Gently to the Summit

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It was a preposterous business.

As Gently remembered it, it began in the silly season, in August, with a small filler paragraph in the Evening Standard. There was no way of telling that it would go any further and certainly not that it would ever make the national front page. It read as follows: COMIN ’ ROUND THE MOUNTAINS The annual meeting of the Everest Club — the surviving members of the 1937 expedition — was last night interrupted by an unidentified hoaxer. Forcing his way into the Asterbury Hotel, where the meeting was held, he announced himself as Reginald Kincaid, the climber who lost his life on Everest. He insisted that he had climbed Everest but had come down on the wrong side, and had spent the intervening years in the hands of Tibetan bandits. Club Secretary Dick Overton described the story as ‘fabulous’. He added: ‘There is no possibility whatever that Kincaid could have survived.’

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