Essays from the Edge | Extract

In Essays from the Edge, Dennis Gray brings together a collection of twenty-one essays spanning fifty years' dedication to the study and practice of climbing. As a veteran of expeditions to the Dolomites and Alps, with first ascents of Asia's Manikaran Spires and Gauri Sankar, and South America's Alpamayo to his name, his career has spanned one of the most vibrant and formative periods in British mountaineering.

In the following extract, which first appeared in the Alpine Journal in 2020, Dennis shares his findings about one of climbing's most remarkable characters, Marco Pallis – a kindly man with a love of ancient music, whose climbing life was almost extinguished before it began when a war injury ended his stint in the Grenadier Guards in 1918. Back home in Liverpool, Marco joined the Wayfarers club, defying expectations and enjoying a varied career which took him from Snowdon and Scafell to the Arctic, Dolomites, Alps and, later, to Uttarakhand, India, where he led the team that made the landmark first ascent of Bhagirathi III. A subsequent diversion to Tibet awakened his interest in lamaistic Buddhism, which shaped much of his later life, before he returned to Britain and his love of music, becoming a professor at the Royal Academy of Music and touring widely as a composer and as part of a performance group. 

The Round of Existence and Marco Pallis 

‘It is a bad pupil who does not surpass his master’ 

Leonardo da Vinci 

I began researching and subsequently contacting a wide range of individuals with specialist knowledge about the life of Marco Pallis, motivated in this by re-reading two books from my earliest climbing days, Helvellyn to Himalaya (1940)by FS Chapman and Let’s Go Climbing (1941), by Colin Kirkus. Within their pages is the story of how both made it to climb in the Himalaya through the inspiration and organising abilities of Marco Pallis, Kirkus in 1933 and Chapman in 1936. The climbs they made on these expeditions were among the most important ascents by British climbers in that decade. 

Marco Pallis was born in Liverpool in 1895, into a wealthy Anglo-Greek family. His father, Alexander, was by that date the head of the Ralli trading house in Liverpool, big in importing cotton and in its operations  within the Orient, including banking. He had married the daughter of one of the principals, Julia Ralli, in 1881. But Alexander was also one of the foremost Greek scholars of his era, translating the Iliad, Antigone and the New Testament into modern Greek (all published by Oxford University Press). The latter caused riots in Athens in 1901, as it was banned by the Greek Orthodox church. I guess it is rare for such a scholar to be a successful businessman, but he was to become one of the richest men in Liverpool, impressive for someone who had needed to drop out of education in Athens in 1869, to travel from there to Manchester to seek employment. He managed to obtain a post with Ralli, then based in Manchester, and from where he moved to Bombay in 1889, to finally settle in Liverpool in 1894, and to become a British subject. While in Bombay he wrote a book of poetry, Little Songs for Children, which was popular in the late Victorian era.

Marco was one of five children, three boys and two girls; he was the youngest of the sons and was bundled off to Harrow at a tender age. But when he began to take a keen interest in the Roman Catholicism, attending extra lessons with a priest, his parents brought him back to Liverpool and a private tutor. At sixteen, he journeyed to British Guyana to study insects and flora, and the following year he joined the Greek campaign against the invading Ottoman armies. During the siege of Ioannina, the ancestral home of the Pallis family, he worked at a field hospital in Arta during the first Balkan War. Returning to the UK, he enrolled at Liverpool University to study zoology, but after the first year he moved to entomology. Having grown to physical maturity, he was 5 feet 8 inches in height, with dark hair, rugged features and a lithe physique. 

The First World War then intervened; he volunteered with the Red Cross to work in Serbia, but then he became a translator for the British Army in Macedonia. Unfortunately, this ended badly after he developed malaria and a serious eye infection; he was shipped out to a hospital in Malta. Once he had recovered, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, specialising as a machine gunner. After some terrible experiences in the trenches, the war ended for him at Cambrai in 1918. In a charge, both his captain and lieutenant were killed, and he found himself the remaining leader until he also was shot badly through a knee. Returning to England to convalesce and for rehabilitation, he was warned not to try anything too physically challenging. In fact, one doctor advised that he might never walk properly again! Such worry must have been allayed somewhat by his family passing over a £50,000 inheritance to help him overcome this disability!

