By Kate Nicholson
Ruth Mallory, wife of Everest climber George Mallory, was described by a mutual ‘friend’ as ‘uneducated’. It hurt.
‘I think a good many of your friends,’ Ruth told her Cambridge University educated husband George, ‘label one … rather. I mean they think you are funny or uneducated or clever or something and always answer or laugh at the same things …’
Ruth had just returned from a dinner party in Cambridge where the hostess had changed the subject when Ruth tried to engage in a discussion on the Italian renaissance. She may have been governess educated but she had visited many of the Italian churches with her uncle Hawes Turner, Keeper of the National Gallery as her guide. Later her husband’s waspish old tutor at Magdalene, Arthur Benson, pronounced that George Mallory’s wife may be beautiful but she is ’a thin and truculent performer,’ concluding ‘I really rather hate Mrs Mallory.’
Even before her Cambridge humiliation, Ruth was determined that their daughters should be educated as their sons: ‘I do want any girl of ours to be capable of earning her own living decently,’ she told George.
Ruth’s mother May [nee Powell] Turner, was of the same mind but her approach was to enable women to be paid for what had originally been perceived as ‘home work’. Both Ruth’s parents were steeped in William Morris’s Arts & Crafts. Together with Morris’s daughter May, Ruth’s mother set up the Women’s Guild since the Art Worker’s Guild did not allow female members. Ruth’s mother wanted her daughters to be able to sell their fine art embroidery, their ceramic painting, their Arts & Crafts art work for real money – to be able to earn their own living ‘decently’. The Women’s Guild was founded in 1907, the same year as The Ladies Alpine Club, but Ruth’s (hitherto overlooked) climbing career is another story.
When I met Hilda Haig Brown, the grand-daughter of Reverend Dr William Haig-Brown, headmaster of Charterhouse between 1843 and 1907, Hilda remembered her father telling her that Ruth’s climber husband George was hesitant, stuttered a lot but they liked him up at Charterhouse. We never thought he’d have the guts to go up Everest. My father had to take over from him half way through a [Charterhouse] chapel address once because he was so nervous.
Hilda was 94 when I spoke to her on 20 October 2006 and as sharp as a pin; she shared an interest in advances in primary education with Ruth. Together they discussed enabling children to have wider horizons by awakening a love of good books, and by providing a key to the treasures of the world’s best thought.
When I spoke to John Mallory – George and Ruth’s only surviving child by the time I started researching her biography in 2007) he told me that Ruth’s recall was exceptional, perhaps a photographic memory. She could recite poetry all the way from Godalming to Winchester when she drove him back to school in the car.
Ruth was possibly an undiagnosed dyslexic – her spelling was ‘imaginative’. When George complained, she told him that he must take it as ‘one of the worses in the for better for worses of the marriage vows’.
But Ruth trained as a Montessori teacher because not only did she want girls to be educated equally with boys, but she wanted to invest in the kind of education that could prevent war. George and Ruth anticipated the formation of the League of Nations in their letters to each other written when he was away with the Royal Artillery in Northern France during WW1. They talked of it as a ‘society’, an international organisation that could replace war with debate, international arbitration. Perhaps idealistically, they believed that it was possible to create ‘cosmopolitan citizens’ of the world.
But it all started with education. Hilda Haig Brown was co-author (with Zillah Walthew) of Speech-Training Rhymes and Jingles for use in Infant and Junior Schools, published by Oxford University Press in 1936. Ruth could play the piano and flute. She taught Hilda a song ‘Sweet Primroses’, which she said George loved her to sing. Hilda remembers discussing the importance of making non-fiction history stories accessible for children with Ruth who particularly rated ‘A History of Everyday Things’, a series of four history books for children written by Marjorie Quennel and her husband Charles Henry Bourne Quennell between 1918 and 1934. (Clare, Ruth’s oldest child, later remembered both Ruth and George reading to her from these before putting her to bed.) The books concern English history between 1066 and 1914. Hilda went on to write Heritage Story Books for Longmans, Green and Co. and the ‘Romance of Reading’ series for infant schools.
George died on Everest on 8th or 9th June 1924, last seen ‘going strong for the top’. Ruth was obliged, for financial reasons, to move back in with her father who refused to allow her to continue with her Montessori school. But Ruth did not allow him to dictate her children’s education. She had always wanted ‘… any girl of ours to be capable of earning her own living decently.’
Ruth’s mother’s relatives enabled Clare and Beridge Mallory to be educated at St Mary’s Calne. Clare went on to Cambridge where she graduated with a First Class degree in History. She married American climber Glen Millikan and moved to America where she became a History teacher and then, lecturer. Beridge Mallory studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge before becoming a Paediatric Doctor in America on marriage to David Robertson.
So although Ruth was described as ‘uneducated’, she overcame her husband’s death, her father’s obstructiveness and her daughters were educated as well as John who attended his father’s old school, Winchester College, before studying Engineering at Magdalene, Cambridge and moving to South Africa to become a Water Engineer. All Ruth’s children were able to earn their own living ‘decently’.
Kate Nicholson has researched Ruth Mallory’s biography over 18 years since her husband climbed Everest by George Mallory’s route from the north. Ruth has been regarded simply as ‘wife-of’ George, invisible behind the myth. But not anymore. Behind Everest – Ruth Mallory’s Story published by Pen & Sword is available now.
Bluestocking Oxford 