Longstaff Tom

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Biografie:
Dr. Tom Longstaff
der älteste Himalayapionier ist am 26. Juni 1964 im Alter von 89 Jahren verstorben
Seine bergsteigerische Qualifikation hatte er sich schon in jungen Jahren in den Alpen erworben.
Im Jahr 1900 trat er dem Alpine Club. bei. Im Jahr 1904 reiste er in den Kaukasus, wo ihm fünf führerlos ausgeführte Erstbesteigungen gelangen. Ins nächste Jahr 1905 fällt seine erste Reise in den Zentral-Himalaya, bei der er von den Führern Alexis und Henry Brocherel begleitet war. Er überschritt mehrere Hochpässe und drang auf den Kamm des „Innern Heiligtums" der Nanda Devi vor. Bei einem Besteigungsversuch des Nanda Kot gelangte er bis zu einer Höhe von 6300 in. Schon im Jahr 1907 machte er den Vorschlag, anläßlich des damals gefeierten 50-Jahr-Jubiläums des Alpine Club eine Expedition zur Erkundung des Everest auszusenden. Politische Schwierigkeiten ließen es nicht dazu kommen.
Seinen bekanntesten Erfolg erreichte er im Jahr 1907 mit der Ersteigung des Trisul, 7120 m, des ersten erstiegenen Siebentausenders, wobei er wieder von den Brüdern Brocherel begleitet war.
Bewunderungswürdig, nicht nur für damalige Zeit, die Leistung: Die 6000 Fuß Höhe vom letzten Lager bis zum Gipfel wurden an einem Tag bewältigt. Später wandte sich Longstaff dem Karakorum zu, wo er als erster den Saltoro-Paß überschritt und den Siachen-Gletscher und viel unbekanntes Gebirgsgelände kartierte. 1910 war er in Britisch Columbia bergsteigerisch tätig.
Bei der Vorbereitung der Erkundung des Everest, 1921, hat er tätig mitgewirkt, an der Expedition von 1922 selbst teilgenommen.
Zwei Expeditionen nach Spitzbergen, drei nach Grönland ins Baffin-Land und nochmals in den Garhwal Himalaya sahen Longstaff als Teilnehmer. Er bekleidete wichtige Ämter in der Königlichen Geographischen Gesellschaft und wurde für seine im Dienste der Wissenschaft geleistete Forscherarbeit vielfach ausgezeichnet. 1947-1949 war er Präsident des Alpine Club, ein Ehrenamt, das, wenn man überlieferten Aussagen potentieller Anwärter Glauben schenken darf, höher eingeschätzt wurde als die Erhebung in den Adelsstand oder gar als die Berufung zum Premierminister.
Sein Buch „This my voyage" ist der Lebensbericht eines alten Bergsteigers, mit dessen Laufbahn sich vielleicht nur die eines Conway oder Freshfield vergleichen lassen.
Nur mittelgroß von Wuchs, zierlich in der Gestalt, verriet der äußere Anblick kaum die unglaublichen Kräfte, die in diesem von einem starken Willen gelenkten Körper verborgen waren.
Anläßlich der 100-Jahr-Feier des Alpine Club hatte ich Gelegenheit, Longstaffs Bekanntschaft zu machen, wir bedauerten beide, daß wir 20 Jahre früher ein auf dem Triglav geplantes Zusammentreffen um wenige Stunden verfehlt hatten, und ich war erfreut, daß dieser in aller Welt gereiste Himalayapionier, nun schon im Herbst seines Lebens, auch an der Schönheit der so viel bescheideneren Julier Gefallen gefunden und von seinem Besuch beim König der Julier tief beeindruckt war.
„Longstaffs Col" im Ringwall der Nanda Devi wird seinen Namen der Nachwelt für immer in Erinnerung bleiben lassen.
Dr. P. Kaltenegger
Quelle: Österreichische Alpenzeitung 1964 September/Oktober, Folge 1337, Seite 155

Tom George Longstaff (1875 – 1964)
Tom Longstaff, who died this summer in his ninetieth year, was elected to the Club in 1900, and to the Committee in 1907; he became Vice President in 1927, President in 1947-49, and Honorary Member in 1956.
