Wing and a Prayer

The Curious Case of Maurice Wilson and his Doomed Quest for Mt. Everest

In 1933, two decades before Mt. Everest was first climbed (by a huge British-led expedition), Maurice Wilson, a 34-year-old Englishman, declared to the world that he would climb the peak—alone. Moreover, he would travel to its base by a solo flight from England. Before his death on Everest’s icy northern slopes in the summer of 1934, Wilson had become one of the most controversial figures in mountaineering history, alternatively revered and reviled by commentators in the press, public, government, and the mountaineering establishment.

Wilson’s body has continually resurfaced from its glacial tomb after successive burials by later expeditions—first in 1959, then in ’75, ’85, ’89, and again in ’99—but his story has largely faded and his legacy remains unclear. Was he a crazed mystic? A pioneer of light-and-fast alpine tactics? A naïve, wannabe mountaineer? In fact, none of these descriptions get to the heart of this most bizarre Everest hopeful.

Wilson was by any standards an unlikely candidate to be first on top of the world. A minor war hero, he had been shot twice during the ghastly trench warfare of the First World War, leaving his left arm permanently immobile. In the years before his climb, Wilson also suffered from a monstrous bout of tuberculosis and a nervous breakdown. Moreover, his ability to persevere seemed questionable at best; he had a penchant for aimless wandering—a post-war jaunt around the world left in its wake a slew of unfinished jobs and abandoned wives. But most damning, Wilson had never before flown a plane, nor had he ever climbed a mountain.

After two months of flying lessons at the London Aeroplane Club and with one fuselage-buckling crash behind him—as well as some hiking in the Lake District—Wilson took off on May 21, 1933. Unable to afford a state-of-the-art plane, he’d settled for a used 1925 Gypsy Moth. Far from the custom-made Spirit of St. Louis flown by his contemporary Charles Lindbergh, Wilson’s aptly named Ever-Wrest was an open-cabin biplane, more reminiscent of what the Wright brothers had used than the slick and sturdy Spitfires and Me 210s that characterized the decade. As Wilson set off across the English Channel, he left a flurry of front-page chatter behind him.

With a 620-some-mile fuel range and geography and weather to consider, Wilson’s route wove all over the map: London to Freiburg, Freiburg to Passau, then an aborted attempt to cross the Alps and a retreat back to Passau and Freiburg. Wilson finally flew over the Western Alps to Rome, where the news of his endeavor preceded his landing and a large and enthusiastic reception greeted him. A few days later, while flying across the Mediterranean toward Tunisia, Wilson—for the first time in his life—was forced to fly through complete cloud cover, a challenge the novice somehow managed to pull off. One week after leaving London, Wilson reached Cairo, and a few days after that Baghdad. The newspapers went wild.

Mountaineering stories were front-page news in the 1920s and ’30s, in an atmosphere akin to the space race decades later. And Wilson’s story was, of course, particularly newsworthy. Even the Times, the pillar of respectable London journalism, got wrapped up in the Wilson hype, though reporting in more reserved tones than its boulevard competitors. Between 1933 and 1934, the Times alone published 151 articles on Mt. Everest, nearly 100 of which mentioned Wilson’s quest.

Unfortunately for Wilson, neither the British government nor the mountaineering establishment was as enthusiastic about his endeavor as the public was. Though Everest remained unclimbed, this was not from lack of trying. In the 1920s and ’30s, numerous British expeditions had attempted to conquer the mountain, including the infamous 1924 expedition during which summit hopefuls George Mallory and Andrew Irwin disappeared. What all of these expeditions had in common—besides failure—was their large-scale, military character and their close supervision by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographic Society. These elite, upper-class institutions, with tight links to government and the military, did not look kindly on foreign nations or non-members trying their hand at the “third pole.” (Mallory, no doubt the only socialist among this stuffy crowd, was simply too good of a climber to be ignored.) Though many Alpine Club members must have enjoyed mountaineering for its own sake, these expeditions were about much more: national glory.

Moreover, Wilson’s planned flying route would take him over Persian territory and ultimately into Nepal or Tibet. Previous expeditions had relied on high-level British diplomatic bullying to force these reluctant countries to cough up the necessary permits. In Wilson’s case, however, the British Indian government and the Air Ministry gave him only their stern assurances that they would offer absolutely no support. The implications of this dawned on Wilson only once in Baghdad. With no Persian permit forthcoming, he was forced to turn south along the Arabian Peninsula—an eventuality he had refused to consider and for which he had no maps. Unperturbed, he consulted a children’s atlas and then set off on the 620-mile stretch from Baghdad to the next airfield in Bahrain. Flying in scorching summer temperatures, he managed to land just before running out of petrol.