Beauman Eric Bentley

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Biografie:
Eric Bentley Beauman 1891-1989
Eric Bentley Beauman was born on 7 February 1891. A six-year-old Victorian at the time of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, he was to live on as a man of the twentieth century for over 80 years, playing an essential if modest role in the period spanning two world wars. He chose the path of support and informed, intelligent comment, with consideration and understanding for others. I had the privilege of knowing him when he was 59 and a retired RAF Wing Commander, and I was a young member of the newly-formed RAF Mountaineering Association.
A treasured family photograph of a very youthful Bentley has a note dated 5 March 1978, written in his own hand: 'Self in 25 HP Deperdussin Monoplane in which I took Royal Aero Club Flying Certificate June 1913.'This early involvement with aviation was preceded by a period at Geneva University where he went to learn French after being introduced to the hills as a schoolboy at Malvern College. He came back to England as an alpine mountaineer and skier, with an interest which remained with him throughout his life.
Soon after returning from Switzerland he learned to fly at Hendon, flew in several air displays, then went to France to train under Bleriot. His Royal Aero Club Certificate was No 510.
Called up on 3 August 19 I 4 into the Royal Naval Air Service, he reported at Eastchurch and Hendon before being told at the Air Division of the Admiralty that he was now the 'sole air defence of London'. He had neither observer nor armaments and, as he wrote later, 'fortunately no Zeppelin came over the city while I was defending it in this way.' He then served in antisubmarine patrols at home and in the Aegean as well as commanding seaplane stations at Dundee and Newhaven. In 1917 he was mentioned in dispatches.
In 1918 Bentley transferred to the Royal Air Force as a founder member. Two years later he joined the Alpine Club. His application, dated 3 February 1920, proposed by Dennis Murray, and seconded by J C Muir, was made as a Flight Lieutenant Regular G D Royal Air Force Officer and Flying Instructor from No 10 Group, Warmash, Hants.
In 1922 he was selected for the first RAF Staff College course held at Bracknell under the direction of Brooke Popham, thereafter a lifelong friend. Here Bentley's literary talent soon emerged; he wrote a play in which several future high-flyers in the RAF took part and Portal was cast as Cromwell. Among other young mountaineers on that first course were R Cochrane and P Drummond.
1926 saw Bentley serving as private secretary to Lord Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, and from 1932 to 1933 he was an Instructor at the RAF Staff College. Later on there were other sympathetic people, such as Leo Amery, in high places when extended periods of leave were needed for an RAF officer to take part in the Kamet and Canadian Coast Range expeditions of 1931 and 1934·
Bentley's application for Alpine Club membership, still to be found in the Club records, is an interesting record of the climbs he made between 1909 and 1919, with the omission of the war period 1914-1918. They include in 1910 the third traverse of the entire arete of the Dents Blanches de Champery, and in 1914 a winter first ascent of the Gross Spannort with the guide Josef Kuster, together with a guideless ascent of the Weisshorn with K de Walteville SAC, his Geneva University climbing companion. Captain Crowe, J W Wyatt AC, G F Whidborne, A J Warner, R B Robertson and T Barstow are also listed as climbing companions.
In Bentley's 1951 Field article, 'First Time Up', readers learned that his Lake District climbs before the First World War started like this: 'In the spring of 1914 Dennis Murray and I, after taking flying certificates were waiting to be called up for training in the military and naval wings of the Royal Flying Corps. We had both done a certain amount of climbing in the Alps, and Murray, who also knew some of the Lakeland climbs, was anxious to tryout the "very severes"; we had never climbed together before but we were both enthusiastic mountaineers.' Running into difficulties in Oppenheimer's Chimney they found, out to the right, a blind corner which had most satisfactory unseen holds behind it. Later they simply stated: 'The variation of the climb that day saved us from a night near the top of Pillar Mountain and an ignominious rescue next day. It must be unusual for a new route to be made unintentionally.' It often happens that firsts are made out of sheer necessity and the heat of the moment; so was born the 'Alternative finish - D G Murray and E B Beauman' as listed in the contemporary climbing periodicals. The article concludes: 'The excitements of that day were by no means over, for on our way home we were privileged to watch at close quarters one of the most notable feats of British mountaineering - the first ascent of the Central Buttress of Scafell by that brilliant pair S W Herford and G S Sansom.' This is typical of Bentley Beauman's view of his own achievements.
The 25,447ft Kamet in 193 I must have been Bentley's most exciting and at the same time most disappointing experience. The group led by F S Smythe also included E St J Birnie, E E Shipton, C R Greene and R L Holdsworth. Kamet was the first 25,000ft peak to be climbed, and as late as 1942 only Nanda Devi and Kamet had been claimed; Everest, Kangchenjunga, K2 and Nanga Parbat remained inviolate despite the endeavours of British, American, German, Austrian and French mountaineers. Many of the peaks up to 20,000ft had been climbed 50 years earlier, so the success on Kamet on the India-Tibet border in 1931 was a triumph indeed.