He played almost as big a part in the Royal Geographical Society, which he joined in 1901 and which he served on its Council for many years, starting in 1908, and later as Honorary Secretary, receiving the Gill Memorial award in 1908 and the Founder's Medal in 1928. His achievements in mountain exploration are unique; he was indeed a great man.
Two things stand out in Longstaff's record as a traveller. The first is the sheer scope and range of his explorations: twenty visits to the Alps, six to the Himalayas, one to the Caucasus, five to the Arctic, two to the Rockies and Selkirks, many of them extending over some months and including a variety of objectives. He had the means to devote a lifetime to travel and gathered an incomparable harvest.
The second is the forethought and preparation that preceded his journeys. 'Qualify yourself' was the advice he constantly gave to aspiring explorers and his own qualification was comprehensive. In addition to his technical competence as an explorer he had, though he never practised, a medical degree, was a first rate naturalist, and always learnt a sufficiency of the language of the country he was visiting. Above all he thought ahead: 'Thus when in I905 I first went to the Himalaya my objective had been determined years beforehand.'
His methods are also worthy of comment. The technique of the lightly equipped expedition, moving fast and living as far as possible off the country, which was so successfully adopted by Shipton and Tilman in the thirties, was pioneered by Longstaff in his early Himalayan journeys. His attempt on Gurla Mandhata for instance, a 25.000 ft. peak, was undertaken by a party of three, himself and the two Brocherels, the six local Bhotias having supported them only up to 18.000 ft. Some of the Garhwal journeys were done with only two Gurkhas for company. The six-month trip of 1905 from railhead and back cost only £100. Nor was he backward in taking advantage of new techniques, having used crampons in 1901 and pitons in 1907.
The period of his active exploration extends over the first thirty-five years of the century but the golden age was undoubtedly the first decade, containing the Caucasus expedition of 1903, the Himalayan journeys of 1905 and 1907, and the exploration of the Eastern Karakoram in 1909. In the Caucasus the party was a guideless one, Longstaff and L. W. Rolleston. The early days of exploration were over but Suanetia was still a wild country and some of the big peaks were still unclimbed. They made the first ascents of Tiktingen, Latsga, Lakra, Bashil-Tau and the West peak of Shkara 'the finest climb I have ever had'.
I905 was the year of Longstaff's exploration of the eastern approaches to Nanda Devi with the two Brocherels for companions and supported by local Dhotial porters. They reached a saddle on the rim of the inner sanctuary and made unsuccessful attempts on Nanda Devi East and Nanda Kot. His programme was then interrupted by the opportunity, which he seized with enthusiasm, of accompanying Sherring, Deputy Commissioner of Almora, on a two months' journey through Tibet. A remarkable episode in the journey was the attempt, which so nearly succeeded, on Gurla Mandhata. While seeking a site for their final bivouac at about 23.000 ft. (they carried neither tent nor sleeping bags) they started a snow avalanche which carried them down to the glacier, a distance of some 1.000 ft. The guides retrieved the ice-axes and, after spending the night in the open, they continued their attempt by the Gurla glacier, spending a further night at about 23.000 ft., in an ice-cave, but being forced by cold and exhaustion to give up next morning.
In 1907 Longstaff was again in Garhwal with the Brocherels and for the first part of the season joined forces with Bruce and Mumm, the former accompanied by nine Gurkhas. What a remarkable party it must have been. Their main objectives were Trisul (23,360 ft.) and the further exploration of the Nanda De vi basin. In the forcing of the Rishi gorge to the inner sanctuary of Nanda Devi they failed; that problem had to wait another twenty-seven years for its solution, but on Trisul they had a spectacular success, Longstaff climbing it with the Brocherels and Karbir, one of the Gurkhas, from a camp 6.000 ft. below the summit. It was to remain for twenty-one years the highest summit reached by man.
The year 1909 saw him in the Karakoram with Morris Slingsby and D. G. Oliver, when they found and crossed the Saltoro pass, discovered the tremendous Siachen glacier and surveyed the Teram Kangri group, establishing the position of the main axis of the range dividing the Indus and its tributaries from Chinese Turkestan.
