Everest heroes want Mullingar mapmakers honoured in 2021

Mullingar is known for its music but rightly, it could also stake a claim to glory in the history of map-making.

Mountaineers making their way up Mount Everest or Mont Blanc are working off maps based on the cartography of two Mullingar men – Charles Howard Bury and Anthony Adams Reilly respectively.

That heritage has not gone unnoticed in mountaineering circles – and plans are afoot to hold events in Mullingar and London next year marking the contribution of Lt Col Charles Howard Bury in particular, says Frank Nugent, a veteran climber who was deputy leader on the Dawson Stelfox team that in 1993 became the first Irish expedition to reach the summit of Everest.

Frank, together with Dawson, has come up with proposals to mark the centenary of the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition that mapped the base of Everest and determined that a likely route to the peak could be found via the North Col.

The leader of that expedition was Charles Howard-Bury, who lived at Belvedere House, and a lead cartographer on the journey was Oliver Wheeler, a Canadian whose father was from Kilkenny.

“Charles Howard-Bury was asked by The Alpine Club and the British Geographic Society to lead The Everest Reconnaissance Expedition,” says Frank, explaining that those bodies, and Mountaineering Ireland, want to hold an exhibition and a seminar in Mullingar.

The big issue making arrangements difficult is Covid-19, but already provisional plans are taking shape thanks to the enthusiasm locally of hotelier Christy Maye, who has artefacts relating to Howard Bury on display in his museum area at The Greville Arms Hotel.

“The Alpine Club are putting an exhibition in London and they were thinking they could bring that over here and put it on display here,” says Frank.

Because there was so much happening on the political front in Ireland at the time of Howard Bury’s Everest expedition, he probably didn’t get the recognition at home for his achievements, Frank says. “The anniversary is probably not high on historians’ lists, but Charles Howard-Bury deserve to be remembered for his contribution – he is highly regarded internationally, but he doesn’t get much of a look-in in Ireland.”

He is proposing a schools competition with, as its suggested focus ‘the map-makers of Lough Ennell’, since Reilly lived at Belmount House, which is also close to the lake.

Mr Nugent points out that there is a local figure who knows much about Mr Howard-Bury – former Westmeath County Librarian, Marian Keaney, who had access to Howard-Bury’s diaries and papers: in 1991 Hodder & Stoughton published her edited account of ‘Everest Reconnaissance – The First Expedition of 1921’ – by Howard-Bury and George Mallory. Previously, in 1990 she edited Howard Bury’s unpublished ‘Mountains of Heaven: travels in the Tien Shan Mountains’, which she found among his papers.

The vision that he and Mr Stelfox share is that speakers from Alpine Clubs abroad as well as Irish mountaineering figures would speak at a seminar in Mullingar; that a plaque in memory of Howard Bury would be unveiled at Belvedere House; and that there be an exhibition of photographs and memorabilia of the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance expedition.

“Seminar activities could include a tour of Belvedere House and a visit to Charleville Castle [where Howard-Bury was born] and to Belmont House – the nearby home of Anthony Adams-Reilly,” says Frank, who explains that Adams Reilly’s achievements were also significant: “The summit of Mt Blanc is shared between the French, the Swiss and the Italians and all the maps when it came to the top were very vague, and Anthony Adams Reilly reconciled the differences between the Swiss and the French and Italian maps and he created the first correct map of the summit.”

Charles Howard-Bury - the Mullingar man who led the first expedition to Everest

Prepared by Frank Nugent and Dawson Stelfox

The Irishman who was chosen in 1921 to lead the first ever expedition to Mount Everest was not an experienced Alpinist or mountaineer, but he had a wide experience in exploration and travel to remote parts of Central Asia and a reputation for diplomacy.

Charles Howard-Bury was a substantial Anglo-Irish landowner whose ancestral home was at Charleville Castle in County Offaly. He was also a distinguished soldier, big game hunter, plant collector, photographer, linguist, diplomat and likely a spy.

Luckily for mountain historians he kept meticulous and interesting diaries of his travelling exploits including 1920 and 1921 expeditions. He was a member of the Alpine Club, who hold some of his original diaries and papers, and others are in Westmeath County Library.

He was requested in 1920 by Sir Francis Younghusband to go to Tibet to seek permission from the Dalai Lama for a British expedition to travel there to Everest. Being wealthy, he went there at his own expense and his skill and success in that endeavour led to his choice as leader of a nine-man expedition sent the following year to map and find a viable route to the top of the world.

This was a time when all the great Himalayan summits were still unclimbed and little was known about climbing at altitude and simply finding and mapping one’s way to the foot of the mountain was a challenge.

The expedition – jointly organised by the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club – comprised four Alpine climbers, two surveyors, a geologist and a doctor who additionally acted as the expedition’s Naturalist and Botanist collecting many specimens en-route.

Two other members of the team had Irish connections.

One of the surveyors, Edward Oliver Wheeler, at the time employed by the Survey of India, was a member of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC). His father, Arthur Edward Wheeler was born and reared at Madoxtown in County Kilkenny and had emigrated to Canada, where he spent most of his life surveying and mapping the Canadian Rockies, making many first ascents; he was a founding member of the ACC. Oliver was also a keen climber and an expert in the Canadian system of photo surveying, which was particularly suited to mountainous areas.

George Leigh Mallory, an English school teacher and the expedition’s most accomplished Alpinist, also had Irish interests including being a friend of Conor O’Brien, the round the world yachtsman who ran guns into Kilcoole, County Wicklow for the Irish Volunteers in 1916. They both climbed with the Geoffrey Winthrop Young set, meeting at his famous Pen Y Pas climbing weekends. Mallory it seems was sympathetic to the Irish cause and was employed by the League of Nations to report on the Irish Troubles in 1919.

The expedition was an unqualified success. They travelled from Darjeeling through Sikkim into Tibet, crossing the Lhakpa La pass to reach the East Rongbuk Glacier and the foot of the North Col which they climbed successfully on September 22nd to reach 23,000 feet. They explored and mapped the whole of the unknown north side of Everest and established a feasible route to the summit via the North Col.