Personal information | |
---|---|
Full name | Christian John Storey Bonington |
Main discipline | Mountaineering |
Other disciplines | Climbing, Alpinism, Art |
Born | Hampstead, London, England | 6 August 1934
Nationality | British |
Career | |
Notable ascents | Annapurna II (1960) Nuptse (1961) North Wall of the Eiger (1962) Old Man of Hoy (1966) Changabang (1975) Baintha Brakk/Ogre (1977) Kongur (1981) Mount Everest (1985) |
Famous partnerships | Ian Clough, Don Whillans, Jan Długosz |
Family | |
Spouse | Wendy Bonington (m. 1962;died 2014)Loreto Herman (m. 2016) |
Children | Conrad (died 1966) Daniel (b. 1967) Rupert (b. 1969) |
Sir Christian John Storey Bonington, CVO, CBE, DL (born 6 August 1934) is a British mountaineer.
His career has included nineteen expeditions to the Himalayas, including four to Mount Everest.
Bonington's father, who left the family when Christian was nine months old, was a founding member of L Detachment, Special Air Service. [1] Bonington first began climbing in 1951 at age 16. [2] Educated at University College School in Hampstead, Bonington joined the Royal Fusiliers before attending Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and on graduation was commissioned in the Royal Tank Regiment in 1956. After serving three years in North Germany, he spent two years at the Army Outward Bound School as a mountaineering instructor.
Bonington was part of the party that made the first British ascent of the South West Pillar (aka Bonatti Pillar) of the Aiguille du Dru in 1958, and the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Freney on the south side of Mont Blanc in 1961 with Don Whillans, Ian Clough and Jan Dlugosz (Poland). In 1960 he was part of the successful joint British-Indian-Nepalese forces expedition to Annapurna II.
On leaving the British Army in 1961, he joined Van den Berghs, a division of Unilever, but he left after nine months, and became a professional mountaineer and explorer. In 1966 he was given his first assignment by The Daily Telegraph Magazine to cover other expeditions, including climbing Sangay in Ecuador and hunting caribou with Inuit on Baffin Island. In 1968 he accompanied Captain John Blashford-Snell and his British Army team in the attempt to make the first-ever descent of the Blue Nile.
In 1972 he was unsuccessful on the south-west face of Mount Everest, but reached 27,300 feet. He had another shot at that route in 1975, and the 1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition that he led was successful--it put four climbers on the summit, but Mick Burke died during his summit attempt. [3]
Bonington has written or edited numerous books, made many television appearances, and received many honours, including the chancellorship of Lancaster University from 2005 to 2014. He is honorary president of the Hiking Club and Lancaster University Mountaineering Club and has a boat named after him among Lancaster University Boat Club's fleet. Furthermore, he is the Honorary President of the British Orienteering Federation. He has lived in Cumbria since 1974. He is a patron, and former president (1988–91), of the British Mountaineering Council (BMC). He succeeded Edmund Hillary as the Honorary President of Mountain Wilderness, an international NGO dedicated to the preservation of mountain areas, in their natural and cultural aspects.
Bonington's first wife, Wendy, a freelance illustrator of children's books, died on 24 July 2014 from motor neuron disease (MND), inspiring Bonington to support MND charities. [4] The couple had three children: Conrad (died 1966), Daniel, and Rupert. [5] The family lived at Caldbeck, Cumbria.
Bonington married Loreto McNaught-Davis on Saturday 23 April 2016. McNaught-Davis is the widow of mountaineer and television presenter Ian McNaught-Davis who died in February 2014. The ceremony took place in London in the presence of about 60 friends and family members. [6]
In 1974 Bonington received the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. [7] In 1985 he received the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. St. Helen's School, Northwood, England has named one of its four houses after him. Bonington was presented with the Golden Eagle Award for services to the outdoors in 2008 by the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild.
He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 2003 when he was surprised by Michael Aspel at a hotel in Heathrow.[ citation needed ]
Bonington was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1976 New Year Honours "for services to Mountaineering", in recognition of the previous year's successful ascent of Everest [8] [9] and was knighted in the 1996 New Year Honours, again for his services to the sport. [10] He was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (CVO) in the 2010 Birthday Honours for his services to the Outward Bound Trust. [11] He was appointed as a Deputy Lieutenant of Cumbria in 2004. In 2015, Bonnington was awarded the 7th Piolet d'Or Lifetime Achievement Award. [12]
Chris Bonington briefly became the oldest known person to summit Mount Everest in April 1985, at the age of 50. [19] He was surpassed by Richard Bass (of Seven Summits fame), who summited later that same season at 55 years old, five years older than Bonington. [19] The record has been surpassed multiple times since.
Annapurna is a mountain situated in the Annapurna mountain range of Gandaki Province, north-central Nepal. It is the 10th highest mountain in the world at 8,091 metres (26,545 ft) above sea level and is well known for the difficulty and danger involved in its ascent.
Peter Boardman was an English mountaineer and author. He is best known for a series of bold and lightweight expeditions to the Himalayas, often in partnership with Joe Tasker, and for his contribution to mountain literature. Boardman and Tasker died on the North East Ridge of Mount Everest in 1982. The Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature was established in their memory.
Duncan "Dougal" Curdy MacSporran Haston was a Scottish mountaineer noted for his exploits in the British Isles, Alps, and the Himalayas. From 1967 he was the director of the International School of Mountaineering at Leysin, Switzerland, a role he held until his death in an avalanche while skiing above Leysin.
