Frank Smythe

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Francis Sydney Smythe, also known as Frank Smythe (6 July 1900 - 27 June 1949) was a British mountaineer, author,^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]} photographer and botanist in the early years of high altitude mountaineering.

Smythe trained as an electrical engineer and worked for brief periods with the Royal Air Force and Kodak before devoting himself to writing and public lecturing. Smythe enjoyed mountaineering, photography, collecting plants, and gardening; he toured as a lecturer; and he wrote a total of twenty seven books.^{[citation needed]}

He was best known as a mountaineer. The highlights of his climbing, summarized below, included first ascents of the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc and of Kamet, and attempts on Kanchenjunga and Mount Everest in the 1930s. It has been stated that the man had a tendency for irascibility, that some of his mountaineering contemporaries said "decreased with altitude"^[16] Smythe's focused approach is well documented, not only through his own writings, but by his contemporaries and later works.

Among his many public lectures, Smythe gave at least several to the Royal Geographical Society, his first being in 1931 titled "Explorations in Garhwal around Kamet", his second in 1947 titled "An Expedition to the Lloyd George Mountains, North-East British Columbia".

Smythe was a prodigious writer and produced many popular books. However his book "The Kangchenjunga Adventure" launched Smythe as a legitimate and respected author.^[17]

During the Second World War he served in the Canadian Rockies as a mountaineer training officer for the Lovat Scouts. He went on to write two books about climbing in the Rockies, Rocky Mountains (1948) and Climbs in the Canadian Rockies (1951). Mount Smythe (10,650 feet) was named in his honour.

In 1949, in Delhi, he was taken ill with food poisoning; then a succession of malaria attacks took their toll and he died on June 27th 1949 two weeks before his 49th birthday.

[edit] Climbing Highlights

• 1927 and 1928 Smythe made the first ascent of the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc.
• 1930 Smythe was a member of the international team (Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Greate Britain), to attempt Kangchenjunga. Under the leadership of Professor Dyrenfurth.
• 1931 Smythe was the leader of the first successful expedition to climb Kamet (7,756 m) in 1931, at the time it was the highest peak yet climbed. During the Kamet expedition Smythe and Holdswordth discovered what is now called the Valley of Flowers^[3] in the Himalaya, now in the state of Uttarakhand, India.
• 1933 Smythe was a member of the Everest expedition lead by Hugh Ruttledge.^[18]
• 1936 Smythe was again a member of Hugh Ruttledge's 2nd Everest Expedition.
• 1938 Smythe was a member of Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman's^[19] expedition to Everest.

[edit] Citations

[edit] References

• Arnold Lunn, ‘Smythe, Francis Sydney (1900–1949)’, rev. A. M. Snodgrass, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Royal Geographical Society—Imaging Everest
• Simon Smythe - Grandson's recollection