After these achievements and war service, which gave further opportunity for mountain travel, as assistant commandant of the Gilgit scouts, most men would have had enough. But Longstaff, now over forty-five, was far from finished, and the Everest Expedition of r 922 was only one of the further expeditions that he took part in, often as leader, turning his attention now to the Arctic and visiting Spitsbergen, Greenland and Baffin Island, 1934, his last journey.
His book This My Voyage was on the classical pattern, a single volume written when his travelling days were over. It is in one way the most ambitious of all climbing books, not merely an autobiography but a contrasting record of the many ranges he explored, their natural history and their people. But it was as a talker rather than a writer that he most excelled; always sensitive to the company but delighting in the challenging, sometimes outrageous, aphorism. 'A glacier is not a marmot, it does not burrow', he insisted in his valedictory address to the Club; and on another rather different occasion, 'they couldn't put to sea, they'd pushed all the officers down the funnels'.
There are a number who knew him on expeditions between the wars, but Tom Longstaff had outlived by many years the climbing companions of his youth Bruce, Bullock, Wollaston, Rolleston and Mumm and the British tradition of reserve and understatement was such that none of them has left a very clear picture of him in their writings. There are only occasional glimpses: Mumm described Alexis Brocherel shaking his head when on what was meant to be an off day Tom went off after burhal: 'Monsieur Longstaff est trop vif.'
But he had the gift of making friends with all generations and of living in the present. Many climbers before the war and since have had his help and advice in planning expeditions, many have known him in the Indian summer of his life under the changing skies and among the mountains and lochs of Wester Ross. We shall remember the enquiring mind, the forthright speech, the firmness of purpose, the ever youthful spirit, and we can see in the mind's eye the slight figure, the jutting beard, the keen eye, the strong graceful hands. It is not too difficult to imagine him as he must have been fifty or sixty years ago.
Peter Lloyd.
Dr. T. H. Somervell writes:
I first came across Tom Longstaff when I had been asked to go on the 1922 Everest Expedition and he, as one of the most experienced Himalayan climbers then alive, had been asked to go with us to share with us his experience. He did more than that; his intense interest in birds and beasts, and his intimate knowledge of them was ·shared with us too. His hatred of anything mean or shabby gave a spice of nobility to his personal charm and keen intellect. He used to rag Mallory for being a highbrow, while his own brow was anything but low! The outstanding event of the 1922 Expedition for me was one for which Tom Longstaff was entirely responsible. Norton, Mallory and I had come down from the North Col to Camp 3 feeling very unsuccessful and almost ashamed of ourselves for not going any higher than 27.000 ft., when Tom came out to meet us from his tent, and like the prodigal son's father said to us, 'You've done splendidly. Do you realise you have been 2.000 feet higher than anyone has ever climbed before? Well done', etc. Our spirits perked up, and at once we felt almost as if we had achieved some success. I have seen him many times since that expedition, and the last visit I paid to him was only three weeks before his death. He was then feeble in body and very short of breath, but keeping up his spirits and talking most intelligently about a variety of subjects ranging from Teilhard de Chardin to Douglas Freshfield talking in many ways like a young man. (Unfortunately, his wife, Charmian, was away having her first 'holiday' after over a year's constant attention to her husband.)
It is remarkable that Tom Longstaff, who celebrated the jubilee of the Alpine Club by climbing Trisul, was present and fairly active at the Club's Centenary. Truly a remarkable man, and one whom it was a privilege to know as a friend.
Dr. T. W. Patey writes:
Some men never grow old. Age, after all, is no more than a state of mind and cannot be measured in years. My late friend, Tom Longstaff, was one of the few who proved this argument. At the age of eighty-nine he was younger at heart than many of my contemporaries in their early thirties. The climbing world will remember Longstaff as the greatest mountain explorer of his time: those of us who knew him more intimately will remember him as one who had discovered the elixir of life. He enjoyed living as few men know how to.
