264J the Alpine Journal 2018 Inside.Indd

Article Thinking Like a Mountain: The Life and Career of E. O. Shebbeare Westaway, Jonathan Available at http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/23505/ Westaway, Jonathan ORCID: 0000-0002-4479-3490 (2018) Thinking Like a Mountain: The Life and Career of E. O. Shebbeare. The Alpine Journal, 122 . It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. For more information about UCLan’s research in this area go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/researchgroups/ and search for <name of research Group>. For information about Research generally at UCLan please go to http://www.uclan.ac.uk/research/ All outputs in CLoK are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including Copyright law. Copyright, IPR and Moral Rights for the works on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/policies/ CLoK Central Lancashire online Knowledge www.clok.uclan.ac.uk JONATHAN WESTAWAY Thinking Like a Mountain The Life and Career of E O Shebbeare Bengt Berg’s warm portrait of E O Shebbeare, taken during the early 1930s. Shebbeare facilitated Berg’s pioneering camera-trap expedition to photograph the wildlife of Bengal. All the pictures of Shebbeare that accompany this article are reproduced with the kind permission of Sue Morton, Shebbeare’s granddaughter. Berg was a Swedish ornithologist and one of the first natural history filmmakers. 205 206 T HE A LPINE J OURN A L 2 0 1 8 T HINKING L IKE A M OUN T AIN 207 ear the start of Percy Wyn-Harris’s official documentary film of the N1933 British Everest Expedition, members gather around a table in Darjeeling.1 Each one is profiled, their name appearing in intertitles. Most of us would be hard pressed to name any of the expedition members today, let alone identify them from the archive footage. One face in particular remains deep in shadow beneath a broad-brimmed tropical hat, the title announcing ‘E O Shebbeare’. The deputy leader and transport officer for the 1933 expedition, Shebbeare appears again 12 minutes into the film in footage shot in Phari, Tibet, smiling and talking to the camera, supervising porters, posing with the other expedition members for a group portrait, the scenes intercut with shots of snow streaming from the sacred summit of Chomolhari. A founder member in 1928 of the Himalayan Club2, Edward Oswald Shebbeare had been the transport officer on the 1924 Everest expedition. He was subsequently transport officer for the Germans on Kangchenjunga in 1929 and 1931. His knowledge of Sikkim and of the indigenous peoples of the region and their languages was central to the logistical success of this and other expeditions. Despite this, his contribution has largely been downplayed and ignored by historians of Everest and Himalayan mountaineering, in part because practical knowledge in a colonial context formed no part of the contemporary archetype of the mountaineering hero. Lacking a degree or any university education, Shebbeare had joined the Indian Forest Service in 1906, eventually becoming chief conservator of forests for Bengal. Class and colonial experience differentiated him from most of the mountaineers selected by the Mount Everest Committee. Shebbeare acted as transport officer for Paul Bauer’s Kangchenjunga expeditions Look at any British mountaineering or expeditionary photograph from and also for the British on Everest in 1933, where he surprised Shipton, seen the period. A small group of sahibs stares impassively back at us. Out of here on horseback, by reaching the North Col. As a seminal member of the Him- shot a vast army of indigenous labour toils on the mountain: high-altitude alayan Club, few expeditions in this period made it into the field without his help. workers, porters, cooks, mail runners. Indigenous expeditionary labour was mountaineers from Britain and making expeditionary knowledge possible. seldom accorded due recognition in subsequent expeditionary accounts, Shebbeare’s relative obscurity is, in part, related to the nature of the British published and unpublished. In sharp contrast, E O Shebbeare’s recognition imperial obsession with Everest and its symbolic importance, particularly in of indigenous autonomy and agency was exemplary for the period, a sym- post-war reconstruction of imperial masculinity and British rule in India.3 pathy derived from his long experience of the subcontinent and his innova- The Everest expeditions of the 1920s and 1930s were high-profile events tive approaches to forest management. In both his 1924 Everest diary held designed to create enduring archetypes. The subsequent focus on a few indi- at the Alpine Club and in the two albums of photographs from the 1929 viduals, in particular George Mallory and his mythopoeic