Using autobiographies, biographies and expedition accounts, this chapter discusses the accommodation of a tradition of English national hero alongside other types of male adventurer whose motivations and ambitions in climbing at high-altitude point to different traditions and subcultural experiences. However, their selection and social construction as heroic leaders came at the expense of others who deviated from norms and expectations of the aristo-military imperial adventurer. It will argue that in both cases qualities of manliness were intrinsic to their selection as leaders. The historical and ideological relationship between national enterprise and normative (‘heroic’) types of masculinity will be interrogated through a study of Hunt, whose leadership led to success for Tenzing and Hillary on the first ascent of Everest in 1953, and Bonington, who was responsible for the first British ascent of Everest, by its South West Face, in 1975.

This paper explores the notion of heroic leadership in a comparison of two men who were at the forefront of national and imperial success in the mountains of the Himalaya – Colonel John Hunt and Chris Bonington. In turn, these other principles impose limits on the nature of and possibilities for counter-hegemonic struggle. It suggests that in order to understand, rather than merely judge, this strategy, it is important to see masculinity not as a completely discrete field of struggle, but as one of many mutually constitutive structuring principles underpinning a social order that is arranged not merely along patriarchal lines, but along lines of nation and class. It argues that despite rejecting many aspects of this norm, objectors nonetheless articulated their counter-hegemonic struggle in starkly militarised language, presenting themselves as heroes sacrificing their lives for the greater good. In a time when ‘if one was born a male, one became a soldier’, what does it mean to be a man who refuses to fight? This article uses Connell’s framework of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to locate conscientious objectors’ male identities as a suppressed, subaltern manliness that deviated from the dominant norm of martial masculinity.

Masculinity in the 1920s