大象传媒

Introduction

The following account of the ascent of Kilimanjaro consists of extracts taken from a fascinating detailed narrative in a letter written by Peggy Fletcher's husband Capt William Horace Fletcher to his parents in Sheffield dated August 1943.
Horace was born in Sheffield on the 19th May 1915, was educated at King Edward the Seventh School Sheffield and Corpus Christi College Oxford where he took First Class Honours in Classics in 1936 and graduated in 1938.
After graduation Horace entered the Ministry of Labour but in March 1940 he volunteered for the army and joined the Yorkshire and Lancashire regiment as a private. He was soon promoted to lance-corporal and corporal but in due course trained as an officer in an O.C.T.U. in Malvern. He volunteered for service in Africa to which he voyaged in mid-1942. He was seconded to the 19th Bn Kings African Rifles stationed in Kenya: his Base Details Camp was in Nairobi.He was posted to Madagascar where his fluent French gained him the post of official Medical Interpreter. Early in 1943 he was reassigned to the 13th Bn K.A.R. and it was while on leave as a lieutenant from this battalion that he climbed Kilimanjaro with two other subalterns and a sergeant.

Kilimanjaro is the highest peak in Africa; there are two peaks on the mountain, Mawenzi and Kibo, the higher. Kibo is an extinct volcano; hence Kibo is shaped in the form of a crater; one point on the crater being Gillman's Point, another Kaiser Wilhelm's Spitze(Point), the highest point on the mountain. The mountain which was secured by a British Company in 1884, was ceded to Germany in 1886: the first ascent was made by Dr Hans Meyer in 1889; the mountain remained German territory until Tanganyika was mandated to Britain in 1919.

"The Ascent"

The anabasis began on a Tuesday morning in late August 1943. The party - Horace, A.,N.,a sergeant, a guide and a train of porters, left the Kibo Hotel at the foot of Kilimanjaro and walked up an "earth track through the cultivated land". The Wachagga cultivate the slopes of Kilimanjaro; "most African tribes just cultivate a little patch(of land) around their villages.....but the Wachagga had the whole slope of the hill under cultivation".
After an hour or so the party struck the forest:"Pretty thick forest it was too, but not so thick as one imagines a tropical forest to be" "By this time we were in the clouds, in the middle of a rainy drizzle"
Where the woods gave way to grassy uplands, Horace passed several lots of elephant dung. It was about the shape and size of a Christmas cake, he recalled " That was the only sign of life we saw, until finally, after crossing the belt of coarse grass, very like Derbyshire moorlands crossed by a narrow sheeptrack " he reached the first hut, the Bismarck-Hutte.
The porters brought the beds and prepared a meal; the climbers " arranged (their wet clothes and boots in front of the kitchen fire" - then slept till dinner time.

After breakfast and a 9-45 start we plunged straight into thick forest of the true jungle pattern.....thick undergrowth and creepers everywhere, crowding in on the narrow, one-man track" But soon the party emerged on to grassy uplands carved,to Horace's delight, into patches of a grey kind of heather which reminded him of Derbyshire. What most struck Horace, however," were the patches of white flowers which we kept coming across" On reflection they seemed to be edelweiss. After a couple of hours the party came to a stream - " like the Derbyshire streams which fall down Kinder" - Horace had a drink ( the first time he had dared to drink from an African watercourse) - " fine, icy water". Shortly afterwards the party reached Peter's Hut.

"Today for about ten minutes early on,the mist shifted and we saw a bit of Mawenzi,rocky ribs piercing through snow, before the mist closed down again"....."Kilimanjaro has two peaks - Mawenzi, the lower one, and Kibo, the higher. One goes past Mawenzi on the way to Kibo." Most of the time, these peaks are shrouded in clouds - perhaps that was the reason, Horace speculated, why the local town was called Moshi " smoke".

"The next day we were off by five to ten..." They went north at first, over a ridge or two and finally up a long glen leading up the flank of Mawenzi. At the head of the glen " we crossed another ridge, then dropped down into the plain from which rises Kibo."
Having crossed the shoulder of Mawenzi, they dropped into a plain covered with fairly small rocks,mere stones:" all in one dull colour of brown" It was " an uninteresting plain, two or three miles across, with parts of it thin shingle, almost like sand, and difficult going" But at the far end rose Kilimanjaro " an imposing sight; the slope was a network of browns and purples...and the top covered with snow".
Halfway across, they met a party on the return journey. "Never again!" They talked with two girls at the end of the party; one of them was almost too tired to speak, and this was their feeling about the climb. As they came to the end of the plain and began to climb again, two members of the party fell behind. Horace did not risk stopping, and hummed to himself the "Sick Call" to keep up his spirits. " All this time I'd been going up a regular, though very slight, ascent. At last I came to a long ridge.....only about three steps up; but when I got to the top, I just had to stop and get my breath"(The height now was about 15000 or 16000 feet) Round the next shoulder of rock he came in sight of Kibo Hut - only 300 or 400 yards away. But those 300 or 400 yards could only be achieved taking 100 steps at a time, then resting; he arrived at the Hut at 12-32 p.m.

