Ralph Barker - The Last Blue Mountain: The great Karakoram climbing tragedy

Several years ago, I sat in a London crown court listening to a barrister explain to a judge what it was like to be trapped high on a big mountain in the Himalaya in worsening weather, making decisions that would impact not just on one persons safety but that of a whole team in circumstances of extreme physical hardship and danger. Even after a good nights rest at sea level, he argued, the brain could be a fickle mechanism. Was it possible to pass judgement on one fatigued by days of effort with minimal rest?

Gradually the court was hushed as the barrister filled out the picture of his clients situation: the strengthening wind, the snow stinging his face, the fight for breath, the numbing of feet and hands, the psychological pressure of a remote situation, far from the help of others. We were no longer in London but high in the Himalaya, in desperate trouble. I was startled to feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickle with fear and almost laughed: up until then, I thought that was simply a figure of speech.

After the days proceedings, I asked a friendly solicitor if the barrister was a climber. He seemed to understand viscerally the situation he was describing; he must have been in similar situations himself. The solicitor laughed. Him? Im not sure he ever leaves the city, let alone climbs mountains. What Id heard was simply a supreme act of the imagination, the ability to think through the consequences of such a hostile environment on a weary, desperate and vulnerable human being, and communicate that experience with a simple intensity that was almost unbearable. x

Ralph Barker did something similar in The Last Blue Mountain, his memorable account of an attempt in 1957 by a group mostly of students from Oxford University on the Karakoram peak of Haramosh, an adventure that ended in a protracted and ultimately fatal misadventure whose twists and turns heaped agonies on top of each other. That anyone survived it at all is testament to the courage, resilience and good luck of the two who escaped: the medical student John Emery, and the soldier Tony Streather, an experienced hand brought in to win approval for the enterprise. Streathers ascent of Kangchenjunga two years earlier had made him something of a celebrity. Barkers version of their story, told for a general audience, is in the same genre as Joe Simpsons Touching the Void, now a much more famous book, which in the 1980s helped reinvigorate a similar strand of narrative non-fiction that Barker was drawing on at the end of the 1950s. Think of Paul Brickhills The Great Escape.

Joe Simpson of course was his own subject, had lived through his own epic and could look hard into his own soul for the meaning and direction of the story he was telling. Ralph Barker hadnt been on Haramosh or any other mountain; like the barrister in court he had to rely on his own imagination, judgement and empathy to unravel the contrasting motivations and personalities of the climbers and the complex sequence of events on the mountain. The first three-quarters of The Last Blue Mountain moves along crisply, setting the scene, offering concise portraits of the climbers and their mountain; but it is all preparation and context for the intense conclusion as these climbers we have come to know and like are faced with unimaginable odds. The books great strength is the way Barker, without ever drifting from his fast-paced narrative, shows how character and fate intertwine.

Some aspects now feel a little dated. It is unquestionably a male book: inevitably given that all the protagonists are men. And the author does on a few occasions dip into language that will make some modern readers flinch a little. But despite how tight-lipped 1950s England was supposed xi to have been, Barker had a liberal rein to use diaries and letters to lift the tough carapace on these men and expose a more complex version of themselves: their frailties as well as their strengths. He does this with an unfailing sympathy that prevents him from being too abrupt in his judgements. Men have died, and he is respectful of the loss others have suffered. If mistakes were made, then they were understandable and are more than offset by the sacrifice and courage of all involved. It is this combination of openness and respect that has secured the books survival, as much as its thrilling tale.

All the protagonists are well drawn: the hugely likeable Kiwi Rae Culbert, the not-so-quiet American Scott Hamilton and the impressive John Emery. (All those I have spoken to about Emery, all old men now, speak of him with great fondness and respect.) But Barker zeroes in, correctly I think, on the differences between the expeditions leader, Tony Streather, an Army officer with immense stamina, and the projects driving force, an ambitious young climber from Huddersfield, very much of the Buhl temperament, called Bernard Jillott, whose climbing partners at Oxford included the young educationalist Colin Mortlock. Streather had come to prominence in a series of expeditions to big mountains, starting with the first ascent of Tirich Mir in Chitral, where he had stayed on after independence and the risks he faced daily on the frontier gave him a depth of experience that his teammates, who werent that much younger, couldnt possibly match. He loved Pakistan, and the expedition to Haramosh was an opportunity to renew friendships. He also understood the Hunza men who worked as porters on the expedition, their limitations and expectations, in a way that Jillott, who was driven and impulsive, did not. These two, with such different backgrounds and temperaments, would chafe against each other.

Barker may not have had experience of mountains but he understood men under pressure. After a stint on the Sporting Life, he had gone into banking before joining the RAF. He served as a wireless operator and gunner in a Beaufort torpedo bomber squadron attacking Axis shipping xii in the Mediterranean that was resupplying Rommels Panzers in the Western Desert: a notoriously risky occupation in such an unreliable aircraft. When Barkers crashed, killing the pilot and navigator, he returned to Britain and spent the rest of the war flying transport aircraft.

Demobbed in 1946, Barker struggled to find meaningful work and consequently re-enlisted in the RAF two years later. He was sent to Berlin during the airlift as a press officer and spent a few more years in Germany with the British Forces Network before returning to work on official war narratives at the Air Ministry. What he learned there would nourish his later career as a full-time writer. A chance remark from a colleague about the Goldfish Club, founded to reunite those serving airmen who had crash-landed in the drink and survived, gave him the idea for his first book. His next described the wartime role of the torpedo bomber squadrons he had served.

How Barker swerved from military history to write The Last Blue Mountain, his third book and on an entirely new subject, is something of a mystery. Bernard Jillott, Barker tells us, was planning to write a book, so perhaps Barker inherited this project. Perhaps his military service made the connection with Streather, but that is simply a guess. Why the climbers trusted him is also intriguing. There was, and to some extent remains, a deep-seated antipathy among climbers to non-climbing third parties writing about mountaineering tragedies. In later life Barker concentrated on military aviation, survival and his other great passion, cricket, which he played for Adastrians, a team for ex-RAF servicemen, and El Vinos. He died aged ninety-three in 2011.