Maurice Wilson had barely
climbed anything higher
than a flight of stairs when
he decided to fly solo to
Everest in an attempt to
become the first person
to scale it. Ed Caesar tells
the extraordinary story of
what happened next
B
y his early thirties Maurice
Wilson, a maverick Yorkshireman
who had been injured and
decorated in the First World War,
considered his life adrift. After
two failed marriages, several
romances and travelling the world,
he had lost the thread of his own
story; he yearned for a plot.
The year was 1932 and inspiration struck
as he was sitting in a café in Freiburg, in
southern Germany, reading a newspaper
article that mentioned the 1924 British
expedition to Mount Everest. A wild idea
began to form in Wilson’s head: he was
going to climb Everest. Wilson had hardly
climbed anything more challenging than
a flight of stairs. Still, he thought, there was
time to learn.
Once he had returned to England, there
were problems to solve. First, he needed
a way to get to the mountain. The
expeditions of the 1920s had bought
passage for their members on steamships to
India. Trains could easily take him from
Calcutta, where the ships docked, to
Darjeeling, the gateway to the Himalayas.
Then something in a newspaper again
caught his eye. The Houston-Mount
Everest expedition, financed by a rich
widow named Lady Houston, planned to fly
over the top of the highest mountain in the
world in 1933. He wondered whether hePEAK
MADNESS
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
Maurice Wilson, a novice
pilot, left north London
for India in his Gipsy
Moth in May 1933