It seems that around this date his life really begins as a climber, but it also produced the awakening of another interest: he was to make a name as a musician and a composer, yet this also led him into climbing. He had studied music as a boy and had realised his keenest interest was in classical studies. In 1920, he was to be found at Haslemere, studying under Dr Arnold Dolmetsch. Because of his influence, he discovered a love of chamber music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in playing the viola da gamba. Dolmetsch was French; besides being a major influence in re-awakening an interest in ‘early’ music, and being an outstanding musician, he was also a skilled craftsman, making replica copies of violas, recorders and harpsichords. Pallis was so impressed by this ability that he provided the money in 1921 to build a large workshop to undertake such activities.

At Haslemere, two other events occurred that were to have a major influence on Marco. One was meeting his life partner, a fellow musician and composer, Richard Nicholson, ten years his junior and the son of C E Nicholson, famous as a yacht designer; the other was a chance meeting with the brother of one of the other students who was a climber. He persuaded Pallis and Nicholson to go climbing with him; they became hooked on the sport.

Back in Liverpool, the climbing scene was moving into a golden age, from the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. Just as happened at the end of the 1940s and 1950s after the second war, the recovery of the sport from the losses in the 1914-1918 war were to be made up and surpassed by new leaders, bolstered by advances in techniques and equipment. Returning home, Pallis joined Liverpool’s Wayfarers, and over the next few years he was to share a rope with some of the most outstanding climbers of that era, such as Menlove Edwards, Ted Hicks, Jake Cooke, A B Hargreaves, Ivan Waller and Colin Kirkus.

In 1929, with A B Hargreaves, he and Nicholson made the third ascent of Longland’s climb on Clogwyn du’r Arddu, and with Kirkus he seconded the first ascent of the Birthday Crack on that same cliff. He and Ivan Waller also supported Colin in pioneering the first ascent of the Mickledore Grooves on Scafell’s East Buttress in 1931, while Bill Stallybrass and Marco seconded Menlove Edwards in making the first free ascent of the Central Buttress on the Scafell crag’s main face. These years were to be hyperactive, climbing-wise, for Pallis and Nicholson; attending club meets in the Lake District, the Peak District, Snowdonia and the Scottish Highlands. They also made trips to the Arctic, the Dolomites and the Alps; one of the first such visits came in 1926, to Saas-Fee, where the highlight was a traverse of the Mischabel. Kirkus’s first Alpine season was with Pallis and Bob Frost; the latter, to all who knew him, was so certain of a great climbing future, but his life was to end tragically young in a motorcycle accident.

It seemed the Alps called every year. Wherever Pallis and Nicholson travelled to, there was music: Ted Hicks was a fine singer and others within the Wayfarers’ membership would join in.

Pallis was also a keen innovator of equipment and liked testing his ideas in extreme conditions. In the winter of 1929, he and Kirkus bivvied on the summit of Snowdon in sixteen degrees of frost. Marco reported that, ‘Colin slept so soundly, I feared he must be dead.’ A short while later, he and Nicholson repeated the exercise on the summit of Ben Nevis, but Pallis found this latter outing far less comfortable than the Snowdonia adventure, both of which were to test sleeping bag design. He put down his ideas about equipment development in an article entitled Bivouacs, published in the 1933 Wayfarers’ Journal, suggesting ways to improve lightweight gear for camping: tents, sleeping bags and the design of mountaineering boots. He even suggested a collapsible pee bottle for personal emergencies while camping. He obviously was thinking of the Himalaya and an expedition he was shortly to lead.

In 1931, he was elected a Vice-President of the Wayfarers, and in 1933, its President. There is an amusing published note by one of his club officers about meetings at Pallis’s parents’ house. You can imagine by this date they lived in grand style, and by order of Marco’s mother, his ‘scruffy’ climbing friends could only meet in their basement. However, he did show how forward-thinking he was, for he suggested that the climbing clubs should meet and produce a scheme to help poor younger climbers visit the Alps. He also noted, unlike some other mountaineering commentators of the 1930s, his admiration for the leading continental mountaineers, in the way they trained physically and mentally for major climbs.

He enjoyed a successful Alpine season in the Valais in 1932 with Ted Hicks and Nicholson, ascending among other peaks the Alphübel, the Dom and the Täschhorn. Some of the other Alpinists of that era remarked how Pallis’s times on not a few of his ascents were slow, but for a man who just a decade earlier had been informed he might never walk again, his climbs were remarkable, as he was to prove in succeeding years in the Himalaya. Spencer Chapman, one of the most decorated soldiers in World War Two, noted, ‘Pallis hides a good deal of determination behind his mild manner!’ And despite being a ‘steady as you go mountaineer’ he was elected to the Alpine Club shortly afterwards.

