Wyn-Harris Percy

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Biografie:
SIR PERCY WYN-HARRIS (1904-1979)
Sir Percy Wyn-Harris, KCMG, 3,113E, died in February 1979 at the age of 75. Sir Percy had a distinguished career in the Colonial Service which he entered in 1926 after leaving Cambridge. He was also a distinguished climber, his career in the field of mountaineering having begun at Cambridge where he was Secretary of the University Mountaineering Club.
While serving in Kenya in the thirties he and Shipton made the first ascent of Nelion, the lower peak of Mt Kenya and the second ascent of Batian, the higher peak. He was picked for the Everest team in 1933, and with Wager he reached an altitude of 28,000 ft. He was also a member of the 1936 Everest expedition.
In 1958, after nine years as Governor of the Gambia Colony and Protectorate, he retired to his home in Suffolk. He became a Life Member of the Himalayan Club in 1972, in which he took a keen interest, and he was a regular attender at the London Reunions.
V. S. RISOE
Quelle: Himalaya Journal, Vol. 36, 1978/79, Seite 242

Quelle: Mountain 1979, Seite 50

Sir Percy Wyn-Harris (1904-1979)
Wyn, who hated his first name and never used it, began to learn about mountains as a boy when his family holidayed near Criccieth, and with his brother he wandered and scrambled, in sometimes hazardous ventures, on and around Snowdon. Soon after he went up to Cambridge he joined the university mountaineering club, and was its secretary when I arrived there. Wishing to join the club I first met him and the President, Van Noorden, about eight feet above floor level, chimneying along the passage between his keeping-room and bedroom at Caius. I joined in, and was accepted for membership. Wyn was already well known as a cross-country runner, and captained the university Hare and Hounds team. For a man apparently so tough and obviously enduring, he was often prey to self doubt: he sacked himself from the team to run against Oxford, because he thought he had lost his form. Later, he confessed to his grand-children that quite often he had suffered from vertigo on steep climbs, though I well remember his complete composure when the whole side of a chimney down which he was abseiling on the Grepon Mer de Glace face fell away in ruins, and he managed surprisingly to bounce better than the boulders did.
He was not an intellectual and told us he couldn't think how he had managed to get a degree, but he read discriminatingly as well as widely, and wrote to me to say how lucky I was to be paid to teach undergraduates about the poems and authors he loved. And though he published nothing, except I suppose official reports, he wrote vividly and with wry humour.
Wyn first aroused the attention of the climbing world when in 1925 he and Van Noorden made the second ascent (and first guideless) of the Brouillard Ridge on Mont Blanc. In the war-stricken poverty of our fumbling rediscovery of the Alps in the early 1920s, this was a great achievement, and he and Van Noorden would certainly have gone on to do bigger things. It was not to be-V.N. was killed in Wales later that summer, before the partnership had fully blossomed. And Wyn played an agonizing part in the search for his lost companion.
Apart from climbs with him in this country, I had only part of the 1929 season in the Alps with him. He was the best climbing companion I ever had, not even excluding his Everest colleague, Lawrence Wager. But Wager, with whom I had climbed in the Alps for the previous three seasons, had his thoughts already fastened on Arctic exploration, and on those geological discoveries of his there, which were to underpin the then infant theory of continental drift. I could not have been luckier in my first two climbing mentors and companions. It was in 1929 too that Wyn, by then already a junior officer in the Colonial Service, had his fortunate meeting with Eric Shipton, and together they made another great second ascent, climbing Mount Kenya, and making the first traverse of its two peaks. After that year Wyn Harris was never again to climb in the Alps, though he wrote to say how much he felt he was missing.
Still, his next assignment was Everest. Our 1933 party was built round the nucleus of those who had climbed Kamet but, had I had any voice in it, Wyn would have been my own first choice. Wyn himself was very surprised at being chosen.
