Exceptional Naval and Polar Awards from the Collection of RC Witte The Mount Everest Expedition 1921 and further exploration


Having been demobilised on his return from North Russia, Wollaston was elected to a six-years’ fellowship at his alma mater, King’s College, Cambridge. And his next major enterprise was the Mount Everest expedition of 1921, led by Lieutenant-Colonel C. K. Howard-Bury. His medical services to members of the expedition and to native Tibetans were highly appreciated, added to which he collected some unique plant specimens and took some of the finest photographs of the entire expedition. In July 1922, he contributed a paper to the Geographical Journal, in addition to contributing a couple of chapters to Mount Everest, The Reconnaissance.


On his return home, Wollaston married Mary, the daughter of Daniel Meinertzhagen, head of the banking house of Frederick Huth, and together they visited the unexplored Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, in Columbia, in 1923, a paper subsequently being published in the Geographical Journal of August 1925. He was awarded the Patron’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and, in 1928, was appointed Honorary Secretary.


Murder


In the same year he was re-elected a fellow at King’s, where he proved to be a highly successful and popular tutor, gifted as he was with a wonderful sense of humour, astonishing insight and broad outlook - ‘he could unlock hearts with a word or a look, and break down everyone’s reserves, except his own’. Thus his tragic death at the hands of a demented undergraduate in June 1930 caused utter horror and indignation, Stanley Baldwin, the University’s Chancellor, speaking of Cambridge ‘mourning a prince among men’. His murderer afterwards turned his gun on himself; sold with copied research, including a poignant article which appeared in the Telegraph Sunday Magazine in October 1977 - ‘Nicholas Wollaston pieces together the jigsaw of his father’s murder one sunny day in the summer of 1930’.


www.dnw.co.uk


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