Review of the Year 2024

January

The New Year starts with a new role, as Adult Care Convenor for Derbyshire UNISON. For good measure I also take on the social media role and get the interactions up from four a day to several thousand a month.

The quiet start to the year does give me a chance to enjoy the Derbyshire countryside in winter. Mostly it is wet and overcast, but some days are clear and cold. 

Greenpeace though has plans for me and I'm down in London at the weekend taking acting lessons ready for the first action of the year, appropriately named Mulled Wine. I have to get into character as the city wide boy who has just made a pile out and doesn't care about the planet. 

February

Bright and early on the first morning of the month Mulled Wine takes place. We arrive outside Shell's HQ, behind the London Eye, wiht our burning sign and act out our roles of rich psychopaths celebrating making a packet out of burning the planet. On the third take I get a shower of (alcohol free) champagne. It all goes well and the pictures are soon out on the wires. The Daily Mail uses one in a straight article about Shell that doesn't mention Greenpeace. 

I'm cleaned up and debriefed in time to get to Westminster Magistrates Court where my friend Jeff is up before the beak along with Greta Thunberg. Phil of the Arctic is there too. I couldn't stay for the verdict, but they all get off in one of the first tests of the new Tory anti-protest legislation. 

March

We've been campaigning against the insurance industry in Manchester for a while, and this year Extinction Rebellion came on board and we organised a big demo against four international companies who are insuring fossil fuel projects. 

Fresh from my performance at Shell I am enlisted as the corporate stuffed suit with a conscience who has some doubts about where the money is going. The weather is mostly kind to us and XR can certainly put on a good show. It was great political theatre.

Greenpeace also made use of me in March. They assembled a mock graveyard outside parliament to highlight the people who die each year due to fuel poverty. As usual with Greenpeace operations it was meticulously planned, and starts very early in the morning. However, they failed to account for a hire van breaking down. I was only there to carry the props, but we ended up having to improvise rather more than was planned. 

We still managed to get the display in place before the parliamentarians dropped by. I ended up photo bombing Natalie Bennett. I meet the one and only Steve Howe, and he photobombs GB News who are filming something completely different. 

The downside of the police not being bothered by us is that we have to clear everything away ourselves. However, we are a dedicated team and manage to squeeze two vans loads of tat into one to get it all back to the warehouse. 

April

In April 2024 it is ten years since the Barton Moss anti-fracking campaign came to an end. It was a minor episode in the campaign that drove the frackers out of the UK. The campaign began in West Sussex and ended in Lancashire, but we did our bit. The cmpaigners who won at Preston New Road did their first actions at Barton Moss, and the councillors who voted against fracking did so after seeing us on TV. Greater Manchester mayor first learnt about shale gas from us, and he then went on to a make Manchester a green city.

With IGas gone the Moss has been returned to the birds, so a few of the veterans go for a nature walk around it. Obsever Ethical Award Winner Anne Power is able to join us, which was great, but where did the last ten years go?

Greenpeace has an away day for their activists in April, as we've haven't really had a big get together since COVID. It was a fairly laid back affair. We were up in the Lake District near Grassmere in wonderful countryside. I climb Loughrigg fell and went for an early morning swim in the tarn.

My fire lighting skills are called into action and I light the fire we sit round in the evening. There's a worry we might have locked ourselves out of the Youth Hostel, but if that had happened we probably had the skills to get back in again. 

Mozza talked about his time in Reclaim the Streets, and I chip in with my stories from that time. It's great, but in the feedback when we're leaving someone says they enjoyed 'hearing stories from the elders'. I guess I am one of them now. 

May

It's back to campaigning against insurance companies with XR in May. The industry is having its big gathering in Manchester again, and this time we put on a proper show. 

There is a packed program of events running all day. We get the delegates as they go into GMex, and a number come out again later to watch us. I'm back in character as the nice stuffed suit again, but we're all somewhat overpowered by the Red Rebels. 

I'm also on press liaison duties, so I run around doing interviews once I've stopped performing. The insurance industry press appears to have noticed us and we get some decent coverage. 

June

June ended up being a busy month. First, UNISON sent me to Brighton for their annual conference. The event showcased the best and worst of UNISON. We're a passionate, diverse group of people dedicated to campaigning for workers rights, but we spending a lot of time arguing about points of order. 

There's some serious business to attend to though, as there's a motion to affiliate with the Ukraine Solidarity Campaign. This is a solid left-wing group backed by John McDonnell and some big trade unions, but the tankies mobilise in force against the motion. I take my place in the line ready to speak, but the vote is called before I do. We win, and it isn't even close really. 

I also got to walk in the Downs and visit Eastbourne Greenpeace, and on the way back home I passed through London at the same time as the March for Nature. It was very spectacular, and completely ignored by the press. It was a lot of fun, but not as much fun as where I went the week after: the Glastonbury Festival.

