Capt. John B. L. Noel was a member of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest Expeditions, serving as photographer and filmmaker.
John Noel was born on 26 February 1890 at Newton Abbot, Devon, the third and youngest son of Colonel the Hon. Edward Noel (1852–1917) and his wife, Ruth Lucas (d. 1926). He was baptised Baptist Lucius and added the name John by deed poll in 1908. His father, the younger son of the 2nd Earl of Gainsborough, was a prominent soldier and military historian. Noel was educated at Lausanne, Switzerland, but often missed classes to visit the mountains. His mother was an artist and encouraged him to study painting in Florence. His father's influence prevailed and he attended Sandhurst, though he passed into the regular army, not the Indian army, to his father's disappointment. In 1909 he was commissioned as Second Lieutenant, and applied to join the East Yorkshire regiment since it was stationed in northern India.
Noel's regiment spent summers in the hills of the Himalayas and he spent his leave plotting routes through the forests of Sikkim towards Tibet. After being promoted to Lieutenant in 1912, he took his leave in 1913 and travelled in disguise and without permission across an unguarded pass into Tibet with three Himalayan guides. Tibetan authorities forced Noel to turn back when he got within 40 miles of Mount Everest.
When war started in 1914, Noel was on leave in Britain and joined the King's own Yorkshire Light Infantry, as his own regiment was still in India. During the retreat from Mons he was taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped and made his way through enemy lines, travelling at night by the stars. He rejoined his regiment at Ypres and was promoted to Captain in 1915, the year of his marriage to Sybil Graham (d. 1939), an actress whom he had met in Kashmir. In 1917 he became an instructor in the machine-gun corps and was temporary a Major from 1918 to 1920. From 1920 he served as revolver instructor at the small arms school at Hythe, Kent, and wrote several pamphlets on revolvers and automatic pistols, as well as publishing, jointly with his wife, a collection of cooking recipes for soldiers.
In 1919 Noel gave a lecture on his pre-war travels in Tibet at the Royal Geographical Society. Sir Francis Younghusband orchestrated the press coverage of Noel's paper to generate interest in a British expedition to climb Everest. Noel was invited to join the second Everest expedition in 1922 by its leader, and his cousin, General Charles Bruce as photographer and film-maker. He had been interested in cinematography since the age of fourteen, when he saw Herbert Ponting's Antarctic film sixteen times. The army would not grant him leave for the Everest expedition in 1922 so he retired and was granted the rank of Major.
Noel made a silent film called 'Climbing Mt. Everest' (1922) which portrays the manners and customs of Tibet as well as the ascent of the mountain. Noel's technical achievements—filming with a Newman Sinclair camera at 23,000 feet and developing film under harsh conditions in a tent at 16,000 feet—were overshadowed by the expedition's failure to reach the summit.
In 1924 Noel formed Explorer Films Ltd, with Younghusband as Chairman, and paid £8,000 for the film and photographic rights to Everest. He posted letters from Tibet with his own Everest stamp, and sent his film to Darjeeling for developing by Arthur Pereira, who in turn sent extracts to Pathé news. Noel also made innovative use of telephoto lenses and time-lapse film techniques. His silent film 'The Epic of Everest' (1924) contrasted the masculine climbers with the mystical Tibetans, and suggested that spiritual forces on Mount Everest might be responsible for the disappearance of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. Noel exhibited his film in London with dances by a group of monks from the Tibetan Buddhist monastery at Gyantse. Officials in Tibet, Sikkim, and Bhutan were offended by certain scenes in the film and by the performances of the monks, who had not been given permission to leave Tibet. The Dalai Lama saw pictures of the monks in newspapers and said he considered 'the whole affair as a direct affront to the religion of which he is the head' (Hansen, 737). The controversy over the 'dancing lamas' led to the cancellation of future Everest expeditions and a chill in Anglo-Tibetan relations, and Noel became persona non grata among British diplomats, geographers, and mountaineers for almost thirty years.
Noel's American lecture tour enjoyed great success, as did the American edition of his book Through Tibet to Everest (1927; repr., 1931, 1989), which was not as well promoted in Britain. His wife also published Magic Bird of Chomolungma (1931), about Tibetan folk-tales she had collected in Tibet in 1924. British diplomats curtly rebuffed Noel's attempts to organize Himalayan expeditions in the 1930s. He filled out an application to become a naturalized American citizen, but the paperwork was misplaced.
Noel was Roman Catholic, and one of his uncles was private secretary to several popes. Pope Pius XI, who was also a climber, sent his blessings to Noel's Everest endeavours and invited him to the canonization of St Bernadette at St Peter's in Rome in 1933. Noel surreptitiously shot the only photographs of the ceremony, with a camera disguised as a prayer book. He occasionally lectured on St Bernadette's story, and his photographs of the canonization were later given to the Society of Our Lady of Lourdes.
After his first wife died in 1939, Noel married Mary Sullivan (d. 1984) on 17 November 1941. During 1941–3 he joined the intelligence corps and was restored to the rank of Captain. He worked out the best supply-route from India to Burma, and it was briefly known as the Noel Road before being renamed the Stilwell Road. In 1944 he moved to Smarden, Kent, and restored several old homes.
After the first ascent of Everest in 1953, Noel began to give mountaineering lectures again with his films and hand-coloured photographs. Younger climbers and film-makers often visited him at Romney Marsh, Kent, to hear his eyewitness account of the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine. Footage from his Everest films appeared in many subsequent mountaineering films and television programmes. Noel's version of events also strongly influenced histories of the Everest expeditions written during this period.
Noel was known for his showmanship, mischievous humour, and an imperious demeanour. He died of pneumonia in 1989.
