Former Sunday Times editor Ken Owen disputes Kathy O’Dowd’s version of her trip to the top of Everest
CATHY O’DOWD’S account of what happened on the sorry expedition to Everest, insofar as it deals with matters within my knowledge, is untrue. She would have done much good for her reputation as a journalist, and a teacher of journalism, if she had bothered to talk to me before going into print (Mail & Guardian, November 1 to 7).
Firstly, it is delicately misleading to say that Ian Woodall and I “met up” at Periche. The truth is that Woodall, having received my note refusing to withdraw the Sunday Times reporting team, came rushing down the mountain to try to change my mind. He flew into a rage when I refused to intervene in the decisions of Brian Pottinger who was then effectively running the newspaper, and who had managed the Everest venture from the start. Woodall’s response to frustration was a torrent of obscene and foul-mouthed threats to kill me and my wife, and shows of overt physical aggression; my streetwise response was to sit very still, and to speak calmly, while Bruce Herrod tried to calm his leader.
I tried to persuade Woodall and Herrod to adopt the methods of South African industrial relations to deal with the journalists who irked them, and I gave them examples of how misbehaviour or disciplinary problems might be solved without resorting to Woodall’s extreme militaristic authoritarianism. Herrod listened carefully and questioned me intelligently; Woodall stared morosely at the table.
The “row”, such as it was, would never have induced me to waste R26 000 of my own money, not to talk of my leave, by abandoning the adventure. My decision to leave was precipitated by a blood-chilling exchange which persuaded me that the atmosphere of the expedition was deranged and that the Sunday Times staffers, Ken Vernon and Richard Shorey, might be in danger of their lives.
Vernon and Shorey had left the expedition after Woodall’s quarrels had caused the departure of the team doctor and the three best South African climbers. Pottinger ordered them to rejoin Woodall, and they were making their way to base camp to do so.
Herrod, early in our meeting at Periche, asked me casually who would be responsible if the journalists “died on the glacier” that day, before reaching base camp. I replied that clearly the Sunday Times bore the responsibility until they rejoined the expedition; after that, the responsibility for their safety would lie with Woodall.
This question, it later transpired, was cunning. Towards the end of our long conversation (if that is the proper word for any exchange that includes Woodall’s demented rages) Herrod told us he and Woodall had passed the journalists, who were, of course, amateurs in the mountains, on their way down the glacier earlier that day. Vernon, he said, was slumped across a rock, “completely played out”; Shorey was wandering about in confusion, without pack or sherpa, looking for a way around a glacial lake. The area, he said, was very dangerous and they had passed within a about 100m of a fresh avalanche.
“Did you help them?” asked my wife.
“No,” said Herrod. “We left them there to teach them a lesson.”
The callousness of the comment was breath- stopping. None of us knew, then, whether the two journalists were still on the glacier, alive or dead. Herrod had, however, carefully established that the Sunday Times was responsible while, farther up the mountain, O’Dowd was primed with instructions to refuse them accommodation, help, or even a cup of tea.
I quickly brought the talk to an end and went with my wife to our tent, where I made a contemporaneous note of the conversation by torchlight. Woodall’s rages were one thing; but combined with a cold-blooded decision to leave two amateur climbers in a perilous environment “to teach them a lesson”, his capacity for rage took on a more sinister dimension.
My duty was clear: Pottinger was struggling in Johannesburg to assess the situation on the mountain, and I knew our staff had – by Herrod’s own admission – been left in conditions of mortal peril. I had to warn him.
Far from storming off in the morning, as O’Dowd claims, I rose at dawn and woke the Californian doctor who was in charge of rescue operations at Periche to seek his advice and help for our staffers. He told me that somebody – climber or Sherpa – was sure to have discovered them if they were in trouble, and would help them according to the code of the mountains.
O’Dowd is also wrong when she says “they [presumably Woodall and Herrod] tried to patch it up but Owen stormed off”. Again, the truth is different. Woodall had spent the night with his French girlfriend, Alexandrine Gaudin, who had been our guide, and in the morning he remained skulking in her tent while we sought out the doctor, broke up camp, had breakfast and set off down the mountain. We did not see him. Herrod did emerge but he did not speak to me, nor I to him. We parted warmly and affectionately from Gaudin.
We did go down the mountain as fast as our strength permitted, making a five-hour detour over a high pass to reach the hospital at Kunde where, we knew, we would be able to communicate with Pottinger by fax. I told Pottinger that the journalists had been abandoned in a state of distress on the glacier, and alerted him to the possibility that Woodall, considering his behaviour towards me and my wife, might actually be deranged.
Meanwhile, of course, the journalists managed to make their own way to base camp where they were notoriously refused a cup of tea and had to resort to other expeditions for help. Pottinger decided to withdraw the reporting team, and asked the Nepalese government to ensure that the women climbers were safe. That was a correct decision: like the climbers who pulled out, we had come to fear that somebody might die on that expedition, and of course, in the end, somebody did: Herrod disappeared in strange, and so far inadequately explained, circumstances.
There is no need for O’Dowd to “compete” with what I have written. All that is necessary is for her, or for the newspapers, to establish the truth. That raises a point which has been assiduously excluded from public debate: the role of the media in this sorry tale has been disgraceful. The best account of what happened on Everest was published on the Internet by Dile Seitz and Sue Park, two amateurs who were so frustrated by the failure of the news media that they did their own research. They make the point that they did not have the resources to trace and interview Pema Tengi Sherpa, Ang Dorje, and Jangbo Sherpa, the Nepalese climbers who accompanied Woodall and O’Dowd but who, inexplicably, left Herrod to die on his own.
The Sherpas are surely the best sources, and one would expect a healthy press to track them down, so that the controversy about Herrod’s death and doubts about the expedition’s achievements could be laid to rest. But the South African media have treated the Sherpas as subhuman, seldom,if ever, bothering to give them names.
Had the press done a halfway decent job of establishing the facts, it would not now be possible for O’Dowd to publish unverified rubbish about events at which she was not present, and to do so without talking to those who were there. I do hope this is not the journalism taught at Rhodes.