born 24 March 1926; died 31 October 2018 .