The Boardman Tasker Trust joins others in mourning the passing and celebrating the achievements of one of Britain’s greatest mountaineers who passed away on 7 December 2020. Best known for the first ascent of Everest South West Face, the first Briton to summit this peak, with an unplanned bivouac on the South Summit without oxygen and the epic descent of the Ogre with broken legs following an accident just below the summit after making the first ascent with Chris Bonington, he actually climbed 40 Himalayan summits on 42 expeditions.
Doug was a good friend of Peter Boardman, who made the second ascent of Everest South West Face with Pertemba a few days after Doug, and of Joe Tasker. Together all 3 climbed Kanchenjunga South Summit in a light-weight trip. Indeed, apart from Everest, all Doug’s climbs were light-weight without porters above base camp. This was a bold and innovative approach that gained great respect within the climbing community and was influential.
Doug was also a good friend to the Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust.
In 1984 he was co-winner of the first BT award with his book about Shishapangma, none having been made the previous year. He donated to the Trust a large framed and signed photograph of himself with Peter and Joe just below the summit of Kanchenjunga which raised a significant sum at auction to augment Trust funds.
Doug was a very determined character and a powerful personality who liked to make individual decisions and get his own way. All the more remarkable that he served as President of the Alpine Club, Vice President of the British Mountaineering Council and on the board of the International Mountaineering Federation and in all roles he made telling contributions to debates on national and international stages. He was also proud of his appointment as CBE, to receive the Patron’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1999 and to be awarded the Piolets d’Or Lifetime Achievement award in 2011.
A measure of his determination was the descent from the Ogre and he was a real stoic. His broken ankles and shins needed to be pinned but they gave him trouble for the rest of his life although he did not let that him stop doing whatever he put his mind to. I recollect a Sunday morning at his house following a Nick Estcourt Award meeting the previous evening. Tut and I were preparing to depart when Doug asked us to barrow into the house logs from the yard for the open fire. He was recovering from recent surgery to his ankles and could not get around very well. We dropped the first load just inside the kitchen, as directed, and were astonished when Doug dropped his crutches, produced a felling axe from a corner and started to split the logs!
Although revered in mountaineering circles, he was perhaps not as well known to the British public as he was in European alpine nations. This notwithstanding, the marathon lecture tours that he conducted every year in the UK and on occasion in Europe and North America, always attracted large audiences. I remember travelling with him to London by train for an AC committee meeting when he produced several boxes of previously unopened slides and started to assemble them for a talk he was to give that evening.. If that sounds slapdash nothing could be further from the truth. Doug was a consummate story-teller and had great stories to tell. He was also a prolific author but sadly we will not get to read part 2 of his autobiography or planned book about Kanchenjunga.
He saw his mountaineering career as part of a spiritual journey that led him to adopt the Buddhist faith. He had a great connection and affection for the people of Nepal and in 1995 he set up a charity, Community Action Nepal. CAN has built and maintained numerous schools, hospitals and porter lodges in several districts of the Nepalese Himalaya and a significant proportion of the funding was generated by Doug’s lecture tours and his sale of Nepalese goods. On his frequent trips to Nepal he travelled out with empty bags, but they were always full on return.
Doug was born in Nottingham in 1941 and started climbing 14 years later after seeing people climbing on Black Rocks during a scout camp. He returned a couple of weeks later with 2 friends and his mother’s washing line after cycling from Nottingham. There was no looking back. He was soon visiting the Alps and then further afield mostly with friends from Nottingham where he worked as a school teacher after training at Loughborough. He was a founder member of the Nottingham Climbers Club. However life as a teacher began to pale and Doug became a professional mountaineer earning an income from writing and lecturing.
At age 20 he married Jan and they had 3 children: Michael, Martha and Rosie. Many years later they divorced and Doug married Sharu with whom he had sons, Arran and Euan. By now he had moved to Cumbria, but that marriage also ended in divorce. Subsequently Doug met and married Trish with whom he spent the remainder of his life. Rest in peace Doug.
Martin Wragg,
Chairman
Boardman Tasker Charitable Trust
13 December 2020