Greenpeace again had me as a team leader, and I have a great bunch of people working for me. There was no major band I was hoping to see, but that was fine. Instead, I discovered new bands. Lambrini Girls were the find of the festival. Idles were excellent and Skindred were something. I also discovered Coldplay aren't boring live. 

Best of all I was stewarding on the Greenpeace field when we had a celebrity guest. It turned out to be Simon Pegg and I literally lost the power of speech. All I could manage was a Vulcan speech sign, which he returned. I'm not worthy! We also had Jane Goodall drop by the stage, but she's never been into space. 

July

And then there was a General Election and we finally got rid of the Tories. Although probably the biggest victory for the environment in the UK this year, I didn't really have anything to do with it, the Labour Party having banned me as a dangerous radical. I enjoy the night though and stay up for to see Rees-Mogg lose his seat.

The rest of the month is mostly spent on holiday, including the Leicester Astrophysics class of 1988 who rented a tipi and a yurt in Lincolnshire for a weekend of drinking, talking bollocks and culture. 

Fen End Farm is an organic farm that I can't recommend enough and we all had a great time.

Then, at the end of the month, there are some horrific murders in the town of Southport where I grew up, followed by a riot.

August

And then just like that the Far Right was back.

August was an unusual month. The Far Right revival seemingly came out of nowhere, although actually it came out of social media, especially Twitter/X.

In response, the anti-fascists took to the streets. They were an interesting bunch. The usual suspects of Stand Up To Racism and the various Manchester green groups were there, as were lots of perfectly ordinary people. What was missing was pretty much every political party except the Greens. I was able to attend officially as UNISON, and some other unions were there too, but almost no other organised groups. Even UNISON wasn't all there, as when I tried to organise a rally in Buxton pressure was applied from above and it was cancelled. 

We outnumbered the fascists on every occasion and only at the first protest in Manchester were the Far
Right present in enough numbers to give them confidence to have a go at us. Greater Manchester Police were onto it before anyone did me any harm, but several hours after we'd left drunken fascists trashed a supermarket in Piccadilly Gardens. In some ways I was lucky. Colleagues went to a counter demonstration in Rotherham and encountered hate like they'd never seen before. 

Thanks to Stand Up To Racism organising the counter-protests, and the courts throwing the book at the rioters, it all died down. However, the at which the Far Right organised via social media, the failure of most parts of civil society to take a stand, and the complete lack of a subsequent debate about how so many people with no history of Far Right involvement had been weaponised by the tabloid media suggests serious problems for the future. 

September

Greenpeace had another job for me this month. The campaign against single use plastic has been going on for a while, and I'd done some covert research last year by planting bugging devices in recycling bins which became a serious piece of research. 

The worst problem are in the Global South, where many products are produced in disposable sachets that clog up water sources and eventually oceans. The global corporation Unilever produces more than anybody else, and also plans to lead the industry delegation at the negotiations for a Global Plastic Treaty later in the year. They also produce Dove, a product with a very well-crafted public image.

They were therefore the obvious target for Greenpeace UK's biggest action of the year. In the early hours of the morning I was at the wheel of an (electric) van that was part of an eight-vehicle convoy that hit their offices before dawn. In a well drilled manoeuvre, lock-on barrels were deployed at each of the buildings dozen or so entrances, whilst two ladder teams - one led by me - helped the climbers onto a ledge form where they could deploy their 30kg banner. 

It all went like clockwork, which meant I was back in Islington for an organic vegan breakfast. The lock-on teams meanwhile endured twelve hours outside in the cold, and then 24 hours in police custody. I did my best to support them by ferrying them supplies in Greenpeace's other electric vehicles, but it wasn't an even division of labour. It was an effective action though, and Unilever were very keen to negotiate with Greenpeace afterwards.  

October

Meanwhile I continued with the day job. Derbyshire County Council, which only a couple of years ago was boasting about how low its council tax was, had got itself into a bit of financial difficulty. They drafted in an ex-Brigadier for advice and responded with a swath of cuts. Having virtually wiped out its own Sure Start Centres it moved on to Adult Care, with plans to close or sell day centres and care homes. 

Finally, I get to use my campaigning experience at work. We organised public meetings, sat down with the management, met with MPs, put out press releases and I showed the branch how to use social media. With the decision to be made in November we had a final push in October with a series of rallies across the county. People turned up and we attracted press attention. Soon we would find out if it had worked. 

November

So, on 6 November the cabinet papers were printed. And we'd won. Sort of. The council had completely redrafted its plans for older persons care and three day centres and three care homes that had been at risk were saved. It had been a lot of hard work, and two members of our organising committee had lost their own jobs in the process, but we'd won something, which Derbyshire UNISON hadn't done for a while. It turns out I do have some transferable skills after all. 

The same day I am elected Branch Secretary of Derbyshire UNISON. 

We organised a demostration at County Hall for the actual decision, and I get my mug on TV again.

December 

And so the year drew to a close. The UK was hit by storms Bert and Daragh, but I managed to make my way to London for a UNISON Social Work seminar regardless. 

