Harrison John Bryden

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Biografie:
John Bryden Harrison (1908-1992)
Jock Harrison was always good to be with: quiet humour, quiet courage and, seemingly, no concern about himself. By the late 1930s he was an outstanding Indian Army officer and an experienced Himalayan mountaineer. He knew Indian flowers and birds. He was a fluent Urdu speaker and his unflapping friendliness was completely colour blind. His Punjabi troops nicknamed him 'Harree Singh' and his fame as a warrior and athlete lived on long after his early retirement.
Graham Brown and I met up with him in 1938 on our way to join James Waller's expedition to explore and, perhaps, to climb Masherbrum (7821m). Young Jimmy Roberts was to join us at Srinagar. Three weeks later, the heavily goitred Balti elders who greeted us at the head of the Hushe valley said we were the first climbers to come there since the Workmans. Even in 1938 there were only two or three other parties in the Karakoram, notably Charlie Houston on K2. They too had a hard time.
One evening in 1985 Jock was reminiscing about his parents and his early days. Where, I asked him, had his almost Kiplingesque enjoyment of India and his love of adventure come from? 'I was there as a child,' he told me, 'Simla, maiply. My father was an up-from-the-ranks officer. Then I went to a minor public school, Dean Close, where there was a marvellous Christian school master called Hedley Warr; he was a tremendous influence. He took us fell-walking in the Lake District.' At Sandhurst Jock's athletic prowess began to show, with a blue for high jump and hockey; and he was a King's Indian Cadet. In 1928 he returned to India and the 8th Punjab regiment. There were camping holidays in Kashmir and some more serious climbing - with James Waller to Nun Kun. On another expediton, in the Kangchenjunga massif, Jock remembered meeting several notable mountaineers: Marco Pallis who would never wear a topee because it symbolised the Raj, the ICS Resident from Gangtok who would never take his off for the same reason, and Freddie Chapman who scarcely ever wore a hat at all. Jock himself, like Marco, favoured a floppy Terai.
I asked him whether he served on the North West Frontier. 'Oh yes,' he said, 'the best times were the operations against the Fakir of Ipi in 1935 and '36. It was the real thing; but a pretty phoney war nevertheless. When I tried to leave a booby trap - a hand grenade and a trip - I was told to go back and remove it. Unsporting.'
Then came our serious and nearly fatal expedition to Masherbrum which had never been explored or attempted before. We pioneered the route which led the Americans to their success in 1960. Jock and I attempted the summit from a high camp and were turned back by bad weather. The story is told in James Waller's The Everlasting Hills (1939). Inevitably, we had Nanga Parbat 1936 and 1937 very much in mind. But it wasn't an ice avalanche which hit us during a night of gales; just a massive snow slide. We burrowed out into the pre-dawn, swirling darkness, managed to salvage boots and an axe, and then spent 24 hours in a blizzard trying to get down. Jock, being the stronger more experienced climber, took the axe and was anchor man, which was the main reason why his fingers were more severely frostbitten than mine. We spent a night in a crevasse but next day the welcome, fickle sun was shining. It was a long limp down and home to Srinagar. Jock, unable to walk or ride, was carried on a litter. In the army hospital and on the voyage home Jock began to realise that an active military career was over. But what a career it could have been!
Back in the Millbank military hospital Jock was finally patched up and was able to be active again. In 1939 he married Mary Webb, one of his nurses, a New Zealander. There followed 20 years of happy family life, mainly in New Zealand, but she died in 1959; in 1961 Jock married a second time. During the war he served as a staff officer in Ceylon. Then, for some years, he worked on the reorganisation of the New Zealand Army and retired as Colonel and ABE. He then became Military Secretary and Controller to Lord Cobham, the Governor General. His final job, during the sixties, was as bursaradministrator to the newly founded Cobham Outward Bound School.
He and Janet retired to live near Stroud, in a house with a steep garden and distant views. In his maturity and old age Jock lost some of his youthfully sharp Christian vision; though it had never shown on his sleeve. It changed into a gentler reverence for the good and the beautiful; and there was much of that around in the life that he remembered.
Robin Hodgkin
Quelle: Alpine Journal Vol. 98, 1993, Seite 331-332


Geboren am:
1908
Gestorben am:
1992