The 1933 Wayfarers’ Gangotri expedition, made up of Colin Kirkus, Dr Charles Warren, Richard Nicholson and Ted Hicks, which Marco organised and led, must have been one of the happiest and most successful of its time, enlivened while marching to a Gangotri glacier base by Pallis and Nicholson performing in the evenings on their viols, to the amazement and delight of villagers and porters. Several peaks were ascended by different partnerships, but the stand-out climb was the first ascent of Bhagirathi III (6,454m), via its South Ridge, by Kirkus and Warren. This entailed some high-altitude free rock-climbing, led by Kirkus at a standard hardly achieved in the Himalaya before that date.

The first half of the expedition being completed, for Hicks and Kirkus needed to travel home and back to work, and with the arrival of the monsoon, Nicholson, Warren and Pallis trekked north towards the Tibetan border to avoid its effects. There, they settled on a mountain, Riwo Pargyul (6771m) which was successfully climbed by Warren and Pallis. It was this journey to the border, and meeting Tibetans, that awakened Marco’s interest in that country, its peoples and lamaistic Buddhism. It should be noted that all the ascents on the 1933 expedition were achieved without porter support, this being a source of pride by those who took part, including the leader.

The Wayfarers held a meet each Easter in Fort William, with winter climbing on Ben Nevis being the raison d’être for the gathering. On occasion, many ‘irregulars’ joined in, including Jack Longland, Graham Macphee, the compiler of the first climbing guide to the mountain, and in 1934 Maurice Linnell. Climbing with Colin Kirkus, they set off up the Castle on Carn Dearg. (I know from an ascent I made in 1953 as a teenager that this is a notorious avalanche trap, especially after a heavy snowfall. Steep rock slabs lead up to a final headwall, seamed with fissures.) Maurice and Colin were victims of such conditions, resulting in a serious accident in which Linnell was killed and Kirkus badly injured. One can never know what might have been, for both men were among the most outstanding climbers of their era, and though Kirkus survived, it marked the end of his bold pioneering. Nevertheless, after a long period of recovery he returned to climbing, but it seems that his desire for new routing was sated. It must have been traumatic for Pallis as the club’s President to deal with this event, but his kindly and caring nature was much to the fore and much appreciated.

In 1936, another Himalayan expedition was organised by Pallis; on that occasion it was to Sikkim and the Kangchenjunga area, with Simvu (6817m) as a major objective, but with other nearby mountains as possibilities. The party was made up of Jake Cooke, of the Main Wall of Cyrn Las fame, Freddie Spencer Chapman, Dr Robert Roaf and Richard Nicholson. Simvu turned out to be a much harder mountain than expected: they were stopped high on the peak by a difficult pitch. Writing about this, Chapman explained it was a vertical corner, which once negotiated was blocked by a twenty feet high band of extremely steep ice. With a lot of difficulty, this was led by Pallis, cutting handholds and footholds in the ice wall. Chapman confessed, ‘I would not have liked it much without the support of a rope!’ With that climbed, and having gained an easy ridge, Nicholson, Cooke, Pallis and Chapman were convinced they had the main difficulties behind them and the summit in view. But they were to be stopped on easy ground by a huge crevasse. While searching for a way to cross this, first it started to snow, then a blizzard set in. Descending in this was trying and as there was no let-up in the adverse conditions, they had to abandon Simvu.

Pallis had hoped to visit Tibet on this expedition, but his application was rejected. And so, he, Nicholson and Roaf trekked north over high passes into Ladakh, while Cooke, Chapman and Jock Harrison, who had by good fortune joined the other two when his own companion had retreated due to illness, made ascents of the technically straightforward Sphinx Peak (7164m) but finished with the more difficult Fluted Peak (6098m).

Ladakh was everything that Pallis had dreamed of, with its monasteries, its lamas, its Buddhism and Tibetan peoples. Both he and Nicholson converted to that form of religion. Eventually, he managed to explain this spiritual journey in a book which has become a classic of its genre, Peaks and Lamas, first published in 1939. This has deeply affected many of those who have studied this work, everyone from Gary Snyder and Philip Glass to Allen Ginsberg. It has appeared in English editions in the USA, India, and the UK, and has been translated just as widely. It is a most unusual work as mountaineering literature. It tells the story of the two climbing expeditions, and it contains some lucid and sensitive travel writing, but underpinning both of these is an explanation of Tibetan Buddhism’s history, precepts and practice. It is a difficult read, challenged by abstract doctrines that for most are difficult to grasp, although the American writer Wendell Berry wrote after reading it, that, ‘I find no other writer on Buddhism surpassing him.’ I counted ten editions published so far of Peaks and Lamas; Pallis is certainly one of those who introduced this form of the Buddhist religion to many in the West.

