Wilson Roger Cochrane

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Biografie:
Roger Cochrane Wilson (1882 – 1966)
General Sir Roger Wilson died suddenly at Cape Town on February 5 last. He was born on December 26, 1882, and was educated at Wellington, whence he passed into Sandhurst. He was commissioned in May, 1901, into the Cheshire Regiment, but transferred in 1904 to the Indian Army and spent almost the whole of his career in that service, finally retiring in 1941. He served in Mesopotamia during the First World War, and in a variety of posts on the North-West Frontier of India, and for three years was Commandant of the Staff College at Quetta. He became Adjutant-General in India in 1937, and was promoted to full General and A.D.C.-General to King George VI, in 1940. He was created K.C.B. in 1937.
Wilson was elected to the Club in May, 1927; inevitably, his climbing seasons in the Alps had been very intermittent; between the years 1894 and 1924 he had made a number of the standard routes round Zermatt, Zinal and Arolla. In 1925 he and Hugh Ruttledge reconnoitred the Pindari and Milam glaciers, and they joined forces again in 1926 .
On his retirement from India, Wilson \Vent to live in South Africa but returned to England in recent years. He had been President of the Mountain Club of South Africa and there will be many there to join with us in regretting his death.
Mr. T. Howard Somervell writes:
In 1926 my wife and I went to Almora to join Mr. and Mrs. Ruttledge and Colonel Roger Wilson (as he then was) in an expedition to the Nanda Devi group of mountains. When we got there, a message arrived from Wilson in Waziristan to say that his war would finish in ten or twelve days would that we could say that about Vietnam!) and he would be at Almora in a fortnight. He was. After a day or two we started, with a large cavalcade, to walk 100 miles or so to our mountains near Milam. We climbed several, but none, alas, to the summit; the condition of the snow was too delaying and in places too dangerous. Perhaps I was a bit too cautious, with fresh memories of the avalanche on the North Col of Everest in 1922.
Roger Wilson proved to be a keen mountaineer, a good friend to us all, a placid and unselfish companion. My wife and I had to return to Almora and on to South India to my job, for I had only six weeks' leave. But Wilson and the Ruttledges went on into Tibet, and Wilson, with one Sherpa, Satan, an Everest porter, visited the sacred mountain Kailas, and was the first European to set foot on this abode of the gods. *) For our return, Wilson kindly lent his cook to my wife and myself, an unselfish act entirely characteristic of a kind and charming man.
*) Wilson's narrative of this expedition will be found at A.J. 40. 23. Although he did not, in strictness, climb on the mountain itself, he and Satan reached, from the south, the col that can be seen in the photograph at A.J. 66. 333, a little to the right of the extreme left hand edge of the picture. Just out of sight, to the left, is the prominent gendarme 'G' to which Wilson refers; the gendarme has some resemblance to a seated figure and popular mythology identified it with Hanuman. To descend from the col, Wilson's party had to make their way back along the South-west ridge, whence a reasonable route down to the west of the mountain was found.
Other human beings have established some contact with Kailas; Wilson refers to a row of votive tablets erected by monks from the monastery on the southern side of the mountain (in 1945 these were sizeable cairns); and Swami Pranavananda (see A.J. 61, 110) has told me that, on the northern side, from Diruphuk Gompa, he has been right up to the face and laid his hand on the mountain, for the sheer satisfaction of doing so.
T. S. B.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 71, 1966, Seite 197-198


Geboren am:
26.12.1882
Gestorben am:
05.02.1966