There was one last gig for Greenpeace, and it was at a gig. Jacob Collier allowed Greenpeace to ship him to Svalbard to play his piano, and in return we could have stalls at his concerts. People signed postcards to stop Deep Sea Mining, then I saw him play. Not really my taste.

The next day was The Greater Manchester Green Summit. I've been to all of them and it was great to see Andy Burnham's vision progressing.

So, that was 2024. A year of extreme weather and extreme politics. We didn't get a Global Plastics Treaty, but there wasn't a deal to allow mining the ocean floor either. We lost the Tories but gained Trump.

Oh well, better keep fighting next year then. 

The Epic of Everest: The Future

So, with the hundredth anniversary of Mallory and Irvine disappearing into the silence on Mount Everest has passed. Hopefully, a few more people in the world now know their story, and the mystery that surrounds their fate. 

We know so much more than we did in the 1990s, when I first became interested in the subject, via a biography of Francis Younghusband. But we still don't have the answer to what happened on 8 June 1924 on the world's highest mountain. So, what more can we hope for from future research? Is it possible we will find out the whole story?

Evidence on Everest

Firstly, what is the prospect of more evidence being collected on Everest itself? 

Mallory and Irvine died in the ’death zone’ of Everest. This isn’t just a turn of phrase, it’s literally true. Even if you have enough oxygen, and nobody ever has enough oxygen, and even if you eat and drink sufficiently, which is also impossible as the altitude destroys your appetite, your body is dying all the time you are at over 8000 metres. With altitude comes bad weather. Everest gives mountaineers just a few days a year when it is safe to climb. The rest of the time the summit is in the jet stream, meaning not just bad weather but bad weather at 100mph. Put those two facts together and any search of the summit will only have a brief window of time.

Then there is the nature of the summit itself. For all that Everest is a ‘non-technical summit’ it is technical enough. You are climbing and if you don’t pay attention to where you put your hands and your feet it's a long way down. Plus, the relative ease of the summit only applies to the main routes, which follow the ridges and are roped and laddered. To search the summit for Irvine you need to come off the ropes and risk your life on the face itself, in the death zone, in the weather.

This brings us to the organisational problems of a search. Every year thousands of people climb Everest, almost all with organised teams. The companies that run these climbs have one goal: to get their clients to the top and bring them home safely again. Clambering around off the ropes is not what they do. Nor is it what the Sherpas want to do. Sherpas earn decent money in a part of the world where that is very hard. They work tremendously hard and take stupendous risks to do this. The more times a Sherpa summits, the more money they can earn in a career that is obviously not going to be that long. To take all the risks of going into the death zone without summitting is asking a lot of them.

These problems can obviously be got round with sufficient time and money, but there is another problem: the Chinese authorities. Everest straddles the Tibet and Nepal, but Mallory and Irvine disappeared on the Tibetan side, so any search party will be on the part of the mountain that the Chinese manage. Now China runs a tighter ship than Nepal in many ways. Certainly, far fewer people die on the Chinese administered side. However, in part this is because the Chinese authorities don't let foreigners wander around wherever they want. 

For all the problems I’ve described Everest is not the Moon. It’s not even the Sahara Desert. It’s a relatively small area of land that has been traversed pretty much every way it can be traversed and which has been surveyed by satellite, aeroplane, drone and every other imaginable way. 

It was one such search party that found the body of Mallory in 1999, on the slope below the First Step, seemingly killed by a fall. Given the conditions, the examination of it was somewhat less thorough than anything Professor Alice Roberts or Time Team would have done at ground level. The body was left on the mountain, so a more forensic examination may still be possible. 

But what about Sandy Irvine? Following accounts by Chinese climbers, Everest expert Tom Holzel went over an eight-foot-long aerial photo of Everest he had in his basement with a magnifying glass, trying to trace the routes the people who claimed to have seen him. He identified a smudge just above where Mallory’s body had been found as the most likely location. In 2019 an expedition was launched and, after many difficulties mountaineer Mark Synnott finally made it to the ‘Holzel spot’, only to find nothing there. Slightly confusingly though, the spot was not a crevice, as thought, but just a dark patch if rock. The various accounts of the 'English dead' spoke of a body in a shallow hollow, which is also where you'd expect to find someone sheltering from the elements, so it's still possible this was not the right area. If he's still there it should be possible to find him with a bit of effort, although, as we'll see later, there is a big 'if' there.

Smaller objects may also remain to be found. Mallory and Irvine appear to have taken, used, and then discarded five oxygen cylinders. Only one has ever been found. Finding another would be of huge importance. Plus, Mallory wasn't wearing the rigging for the kit when he died, so that must be somewhere too. Irvine also had a rig, and if that's not on his body it too would have been discarded on the mountain. At present no physical evidence puts Mallory or Irvine beyond the First Step on the Northeast Ridge, so anything higher would be a significant new find. Objects would also give an indication of route. If something turned up in the Great Couloir it would solve a century old debate about their route and make arguments about the second step redundant. With Mallory's body was found a note on his where he had recorded the serial numbers of the oxygen cylinders he took and their pressure, so if a cylinder was found we would know if it was one of his. As well as showing how far they got and by which route, where an oxygen cylinder was discarded would give an indication of rate of progress. 

