Sydney Wignall
FEW things annoyed Sydney Wignall more than the thought that the world's least accessible places were divided up among the great powers. To go where he wanted among the wilds and snows—to cross that pass undetected, to find lakes unmarked on charts, to see what lay on the other side of the hill—was a fever in him. He longed “to make indelible marks on history, or preferably on the blank areas of maps”. Among the various motives that led him to launch the first Welsh Himalayan Expedition, trundling out of Llandudno in 1955 in two Standard Vanguard estate cars painted brightly in the national colours, was the urge to thumb his nose at China and its pretensions to govern large areas of those mountains. The flags he intended to plant on Gurla Mandhata, 25,300 feet high and straddling unmapped Nepal and Tibet, included not only the red dragon of Wales and the blue pennant of the UN, but the skull and crossbones, in honour of swashbuckling and privateering. He also took a loaded pistol.
He had done no Alpine climbing; Snowdonia was the limit of his experience. Nonetheless, in those heady days just after the conquest of Everest, the British thought they could master any mountain with enough pluck and Kendal Mint Cake. And so they might have done, if the Chinese had not insisted they owned the territory. Mr Wignall and his team had no sooner started on the final climb than they were captured by thuggish, quilted soldiers of the PLA and taken off to jail.
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