Younghusband
Ratings2
Average rating4
15
Ratings2
Average rating4
Soldier, explorer, mystic, guru, and spy, Francis Younghusband began his colonial career as a military adventurer and became a radical visionary who preached free love to his followers. Patrick French’s award-winning biography traces the unpredictable life of the maverick with the “damned rum name,” who single-handedly led the 190 British invasion of Tibet, discovered a new route from China to India, organized the first expeditions up Mount Everest and attempted to start a new world religion. Following in Younghusband’s footsteps, from Calcutta to the snows of the Himalayas, French pieces together the story of a man who embodies all the romance and folly of Britain’s lost imperial dream.
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This is an incredibly thorough biography of Sir Francis Younghusband - almost reaching a point of being too thorough for me. It turned into quite slow read - which is not what I expected.
Without peer in the achievements he made for the British army, Indian Civil Service and as an explorer in his own right, he is a fine example of mental and physical ability. Small of stature, and as Partrick French discloses in this book, being thoroughly bizarre in some of his thoughts, was no bar to his overtaking of obstacles.
His expedition through the uncharted Gobi desert undertaken in much hardship, and his headstrong taking of Tibet are probably his most active achievements, but some of his activities post military are also worth mention. It is a confident man who can change his option based on newly learned fact - his wholehearted support of Indian Independence having spent a good many years of his life in the British army in the control of British India, and pushing out into Central Asia and Tibet to secure and increase her borders.
Younghusband was also elected the youngest member of the Royal Geographical Society and received the society's 1890 Patron's Gold Medal. He was later the president of the Royal Geographical Society from 1919 to 1922, and Chairman of the Mount Everest Committee which set up various expeditions, including the ill fated Mallory expedition in 1924.
However, hand in hand with his achievements, Patrick French also describes in great detail the odd sexual repression Younghusband felt, having been brought up devout Christian. This impacted nearly all his relationships with women, including a relationship with his sister (hinted at being incestuous), and various women he came to fixate on (some of which became lovers, others asexual relationships). He was in later life to become open to a multitude of religions, in fact founding the World Congress of Faiths, and wrote a large number of terrible sounding books on spirituality. It was this part of the biography I could have survived with far less of. His terribly infantile sounding love letters - almost enough to stop me reading.
Nevertheless - a full biography it is, and without doubt his achievements outweigh his personal issues, which really only became public knowledge due to the archiving of his personal paperwork.
3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.
