Times
In his book, Ascent and Dissent, Ken Vernon asks the unanswerable question: why did the country’s top newspaper never check on the credentials of team leader Ian Woodall?
In a review last week, Brian Pottinger, editor of the Sunday Times, fired off a series of missiles at the reporter he assigned to cover the tragic Everest expedition. He described Ken Vernon’s book Ascent and Dissent as “… flawed work … misrepresents the Sunday Times’s role … his book shows him to be full of self-doubt … I should have kept him at home … lack of fitness … badly researched … he reported … poorly and with much complaining, self-absorption and nit- picking – oblivious to the far grander tale waiting to be told.”
The grander tale to which Pottinger refers was, according to Vernon’s book, a shambling expedition set against a background of post-1994 election euphoria. An expedition, graced by President Nelson Mandela, which produced one corpse, two summitters regarded as villains not heroes, volumes of damning press reports about disgraceful behaviour and scorn from international mountaineers for the South African team. And, of course, a public squabble which continues to this day.
Pottinger, a desk-bound journalist about to inherit the most important editing job in the country from flinty, brilliant Ken Owen, nailed his colours to the mast of the Everest expedition to boost the Sunday Times’s failing circulation. In the process, the most powerful newspaper in South Africa ignored the first rule of journalism: checking the facts. Pottinger has no kind words for team leader Ian Woodall, describing him as a “charlatan”. But had Pottinger done his homework, Woodall, the “little” Englishman wrapped up in the South African flag, would have been denied his pyrrhic victory, and maybe photographer Bruce Herrod would still be alive.
Pottinger left his position as editor this week and is now managing director of Times Newspapers.
In this extract from his book, Ken Vernon recounts how the Sunday Times blundered at first base.
`Are you the kind of guy who is ready for a jol?” I was asked. “Does Pinocchio have a wooden winkie?” came my stock reply.
It was Tuesday, October 31 1995.
The phone call with its cryptic question had come out of the blue from Sunday Times deputy editor Brian Pottinger, and I had no inkling of what was to follow.
“Ken, the Sunday Times is sponsoring the first South African bid to climb Mount Everest, and I would like you to be the journalist to cover the story – would you like to do it?”
Would I? I didn’t hesitate. “Abso-bloody- lutely.”
Then my mind kicked into gear. “Of course, I will have to discuss it with [my wife] Daniele first.”
Then, just to make sure there were no second thoughts on his part, I added: “But yeah, I’ll go for sure.”
“How fit are you?” he asked, almost as an afterthought.
I said I was pretty fit (for a 46-year-old who spent most of his time propping up a desk, I thought, though I neglected to verbalise the addendum).
I added I was sure I could handle anything that might be put in front of me.
But the question triggered another thought. If I was going to go all the way to Mount Everest, then I was going to get fit enough to climb the bloody mountain as well.
Then the journalist in me took over and more practical questions popped into my head.
When was the trip? How long would it take? Neither of which Brian could answer directly at that time. Instead he said it was great I wanted to do the assignment and we would discuss the job at greater length soon.
I slumped back in my office chair, totally flabbergasted. When your boss asks you if you want to take on that kind of assignment there is only one answer, but there are lots of questions.
I had been with the Sunday Times for less than six months and to be offered such a plum assignment was extremely unusual, but I admit I did not look too deeply into the reasons I had been selected rather than another journalist.
I assumed – naturally – I was simply the best man for the job, and it wasn’t such an outrageous assumption.
I was a journalist with a record of getting into tough places, getting the story and getting it out.
Before joining the Sunday Times I had done my share and more of covering the South African revolution, breathing tear-gas and being threatened by both sides in the ghettos called townships, before specialising for almost seven years in reporting on Africa outside South Africa. This stint included covering the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars and the South African involvement in both.
I had covered coups and assassinations and revolutions in several Indian Ocean island countries and had had to spend several days in hiding in the Comores while Bob Denard’s mercenary goons looked for me with evil intent.
