Bruce, Charles Granville (1866-1939), army officer and mountaineer

Person

Bruce, Charles Granville (1866-1939), army officer and mountaineer

• General Bruce

7 April 1866 - 12 July 1939

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.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography