I took some photos, including one of a banner in support of saving my local hospital back in Gosport in the UK. I also had a photo with Cos and Pasang Dawa before we started our descent. We had arrived at 9.26 a.m. and we left at 9.45 a.m. The weather at the summit was fine, but there was a disturbing amount of cloud bubbling up below us and I was again reminded of what had happened in 1996.
Katja and Dave Rodney had reached the summit not long after Pasang Dawa and me, and on the descent, just before we reached the Hillary Step, we passed Chris Brown and Martin Doyle. I had a little epic at the Hillary Step, which I decided to descend using my figure-of-8 descender, which I dropped while I was trying to attach it to a rope, but an Italian hitch through my karabiner worked just as well.
It is not always easy to recognise climbers, given we are wearing full down suits with our faces hidden behind oxygen masks, and I didn’t realise at the time that the climber I passed at the bottom of the Hillary Step was Mike Matthews.
Not long after passing Mike I met Nick Kekus, who was sitting down in the snow. I thought initially that he was a Sherpa until a voice asked, ‘Is that you Mike?’ In my view Nick was doing a first-class job in leading his team that day; he could have easily become the second British climber to twice reach the summit, but such records were of no interest to Nick. Instead he positioned himself to ensure climbers were appropriately supported by other guides and Sherpas.
We changed oxygen cylinders again at the South Summit, but it became apparent very quickly that yet again mine wasn’t working. There was little point in trying to sort it out and I told Pasang Dawa to keep heading down and I would follow. What shocked me was just how quickly I became very tired as we descended the south-east ridge. I soon became absolutely exhausted and I kept on sitting down. Fortunately, it was still very early in the day, about noon, and I had plenty of time to reach the South Col in daylight. I could only imagine how the climbers who had summited in 1996 had felt when they started to run out of oxygen while they descended in a storm and with limited visibility, having reached the summit late in the afternoon.
Not far below the Balcony there was a sudden whoosh and an oxygen cylinder flew past me at head height and almost hit Ken Noguchi, who was just below me. There is no doubt that either of us would have been killed if it had hit us. I was annoyed that someone was clumsy enough further up the mountain to kick it loose without giving a warning to those below but, to be fair, we were by this time far below others on the route and I probably wouldn’t have heard a warning even if one had been shouted.
As I descended to the South Col, I didn’t appreciate in my exhausted state just how much the weather had deteriorated. We had noticed the bubbling clouds when we had looked down from the summit, but I hadn’t thought at all about the weather since then – I was solely focused on getting my body, which was becoming difficult to move, down to the sanctuary of Camp 4. I only realised just how bad conditions were when I returned home and saw a photograph I had taken just after the near miss incident with the oxygen cylinder, which showed that developing cloud had severely restricted the visibility as we approached our top camp.
At last we reached the South Col at 2.30 p.m. and crawled into our tent, where we lay in an exhausted state while Pemba helped us out of our climbing equipment, before we spent the rest of the afternoon resting and taking in fluids.
As it got dark we heard a metallic clanging sound outside our tent and Pasang Dawa said that he thought some climbers had still not made it back to camp and the noise being made was to guide them in to the South Col.
We had some old oxygen cylinders which Pemba had found while we had been making our summit attempt, and, although they were only partially full, they at least worked and we used them as we dozed fitfully through the night. As we lay there after sunrise the following morning, trying to get our bodies to move to prepare ourselves to depart, Nick Kekus arrived at our tent. Before Nick spoke I knew he was going to tell me that something bad had happened. My immediate thought was that he had heard on his radio some terrible news to tell me about my children in the UK, which was in retrospect a completely irrational thought, but I can still clearly recall that feeling of dread.
Mike Matthews, the charming and intelligent young man who I had got to know well during the expedition, and who I had shared a brew with when I reached the South Col less than forty-eight hours before, had not made it back to the camp the night before.
I felt devastated and my immediate thoughts were for his parents. He was almost certainly dead and they would have to go through the ordeal that all parents fear: to be told that their child has died.
The previous day Mike had reached the summit at around noon, together with the guide Mike Smith who had just become the second British climber to reach the summit more than once. There were no Sherpas with them and they then started to descend and had reached a point below the Hillary Step by 1 p.m., and the South Summit by 2 p.m., which should still have given them plenty of daylight in which to descend. They then headed down, with Mike Smith going ahead to free the ropes, in what must have been rapidly worsening weather, considering what we were experiencing lower down at the same time.