Frank Smythe in his account (Kamet Conquered, P34) simply describes Wing Commander Beauman of the RAF as 'a mountaineer of many years' standing. He has a large number of first-class Alpine climbs and ski expeditions to his credit.' On page 213 Smythe refers to Bentley's disappointment: '... Beauman decided [at Camp 5, 23,500ft] that he would not accompany the second [summit] party. Unselfishly, therefore, he decided not to imperil the safety or success of his companions by risking exhaustion or collapse. It was a wise decision, and one made in accordance with the best traditions of mountaineering.' It should be mentioned that Greene had administered ammonium chloride to himself and Beauman to counteract the lack of oxygen at high altitude; clearly it did not work for Bentley. Years later, in November 1956, Bentley - when noting that the ski record of 23 ,500ft on Kamet was still held by the Ski Club of Great Britain - typically omitted the small detail that the skier was himself.
During the Kamet march-out to Badrinath he and Greene came across footprints which their porter identified as those of the yeti. In July 1937 Guy Dollman of the British Museum of Natural History wrote in a letter to The Times: 'Wing Commander E B Beauman once again revives the rumours of the existence of the «Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas".' Bentley's own scrapbook continues until 1955 with letters on the subject from F S Smythe, H W Tilman, E E Shipton and many others, together with those from the Natural History Museum. I suspect that he had an open mind but enjoyed the whole idea of such a creature; his short article dated 22 September 1955, entitled 'On the trail of the Snowman', written while reviewing Ralph Izzard's book Abominable Snowman Expedition of 1950, concludes with the statement of fact: 'So this remarkable mystery still remains to be solved.' Today in 1990 the mystery persists, and I hope for Bentley's sake that this is how it will remain.
Regret that Bentley was not included in the 1933 Everest expedition, two years after Kamet, has recently been expressed by Sir Jack Longland: 'Bentley was a very competent, reliable and safe climber. I still believe we ought to have had him with us on Everest in 1933, but the rules on upper age limits then were pretty strict even if mistakenly so. Apart from the Leader and the Transport Officer, we were all in our twenties or early thirties, and Bentley Beauman would have been 42. All the same I am sure he would have improved our efficiency and enlivened our evenings together.'
As an expert skier Bentley was a natural choice for Sir Norman Watson's pioneer crossing of the Coast Range in British Columbia in 1934. His account was read before the Alpine Club on 30 October 1934 and reported in AJ 47, 75-86,1935; he also lectured to the Royal Geographical Society. The crossing was completed by way of the Homathko Valley and river, Lake Twist, Scimitar valley, Scimitar canyon, the 2600m Col Fury Gap and the Franklin glacier down to Knight Inlet, where a Norwegian with his boat waited five days for their safe arrival. To recall a snippet from the second day in the Homathko valley: 'It was necessary for three men with woodman's axes and shovels to go ahead to hack and dig a way for the pony train to cross and recross the river. The trees were the real enemy, old trees, young trees, rotten and burnt trees, Douglas Firs, Jack Pines, Spruce, Poplar and Birch; they formed a tangled mass barring our path forward.' Five days of blizzard with two feet of fresh snow in Scimitar canyon prevented the ponies from making further progress, and the stores had to be manhandled up to Fury Gap and the Col. It appeared that Watson had sought the advice of very few people who knew anything about the district. Those he did ask had not approached it in the winter or spring, and they advised that the attempt should be abandoned. The success of the attempt says much of the team of E J King, Clifford White (Canadian), Camille Couttet (Chamonix guide), Beauman and Pete McCormick, trapper and Yukon 'old-timer', and his 21 mountain ponies pack-train with 1'501b loads per pony. Bentley's chapter on the expedition in Living Dangerously ends: 'As the little motor boat chugged its way placidly down the great Inlet we turned to take one last farewell of our Valley of Adventure. While we gazed the giant trees guarding its entrance seemed to press more closely together, and once again Mystery Mountain was left in peace to brood over its wild ice kingdom, inhabited only by the wolves and bears.' Today Mystery Mountain is known as Mount Waddington.
Wing Commander E B Beauman was President of the Alpine Ski Club from 1932 to 1935, and an honorary member from 1978. He was made a Vice President of the newly-formed RAF Mountaineering Association in 1951, having been a stalwart supporter during its formation period in 1947; he could well have been its first Chairman. From 1952 to 1954 he was Chairman of the Touring and Mountaineering Committee of the Ski Club of Great Britain, and from 1947 to 1958 Honorary Librarian of the Alpine Club.
