Sir Chris Bonington has come some distance since he was first enthralled by the Wicklow mountains as a 16-year-old. His grandfather lived just below them. Though they had "not quite the atmosphere" of the Welsh mountains which he had seen from the Holyhead train, he was "frightened by their size" and by his own lack of experience at the time.
Now one of the best known names in British mountaineering, his boots have been on many a summit since, at far greater altitude - in Europe, Asia and South America. In 1985, after over three decades of climbing, he endeared himself to the British public when he reached the summit of Everest at the age of 50. It was one of four expeditions to the highest peak - the first being the successful south-west face expedition of 1975, which claimed the life of one of his team.
Small wonder that his autobiography spans three volumes, now published as an omnibus, and no doubt there is more to come. He has written more than a dozen books to date, and is something of an industry. "Sir Chris Bonington is one of the most successful expedition leaders in the history of mountaineering. He is also a successful and brilliant motivational speaker," one website entry on the Internet says, "with superb audio-visual presentations which have inspired companies and workforces all over the world."
Bonington's management style is one of "visionary leadership, empowerment, synergy in teamwork, planning and organisation, determination and perseverance," the web page continues, quoting plaudits from industrialists and academics. He is listed as a visiting lecturer at the Cranfield School of Management in Britain, and his many decorations and titles include a knighthood in 1996, the CBE in 1976, founder's medal of the Royal Geographical Society, president of the Alpine Club, the Council for National Parks, the British Orienteering Federation and the British Leprosy Charity.
If it all sounds a bit overpowering - at a time when the Irish explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton, must be rolling in his Antarctic grave at the thought of becoming a "management icon" in the US - Bonington's autobiographies are anything but. Refreshingly honest, and even modest, about his own achievements, the climber is an accomplished writer who is keen to share his passion for the outdoors. These are first and foremost books for climbers about climbers, written by a man who is very much associated with the "golden age" of British mountaineering, who has lived life to the full, and has lost several close friends to the pursuit - such as Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, on Everest's north-east ridge.
He is well able to engage the general reader, however, and some of his accounts of early experiences up the crag, and his impressions of the macho mentality prevailing in certain circles, are particularly entertaining in his first volume, I Chose to Climb. Here's one example. "Haven't I seen you before?" says one climber to another, trying to break the ice among relative strangers in a mountain hut in Scotland. Yes, the other confirms, describing his experiences in the Alps the previous year.
"I was doing the traverse solo and abseiled from some old slings on the way down; the buggers broke on me and I fell about 50 feet. I was lucky to get away with it - landed on a ledge. But I only cracked my skull on that. We got pissed the same night and I tried to climb the Church Tower. The drain pipe came away when I was half-way up. That's where I broke my leg. What did you do last summer?"
It isn't all big mountains and bigger feats. At a human level, he describes conflicts, expeditions driven and riven by competing egos, expeditions where the "military style" of leadership in which he was trained at the outset didn't work. And there is some glimpse of the man behind the beard and the "hot beefy Bovril" advertisements, with his tender references to his wife, Wendy, and his admission that his absent father may have influenced his path in life.
He and his wife sustained a deep wound while he was away climbing in Ecuador in 1966. In the same year their first son, Conrad, drowned as a toddler in a stream at the end of a friend's garden. Twenty years later, as he descended from Everest, Bonington was still haunted with images of what might have been. It is a bitter-sweet irony that he should have continued to cheat death so many times since then.
Lorna Siggins is an Irish Times journalist and was a reporter on the successful Irish expedition to Everest in 1993. She is author of Everest Calling