On Everest Wyn Harris had to fight illness and some acclimatization lag. Eventually he was going more strongly than anyone. When he came back to Camp IV after his record-equalling climb with Wager to 8565m, he told me that, but for the bad state of the snow around the Great Couloir, he thought he could have gone on for at least another hour, oxygenless. Had he managed that last traverse up out of the couloir I think Wyn would probably have reached the top-the remaining ground having been shown, years later, to be relatively easy.
Wyn was also involved in what many of us believe to have been the turning point of the 1933 expedition, the attempt on 20 May to establish Camp V at 7835m. Unfortunately he was not that day in charge of the team of porters picked to do this job, and those we called the soldiery (Wyn added a 4-letter-type adjective) who were in charge, did not know enough about big mountaineering nor even about the site chosen for Camp V. They broke off the climb, fearing the effect of the cold on the porters, and Wyn came down to IV almost-though not quite-speechless about the lost opportunity. The next two days were fine, and even on 23 May the high wind would probably not have stopped a summit party descending. We never again saw Everest so clear of snow, and Wyn's own later summit attempt was wrecked by the snow conditions.
I was not on Everest in 1936, when Wyn was again given leave (at his own expense) to join the party. The expedition, dogged by bad weather, never had a chance, but Wyn and Shipton were lucky to come back from it alive. Frank Smythe, his own ambitions bitterly frustrated, taunted them with cowardice, so that they attempted the North Col in avalanche conditions and were very nearly killed. Wyn never forgave him.
Perhaps that was the end of Wyn's mountain dreams. I think I had shared with him his romantic vision of impossible mountain goals, which gave us a partnership in endeavour that I never quite found again. I remember his cheerful sangfroid among the beastly seracs of the Fresnay glacier which we crossed or descended three times in as many days in our attempts on the Peuteret ridge: his concerned amusement when he slid down the slushy snow of the Dames Anglaises couloir, and registered half a dozen dartboard scores with his crampons on my hands, desperately holding on to the head of my anchored ice axe; the cold bivouac near the top of the Aiguille Blanche, where we watched the frosty lights of Courmayeur 3000m below; or stepcutting across the undercut ice runnels below the Grepon Mer de Glace face, where Wyn, unbelayed, told me his thoughts had been quite remarkably profound I They were as good times as I have ever spent among the mountains, and I was lucky to be with him.
I think it is fair to say (and Wyn himself has acknowledged this) that from the early 1930s onwards, the responsibilities, opportunities and occasional dramas of colonial service largely took the place of the mountains in his imagination and his endeavours. He had a deep affection for the inhabitants of Kenya and later of the Gambia, and became wholly devoted to their welfare and to the progress of those onetime colonies. His value was soon recognized, and he became Kenya's chief native commissioner and a chief law officer who knew well how to recognize when the law was an ass. When he was appointed Governor of the Gambia, he found himself able to combine dedicated but quirkily amused absorption in his job with perfectly proper pursuit of his new hobby of messing about in boats. No Gambia Governor can ever have spent so much time visiting his more jungly friends on the upper reaches of the river in the Governor's launch. He was very fitly dubbed KCMG in 1952, and was later chosen to sit with Lord Devlin on the Commission of enquiry on Nyasaland, when he spent sleepless nights wrestling with his conscience as to whether the Commission's recommendations might not be unfair to his old friends in African service.
In retirement, sailing became the chief of his interests, much as happened with Bill Tilman, another climber turned sailor. Wyn sailed round the world long before this became a sponsored and publicized stunt, often took his boat to New Zealand and back on visits to his family, and, single-handed, made a triumphant return by sail to the Gambia in 1965, making his landfall at Bathurst harbour, to join as honoured guest in the celebration of the independence of the Gambia, which as Governor he had served so well and faithfully.
He was caught up by ill-health in his last years, but was devotedly loved and cared for by his widow, Julie, and his stepdaughter. We don't seem to breed them much like Wyn any longer.
Jack Longland
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 87, 1982, Seite 270-272



Geboren am:
1904
Gestorben am:
02.1979