In 1938 Bentley resigned from the RAF to take a permanent post at the Air Ministry, and in June 1940 he married the Public Relations Flight Officer in the WAAF Directorate. In the Second World War, as Taste and Suitability Censor for the RAF, he soon extended his vetting responsibilities by encouraging pilots, at first on a question-and-answer basis, to broadcast after air battles over this country and abroad. He was permitted still to wear uniform and, when he was RAF Liaison Officer with the BBC, a statement that 'here is the Wing Commander as usual' introduced several of the early talks. In 1941 these were published as Winged Words, a Book Society choice, with similar acclaim in the USA during 1943 as We Speak from the Air. He subsequently wrote for many national newspapers and other publications including The National Review and The Boys' Country Book, and he was involved in the Kamet film.
From 1952 to 1957 Bentley was Librarian at the Royal United Services Institution. He was on his way to an RUSI window overlooking Whitehall on Coronation Day in 1953 when he heard of the conquest of Everest. His final job, lasting over 20 years, was as Mountaineering Correspondent for The Field.
Books then arrived for review, while summer holidays abroad included the Whymper Centenary celebrations at Zermatt and other memory-stirring events.
In December 1951, writing in The Field about the eighth expedition to Everest, the first since the Second World War, he had pointed out several interesting features:
a. The approach to the peak was entirely different from that through Tibet.
b. Its lateness, i.e. after the monsoon and not before it, would serve to find out whether autumn conditions were more favourable than the spring.
c. The aim was to force a way into the Western Cwm.
He emphasized that this reconnaissance was led by the experienced and competent Himalayan explorer Eric Shipton, and no better leader could have been found. It was Shipton's judgement and conviction - that a practical route existed from the Western Cwm up to the South Col and thence to the summit itself - that paved the way for success in 1953. But in 1951 Bentley asked the following questions:
a. Should the climbers use oxygen and would the weight outweigh any gains?
b. How big should the parry be?
He said that Shipton and Tilman favoured a handier and mobile party of about six climbers with a consequent reduction of stores; comments and observations from a very well-informed, competent and experienced mountaineer which did not fall on deaf ears, although different views prevailed in the end.
One further quote, from his writing of July 1951, concerns the Italian proposal for a Matterhorn railway. In 19°7 popular outcry had culminated in a petition from far and wide against the earlier Swiss proposal for a funicular up the mountain, rising 2400m in three stages starting from Zermatt. The Swiss Federal Government withdrew its sanction and the Matterhorn was reprieved from such vandalism. The 1951 proposal was for the cable railway for skiers, which runs from the village of Breuil to the Furggrat, to be extended to the Italian summit. Between 1920 and 1931 Bentley had climbed the Matterhorn on five occasions, each time by a different route, and he made the following plea: 'Let us hope that the noble sentiments expressed during the previous threat of 1907 will again prevail. The high summits of the Alps are the property of the whole people and a symbol of liberty. They are not for sale.'
Without Map or Compass, written in 1957, describes a skiing trip on the Pischahorn with his companion A P Ledger, a member of the RAF Staff College course at Bracknell and later Air Vice-Marshal Ledger of the RAF Mountaineering Association. Bentley tells of a run from the Weissfluhjoch down the Dorftäli valley on a direct run to Davos, in a blizzard, finishing up near Langwies on the way to Arosa. He recalls his shame at '... finding ourselves in entirely the wrong valley and horror in crossing the avalanche slopes under difficult conditions'. They had broken the golden rule which lays down the necessity for at least one member of the party to carry a map and compass. But, he concluded, '... to expect ski runners to observe every safety precaution all the time is, I suppose, too much.'
In 1975 one of his last articles in The Field speaks of Hillary, a man who stood on the summit of Everest and who also stood at the South Pole. Bentley's own achievements some 20 or 30 years earlier in the Himalaya and British Columbia were no less remarkable.
Beauman died on 26 July 1989. The Presidents of both the Alpine Club and the Alpine Ski Club, the latter himself a distinguished aviator, attended the funeral service at St Michael's, Chester Square. They heard his son Christopher read an aviation story and then an extract from his father's favourite written work, 'A night in the Matterhorn Couloir'. Some weeks later this essay (published in the National Review, March 1930) was read again in the more relaxed atmosphere of the Alpine Club where its self-deprecating, dry humor roused much laughter.
Such was the man, mountaineer, writer and aviator who lived through most of the twentieth century. I am sure that we would all wish to thank him for the part that he played.
D le R Bird
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 95, 1990-91, Seite 305-310


Geboren am:
07.02.1891
Gestorben am:
26.07.1989