At some stage during the descent to the Balcony, the two climbers lost contact with each other and, although Mike Smith waited at the Balcony, Mike Matthews was never seen again. Already frostbitten, Mike Smith was eventually forced to move on down to Camp 4.
I felt numb. Death on high mountains is certainly not rare, but the comparison between Mike and my children led me straightaway to ponder whether or not climbing Everest was worth the cost of a young life.
Later that day, Jon Tinker, who was by then back in the UK and had been given the news from Base Camp, phoned the Matthews family to tell them that Mike had been missing for twenty hours.
I later made my way off the South Col in what was still very gloomy weather. I overtook Martin Doyle on my way to the Geneva Spur and we silently looked at each other, our expressions showing the grief we felt. At the Yellow Band I lost my spare figure-of-8 descender, which was an odd repetition of the incident at the Hillary Step the day before. Further down, as I approached Camp 3, the weather turned particularly nasty and it was a slow, miserable journey to reach Camp 2.
I reached Camp 2 at 12.30 p.m., but before any of those at camp could start to congratulate me I told them about what I knew of Mike’s disappearance the day before. There was nothing to feel triumphant about; a young life had been lost. The weather at Camp 2 was awful that afternoon and I stayed in my small tent with my own thoughts, while other team members worked to stop the dining tent from being blown away.
It normally takes a couple of days to descend from Camp 4 to Base Camp after a summit bid, and often longer in the sort of weather we were experiencing, but I simply wanted to get down and off the mountain. I left Camp 2 on Saturday 15 May and trudged through heavy snow down the Western Cwm to Camp 1. It was far more dangerous than I had previously experienced in the cwm, with crevasses hidden by the snow, and slippery, unstable ladders bridging across the known ones.
The Icefall was even worse, and although I had started down from Camp 2 fairly late, I was the first person that day to descend through the Icefall until some Sherpas overtook me in the middle section. Over the years I had been through the Icefall on about thirty occasions, but this was by far the worst trip. The snow had changed everything.
Perhaps the need to focus during the journey down had calmed my spirit. I still felt sad, but the heavy grief which I had experienced higher on the mountain had lifted somewhat by the time I reached Base Camp. One of the first to congratulate me was Pertemba Sherpa, which meant a lot. He presented me with the first of many white scarves which I would collect on the way back to Kathmandu. I was keen to phone the news of my summit success through to my children in the UK but, of course, such is the modern world: they had already read about it on the internet. That night I had a solemn dinner with Nick, Lauri and Chris Brown and, after going to bed at 8 p.m., I had my first reasonable night of sleep in several days.
For those left on the mountain there was still an issue about oxygen and there were no further successful summits until 26 May when eleven climbers reached the top.
A week after climbing Everest I was at Lukla waiting for a flight back to Kathmandu, desperate to get home to see my family and then to see what other challenges life would have waiting for me.
On arrival back in the UK it was important for me to see my children. I went first to see my son, Tom, followed by my daughter Nicole at the final speech day at her school in Cranbrook in Kent. Then, on 4 June, I travelled with my son Dan from Durham University, where he was studying, to the home of Chris Brown, who had reached the summit of Everest shortly after I did on 13 May, thus completing his quest to climb the seven summits. Also at this mini Everest reunion was Jon Tinker, the first Briton to climb the mountain from the Tibetan side, and Nick Kekus, who reached the summit in 1997.
When I arrived, Chris immediately asked me if I had heard the news. In a sport where deaths occur regularly, I knew straight away that someone I knew had died. But when Chris showed me a newspaper clipping I was surprised and shocked. Cos Niarchos had died at his London home on 31 May, eighteen days after reaching the summit just before me. Apparently he had suffered a heart attack.
It did not seem possible that someone who could reach the summit of Everest could die so soon afterwards in such a way. We speculated that Cos’s rapid descent, aided by the change of pressure during the helicopter flight he used to immediately fly back to Kathmandu after reaching Base Camp, may have brought on the attack, but none of us had heard of such a thing happening before.
The funeral took place in Switzerland the following week and his team members Jon, Nick and Chris were among the mourners. His family had placed a photograph of Cos on the summit of Everest on his coffin, and they asked Nick to identify the climber next to him. When Nick told them that it was me and I was going to be at my farmhouse in Normandy the following week, they passed a message to me, inviting me to meet at their stud farm, which coincidentally turned out to be only a short drive from my French house. It immediately became clear when I visited his family that Cos and I lived very different lifestyles when his extraordinarily wealthy sister, having heard that my house wasn’t far away, asked me if I also bred horses. I was, however, happy to chat about being with Cos when he had achieved his ambition to become the first Greek climber to reach the summit of Everest.
