History

Heather Ellis

This article explores in what ways and to what extent it is possible to talk about ‘higher learning’ and ‘higher education’ in Manchester before 1824, the date formally chosen by the University of Manchester to mark its foundation. It considers diverse sites and institutions, revealing a complex, interconnected web of knowledge spaces – dissenting academies, teaching hospitals, learned societies, independent libraries and individual initiatives – which complicate existing narratives of the development of higher education in the city that usually focus on the origins of the university. In the early nineteenth century, with Manchester rapidly becoming the ‘world’s first industrial city’, we see emerging at the same time a vibrant urban educational landscape, with no parallel in the British Isles at that time. 1 In contrast to England’s ancient universities which remained, for the most part, closed and private entities until the mid-nineteenth century, Manchester’s educational culture was self-consciously diffused, civic and participatory, strongly influenced by the city’s prominent dissenting communities. Excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, Manchester’s Unitarians, in particular, sought to shape the city’s educational culture according to the Enlightenment ideal of polite learning as a public endeavour. While civic participatory models have been foregrounded by historians of knowledge and ideas in recent years, this article considers, for the first time, how such models influenced the history of educational cultures in Manchester.

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
H. S. Jones

This article demonstrates that the ‘extension’ of Owens College, Manchester – the ancestor of the University of Manchester – in 1870–73 represents an important and misunderstood moment in the history of English civic universities. The new model of governance instituted by the extension movement subsequently became normative for the civic universities, and remained largely in place throughout the twentieth century. The reformers set out to devise a model of public accountability appropriate for a public institution as distinct from a private trust. The article centres on the relationship between James Bryce and the lay leaders of the extension movement, and explores the connections between the Owens College reform, the Taunton Commission’s inquiry into the endowed grammar schools, and contests over the control of three major educational foundations in Manchester (Chetham’s Hospital, Manchester Grammar School and Hulme’s Charity).

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
Richard Brook

Following its charter of 1956, the Manchester Municipal College of Technology appointed a new principal, who oversaw the rapid expansion of the campus. The development of a suite of new buildings, on one of the city’s most polluted and derelict tracts, required cooperation between the College, the Victoria University of Manchester, the Manchester Corporation, and a host of central government ministries. This initiative was driven by the recognition that technology and technological education were vital tools in the retention of Britain’s global influence. Manchester was identified for the accelerated growth of higher technological education due to its history of engineering, manufacturing and the development of commercial computing. Founded on archival sources, this article explores the complex relationships between statecraft, Whitehall policy, municipal governance and space. Using the manifestation of urban planning and architecture, it argues that the ‘Warfare State’ had influence beyond overt military programmes, which informed certain civic and municipal local enterprise with objectives other than rearmament, such as education, employment and economic recovery.

Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
Equipping early British Everest expeditions
Sarah Pickman

What can packing lists and receipts tell us about the history of mountaineering on Everest? Sarah Pickman explores this question by examining the archives of the British Mount Everest expeditions of the 1920s. The materials used to outfit the expeditions reveal the social worlds that produced the early Everest climbers and the climbers' expectations for life on the mountain. British Everest climbers brought many items that might seem superfluous to the modern eye – from decadent foods to evening clothes – but that reveal Everest's connections to colonialism, the growth of Western consumer culture and advertising, British beliefs about class and status, and assumptions about expedition labour. What they carried also demonstrates that the idea of 'comfort' was part and parcel of expeditions to even the most extreme environments on earth. By taking seriously the quotidian gear and provisions carried on the 1921, 1922, and 1924 Everest expeditions, this chapter demonstrates that the study of material culture can be a fruitful approach for telling new stories about the world's highest mountain.

in Other Everests
Open Access (free)
Practices, imaginations, and futures
Jolynna Sinanan

Everest has always been mediatised and its appeal as an idea has existed historically in part through technologies of visual cultures. Twenty-first-century tourist experiences and mobile livelihoods also depend on configurations of fixed, dispersed, and mobile digital infrastructures. Drawing on fieldwork in the Solukhumbu region of Nepal with guides, porters, and tourists, Jolynna Sinanan argues that digital practices create gradients of visibility in visual narratives of Everest. The production and circulation of images through digital technologies shape how tourists imagine and experience Everest. At the same time, the digital practices of guides and porters can be strategies for livelihoods and aspirations for recognition and intergenerational mobility that have the potential to create alternative Everest narratives based on regional knowledge and experiences of work. Guides and porters in Everest tourism were formerly Sherpa but are increasingly from Tamang and Rai ethnic groups, which have been historically at the margins of Nepali society. Sinanan interrogates the relationships of power in representing Everest through contemporary digital practices and the tensions between the valorisation of regional knowledge and neocolonial imaginations.

in Other Everests
Open Access (free)
Contemporary theatre’s contribution to decolonising the mountain
Jonathan Pitches