Perhaps the most sought after item though is the expedition's Kodak camera. It was not on Mallory's body when it was found and whilst there is a slim chance it was lost in the fall, more likely it was with Irvine. Kodak apparently have some confidence they could get something from hundred year old film. A photo of the summit would settle the whole argument. 

Finally, the object that I would most like to find would be the picture of Mallory's wife, Ruth. Mallory said he would place the picture on the summit, and it wasn't on his body when it was found. Maybe he forgot it - he was like that - or maybe it was lost in the fall, or in the sixty plus years his body was exposed on the mountain. Most likely though he left it at the highest point he reached. Nobody has seen it on the summit and Sir Edmund Hillary, the most likely person to do so, spent some time looking in 1953. If there is one piece of evidence that would convince me Mallory did not stand on the top of the world, it would be a picture of Ruth found tucked away at the Second Step or in the Great Couloir. 

Evidence in China

So, who were htose climbers who spoke of seeing 'English dead' on Everest? In 1960 Xu Jing was second in command of the Chinese expedition that was the first to climb Everest from Tibet and descend safely. He claimed he saw a body whilst up there, although it wasn’t until 2001 that he told his story to anyone in the West. In 1965 another member of the team, Wang Fu-chou, gave a talk in Leningrad in which he recounted seeing a the body of a dead ‘European’ at 8600m. This startling news was recorded in the St Petersburg Alpine Club Journal, but nowhere else, and hence was not noticed by anyone outside of the Communist block for half a century.

The next recorded sighting was by another Chinese expedition in 1975. Wang Hongbao wandered off the established route whilst trying to rejoin his team and came across the body of an old “English” dead. Hongbao told this story to a fellow climber in 1979. The next day Hangboa was killed in an avalanche so, once again, it was mostly ignored. China denied this story for years but then in 1986 the man who Hongbao had shared a tent with in 1975 confirmed it to mountaineer and Everest historian Tom Holzel.

Finally, in 1995 Sherpa Chering Dorja, descending ‘via a more direct route’ also found an old body. By this time though people were taking note, and three years later an expedition was launched to find the body. In the end they found, not Irvine, but George Mallory, but this body was also not in the spot described by Xu King, Wang Hongbao or Sherpa Dorja.

Then, in 2021, came a claim, via a source at the British Embassy in Beijing, that a 1975 Chinese expedition not only found Irvine’s body, but retrieved a camera from it. The body had allegedly been found by Pan Dao, a remarkable woman who was the first to summit from the north side, and the first Tibetan to stand on top of the world. Pan Dao thought that Irvine had died of the cold, rather than a fall. What really made Pan Dao’s story stand out though was the claim that she had found and retrieved a camera from the body.

In 2010 China had launched a big clean-up of Everest, removing over half a century’s worth of rubbish and dead bodies. Rumours were soon swirling round that amongst other things removed from the mountain was at least one “English dead”, although five-times Everest summiteer Jamie McGuiness was told by an official of the China Tibet Mountaineering Association that the body was removed "much earlier than that".

It's also possible Irvine’s body might not have been the only one disposed of. In 2007 Conrad Anker, who’d found Mallory’s remains in 1999, returned to the same spot but couldn’t find him. Neither could a drone flown by a 2019 expedition.

Why would China be doing this? Well, their 1960 ascent, the first to summit Everest from the north, is to China what putting Yuri Gagarin into space is for the Russians or Neil Armstrong on the Moon is for the Americans. After their ‘century of shame’ when Europeans all but colonised the country, after the devastation of the Second World War and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, they do not really want to promote the idea that a pair of British amateurs might have got there first.

So, what would it take to get the Chinese to reveal what they know? 'Money' is the usual answer, but on a sensitive subject like Everest even money might not be enough. The answer then to my original question is that we really don't know when there will be an answer to this mystery. 

The Epic of Everest: The Mystery of 1924

One hundred years ago today, two young men set out on one of the most remarkable adventures in human history. 37 year old George Herbert Leigh-Mallory, the greatest climber of his generation, and 22 year old Andrew Comyn 'Sandy' Irvine, an expert at repairing the new fangled oxygen equipment they were using, left their camp 7000 metres above sea level, and attempted to be the first people to reach the summit of the highest mountain in the world. They were never seen alive again. 

The first person to be asked to climb Everest appears to have been a chap called Francis Younghusband. A Victorian British Army officer he made his name with various acts of daring-do in what came to be called the Great Game, a sort of  Cold War in the Himalayas between the British and Russian empires. The conversation took place in 1893, on the polo ground in Chitral, an obscure place on the northwest frontier that had just been the scene of one of the bloody little wars of empire. Captain Charles Grenville Bruce of the 5th Gurkha Rifles suggested it to Younghusband, although it could have been other way round. Grant, a volcano of a man in both size and temperament, is the person who introduced shorts to the British Army and had once commanded Younghusband's Gurkha escort during one of this Great Game expeditions.