When I first drove along the moorland road to Badentarbet Lodge a little over two years ago, I must admit that the forthcoming encounter savoured almost of a visit to the oracle at Delphi. It was rather an awe-inspiring thought that I was about to meet a man whose climbing career had started at the end of last century. However, Tom was a far more exhilarating character than the retired elder statesman I had expected to find. For him the flame of adventure burned as brightly as it had ever done. Although no longer able to tackle the great peaks, he climbed with us in spirit. Tom Longstaff was never the man to shake his head mournfully over the so called decadence of modern British mountaineers. Had he been climbing actively today, he would, I'm sure, have joined us on the Eigerwand! His only objection to the use of pitons was that 'he had lived too early to be afforded the opportunity of trying them out for himself'!
As a friend I never thought of him as one who was old enough to be my grandfather. Tom was always 'orie of the boys'. As his doctor (a position I did not altogether relish), I had to accept the fact that any advice or treatment I gave him had little material effect on the outcome. It was his own vitality and zest for living that kept him going.
When eventually the end came, as it had to inevitably, even for the indefatigable Tom, he had no complaints. He would not have wished it otherwise. There were few men less suited to the role of the invalid.
Mr. T. S. Blakeney writes:
I should be sorry not to add my own expression of gratitude to Longstaff, for it was he who secured my appointment to the A. C. as Assistant Secretary in 1948, and later it was he who proposed me for re-election to the Club. One could not have had a more congenial President to work under, nor, in matters touching the editing of the A.J., could one have found anyone readier with information and advice from his immense stores of knowledge.
He was perennially young, and as L. S. Amery pointed out in his Valedictory Address to the Club in December, 1946, Longstaff's first contribution to the A.J. bore, characteristically, the sub-title, 'Afoot and light-hearted I take the open road'. Amery went on to observe that Longstaff remained as light-hearted 'as in the days when his pirate beard first blazed red against Himalayan snows'. The same was true of him to the end, and all who knew him, whether inside or outside the Club, will be conscious of their sympathy for his widow and family in a loss in which we all share.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 69, 1964, Seite 322-326

Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 70, 1965, Seite 133 f

Quelle: Adolfo Hess: Saggi sulla psicologia dell'alpinista, 1914, Seite 354 ff (siehe Anhang)

Longstaff Tom George,England,später Schottland
Bildquelle: http://imagingeverest.rgs.org/Media/374_50.jpg
20 Alpenbesuche,6 mal Himalaya,1 mal Kaukasus,5 Arktis-Expeditionen,2 mal Rocky Mountains
1897 1.Beg.Mont Vélan-Nordnordwestgrat,3731m, (Westliche Walliser Alpen)
1903 Teilnehmer Kaukasus-Expedition,5 Erstbesteigungen
1903 1.Best.Baschiltau,4200m, (Kaukasus)
1903 1.Best.Ljalwer,4350m, (Kaukasus)
1903 1.Best.Schchara-Westgipfel,5184m, (Kaukasus)
1903 1.Best.Ullu Tau Tschana,4203m, (Kaukasus)
1903 1.Best.Tichtengen,4614m, (Kaukasus)
1904 Fünf führerlos ausgeführte Erstbesteigungen im Kaukasus
1905 Teiln.Zentral-Himalaya, mit Führern Alexis und Henry Brocherel
1905 Best.Vers.Nanda Kot bis 6300m,6861m, (Himalaya,Indien)
1905 Leiter Garhwal-Expedition, (HimalayaTibet)
1907 1.Best.Trisul,7121m, (Nanda-Devi-Gruppe,Garhwal Himalaya,Indien) mit Brüdern Brocherel
1909 Leiter Östliche Karakorum-Expedition
1909 1.Überschr.Saltoro-Paß, (Karakorum)
1922 Teilnehmer Mount Everest-Expedition, (Himalaya,Tibet/Nepal)
1934 Leiter Arktis-Expedition, (Spitzbergen,Grönland,Baffin Island)
Gerd Schauer, Isny

Geboren am:
15.01.1875
Gestorben am:
26.06.1964
Longstaff_Tom_-_Hess_Sulla.pdf