Alan Hinkes OBE is an English Himalayan high-altitude mountaineer from Northallerton in North Yorkshire. He is the first British mountaineer to claim all 14 Himalayan eight-thousanders, which he did on 30 May 2005.
Douglas Keith Scott was an English mountaineer, noted for being on the team that made the first ascent of the south-west face of Mount Everest on 24 September 1975. In receiving one of mountaineering's highest honours, the Piolet d'Or Lifetime Achievement Award, his personal style and climbs were described as "visionary".
Ian Clough (1937–1970) was a British mountaineer who was killed on the 1970 British Annapurna expedition led by Sir Chris Bonington to climb the south face of the Himalayan massif. He was later described by Bonington as "the most modest man I ever had the good luck to climb with" and "the kindest and most selfless partner I ever had."
Donald Desbrow Whillans was an English rock climber and mountaineer. He climbed with Joe Brown and Chris Bonington on many new routes, and was considered the technical equal of both.
Hamish MacInnes was a Scottish mountaineer, explorer, mountain search and rescuer, and author. He has been described as the "father of modern mountain rescue in Scotland". He is credited with inventing the first all-metal ice-axe and an eponymous lightweight foldable alloy stretcher called MacInnes stretcher, widely used in mountain and helicopter rescue. He was a mountain safety advisor to a number of major films, including Monty Python and the Holy Grail,The Eiger Sanction and The Mission. His 1972 International Mountain Rescue Handbook is considered a manual in the mountain search and rescue discipline.
Kelvin Kent is a British adventurer, hiker, mountaineer, businessman and lecturer. He served in the British army for many years, seeing combat in Borneo and working with the Gurkhas of Nepal, before moving to the United States in 1976. Previously he had been a member of two mountaineering expeditions organized by Chris Bonington, to the south face of Annapurna in 1970 and the south-west face of Mount Everest in 1972. The Annapurna expedition, on which Kent served as base camp commander, successfully put Dougal Haston and Don Whillans on the summit, but Kent's friend Ian Clough was killed by a falling ice-pillar on the descent. In 1999 Kent established a commemorative plaque in Clough's memory at the site.
John Elvis Harlin II was an American alpinist and US Air Force pilot who was killed while making an ascent of the north face of the Eiger.
Stephen Venables is a British mountaineer and writer, and is a past president of the South Georgia Association and of the Alpine Club. He is the first Briton to ascend the summit of Mount Everest without bottled oxygen.
The Kangshung Face or East Face is the eastern-facing side of Mount Everest, one of the Tibetan sides of the mountain. It is 3,350 metres (11,000 ft) from its base on the Kangshung Glacier to the summit. It is a broad face, topped on the right by the upper Northeast Ridge, and on the left by the Southeast Ridge and the South Col. Most of the upper part of the face is composed of hanging glaciers, while the lower part consists of steep rock buttresses with couloirs between them. The steep southern third of the Kangshung Face also comprises the Northeastern Face of Lhotse; this section may be considered a separate face altogether following the division of the South "Neverest" Buttress up to the South Col. It is considered a dangerous route of ascent, compared to the standard North Col and South Col routes, and it is the most remote face of the mountain, with a longer approach.
Francis Sydney Smythe, better known as Frank Smythe or F. S. Smythe, was an English mountaineer, author, photographer and botanist. He is best remembered for his mountaineering in the Alps as well as in the Himalayas, where he identified a region that he named the "Valley of Flowers", now a protected park. His ascents include two new routes on the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc, Kamet, and attempts on Kangchenjunga and Mount Everest in the 1930s. It was said that he had a tendency for irascibility, something some of his mountaineering contemporaries said "decreased with altitude".
Robin Smith was a Scottish climber of the 1950s and early 1960s. He died together with Wilfrid Noyce in 1962 on a snow slope in the Pamirs, during an Anglo-Soviet expedition, at the age of 23.
Michael "Mick" Burke was an English mountaineer and climbing cameraman.
Pertemba, also called Pertemba Sherpa, is a professional Nepalese mountaineer, trek leader and businessman. He reached the summit of Mount Everest by the Southwest Face on the first expedition to successfully take that route, in 1975.
The 1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition was the first to successfully climb Mount Everest by ascending one of its faces. In the post-monsoon season Chris Bonington led the expedition that used rock climbing techniques to put fixed ropes up the face from the Western Cwm to just below the South Summit. A key aspect of the success of the climb was the scaling of the cliffs of the Rock Band at about 8,200 metres (27,000 ft) by Nick Estcourt and Tut Braithwaite.
Paul ("Tut") Braithwaite is a British rock climber, mountaineer, and company director. With Nick Estcourt he climbed Mount Everest's almost vertical Rock Band, a key to the success of the 1975 British Mount Everest Southwest Face expedition. He was president of the Alpine Club from 2007 to 2010.
The 1970 British Annapurna South Face expedition was a Himalayan climb that was the first to take a deliberately difficult route up the face of an 8,000-metre mountain. On 27 May 1970 Don Whillans and Dougal Haston reached the summit of Annapurna I, which at 26,545 feet (8,091 m) is the highest peak in the Annapurna Massif in Nepal. Chris Bonington led the expedition, which approached up a glacier from the Annapurna Sanctuary and then used rock climbing techniques to put fixed ropes up the steep South Face. Although the plan had been to use supplementary oxygen, in the event it was not possible to carry any cylinders high enough for the lead climbers to use on their summit bid.