It took nearly 30 years for the plan to come off, by which time both men were too old for the climb themselves. By this time Younghusband was president of the Royal Geographical Society. He was also a mystic who believed in free love, the unity of the world's religions and a cosmic intelligence living on a planet called Altair, but this didn't stop the RGS teaming up with the Alpine Club to launch a reconnaissance expedition to Everest in 1921. The team included Mallory, who spied out the terrain and chose the route he would use the next year to try for the summit. 

Prior to this expedition, British surveyors had only seen the top of Everest. They had no idea what the rest of it looked like, or even if they would be climbing rock or snow. What they saw was impressed them, but did not put them off. "An easy rock peak" was the verdict. Imperial arrogance, for sure, but also the voice of experienced Alpine climbers. Everest stands 10,000 feet above the Tibetan plateau. By contrast, Mont Blanc stands 14,000 feet above Chamonix. What makes Everest a challenge is not its prominence, but its altitude. Climbing at 29,000 feet is not the same as climbing at 15,000 feet.

The party could not do much about the weather, except pray that the monsoon was late, but they could do something about the lack of oxygen. When they returned in 1922, with the team by General Charles Bruce, as he now was, they brought oxygen cylinders with them, much to the chagrin of Younghusband, who thought they should have more faith in the human spirit. These early systems were heavy and unreliable, but they proved their worth.

But the 1922 attempt was ended by tragedy. Mallory and the climb team accidentally caused an avalanche that carried away seven Sherpas following up below. At this time the Europeans didn't appreciate that Sherpas were the key to Everest, instead using them as little more than high altitude pack animals. The compensation the families of the dead received was £13 a Sherpa, which seems insignificant, but is actually, when you allow for inflation, more is paid today. The reaction to this amongst the team was interesting: "Why was it not one of us?" said Mallory. This was the guilt of a survivor of the Great War.

The party returned home, defeated, and it would be two years before they could return. Mallory was now in his late thirties, and negotiations with China for access to Everest were getting difficult. All concerned knew this would be the last chance to reach the top of the world. So, on the morning of 8 June Mallory and Irvine set off for the summit from Camp VI, clinging to the mountain just below it's Northeast Ridge. Did they make it to the top?

At first glance it’s quite implausible. Compared to modern expeditions, Mallory and Irvine camped further down the mountain and started their final ascent after dawn, rather than in the night. Expedition barometer readings taken at Base Camp, when analysed with modern technology, suggest they were also attempting the summit in low pressure, which reduces the oxygen in the air and effectively makes the mountain a few hundred metres higher. They were also  hit by a snow storm for good measure, which in those conditions is often fatal even for climbers in modern clothing. They were going where no man had gone before and were having to invent their own route as they went. The odds were very much against them.

There are clues as to what happened. Noel Odell, who was one camp below them that morning and following them up the mountain, believes he saw two figures climbing the Northeast Ridge just before 1PM, when the swirling mists parted for a moment. A subsequent failed British attempt to climb the mountain found Irvine's ice axe just below the First Step on the ridge, then in 1999 a search party found one of their oxygen cylinders, and then, below the First Step, the body of Mallory himself, seemingly killed in a fall. They also found a mitten and a sock, all below the First Step. The body contained some clues. As well as confirmation of the number of oxygen cylinders they were carrying, Malloy was not wearing his goggles, which suggested he fell in the dark, and the picture of his wife he was to leave on the summit was not in his pocket. 

The physical evidence though doesn't put Mallory and Irvine any higher than that First Step on the ridge, still a thousand feet below the summit. The only hint that they went beyond this is Odell’s eye witness account, which is problematic. Odell was a one-man support expedition, and was nearly a mile away when he claims he saw two figures climbing one of the steps. He appears to have given in to pressure to say this was the First Step, but he seems to have always thought himself it was the Second, or maybe the Third. His diary entry of 8 June is unfortunately brief and ambiguous. 

The trouble is, almost nobody else thinks Mallory did climb the Second Step, as it's a technically very challenging section, and in the opinion of many climbers beyond his abilities. Even if he did climb it, he didn’t do it in the five minutes Odell says it took. Then there is the implausibility of the hundred-to-one chance that the clouds would part just at the moment Mallory was cresting the most challenging part of the climb.

The Second Step is the major technical challenge Mallory and Irvine faced on their route. Three days before their colleagues Teddy Norton and Howard Somervell had tried to get up a lower route, the Great Couloir, that bypassed the Second Step. This may have been Mallory’s intended route. If it wasn’t, it’s likely it became the intended route after Mallory saw it from the ridge. The Second Step looks intimidating at the best of times, and in 1924 pictures show there was a significant snow cornice. Mallory may have felt up to the challenge, but Irvine was a much less experienced climber. If Odell didn’t see Mallory and Irvine at the Second Step, then maybe it was the Third Step, almost at the base of the final pyramid. That puts them nearly at the top, but also means they would have made record progress from their camp to be there by 1PM.