What can theatre offer the cultural record of Everest that has not already been expressed in literature, music, photography, or film? Less visible than these media, the dramatic record of Everest on stage is nevertheless rich, extensive, and long-lived. In this chapter, Jonathan Pitches focuses on the staging of Everest in the 2010s and early 2020s, considering three performances to establish what they reveal about the changing significance of Everest in the contemporary world. Drawing on insights from newly conducted interviews with four artists (Matt Kambic, Carmen Nasr, Gary Winters, and Gregg Whelan), the selection of recent performance work serves as a paradigm of the ways in which Western contemporary theatre has engaged with the history, culture, and geopolitics of the world’s highest mountain. Each of the live acts and performances uses varied means to render Everest’s cultural complexity, contradictory reception, and historical density with a lightness of touch which belies their rigour and import.

in Other Everests
Wanda Rutkiewicz’s ascent of Everest
Agnieszka Irena Kaczmarek

Agnieszka I. Kaczmarek examines expectations of hypermasculinity when Wanda Rutkiewicz broke gender barriers in high-altitude mountaineering as the first Polish mountaineer and first European woman to scale Mount Everest in 1978. The chapter discusses why male team members in the German–French Mount Everest expedition diminished her achievements and held Rutkiewicz to high expectations of hypermasculinity during the climb. Utterly determined to stand on top, Rutkiewicz did exhibit hypermasculine patterns of behaviour while climbing and had similar expectations for Marianne Walter, a German woman climber whom Rutkiewicz criticised for her dependence on her husband and lack of self-reliance. Tough on herself and her companions, Rutkiewicz also commented on her own fear and loneliness. Rutkiewicz oscillated between behaviours and attitudes too often regarded as embodiments of either femininity or masculinity. The chapter presents Rutkiewicz as a woman who embodied a mountaineer with a hybrid identity, not binary, blending attributes of gender as multiple, not just one.

in Other Everests
Occidental escapism in the high Himalaya
Tim Chamberlain

Tim Chamberlain examines the allure which the Himalaya has long exerted upon Western adventurers, both in fiction and in real life. Drawing upon contemporary interest in the early British expeditions to climb Everest, this chapter shows how two novels blurred the line between imagination and authenticity, playing upon themes of escape and adventure. In response, travelogues fed back into Western notions concerning the remoteness of the Himalaya. Chamberlain demonstrates how networks of mobility for the Indigenous guides supporting Western travellers spanned the full extent of the Himalayan massif. Though portrayed as a distant and inaccessible region for Westerners, this interconnected landscape was, in fact, already well-known and consciously mapped by local polities. This network of knowledgeable and experienced Indigenes was essential for the travellers who wished to fulfil their aspirations ‘to step off the map’ and ‘escape modern civilisation’. Their search for a notionally ‘unexplored’ Shangri-La thereby created an abiding leitmotif for Himalayan exploration in the Western imagination.

in Other Everests
Open Access (free)
The long life of Miyo Lang Sangma
Ruth Gamble

In the 1850s, Andrew Waugh, head of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, named the highest peak in the central Himalayas after his mentor, George Everest. As Ruth Gamble describes in this chapter, Waugh’s decision obscured the mountain’s centuries-long association with Chomolungma, also known as Miyo Langsangma, a deity revered by the Tibetans and Sherpas who lived near it. By tracing this goddess’s history back through the centuries, Gamble places the goddess in the wider contexts of Himalayan sacred geography, demonstrating the role she and her sisters, the Tseringma Chenga (Five Sisters of Long Life), played in the region’s cultural history and the life stories of two of the Himalaya’s most famous religious figures, Guru Rinpoche (semi-mythical, eighth century) and Milarepa (eleventh century). By tracing this history, Gamble shows that the British claims that there were no local names for the mountain are incorrect, and the Tibetan and Sherpa communities have continued to venerate the goddess despite commercial imperatives to refer to it as Everest and Chinese and Nepali attempts to recast the mountain as nationalist symbols.

in Other Everests
Open Access (free)
One mountain, many worlds
Peter H. Hansen
,
Paul Gilchrist
, and
Jonathan Westaway

Other Everests attempts to clear a space to engage the many worlds that share the same mountain, the multiple ways of being-in-the world, ‘a world where many worlds fit’. This introductory chapter highlights some of these ‘worlds’ and overlapping themes in Everest’s many names, nations, genders, tourists, climates, and stories. Throughout this volume, the international and interdisciplinary array of contributors reactivate old and new archives, engage with multimedia and live performances, and participate in historical or ethnographic fieldwork. They shed light on the different ways of being in relationship with the mountain and how these are navigated by climbers and high-altitude workers alike, from ritual ceremonies to the mountain’s immovable goddess, through to contemporary digital practices as global adventure tourists and guides curate their Everest experiences. The authors in the volume contribute to a plurality of new histories and perspectives.

in Other Everests