THE WYKEHAM JOURNAL 2021
MORE THAN A MOUNTAIN
AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMIE ANGUS ( COLL , 1987-92 )
One hundred years ago the Everest expedition which included OW George Herbert Leigh-Mallory had completed its first visit to scope out potential routes to the summit , and was preparing to return again in 1922 ; the final expedition which led to Mallory ’ s death was in 1924 .
The College has exhibited in the last year significant artefacts and documents relating to Everest . Reading the details of the extraordinary hardships of these trips , entirely lacking the relative comforts of modern fabrics and technology , we wonder what motivated the team of climbers to attempt the apparently impossible . Mallory ’ s own words are useful : ‘ What is the use of climbing Mt Everest ? … It is no use … if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it , that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward , then you won ’ t see why we go . What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy . And joy is after all , the end of life .’
So , the traditional explanation ‘ because it ’ s there ’ is incomplete . There was some sense in this group of climbers , many of whom had survived the horrors of the Western Front , that the world could be a better place than it had been , and that somehow conquering the ‘ third pole ’ would help to frame mankind ’ s primacy over the natural world , for the benefit of all .
Like some of the other contemporary attitudes of the expedition , not least towards the country they were climbing in and its inhabitants , that perception of mankind ’ s superiority has not weathered the subsequent century well . We reflect after an immensely challenging couple of years , battling a global pandemic and fighting to reverse through ‘ net zero ’ our indelible impact on our own planet .
But for this group , and despite the immensely inhospitable terrain , there is a great sense of seeing the best in the challenge in front of them . In confirming the views of the climbers that Mallory had likely made the summit , Tom Longstaff said : ‘ It sounds a fair day , probably they were above the clouds that hid them … How they must have appreciated that view of half the world . It was worthwhile to them ; now they will never grow old , and I am very sure that they would not change places with any of us .’
It echoed the moving words of AD Gillespie , the Wykehamist poet who closed his moving 1915 letter from the shattering Western Front to his Headmaster thus : ‘ I ’ m very fit , and happier here than I would be anywhere else .’
Gillespie ’ s work and legacy are the subject of one of the pieces I ’ ve written for this year ’ s Wykeham Journal . The natural optimism of his generation is evident — a sense that through duty , faith and community , hardships should be endured , even celebrated .
A century on , and we find the school that raised Mallory and Gillespie similarly contemplating the future and how to shape it . Much of this year ’ s Journal will set out the new Vision for Winchester College in the 21 st Century , which is summarised in the Warden ’ s introduction to this volume .
In these pages you will get a sense of the arguments weighed in reaching these conclusions , and the human faces of those given the responsibility of delivering the new Vision . Above all I hope readers will see reflected the timeless values that underpin it , never clearer than in those a century ago who saw the world as it was , and believed it could and should be changed for the better — perhaps with that same Wykehamical over-confidence that sometimes borders on obsessiveness — upward and forever upward .
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