This is where it all starts to get confusing. Odell went to his grave convinced the two had made it to the summit, but died there. Odell was almost the only one of his contemporaries who believed this, but in time it came to be the majority opinion amongst researchers. 

By modern standards Mallory and Irvine were woefully under-equipped, even for a walk in the Lake District. However, with over sixty years of Alpine experience to draw on, their gear was actually surprisingly practical. Their boots were thinner than those of today’s climbers, making them better for more technical ascents, and by not wearing bulky clothing they could see their feet, which makes a huge difference. They also carried far less gear than modern climbers. All told they were well equipped for a quick dash to the summit, but not for an extended stay on the mountain. That they’d climbed up, but not down again, was believable.

The discovery of Mallory’s body below the First Step changed all this though. Now the people who put him on the summit, also had to get him back down again, to within a few hundred yards of his camp. To climb for ten or so hours to the summit would have been an incredible achievement. To climb ten hours back down again, without oxygen and mostly in the dark, would be something else again. It just doesn’t seem possible but, how else do we fit where he was found with what Odell saw?

There are theories. One has Mallory leaving a possibly injured Irvine and returning alone along the lower Great Couloir route. But it seems unlikely that Mallory would return a different way to how he’d come up, in the dark, with Irvine above him. Another has Mallory and Irvine both ascending and descending via the couloir, a route that has rarely been used since, which would explain why so few traces of them have been found. But in that case, why is Irvine’s ice axe up on the ridge? And so on. Each new theory brings more problems. Until some hard evidence places either Mallory or Irvine beyond the First Step the balance of the evidence is that they did not reach the summit. They turned round at some point either on the Northeast Ridge, or in the Couloir, and then fell on the way back to their camp. Maybe 

But to the question of is it possible that Mallory, with or without Irvine, reached the summit of Everest 29 years before Tensing and Hillary the answer is, yes, it is possible. The vertical distance they had to cover was not much more than 650m, half the height of Ben Nevis, over terrain that Mallory would have tackled in the dark if it had been in the Lake District, travelling light and with the knowledge that if they stopped, they were dead. 

Mallory, it was said, was the most formidable enemy a mountain ever had. When Everest was tackled again in 1933 three climbers, on two successive days, retraced Norton and Somervell's route, and turned back at the same point. Also with the party was Odell, twenty years older than the other climbers, but still able to outpace them on the mountain. Odell, when ten years younger, had not been able to compete with Mallory, so there is no doubt the 1924 party was more capable than the 1933 one.

This would take nothing away from the 1953 achievement of Hillary and Tenzing. Mallory’s may be the better story, but Hillary and Tenzing’s was the greater achievement. That said, a Mallory who summits Everest and then dies only 300 yards from his camp is not the reckless fool who got up the mountain, but couldn’t get down again, as was believed until 1999. If proved to be true, this would be one of the most incredible adventures ever. Imagining them both on the top of the world, knowing that they only had themselves to rely on and that no help was ever going to come, is awe inspiring.

But the crucial question on this centenary day is does Everest have more secrets to give up? And the really huge question after that is ‘what do the Chinese know’? Chinese climbers have said, off the record, that they found evidence of Mallory and Irvine. Some of those accounts appear to refer to Mallory, but others describe a different 'English dead', in a different location and face up, rather than face down as Mallory was found. The location described has now been thoroughly searched, both on foot and by drone, and there is nothing there. Either the accounts were wrong, or the body has been moved. And if the body has gone, have other clues gone too?

Certainly there are rumours, Mark Synnott has described the search in his book The Third Pole, and has found out more since. There appears to be a private climbing museum in China, secretly recorded on a mobile phone, containing pre-war artifacts. There are even rumours that Irvine's camera was recovered, although attempts to develop the film failed. 

Why is China so paranoid and secretive about this? Chinese team climbed Everest from the Tibet side in 1960. This is a big deal in the country. It is their 'Moon landing'. The Communist Party would not want anyone to even suspect someone else had done this before them. They certainly wouldn't want proof that anyone ever had. So, is China just being careful, or do they actually know the answer to this puzzle and it's not the answer they want?

Review of the Year 2023

Activism is how I pay my rent on planet Earth.This has been my year.

January

The year began with Greenpeace and medley of other groups continuing their campaign against high energy bills. We suggested renewable energy and home insulation. We take our campaign to the street of Altrincham and Glossop and find that nobody in either town liked their local Tory MP much. Graham Brady at least took the hint and announced he wouldn't be standing again in Altrincham. The government though didn't listen to us, but decided to bung the energy companies several billion quid. This rather shot our fox  After that the campaign should really have been about why tax revenue was being used to bail out the world's biggest polluters. 