Pallis visited the Alps again, in 1938, climbing with Jake Cooke. They ascended a host of peaks including the Obergabelhorn, Wellenkuppe and the Breithorn, but the darkening storm of war caught up with such idyllic outings: Cooke was to perish a short while later at Dunkirk. Pallis retreated to Liverpool and in the war worked during the day at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, and in the evenings took on Special Constable duties in reaction to the massive air raids visited on the city. Surprisingly, though, being by then forty-eight years old, he was called to appear before a tribunal for Conscientious Objectors in Liverpool’s St George’s Hall on 1 October 1943. His objection to military service was upheld on account of his pacific Buddhist beliefs.

In 1947, he and Nicholson were at last able to visit Tibet, where they travelled widely through the Tsang area, and at Shigatse they were ‘ordained’ in a ceremony at the Tashilhunpo monastery, the seat of the Panchen Lama and one of the four major sites of the Gelugpa sect (there are three others, Nyingmapa, Kagyudpa, Sakyapa), the same sect as the Dalai Lama. Both he and Nicholson liked their Tibetan names, Pallis being known as Thubden Tendzin. By that time, Pallis was fluent in the language, writing a short book in Tibetan which attempted to warn of how he saw trouble looming in accepting the dangers of modern civilisation, and a possible outside incursion into a society which, though he recognised as primitive, he had found spiritual, traditional and serene. He and Nicholson then retreated to Kalimpong, where they lived for nearly four years. Kalimpong was at that time a centre of literary and cultural activities as well as a refuge for many of those who were forced to leave Tibet after the Chinese takeover. Pallis became active in the Tibetan Society, the first support group created to aid the Tibetan exiles. One of the surprising items of furniture Marco owned in his bungalow at Kalimpong was a harpsichord, which often astonished visitors.

Returning to Britain in 1951, he picked up on his previous life, particularly ancient music, and reformed a group he had previously named the ‘English Consort of Viols’. He also developed his ability as a composer, and by the 1960s he had become a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, a post he held for over a decade, with his work there being recognised as worthy of an Honorary Fellowship. His ‘String Quartet in F#’ became a performance piece for the Salomon Quartet. With the Consort, he toured widely in the UK and the USA. At a sellout event in New York, the review in the New York Times declared their 1962 Town Hall concert, ‘A solid musical delight.’ The Consort released three records, of which Music of the English Home is accepted as a classic of early music.

Pallis kept to his Buddhist beliefs, writing two further books on that subject, The Way and the Mountain, published in 1960 and the Buddhist Spectrum in 1980. He was acknowledged as a major contributor to perennial philosophy, and he became a frequent contributor to the Studies in Comparative Religion, a journal that carried the view that all religions have at their core common ‘truths’. Among his fellow writers were Schuon, Guenon, Coomaraswamy and Aldous Huxley (who wrote a book on this subject). Pallis’s writings were published in Italian, French, Spanish and Turkish; he also translated several works by his fellow perennial writers from French into English.

As he moved to an advanced age he continued to write and compose; at the age of eighty-nine, his Nocturne de L’Éphémère was performed at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The audience insisted the composer should appear on stage at the end of the concert, and he received a rousing reception. For many years, he worked on an opera The Life of Milarepa, a famed Tibetan poet and saint, composing the music, writing the libretto and designing the costumes. Surprisingly, this was discussed recently in a media arts programme, noting that it remains almost finished but that it now needs someone of the stature of a Fenton or a Britten to do this justice and complete the task; it made one wonder who might take this on.

Pallis died in 1989, aged ninety-three. One of those who paid keenest tribute to his memory was Charles Warren, doctor on the 1936 and 1938 Everest expeditions and a member of Marco’s 1933 Gangotri expedition. It read, ‘Marco Pallis! A household name among most mountaineers of my generation, a very gentle, gifted and most lovable man.’ To those readers who have never been on a climbing expedition, particularly one like the 1933 Gangotri trip, which lasted for over half a year, this is so telling, for normally one might be hard pressed to find a participant so willing to pay such a heartfelt tribute to his leader.