For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow?
TThe wind was bitingly cold and, at 4,000 metres up on the Tibetan plateau, the air thin enough to make my scramble up the stony hillside feel like an epic feat of mountaineering. I was light-headed and panting for breath by the time I reached the fort at the top, and so pretty sure that it was just my dizziness impairing my vision when I first clapped eyes on the red and gold sign.
But a thorough rubbing of my eyes as I caught my breath made no difference - it seemed I really was being welcomed to “The Memorial Hall of Anti-British”. But surely this must have been a mis-translation of whatever was written in Tibetan and Chinese above it? After all, nobody would actually set up a museum with the sole aim of criticising another country. Would they?
Ten minutes later, I had completely reversed that opinion and also greatly improved my knowledge of Tibetan history. The two rather shambolic rooms I’d just emerged from were dedicated to the 1904 invasion of Tibet under the leadership of Sir Francis Younghusband, a British army officer. In one particularly brutal incident that had occurred nearby, he set his machine guns on Tibetan monks armed with just sticks and swords, killing some five thousand of them. British casualties meanwhile stood at five. I could now see where the curator was coming from.
By the time of this massacre, Sir Francis was already a seasoned traveller, best known for a series of death-defying treks across the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, drawing the first detailed maps of these remote areas along the way. These exploits led to him being made the youngest ever Fellow of London’s Royal Geographical Society at the tender age of just 24. A few decades later, he rose to become its President.
Today, the Society is housed in a rambling Gothic pile adjacent to Hyde Park in one of London’s poshest postcodes, as befits its status as the world’s premier explorers’ club. It is the birthplace of some of the most epic adventures of the last two centuries, including David Livingstone’s nineteenth century expeditions to Africa (he of the “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?”), Charles Darwin’s maritime odysseys that led to him writing “On The Origin of Species” setting out his theory of evolution, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott’s ill-fated travels to the Antarctic, and Sir Edmund Hillary’s summiting of Mount Everest.
The Society started its life in the early nineteenth century as a dining circle for over-privileged white men to discuss travel and science, acquiring its “Royal” moniker in 1859 when Queen Victoria gave it her blessing. This thumbs up from the monarchy was in part due to the Society’s usefulness in providing detailed maps and intelligence about little known lands to the Establishment. It was a time when exploration tended to go hand-in-hand with exploitation. While many explorers no doubt had a genuine interest and curiosity in the places they voyaged to, they would also have been aware that their findings were likely to be used to push forward British power and influence, cloaked in the fig leaves of “civilisation, christianity, and commerce”.
Even the Society’s own website acknowledges its history “was closely allied for many of its early years with colonial exploration in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the polar regions, and central Asia”. That colonialist bent was also reflected in its choice of Presidents who, in addition to Sir Francis, included Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India and later the British Foreign Minister.
These days however, the Society’s much friendlier modus operandi is “to promote and support the discovery and understanding of the world’s people, places and environment”. It supports research and expeditions across the globe as well as holding really rather interesting talks and exhibitions. It also houses a massive library containing a couple of million books, documents, and photographs, along withone of the world’s largest map collections. This reform in approach is reflected in its recent choice of Presidents, with, for example, the 2009 swearing-in of former Monty Python comedy troupe member and traveller extraordinaire Michael Palin. As someone who’s also known as “Britain’s nicest man”, he’s about as far away from Lord Curzon as you could get.
It took me some twenty more years than Sir Francis to finally clock up enough miles to make the Society’s grade and be appointed a Fellow in 2021. And I had no inkling at the time that I’d one day be asked to step on to that hallowed stage, in the footsteps of those legendary explorers of yore, to confess all about my adventures searching for the yeti…