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E. F. Benson Frederic was born at Wellington College. He was the third son of Edward White Benson (1829–1896), headmaster of Wellington College and subsequently archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife, Mary Sidgwick (1841–1918). He was a younger brother of A. C. Benson (Master of Magdalene College, 1915-1925), Mary Eleanor Benson (1863–1890), and Margaret Benson (1865–1916), and an elder brother of Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914). He was educated at Temple Grove School, Sheen, at Marlborough College, and at King's College, Cambridge, where he was exhibitioner (1888) and scholar (1890), and secured first classes in both parts of the classical tripos (1890, 1891).

Worked in Athens for the British School of Archaeology (1892–5) and in Egypt for the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies (1895). His first novel, Dodo, was published in 1893. From 1895 to 1918 he lived in London and devoted himself to writing. From 1918 he lived for the greater part of each year at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, which had been the home of Henry James.

He published at least ninety-three books, excluding collaborations. His writings fall into three groups: novels of social satire, reminiscences, and horror stories.

Benson never married and lived alone in Rye. He was mayor of Rye from 1934 to 1937 and a JP. He was elected an honorary fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1938 and was appointed OBE. He died in University College Hospital, London, on 29 February 1940, and was buried in the Rye cemetery after a funeral conducted by the bishop of Chichester.

The E. F. Benson Society was founded in London in 1984.

Stephen King, born on 11 September 1923 in London. Son of Ernest William King and Janet Paterson Stathers. Educated at St Paul's School. Was admitted pensioner January 1946.
Terms kept: Lent 1946, Easter 1946, Michaelmas 1946, Lent 1947 and Easter 1947. Read Law and was awarded BA in June 1947.
A collection of his rowing photographs was donated to the College by his widow in 2022.

Could be useful to see if this might be Theodore Blake Wirgman (29 April 1848 – 16 January 1925), although the initial seems wrong.

Cyril Fox was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, on 16 December 1882, the first son of Charles Frederick Fox, a bank official, and his wife, Henrietta Maria Paul. His family moved to the Isle of Wight when he was a boy and he was educated at Christ's Hospital and then in London (1895–8). Illness led to him leaving school at sixteen to take up market gardening in Worthing, Sussex. In Sussex he met a Cambridge bacteriologist, Louis Cobbett, who obtained for him a position as a clerk at the bovine tuberculosis research station in Stansted, Essex. This institution moved to Cambridge in 1912. After the war he returned to the research station as superintendent of its field laboratories, but post-war reorganisation made his future there uncertain, and at thirty-six he changed to archaeology as a career.

Fox gained entry to Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1919, as a part-time student of archaeology, at first reading for the English tripos, and was much encouraged by Professor H. M. Chadwick, who had him transferred to work for a PhD. In 1923 his thesis was published as The Archaeology of the Cambridge Region. This was a landmark in archaeological thinking, and gave Fox an immediate standing among scholars. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in the same year, and was appointed to an assistantship in the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge. He was elected to the Kingsley Bye Fellowship at Magdalene in 1924.

In 1924 he was nominated keeper of the National Museum of Ireland, but the electors' choice was not confirmed at a higher level and instead a German archaeologist, Walter Bremer, was appointed. Fox then applied for the keepership of archaeology at the National Museum of Wales. In 1926, he became director, and guided the affairs of the National Museum of Wales until his retirement in 1948. Fox's time as director saw great developments and he succeeded in unifying the regional and local museums of the principality by affiliation to the National Museum.

Fox served with distinction on public bodies such as the royal commissions on ancient and historical monuments in Wales and in England, and on the Ancient Monuments Board of the Ministry of Works. He also continued his field studies and publishing works.

1934 - president of the Museums Association.
1935 - knighted for his services to museums.
1940 - elected fellow of the British Academy.
1944-1949 - served as president of the Society of Antiquaries of London was awarded the society's gold medal in 1952.
1947 - an honorary DLitt of Wales.
1952 - an honorary fellow of Magdalene.

On 6 May 1916 Fox married Olive, daughter of Arthur Congreve-Pridgeon, vicar of Steyning in Sussex. She was drowned off the Gower peninsula in 1932. They had two daughters, Helen Felicity, an art critic, and Penelope Eames, the author of a work on medieval furniture (1977).
On 6 July 1933 he married his second wife, Aileen Mary Henderson, an active archaeologist, daughter of Walter Scott Henderson, solicitor, of Surrey. They worked together in the field. He retired to Exeter, where she held a position of university lecturer in archaeology. They had three sons.
Fox died at the Cranford Nursing Home, Cranford Avenue, Exmouth, Devon, on 15 January 1967.

