In Passage West, Co Cork, there is a small church called St Mary’s, situated on what locals refer to as the “back road”. The graveyard is unique for its many memorials both maritime and otherwise. However, the most interesting grave of all is perhaps the least ornate. The grave in question, that of Maj Richard William George Hingston, is a discreet final resting place which belies his incredible life.
Born in London on January 17th, 1887, Hingston moved to Passage West at the age of eight to be brought up by his aunt. He graduated as a medical doctor from University College Cork in 1910 and joined the Indian Medical Service of the British army soon afterwards. A secondment in 1913 to the Russian Pamir Triangulation expedition allowed him to indulge in his life’s passion, the study of natural history.
However, Hingston like many other men of his generation was not immune to the outbreak of the first World War. He saw action in 1914 in Mesopotamia as well as in East Africa. Hingston received the Military Cross for gallantry in action and kept meticulous diaries chronicling the horrors of which he was exposed to working in various field hospitals.
Writing about the infamous Battle of Tanga, Hingston encapsulated the cruelty of the new mechanised warfare unleashed on the world during the Great War.
“The machine gun is much more executive than the rifle and our men feared the sound of it . . . One cannot appreciate the horrors of war until they contemplate the awful wounds; bones shattered, fingers blown away, faces mangled out of all recognition formed a never to be forgotten sight.”
After the Armistice of 1918, Hingston travelled to India and commanded various field hospitals and was soon recruited to join the infamous 1924 British Expedition to Mount Everest, during which Mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared within 300 hundred vertical metres of the summit.
Hingston served as the group’s chief medical officer as well as the expedition’s official naturalist. His diaries continued and he recorded details and sketches of many new species in the Himalayas. He was also hugely interested in the effects of altitude on human beings and carried out experiments on many of the climbers.
Hingston formed a close bond with Mallory, who wrote in his own diary: “Really it is an amazingly nice party altogether; one of the best is Hingston, our Medical Officer, an Irishman, a quiet little man and a very keen naturalist.”
Sadly, Hingston who was left in charge of base camp had to give the order to abandon the search for Mallory and Irvine on June 12th, 1924.
However, his diary attests that he believed that the men may well have reached the summit. “Everest is a most dangerous mountain. In three expeditions it has claimed twelve victims. It is just possible that Mallory and Irvine may have climbed it.”
After Everest, Hingston pursued what he believed to be his greatest challenge of all, the prevention from extinction of endangered animals.
In 1931, using his new-found fame, he campaigned for the setting up of National Parks in East Africa to prevent the extinction of various species, such as the elephant and rhino by giving a series of lectures to the BBC entitled “Dodos of the Future”.
He also successfully led an Oxford Expedition to British Guiana to conduct an ecological survey on its rain forests – the first of its kind in the world.
He served as a surgeon in Bangalore during the second World War and lectured widely in the years that followed; however, he was advised not to do so in Ireland lest he draw attention to the fact he had served in the British army.
He married Mary Siggins Kennedy and devoted much of his later years to the community of his hometown Passage West and to St Mary’s Church, where he was buried on August 5th, 1966.
Richard Hingston’s diaries were donated by his daughter Jill, herself a physician, to Trinity College Dublin. In her last interview with a local newspaper, she said: “My father was really before his time; Nobody really knew about him. He had a very adventurous life.”
Jill Hingston herself passed away in 2023, the last in that line of Hingstons.
Wade Davis, explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society, has referred to Richard Hingston as “A most remarkable man, the likes of which the world will never again know.”
A simple inscription on the grave in St. Mary’s reads: “R.W.G. Hingston Indian Medical Service.”