Before Horace,N. and A. went to bed in the Kibo Hut - they had to be up on the following morning at 1-30, they took a look at the summit of Mawenzi. It reminded Horace of St Michael's Mount,le Mont St Michel. N.agreed. Horace was also reminded of " Gibb's Ivory Castles: like a fairy castle, with turrets and spires and precipitous approaches-------"Kibo on the other hand was just a snow-capped hill looking comparatively inoffensive "like a winter scene near Hope" How wrong he was!
For the final climb they needed special gear - in addition to a vest - the first time Horace had worn one in Africa - an army murduff shirt, a pair of shorts,battle-dress complete, brown boots and Fox's puttees - a "fur-cap(North West Mounted Police fashion) fur scarf, fur gloves and green sun glasses " were needed and these were produced by the guide, a "wizened, ragged fellow" who wrapped a thermos flask of coffee in a towel for them to drink at the top, to Horace's surprise.

The first lap was a kind of windy river of this deep shaly stuff between ridges of rock until they " came to a wide level stretch of the same stuff, which seemed to reach to the top of the mountain. "It went up like the roof of a house - at 45 degrees. It took Horace three hours to cross it.
They left the hut at 3 or just after: they were on the house roof by 4-30 to 5; and Horace reached the top around 7-30. Taking ever more frequent rests, Horace reached the top - Gillman's Point. It was "terrible going on this thick sandy gravel"
"After a rest I used to start off pretty fresh and kept going well for 20 paces or more: then I'd begin to pant and it would just get worse till the end of my ration of psces when I used to dig the old alpenstock in and lean forward nearly on my knees...."
The sun rose, but Horace did not enjoy the scenery: he was afraid of losing his foothold on the slope. Eventually he joined A on Gillman's Point.
Thanks to the foresight of the guide, who had prepared a cold colllation, A. and Horace enjoyed a sandwich or two and a cup of coffee on Gillman's Point. " The scenery was pretty good - clouds in front of us as far as we could see, except for the slope below us....to the left was a rift in the lip of the crater, heaped with drifted snow. To the right we had no view, except of the nearby rocks. Behind was the crater------scattered in a haphazard way with large and small drifts of snow".
Horace estimated that the crater was about a mile across------the other side didn't look much higher than Gillman's Point and Horace could not distinguish Kaiser Wilhelm's Spitze (The highest point on the mountain and agreed " in a carefree manner" to attempt to reach it.
They set off round the lip moving to the left but Horace soon found they were not going to have an easy fairly level walk to the top. The lip of the crater was a " rugged craggy affair split into little peaks and headlands" They skirted these with short climbs and descents.

Till then they had kept to the side of the ridge that faced the crater: now they climbed on to its top and saw a gradual slope covered with what Horace took to be peat bog: the path was strewn with granite boulders which reminded Horace of the Derbyshire moors. A. went on ahead with the guide, and Horace dragged himself along bit by bit - 40 or so paces and then a rest.

When he " eventually reached Kaiser Wilhelm's Spitze " he just lay on his back and rested" while A. wrote up their achievement in the log-book in the tin box at the top and took some photographs. One of these survives, and shows Horace at full stretch relaxing after his climb.

He would never make such a climb again, he vowed in his letter, but enclosed a sprig od edelweiss as a memento to his parents.

(Summarised from Horace's own account of the "ascent" by William Leslie Fletcher, his eldest son, who followed Horace to Corpus Christi College Oxford to study classics, ancient history and philosophy and took a First in German at the University of London)

Conclusion.

Captain Fletcher saw active service in Burma in 1944 and 1945 when he commanded a company of East African troops from Uganda. On one occasion,knowing he would soon be engaged in hand to hand fighting and feeling understandably apprehensive, he went to the medical tent, where his old schoolfriend Dr V.G.S.Damms was M.O.,and - in order not to alarm his men - said to him in Latin "Timor mortis turbat me" ("The fear of death worries me").Thereupon Dr Damms produced a glass of whisky and said " Drink this Horace" Having drunk it, Horace said " I'll have another, please" to which Verdun replied "No, Horace, I want you to come out alive". They remained lifelong friends: Horace was Verdun's daughter's godfather, and Verdun was Horace's daughter's godfather. The incident with Dr Damms probably took place in 1944: Horace was wounded in action with the Japanese, when a grenade was thrown in front of him and he was only saved by the gallantry of one of his askaris who threw himself between Horace and the blast. Horace was wounded, however, recuperated from his wounds in India and met his future wife Winifred Marjorie Tench at Ranchi in 1945. They were introduced to one another by another K.A.R.officer, who also remained a lifelong friend, Capt. Geoff Elcoat. Horace was preparing to return to active service in Burma with his men in 1945 when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and that country surrendered. Horace and Marjorie ("Peggy") were married on 12th December 1945, when Horace was demobbed and returned to civilian life as a civil servant in the Home office.

Note 1:
On reading his father's account of the "Ascent" Colin Fletcher,Horace's third son and three teaching colleagues at the school where he works have vowed to make an expedition to Kilimanjaro and climb the mountain.

Note 2:
Peggy Fletcher's war stories can be found at A5864358 "From Much Wenlock to India" (My War as a Queen Alexandra Nurse 1942-45 SEAC) & A5883816 "After the Turmoil of War".

Story: This story has been submitted to he People's War site by Muriel Palmer (volunteer) Age Concern Shropshire Telford & Wrekin on behalf of WM FLETCHER (author) widow of WH FLETCHER; and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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