After those heady days I had spent almost three years sitting behind a desk as deputy editor of the country’s biggest Saturday newspaper, followed by a year lazing on the beach in semi-retirement pretending to write the great South African novel and recovering from the previous 10 years – a decade that had left me divorced, ill and recovering from skin cancer.
It had been a great year. It left me broke, but raring to go.
The opportunity to cover the Everest story was a chance to return to a more exciting brand of journalism that I had not really understood just how much I missed until that moment.
I also instantly saw it as the opportunity to make my name with the paper I was still new to, in order to do more of the kind of exciting action journalism I loved so much.
I had just one major hurdle – how to convince my wife to let me go.
In such circumstances I turned to the kind of subterfuge that husbands traditionally turn to – wine and roses.
I bought the roses and booked a restaurant. But as soon as I picked Daniele up from work I forgot all my nefarious plans and blurted it out.
“Hon, the Sunday Times is sponsoring an expedition to climb Mount Everest and they want me to cover the story” – accompanied by a genuine hang-dog expression.
To Daniele’s eternal credit, considering that we had been married for less than 18 months, she didn’t hesitate. “I’ll miss you, but there is no way I can stand in your way with such a great opportunity.”
Then came the catch-22. “But I want to come too.”
No amount of explaining about work pressures and how hard the trek would be would deter her, and so that night we set to planning a mid-Everest assault conjugal visit.
Other plans were already well under way when that conversation took place.
Almost three months before, in late July 1995, the Sunday Times’s involvement in the first official South African – and African – attempt to climb the highest mountain in the world had begun when a simple, cheap plastic folder landed on the desk of Sunday Times marketing manager Robin Parker.
How it came to get there and where it had been before it arrived on his desk he has never found out.
“I think it must have initially been given to someone in the editorial department,” he recalled later. “It was addressed `To The Editor’ and looked like it had gone through a few hands before it had landed in mine, possibly because no one knew what to make of it.”
Contained in the plastic was a sketchy proposal for a first “official” South African team to conquer Mount Everest, an expedition the proposal said that had been “many years in planning”.
The proposal explained briefly that opportunities to climb Everest were rare, but the author had managed to secure a permit to a “window” on the mountain and asked the Sunday Times to sponsor the expedition.
It was signed “Ian Woodall”, who went on to describe himself as chief guide and director of “Thin Air Expeditions”.
The proposal could not have come at a more opportune time.
Indeed, had it come at virtually any other time in the history of South Africa – or of the Sunday Times – it might have died there and then, consigned to “file 13” with all the other hare-brained schemes that arrive daily at major newspapers the world over.
But as it happened both the country and the paper were in the throes of a major transition.
South Africa had only recently emerged from its first elections in the post-apartheid era.
While the long dark night of apartheid had been a horror that no one wanted to revisit, for many people – black and white – the transition into a “New South Africa” had been a step into an unknown that might conceivably have ended up even worse than what they had known before.
Instead the future seemed full of promise. A possible right-wing threat had been shown to be a paper tiger and, with newly elected President Nelson Mandela determined to foster a spirit of reconciliation, it appeared a miracle had indeed occurred.
A surge of national euphoria swept the country, sweeping up young and old, black and white, left and right.
As if to underline the optimism, South Africa had won the Rugby World Cup, with everyone behind the green-shirted warrior- sportsmen for the first time. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond the new South Africa with all its people united for the first time.
In the newspaper world things were less rosy. For long a bastion of white liberals battling against the white apartheid government, the English-language newspapers in South Africa, ironically, had depended mostly on conservative white readers and advertisers to sustain them.
In the years after Mandela was released and politics were slowly “normalised”, whites lost interest in politically oriented newspapers, while blacks, to whom the white-oriented papers looked to replace the shrinking market, never stepped in to take their place.
Circulations dropped alarmingly and the Sunday Times, like other papers, pondered how to recoup its losses. One idea was to sponsor promotions that would tap into the new-found nationalistic fervour, but such options were few and far between.
Shortly before the plastic folder landed on Parker’s desk the current editor of the Sunday Times, Ken Owen, an irascible, blunt, journalistic street fighter and peerless political analyst who believed any newspaper story that was not political in nature was a waste of space, had decided to resign – without waiting for a successor to be named.
Owen had, he believed, succeeded in the brief he had set himself five years earlier when he had taken the editorship – that of changing the paper from a downmarket pop product, referred to disparagingly as the “Sunday Slimes”, into a respected journal with political integrity and credibility.
He had also seen the future of both the country and the paper was to be black and had begun the process of changing the content and focus of the paper to better reflect that reality.
He had not taken the market with him and circulation continued to fall, but nevertheless as the largest paper in South Africa, the editorship of the Sunday Times was a plum job, and an immediate backroom scramble got under way as possible candidates jostled for position.
“It was a mistake to resign without waiting for a successor to be named,” he said in an interview much later. “It was utterly corrosive and set the staff to conniving in the most despicable way, and because it meant my authority slipped. I could see it at the time but it was too late. Everyone began to look out for their own interests.”
This was the context into which the “Thin Air” Everest proposal landed, and when it landed on Robin Parker’s desk, fate had chosen wisely.
A former journalist turned marketeer, Parker was one of the shrewdest newspapermen in the country and he immediately saw the possibilities inherent in the scanty proposal.
“The Everest expedition fitted the bill perfectly,” he recalled.
“Mount Everest was a high-profile subject that was known worldwide and an expedition to conquer it would encapsulate all the drama of a life-and-death struggle in a terrifying situation, while the angle of this being the first official expedition to place the new South African flag atop the highest mountain in the world was a symbolic gesture that would tap the new patriotic passion.
“Best of all, if we were the sponsors, people would only be able to read about it in the Sunday Times.”
The problem was that such an expedition cost a lot of money and, as circulation fell, there was less and less money to spend on promotions – the perfect catch-22.
In any event the first step was to get approval. Parker scribbled “Ken, are you interested?” and sent the proposal to the editor’s desk.
A short time later the proposal came back with the same note still attached, but with an additional “Brian, are you interested?” sticker. Owen had passed the buck to deputy editor Brian Pottinger and sent it on its way.
Brian was very interested, it turned out.
He immediately contacted Parker and after discussions about the various ways the project might be handled were bandied about, it was agreed Parker would contact Woodall for more details to enable him to put the project forward to management for funding.
With hindsight Parker has no doubt that Pottinger saw the Everest expedition as an excellent publicity campaign for the paper, as well as one that might provide a vehicle he could drive into the editor’s chair.
If it worked out as he wished, it would in one fell swoop help solve many of the problems facing the paper.
He envisaged an unashamedly jingoistic campaign to whip up public fervour, just as the original Hillary conquest of Everest had done in Britain in 1953.
It was hoped that nationalistic interest would get people rushing out to buy the Sunday Times to see how the team climbing Everest was progressing.
That would increase circulation, identify the paper with the new South Africa in the minds of readers across all race groups and, at the same time, provide a way to tap the current of nationalistic feelings.
An initial telephone call to Woodall impressed Parker, who recalled that the man sounded confident and capable. Things began to move ahead quickly and a meeting was arranged for the following week.
“I was a bit taken aback when he walked in because he was a slip of a man, not what I had imagined,” Parker remembered, “but once again he was very confident and polished and seemed to know what he was talking about – not that I knew what to ask him about when it came to mountaineering.”
Woodall arrived at the meeting with a much fuller proposal than the first sketchy plan, one that included climbing routes, time frames and, more importantly, approximate costs.
“I began to see a lot of real value in the deal,” Parker said, “so I put some work into a marketing plan that was quite detailed. The cost came to something like R1-million. I sent it on to [MD] Roy Paulson.”
The answer came back quickly – an emphatic no.
Parker then went back to both Pottinger and Owen and said if they still wanted the project, they would have to swing Paulson around. Meanwhile he would come up with a new plan that would pare costs.