Colin Crawford was an officer of the British civil colonial government and mountaineer. He was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition serving as a transport officer.

Major C. John Morris was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition, serving as a transport officer and assistant to General Charles Bruce.

Major Charles John Morris was a British mountaineer, anthropologist and journalist, and controller of BBC Radio's Third Programme. He served as General Charles Bruce's personal secretary in 1922.

Morris served in the army from 1915 to 1934. After serving in the trenches during the First World War, he transferred to the Indian Army's 3rd Gurkha Rifles. He took part in two attempts to climb Mount Everest; the first under General Charles Granville Bruce and climbing leader Lt-Col Edward Lisle Strutt in 1924, and the second in 1936 under Hugh Ruttledge. On the latter, his personal servant was Tenzing Norgay, who made the first ascent of Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary in 1953.

He received an award from the Royal Geographical Society for his exploration of Chinese Turkistan, while still in the army. He retired from military service in the mid 1930s and taught English in Japan. He was Professor of English Literature, Keio University and lecturer at Imperial and Bunrika Universities, Tokyo from 1938 and also adviser on the English language to Japan's Dept. of Foreign affairs. He was repatriated by the Diplomatic corps after Japan's entry into the Second World War and joined the BBC, running their Far East service.

Morris was head of the BBC Far Eastern Service 1943–1952, and controller for the BBC Third Programme 1952–1958. From February 1943 to October 1943 he worked in the same department as George Orwell, at 200 Oxford Street.

He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1957.

Dr Tom Longstaff was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition, serving as medical officer.

Tom Longstaff was the first person to climb a summit of over 7,000 metres in elevation, Trisul, in the India/Pakistan Himalayas in 1907. He also made important explorations and climbs in Tibet, Nepal, the Karakoram, Spitsbergen, Greenland, and Baffin Island. He was president of the (British) Alpine Club from 1947 to 1949 and a founding member of The Alpine Ski Club in 1908. He was the chief medical officer and naturalist on the 1922 British Mount Everest expedition.

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.

Dr Arthur Wakefield, a general practitioner from Cumbria, was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition.

Major Edward Norton was a member of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest Expeditions, serving as Acting Leader in 1924 after General Charles Bruce was taken ill.

Edward Norton was born on 21 February 1884 in Argentina, the second son of Edward Norton, a director of the Royal Mail and Union Castle shipping lines, and his wife, Edith Sarah. He was educated at Charterhouse School and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and was commissioned in 1902. In 1907 he was posted to Meerut, India, first with the Royal Field Artillery, then from 1910 with the Royal Horse Artillery. During this period he was aide-de-camp to the viceroy.

Norton served in France during the First World War. He was mentioned in dispatches three times, was appointed to the DSO, and was awarded the Military Cross. After the war he commanded D Battery in India and later served on the staff at Chanak.

On 18 December 1925 he married (Isabel) Joyce. They had three sons.

He attended the Staff College and later the Imperial Defence College, and returned to India as senior instructor at the Staff College at Quetta (1929–32). He then became commander, Royal Artillery, to the 1st division at Aldershot, and subsequently brigadier-general staff to the Aldershot command. In 1937 he was appointed aide-de-camp to King George VI, in 1938 he commanded the Madras district, and in 1939 he was appointed CB.

1940-41 - acting governor and commander-in-chief in Hong Kong. While there he was severely injured in a riding accident, from which he never fully recovered. It forced his retirement in 1942. He was granted the honorary rank of Lieutenant-General. After returning to England he became commander of the north Hampshire sector of the Home Guard (1942–4); when the Home Guard was disbanded he went on to serve as Hampshire's county Army Cadet Force commandant (1944–8). In 1947 he was appointed colonel commandant of the Royal Horse Artillery.

Norton was an alpine climber and in 1922 was selected for the second British Mount Everest expedition. With George Mallory and Howard Somervell he reached the then record height of 26,985 ft. They were the first to pass the critical level of 8,000 metres, and this without supplementary oxygen.