On 7 July an inquest into Cos’s death was held in London and next day the newspapers recorded that he had died from an enormous cocaine overdose – he had taken several times the amount of cocaine normally associated with drug-related deaths. The pathologist at the inquest also reported that Cos had a degree of heart disease, which could have caused his death at any time, although there had been no heart attack.
Cos was born Constantine Niarchos, the fourth son of the ‘Golden Greek’ Stavros Niarchos, the billionaire shipping rival of Aristotle Onassis. During his time at Harrow, one of Britain’s top public schools, Cos received £500 per week pocket money, which earned him the newspaper title of ‘Britain’s richest schoolboy’. He was expelled from the school for possession of drugs and the same happened at his next school, Gordonstoun, when a detective guarding fellow pupil Prince Andrew discovered drugs in a hollow chair leg.
Through his twenties, Cos’s drug abuse fuelled the newspaper gossip columns. He even had a spell in the Betty Ford clinic. But it was not until Cos discovered a passion for climbing that his drug problems appeared to be behind him. He climbed Mont Blanc and then graduated to Cho Oyu and on to Everest. I had the pleasure of knowing Cos the climber during two expeditions. He was a very pleasant and likeable companion. As a friend who also climbed with him said to me, ‘what a daft way for such a nice bloke to die.’
On the day after our reunion at Chris Brown’s house, Mike Matthew’s parents met with Jon Tinker and other members of the OTT expedition in Sheffield. It was always going to be a difficult meeting and it could well have been the end of the issue, but no mention was made of the problems with the oxygen. It still seemed that at this stage Mike’s family, although clearly grieving, seemed to accept that his was just another death on the world’s highest mountain.
It all changed some two months after the expedition ended, when the Matthews family received a phone call from John Crellin, who had been a member of the OTT expedition, saying that there had been a problem with oxygen on the expedition. Subsequently, the Canadians, Denis Brown and David Rodney, also contacted the Matthews family to make allegations about the oxygen systems which Henry Todd had provided, confirming that not all were the Poisk system which the OTT brochure promised would be used on Everest.
The Matthews family started to ask questions and they were not happy with the answers.
I was first contacted twenty months later in January 2001 by lawyers representing the Matthews family, who asked if I would be willing to be interviewed. I agreed, given that I felt that anything I said would absolve Jon Tinker and Mike Smith from any blame and also given that in my view the death had been a sad result of the dangers of climbing at over 8,000 metres. Whether or not the oxygen issue had in some way led to Mike’s death was possible, but it was very unlikely that it could be proved.
At a second meeting with the lawyers, I mentioned that I would be willing to search for Mike’s body while I was back on Everest in April of that year. I also pointed out that if the body hadn’t been seen by expeditions on Everest before the pre-monsoon season in 2001, it would be very unlikely that we would find it and, most importantly, I wasn’t prepared under any circumstances to risk lives to recover Mike’s body.
I later met with the Matthews family at their home in London. It was a strange meeting because I sensed that the Matthews family saw me as potentially being a spy, given that some of the accused were close friends of mine. I simply saw myself as an honest broker who had had a very high opinion of their son and, as a father, I wanted to help them to achieve some closure.
Given the nature of the death, various people involved had clearly taken legal advice and lawyers had advised them not to say too much to the family. This had created an understandable impression that the mountaineers involved were working together to cover up issues. I am confident that this was not the case, but more openness and transparency, particularly during the meeting at the OTT office in June 1999, may well have brought the issues surrounding Mike’s death to an earlier conclusion.
Because Martin Doyle and Nick Kekus were professional mountain guides, their professional governing body, the British Mountain Guides, carried out their own investigation and their professional standards committee concluded that there was no case to answer. This also didn’t satisfy Mike’s father who felt that this was simply a case of professionals protecting fellow professionals.
In effect, two camps were forming, on one side was the Matthews family, supported by disgruntled OTT clients, and on the other side the greater climbing community, who saw Mike’s death simply as a consequence of the dangers of climbing at high altitude. The issue was not going to go away, as over a period of time the disgruntled clients of OTT, and others who had crossed paths with Henry Todd, used Mike’s death as a way of getting back at a number of people for various issues which they had had in 1999 or before.
Eventually the Matthews family felt that they had no alternative but to turn to the law to get answers to the questions they felt were still unanswered, but it would take a number of years before the case reached court.