He devised a bare plan that would pay for the expedition and secure the major sponsorship rights for around $75 000 to R350 000 at the current exchange rates – which was accepted.
Another meeting was arranged with Woodall, who was impressive in a full presentation, bringing up his distinguished military career in the British and South African armies as well as alluding to a credible climbing resum – and essentially the deal was done.
On September 20 1995, a hastily drawn up contract was signed by Woodall and editor Ken Owen in which the Sunday Times agreed to pay Woodall $75 000 by January 15 1996 provided that by that time Woodall had managed to secure other sponsorships to the value of $136 860 – the amount needed to run the whole expedition, according to Woodall’s accounting.
Given the later running of the expedition, which literally went to great lengths to save even a few cents on running costs, it is highly doubtful that Woodall ever managed to secure more than a fraction of this amount.
No one at the Sunday Times ever checked, certainly not editor Ken Owen.
“I had already announced my retirement, I was ill and had to have a growth removed from my stomach at this time. Pottinger really wanted to run the thing, so essentially I handed the project over to him and he ran with it,” Owen recalls.
What is incontrovertible is that Woodall overstated the value of at least some of his sponsorships, as will be detailed later.
In the preamble to the contract it is baldly stated that: “Woodall has significant experience and expertise in organising and leading, inter alia, mountaineering expeditions throughout the world, including, in particular, Nepal and Everest.”
This “experience and expertise” proved to be pure fantasy, but once again no one from the Sunday Times checked that the legal niceties accorded in any way with reality.
What is more important than money is that in the rush to sign up the deal, not once had anyone bothered to question whether Woodall was in fact what he said he was.
There had been questions, Parker recalls, but they were questions asked by laymen about a subject of which no one had the slightest in-depth knowledge.
No one had been tasked with checking with either the British or South African armies about Woodall’s “illustrious” military careers in both forces.
Interviewed later, Ken Owen said that sometime after the deal had been struck he and his wife – a razor-sharp lawyer named Kate – dined with Woodall.
“I asked if he had ever climbed an 8 000m peak and his response was that he had `climbed on’ an 8 000m peak. Both Kate and I picked up on that and after the meal I looked at her and said: `Oh-ho – we could have a problem here.’
“Shortly afterwards I spoke to Brian and raised my concerns. I asked if anyone had checked out Woodall’s credentials. He replied that they had been checked out and that they checked out perfectly. He even added that Woodall was well-known in climbing circles,” said Owen.
Just who was fooling who at that time is difficult to know.
Certainly Woodall was completely unknown in South African, British and Nepalese climbing circles at the time. If anyone did try and check out Woodall’s credentials, they had botched it completely.
No one spent the 30c it would have cost to make a single phone call to the Mountain Club of South Africa to hear if they thought Woodall was fit to carry out his plans.
Or if they had ever heard of him.
No one checked with the mountaineering authorities in Britain to find out what they thought the chances were of Woodall leading a successful Everest attempt.
Or if they had even ever heard of him.
In fact, it is highly unlikely that anyone at the time was tasked with checking up on the would-be mountaineer. Despite the Sunday Times being a newspaper that boasted having some of the finest investigative journalists in South Africa, I do not believe that then, or at any time until it was far too late, did anyone at the Sunday Times try to verify his claims.
A reader might ask why I didn’t do so myself, and this would be a valid question.
Of course, I should have. But I firstly assumed this had been done and, secondly, by the time my doubts were substantial enough to possibly lead me to raise the subject, the expedition had grown a life of its own that was difficult to challenge.
When I did begin to ask questions, it was my own integrity that began to be called into issue. I was told to get on with the expedition and ignore anything that did not immediately concern me.
It was this glaring failure to check sources, more telling when the party involved was a major newspaper, that was to lead to the expedition becoming, instead of a national celebration, a national embarrassment.
— Ascent and Dissent, published by Jonathan Ball, is available for R89,95