disappearance, German expedition gifted to him by Paul Bauer [Editor’s note: see p189 in has left a legacy of hypertrophied heroism and endlessly repeated, highly this edition of the Alpine Journal] and now in a private family collection, Sheb- simplified stories. As Charles Lind observed in the notes to his poem An beare has annotated every photograph of Sherpas, recording their names. Afterclap of Fate, ‘Mallory has taken on an almost mythic status in our time,’ Few of his contemporaries could have named more than a handful of the doomed to the incurious attentions of ‘the reverential monument builders indigenous workers they encountered on the way to the mountain; very few & the debunking demolition squad’ alike.4 All too often, the history of bothered to systematically record them. Exploring Shebbeare’s life and career moun taineering has become ‘monumental history’, Nietzsche’s term for the shows us the hidden histories of mountaineering and exploration, highlight- history of outstanding individuals imagined as a series of isolated moun- ing the colonial official’s role in traversing imperial and indigenous cultures, tain peaks.5 Monumental history was a reaffirmation of Carlyle’s ‘Great Man’ framing colonial encounters, mediating the culture shock experienced by 3. W Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, London, The Bodley Head, 2011. 4. C Lind, An Afterclap of Fate: Mallory on Everest, The Ernest Press, 2006, p120. 1. P Wyn-Harris, Fourth Everest Expedition, https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-fourth-everest-expedition- 5. P Hansen The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard Uni- 1933-online versity Press, 2013. J Westaway, review of ‘The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlighten- 2. G Corbett, ‘The Founding of the Himalayan Club’, Himalayan Journal, Vol 1, 1929. ment’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol 32, 2, 2015, pp393-5. DOI:10.1080/09523367.2014.963960 208 T HE A LPINE J OURN A L 2 0 1 8 T HINKING L IKE A M OUN T AIN 209 theory of history, intentionally aristocratic and rhetorically reinforced by the cultural capital of idealised mountain landscapes and the power of mountains as metaphor; what historians call ‘history from above’. Postcolo- nial perspectives on Empire have enabled us to begin to undertake a ‘history from below’ approach to Himalayan mountaineering and expeditions. Felix Driver’s work on the hidden histories of exploration brings into focus the importance of indigenous knowledge and agency in exploration.6 As well as issues of race, ethnicity and the subaltern, the influence of class in a colonial expeditionary context has also been an under-examined area. The Mount Everest Committee in the 1920s clearly thought character and class every bit as important a mountaineering ability in its selection pro- cess, the ‘Everest Mountaineering Archetype’ being well attested to: public school, university degree, medical degree, army officer, middle-class profes- sional, sportsman. Take a good look at those expeditionary photographs again. The figures in the photographs share many affinities as a ruling imperial class but can be divided on the basis of their experience of the Indian subcontinent. Most of the sahibs in those photographs only visited India, Sikkim and Tibet briefly, returning to Britain or elsewhere in the empire. There has been very little research undertaken on the lives of colonial officials involved in Himalayan mountaineering: the British political agents in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet who negotiated diplomatic access to the mountain, Shebbeare and friend, India. He spent The cover of Shebbeare’s remarkable the Gurkha officers and NCOs, Survey of India officers, Indian Forest Ser- 32 years in the Indian Forest Service. natural history work Soondar Mooni: vice officials, acting as transport and liaison officers. Few have analysed the Though known to climbers for his The Story of an Indian Elephant, importance of colonial knowledge and expertise to the Everest expeditions, exploration, he would more accurately published by Gollancz in 1958. be described as a deep ecologist. where success depended on a vast logistical pyramid of indigenous labour that demanded language skills, intercultural understanding and sympathy, good working relationships, command structures, and the deployment of it with. Despite this, there is an almost complete lack of accessible biograph- geographical, political and diplomatic knowledge and authority to succeed. ical information about him. This is in large part because Shebbeare was Shebbeare was undoubtedly part of the Raj, the white colonial ruling class notoriously diffident and self-effacing.8

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