Offaly men who wrestle bears are rare, but there’s far more to Charles Howard-Bury than this. Raised in Charleville Castle, near Tullamore, Howard-Bury was an early explorer of Tibet, reaching sacred Mount Kailash in 1905, aged 24.
He proceeded to Turkestan, Kashmir and the Karakorum. In 1921 he led the first Everest reconnaissance with George Mallory and came upon huge human-like footprints on Everest’s north face which his sherpas said belonged to an “abominable snowman”. He reported this as an eccentric local belief, but journalists mistook it as fact.
He was a bullish adventurer and hunter, but a sensitive botanist too.
On a trip mapping and collecting flora in the Tian Shan Mountains on the China-Russia border in 1913, he bought a bear cub, befriended it and brought it home to Ireland. It grew 7ft tall and lived with him in Belvedere House outside Mullingar, where it served as his wrestling partner.
We in Ireland don’t celebrate our explorers enough, possibly because most were Anglo-Irish, but Howard- Bury deserves recognition. Fortunately, two young English adventurers, Jamie Maddison and Matthew Traver, are about to give him that recognition.
Next Saturday, they set off to recreate his journey to the Tien Shan mountains in Kyrgyzstan exactly a century after he departed from Tullamore, using trains, ferries and, of course, horses. Whether they too will befriend bears has not been made clear.
In all they will cover 2,500km on horseback, starting with a 40-day ride from Semey to Zharkent, then 10 days over the Jungar Alatau range, another 10 days across southern Kazakhstan to Almaty and 35 days through Kyrgyzstan to Tashkent in Uzbekistan.
Their website onesteppeahead.com is like a bracing gust of positivity, a blast of pure ozone-rich air. Maddison (24) is an adventure journalist and photographer, and Traver (26) has led expeditions to Greenland and Mongolia.
They hope to gather information on the rare argali wild sheep which Howard-Bury once hunted and also to document the cultural and environmental changes in this stretch of central Asia since Howard-Bury’s time. They will face challenges, but far fewer than Howard-Bury – the world has grown unimaginably safer since he set out from the Irish midlands in 1913.
Howard-Bury died in 1963 but he is still fondly remembered by friends in Offaly and Westmeath. His partner, actor Rex Beaumont, remained in Belvedere House until 1988. Maddison and Traver were hoping to set off from Charleville Castle, but although they have sunk every penny of their savings into the trip, they don’t have the funds to fly here. If Ireland isn’t going to honour its former heroes, perhaps we should support those who will.