In January Greenpeace sent me to Leeds to tell new supporters about what Greenpeace local groups did. I enjoyed free train travel thanks to Trans Pennine Express, who left mw waiting for a ghost train at Guide Bridge station and only removed it from the electronic sign board when it was seconds away from the platform and I was starting to wonder why I couldn't see it. All a perfectly normal for a day on Britain's privatised trains. What was not perfectly normal though was the life-sized Spinosaurus by the canal at the back of Leeds railway station. 

February

February saw me hanging out with two quite different groups of eco-warriors. Earth First! had their Winter Moot in a squat in Rusholme. Entering via a padlocked door, with a friendly security man parked outside all weekend, it was anarchy touched with some very cerebral discussions about sociology. 

Once upon a time Earth First! did more than just talk - it was central to the Road Protests of the 1990s - but although it's no longer a dynamic or mass movement it's children are everywhere these days: decentralised and anarchic, although usually rather less keen on sociology. The best part of the weekend was the talent show on the Saturday evening. Whoever you were who sang 4 Non Blondes' What's Up, you were brilliant. 

Later in the month it was down to Canonbury Villas for the first in-person meet-up of Greenpeace Local Group Coordinators since COVID. It was great to be back at HQ, and the revelling and quaffing was suitably epic. We also got to meet the new team and almost every manager had left over the previous twelve months. There was a mixture of the usual suspects and new faces and Manchester was well represented although Stuart, our video expert, may have made himself too widely available as a film editor. 

March

We'd been showing the Greenpeace film The Cost of Living for three months by this time, but in March I got to meet some of the cast by helping to organise the first showing in Malby, one of the towns where it was made. I met some of the very forceful miners wives who had supported their communities through the strike and who were now dealing with the cost of living crisis. This was a part of the 'red wall' where the women at least were not voting Tory. They weren't really into social media and organising film showings, which is why I ended up doing most of that, but I imagine they were difficult to say no to when they appeared on your doorstep. 

I also watched a different film in March as the Manchester group
campaigning against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline had its first event, a screening of the documentary EACOP: A Crude Reality. EACOP is one of the largest and most destructive fossil fuel projects in the world, and with significant victories in the USA in recent years it was one of the few pipelines left standing. It was also a way for the Greater Manchester Climate Justice coalition, which formed for the COP25 in Glasgow, to offer practical support to the Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) in the world. 

April

It was back to campaigning on the cost of living again in April as the Manchester Greenpeace Group joined the Warm This Winter coalition for a day of action. This time we targeted the Conservative MP for Cheadle, Anne Robinson. Number one son even dragged himself out of bed to join us. We had a script to follow and thanks to our video ace Stuart we managed to film ourselves doing it. We were only one of eighty events happening across the country, but we managed to be most of the subsequent video the coalition put out. We can't really say we won, but as the government was trailing the opposition in the polls by a country mile, neither could they. 

However, the big story of April was that XR decided to go for a big protest in London that they called, appropriately enough, The Big One. I went down as part of the organising team and pitched camp in the Greenpeace warehouse for the duration. The Greenpeace Events team are fully occupied with preparations for Glastonbury, so the whole weekend is organised by Local Groups. 

We set up in the early hours opposite Oliver Cromwell's statue outside the Houses of Parliament. When we arrived we were outnumbered by the police, but by lunchtime there was a good sized protest going on and the police reluctantly closed the roads. The police insist we take down our banners, allegedly because they're attached to 'historic' railings, but almost certainly so they can observe us from parliament. The clue is that the railings are less than a decade old, and only added after Greenpeace climbed over and put a gas mask on Cromwell to highlight London's air pollution. 

I start of in charge of the money, which is a challenge in the rain, but by the afternoon the Sun comes out and I move front-of-house. We've organised a pretty good event, even if I say so myself and our team even had its own bespoke hats made. 

The next day is more of the same, but with a march and a 'die in' as well. I only briefly get to look around the rest of the site, but it's a marvelous mix of theatre, protest and general mingling around. XR certainly seem to have done their job in getting people to turn out. Alas, unlike their illegal protests, the media doesn't bother and it's only reported as 'local news' in London. 

I head home and just about have time for a shower before it's time for our annual walk to remember the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932. This year we're joined by Boff Whalley, the former Chumbawamba guitarist, and Commoners Choir. We meet up with the mass swimming trespass and the choir perform next to the water. Stuart once again makes a brilliant video of the event, although some of his clips end up on the cutting room floor as he fails to notice the wild swimmers disrobing in the background. 

May

Manchester's Stop EACOP campaign continues with a protest at the national BIBA insurance conference at GMex. Unfortunately, I'm laid low with a gippy tummy, so my contribution is just coordinating the social media and press from my sick bed. 

Back for the first time since COCID in May was Manchester's best free day out: Envirolution. We've missed it, and the weather is great for us. We've a campaign against Deep Sea Mining which involves children painting pictures of the amazing creatures that live at the bottom of the sea, so it's good that we're doing it outside with plenty of time and space. 