On the 1924 Everest expedition he took charge when the leader, Charles Bruce, was taken ill. He led the first serious summit attempt. Again he climbed without oxygen, an aid for which he had little respect. At 28,000 ft his companion, Somervell, was stopped by severe throat trouble and Norton continued alone to a height of 28,126 ft. He reached the great couloir on the north face, which later became popularly known as Norton's couloir. This, too, was an altitude record, and it was fifty-four years before anyone climbed higher without oxygen.

Another summit bid was undertaken a few days later by Mallory and Irvine, from which neither man returned. Norton handled this tragedy and the publicity with impeccable dignity. He also wrote the greater part of the official expedition book, The Fight for Everest, 1924.

He was a fine horseman, a keen shot, and an enthusiastic fisherman. He was also interested in natural history, and on his trips to Everest made collections of birds and flowers for the British Museum. He was a skilled draughtsman and watercolourist, with a preference for painting landscapes, several of which have been reproduced in the Everest literature. He also had a talent for quick and often witty sketches of his companions. A man of many interests, he was widely read, well informed, and a charming companion. Integrity was the essence of his character. He was a born leader and, in the army, popular with all ranks; he understood and got on well with Indians and with the Gurkhas, Sherpas, and Bhotias on Everest.

Norton died at his home, Morestead Grove, Morestead, Winchester, on 3 November 1954, survived by his wife, Joyce.

George Finch was a member of the 1922 British Mount Everest Expedition. He was a proponent of the use of oxygen at high-altitude, a controversial topic at the time.

George Finch was born on 4 August 1888, near Orange, New South Wales, the eldest son of Charles Edward Finch, farmer and land court judge, and his wife, Laura. From an early age he was a keen explorer of the local countryside; it was a view of Orange, from a nearby hill, that inspired his desire to see the world from the tops of mountains. In 1902 the family moved to England as his father thought that a British education would benefit his sons. However, the discipline of public schools was incompatible with his desire to instil in them independence and self-reliance. It was agreed that Laura Finch would oversee the boys' private tuition in Europe, while their father returned to Australia to manage the family property.

In 1905 Finch entered the École de Médecine, Paris, but soon decided the subject was not to his liking. From 1907 he studied physical sciences at Zürich Polytechnic, graduating DTechChem in 1911. While in Switzerland he spent much time climbing in the Alps with his younger brother Maxwell, who was also studying in Zürich. George Finch was regarded locally as a very talented climber.

Finch moved to England in 1912; he worked briefly at the Royal Arsenal but the following year was appointed demonstrator in the newly formed fuel department at Imperial College.

During the First World War he served in France and in Salonika, where he developed an aerial mine to combat enemy spotter aircraft. He was mentioned in dispatches and appointed MBE. While on leave, on 16 June 1915 he married Alicia Gladys but the marriage was short and unhappy, ending in divorce about 1919.

After the war Finch returned to Imperial College. On 28 December 1921 he married Agnes Isobel Johnston. In the same year Finch was appointed a lecturer in electrochemistry. He became professor of applied physical chemistry in 1936. In 1952 he was appointed director of the National Chemical Laboratory in Poona, India. He retired in 1957, returning to England.

Throughout the 1920s Finch was an active mountaineer. Though his Australian unorthodoxy did not go down well with the climbing establishment he was selected for the 1922 British attempt on Everest. He was one of the earliest advocates of the use of oxygen. With George Mallory he reached 27,235 ft, at that time a record altitude, and the following year he was the first to climb the north face of the Dent d'Herens in the Swiss Alps. Yet, despite his achievements, he was excluded from the 1924 Everest team.

In 1929 he founded the Imperial College Mountaineering Club, but following a gastric illness and the death of three club members on the Jungfrau in 1931, he gave up climbing himself. Many years later, in 1959, he was elected president of the Alpine Club.

During his subsequent career Finch received many honours. He was elected FRS in 1938, and awarded the society's Hughes medal in 1944. He was president of the Physical Society in 1947–9 and Guthrie lecturer in 1950. He was appointed commander of the Belgian order of Leopold II in 1938, and made a chevalier of the French Légion d'honneur in 1952. A keen sailor from the time he had given up mountaineering, he moved in his last years to The Grange, East Hanney, Berkshire, where he died on 22 November 1970, survived by his wife.

Edward Strutt was born in 1874, he was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and Innsbruck University. He spent his holidays climbing, and he joined the Alpine Club at the age of 21. He was also a member of Sektion Bernina of the Swiss Alpine Club.

