By 1921 the future of the British Empire was in great peril – as the government faced revolutionary insurrection at both home and in the colonies. In order to preserve the prestige of the Crown, the Royal Geographic Society and the Alpine Club, with the backing of George V, decided to tackle man’s last frontier – Mount Everest. After superintending the complex diplomatic negotiations required for a team to gain permission to enter the hermit kingdom of Tibet, Howard-Bury was chosen as leader of the ‘1921 British Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition’.
 Tibetan Visa issued to C.H.B. |
 Dzongpen of Kharta and his wife, taken by Charles Howard-Bury: |
 1921 Everest Reconnaissance team. |
The Colonel was not expected to conquer the mountain, but to find a route for an attack on the summit the following year. In this context, the expedition was a resounding success – with Howard-Bury overseeing various geographical, climatic and mapping surveys. Indeed, due to the Colonel’s eloquently written dispatched to the Times, the team returned as national heroes. However, the 1921 expedition was to become dominated by a dispatch sent by Howard-Bury whilst traversing the Northern slope of Everest:
“We were able to pick out tracks of hares and foxes . . . but one that at first looked like a human foot puzzled us considerably . . . these tracks, which caused so much comment, were probably caused by a large ‘loping’ grey wolf, which in the soft snow formed double tracks rather like those of a barefooted man – that is, a wolf that had placed its paws in the depressions that had been made famous by its front paws.”
The controversy centred on Howard-Burys’s reference to the now infamous human-like footprint. After qualification from the Colonel regarding the origins of the foot, the matter would have been resolved, if it wasn’t for the intervention of an ambitious young journalist at the Calcutta Statesman, Henry Newman. Below Newman recounts his role in popularising the myth of the Yeti:
“I am the showman responsible for the introduction of the ‘Abominable Snowman’ to the world of literature and art . . . I fell into conversation with some of the porters, and to my surprise and delight another Tibetan, who was present, gave me a full description of the wild men – how their feet were turned backward to enable them to climb easily and how their hair was so long and matted that, when going downhill, it fell over their eyes . . . When I asked him about what name was applied to these men, he said “Metoh Kangmi.” Kangmi means “snow-men” and the word ‘Metoh’ I translated as “abominable” quite so much as “filthy” and “disgusting,” somebody dressed in rags.”
Newman’s article reached Fleet Street and soon ‘Yeti fever’ spread the Western-world. Howard-Bury returned to Britain as a national hero – with his book ‘Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance’ soon becoming an international bestseller. After delivering a series of lantern slideshows at packed cinema halls across the country, the Colonel used his new found fame to turn his hand to electoral politics – competing for the seat for Bilston in 1922. Much to the annoyance of his political rival, John Baker, Howard-Bury used his public image as the discoverer of the Abominable Snowman to draw large crowds at public meetings throughout Bilston, Sedgley and Coseley. The following letter to the editor of the Express and Star in November 1922 alludes to the frustrations of his political opponents:
“Sir – May I be permitted to remind Colonel Howard-Bury that he has been nominated as a candidate for Bilston, and not Mount Everest? My sympathy goes out to the Colonel in his attempt to describe himself as a politician.”
Despite this, the Colonel would prove to be a popular local politico – only being ousted in 1924 with a Liberal-Labour coalition. After a short stint as MP for Chelmsford, Howard-Bury retired to his beloved citrus farm in Hammamet Tunisia, where he entertained the likes of fellow explorers Freya Stark and Andre Malreux, as well as Colonel Bourgiba – the first President of Tunisia. Although he is still relatively unknown amongst contemporary Bilstonians, Howard-Bury is celebrated by modern explorers. I will leave you with the words of celebrated modern-day explorer Wade Davis, who considers the Colonel as one of his heroes:
“Bury was a man of discretion and decorum, typical of a generation of men unprepared to yield their feelings to analysis, and quite unwilling to litter the world with themselves. Individuals so confident in their masculinity that they could speak of love between men without shame, collect butterflies and flowers in the dawn, paint watercolours in late morning, discuss poetry in the early afternoon and at dusk still be prepared to assault the German trenches or the flanks of the highest mountain in the world.”
Read more about The life of C.H.B. and The Everest Expedition Here. My Thanks to Greig Campbell for this feature