As usual, it's food and drink and we meet Afzal Khan MP again, and he endorses this campaign as well.  

June

We continued with the Deep Sea Mining campaign and in June we tried a fancy photo shoot at Castlefield. Sadly, the wind blew out the candles and our creative reach exceed our creative grasp.

A few days later it's flames of a different sort that attract my attention as, whilst on my evening walk, I find the local woods on fire. It's almost dark by the time the Fire Service arrive, but they manage to stop the whole hill going up. 

Manchester Metropolitan University had a sustainability festival in June, It was just in time for Greenpeace to release their new video, a jazz/rap version of Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop, so I get to play that on an endless repeat to the students.

The next day it was time for me to head down to the Glastonbury Festival. Once again I'm a team leader for Greenpeace, but by getting there early and volunteering for extra shifts I get more time off during the festival weekend. Our team has to do some pretty unpleasant jobs but as a reward I get to see Seize the Day, Headmix, Seth Lakeman, surprise guests The Foo Fighters, Sparks (with special guest Galadriel), The Chemical Brothers, Unthanks, Billy Bragg, Steve Hillage, K Klass, Alison Goldfrapp and Elton John, who was wonderful. Even better, I went to the Sunday morning talks and got to meet Professor Alice Roberts and Dr Janina Ramirez, who were both wonderful. 

July

In July Sinéad O'Connor died. Her music, her activism and her troubled life touched me, but her relevance to me was that I was living in Ireland in the 1990s when the dam burst and a tsunami of allegations engulfed the Catholic Church and people realised Sinéad had been right.

Because of this she gets her own blog entry. 

August

In August I had a holiday. The family went to Shropshire and I finally got to climb Caer Caradoc. It was a good day out, but I didn't find Merlin's treasure. 

September 

Greenpeace launched it's new campaign, Operation Climate Vote, in Manchester. This involve door knocking to try to get people to sign up to a voting block big enough to influence the general election. Not a bad idea, but Greenpeace were certainly being ambitious. 

However, Marple people were certainly up for it and so we started our door knocking there. I can't say it was a campaign that caught my imagination though.

Slightly more exciting though is the start of the Derbyshire badger cull. This butchery has been going on for a decade now, and badgers are dying but TB is not going away, just as the scientists said. Even some farmers are now openly saying that vaccination should be given a chance. 

Opposing the cull not particularly effective as the government tends to just extend it until they have their quota, but we don't want to make things too easy for them. Additionally, the area we cover is also a black hole into which numerous protected birds disappear, and if the people killing the aren't the same ones shooting the badgers then you can call me Trufflehunter. Besides, what's not to like about tearing down country lanes in the middle of the night with the police in hot pursuit, sneaking around the countryside with night vision equipment and going face-to-face with an armed farmer in the dark?

October

In October we were visited by Patience Nabukalu, a Ugandan climate activist and friend of Greta Thunberg. She was in the UK to protest EACOP and arrived in Manchester after a difficult journey and not having slept for 36 hours. Despite this she immediately headed off to the HQ of the insurance company Chubb, where security stopped her getting in to talk to anyone. Instead she addressed our gathering outside.

I had the job of looking after her whilst she was in Manchester. She wanted to buy enough cheap clothes to avoid freezing to death, eat the nearest we could find to African food We went to Primark, Nandos and Old Trafford. I told my 21 year old son "I'm having your day out."

Thanks to this and other actions Manchester was finally achieving what we set out to do at our rally in support of COP26 in Glasgow and bring the voices of the Global South to the city. The insurance industry also looks like a good target for campaigns. They are not climate change deniers and know the risks from climate change. 

Also in October I went to Liverpool to meet the people who put together The Waiting List. This was complicated arts project funded by Greenpeace that involved some organic paper made with wild flower seeds and ashes from the Brazilian rain forest that was buried in a site owned by Tesco that overlooked the port where soya grown on what used to be Amazon rainforest is imported. The aim being to highlight the stupendous number of people on the waiting list for an allotment.  

November

In November I got to do my Kinder Scout walk and talk again, this time for University of Manchester students. They were very interested and asked some interesting questions about the Mass Trespass and Just Stop Oil, which is an interesting couple of movements to contrast.

Also this month I decided to have a bit of a career change and swap from being a Social Worker and occasional UNISON Steward to being a UNISON Convener and occasional Social Worker. 

December

COP28 was taking place in the petro-state of Dubai and goes about as well as can be expected. Well, maybe it went a bit better than that, but it still wasn't either good or enough.

The start of a genocidal campaign in Gaza by Israel somewhat distracted people from organising anything significant in Manchester about COP, and put paid to my plans for a ten year anniversary of the Barton Moss anti-fracking protests. However, we did manage a decent enough rally and march which briefly shut down a few branches of climate destruction funding banks. Sami the polar bear was able to come out for his one and only appearance of the year.