During the Boer War Strutt served with the Royal Scots, 1900-02 (dispatches, Queen’s Medal and four clasps, King’s Medal and two clasps).

He married Florence Nina Hollond in 1905.

In the period 1916-17 he was Field-Marshal Milne’s principal liaison officer with French headquarters at Salonika, and for his services in the war received many decorations and honours (D.S.O., 1917; C.B.E., 1919). In March 1919, as an officer of the Allied Council in Vienna, he escorted the Austrian Imperial Family to safety in Switzerland. In 1920 he became High Commissioner at Danzig.

On the Mount Everest expedition of 1922 he was second in command to General Bruce.

He was editor of the Alpine Journal from 1927 to 1937 and president of the Alpine Club from 1935 to 1938. His last visit to Switzerland was in May 1946, when he addressed a gathering of mountaineers at Zürich.

Brigadier General Charles G. Bruce was the leader of the 1922 and 1924 British Mount Everest Expeditions.

Charles Bruce was born in London on 7 April 1866, the youngest son of Henry Austin Bruce, first Baron Aberdare (1815–1895), politician, and his second wife, Nora Creina Blanche, youngest daughter of Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier. He had three brothers and eight sisters. They lived at Dyffryn, an estate in Glamorgan, and at Queen's Gate, London.

He was educated at Harrow School (1879–80) and Repton School (1881–4), and spent two years in the militia in York, where he was a noted wrestler and runner. He was commissioned in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire light infantry in 1887; and he served briefly with an Indian regiment in Madras and Burma before moving in 1889 to the 5th Gurkha Rifles, the regiment with which he served for most of his career. During the Tirah campaign Bruce cut the Gurkhas' tight-fitting breeches off above the knee, an improvisation that was once said to have introduced shorts into the Indian and British armies. In 1891 Bruce studied the equipment of Italian mountain troops in Turin, and he ran a training course for frontier scouts from 1891 to 1913. He taught staff college instructors in his training methods on the slopes of Snowdonia in 1910.

Bruce travelled widely in the Himalayas and organised porters for several important mountaineering expeditions. In 1907 and 1910 Bruce developed serious proposals for the ascent of Mount Everest that were abandoned for political reasons.

On 12 September 1894 he married Finetta Madeline Julia, daughter of Colonel Sir Edward Fitzgerald Campbell, second baronet; and their only child, a son, died in infancy in the Himalayas.

After being adjutant and second-in-command of the 5th Gurkha Rifles he was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel in May 1913, and in May 1914 he was appointed to command the 6th Gurkha Rifles. He went with them to Egypt for the defence of the Suez Canal at the outbreak of war in 1914. In Gallipoli he commanded the depleted battalions of the 29th Indian Brigade, including the 5th and 6th Gurkhas at Gurkha bluff, for which he was mentioned in dispatches three times and was promoted to Brevet Colonel in November 1915. Severely wounded in the leg, he was evacuated before the withdrawal, and on discharge from hospital was appointed general officer commanding the independent frontier brigade at Bannu, a position he held from 1916 to 1919. He commanded the North Waziristan field force in 1917, and served in the Third Anglo-Afghan War (May 1919). In these operations he was mentioned twice in dispatches. His health deteriorated in the heat, and he was invalided out of the service with the honorary rank of Brigadier-General in 1920.

When Tibet unexpectedly granted permission for a Mount Everest expedition, Bruce could not obtain leave to join the first reconnaissance in 1921, but he was appointed leader of the next expedition in 1922. He was too old to take part in the climbing, but his knowledge of Himalayan languages and military organisation, his cheerfulness and joviality, and the Gurkhas he brought to organise the porters all contributed to the expedition's success. Captain John Geoffrey Bruce (his cousin) and George Finch reached a record elevation of 27,300 ft using oxygen.

In 1924 Bruce was again appointed Everest leader, but contracted malaria on a tiger hunt immediately before the expedition. On the march to Everest he became seriously ill and turned the leadership over to Colonel E. F. Norton. Bruce became the model for later Everest leaders.

After his wife's death in 1932 he wrote his autobiography, Himalayan Wanderer (1934), and moved to 27 St Mary Abbot's Terrace, London, where he died on 12 July 1939.

Climbing sherpa on 1921 Mount Everest Expedition with George Mallory, mentioned by name.

Climbing sherpa on 1921 Mount Everest Expedition with George Mallory, mentioned by name.