Obituaries
Snowdon aged ten to see an eclipse, and he was still climbing the mountain aged 80. Emlyn remained intensely proud of his Welsh roots even though, having left Wales aged 13 when he moved from John Bright County School in Llandudno and arrived at Dulwich, he never actually lived in Wales again. At the College he was in Spenser, was a Company Sergeant-Major in the CCF (then called the Officer Training Corps) and was a school prefect in his final year. On leaving Dulwich, he qualified as a chartered surveyor with a firm in Liverpool, spending most weekends climbing in North Wales and the Lake District. He went on climbing holidays in the Alps in 1938 and again in 1939, just before the outbreak of WW2. Emlyn joined the Royal Engineers on the outbreak of war, was commissioned in 1940 and was posted to an Engineer field company of the 55th (West Lancashire) Division at the Gibraltar Barracks in Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk. Shortly after arrival in Suffolk, an unexploded bomb was found in a nearby field and he was sent to destroy it. He recalled ‘The Luftwaffe’s low-level bombs had a time-delay fuse which did not arm until the shell hit the ground. We could stop the fuse’s clock using strong magnets or by pouring in brine, safely withdraw the fuse and then steam or burn out the explosive. German intelligence realised this and soon developed the concealed and dangerous “ZUS-40” anti-withdrawal device. My sergeant and I unknowingly removed a faulty one of these new devices which luckily did not detonate.’ He took the faulty new device into the War Office, causing consternation to some staff who said ‘Don’t bring that thing in here!’, but the news was immediately spread by the War Office, and in January 1941, Emlyn was appointed MBE (military) for conspicuous gallantry. By May 1943 he was a Major commanding all five bomb disposal sections in north-west London: ‘In 1944 the V1 rockets started, but they offered no work for us because they all went off!’ Immediately following D-Day, he was posted to France, where his company cleared mines, booby traps and beach obstacles along the Channel coast in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. He took part in the destruction of the colossal underground complex at the fortress of Mimoyecques, built for the secret V3 rockets with 150,000 cubic metres of concrete 12 miles from Boulogne. The site had five 330ft-long shafts inclined at 50 degrees, intended to house 25 V3 super-guns which could have fired 600 finned shells an hour, each weighing more than 200 pounds, into central London, and two of the shafts were almost ready for use. Winston Churchill was advised to destroy the fortress ‘whilst our forces are still in France’, and the Royal Engineers were ordered to do so. He and his company detonated 35 tons of explosives in the shafts to destroy them in early May 1945. An infuriated Charles de Gaulle regarded this as an attack on French sovereignty, but as Emlyn
recalled with a chuckle: ‘Somehow, a message from de Gaulle managed to reach us just a bit too late!’ On being demobbed in April 1946, he resumed his career as a surveyor and joined Miln and Bourne in Birmingham, as a county valuer. He was soon climbing again in the Alps, making notable ascents including the North ridge of the Dent Blanche at 14,318ft, the Matterhorn and the whole of the Moming ridge from the Mountet. In 1950 he joined a commercial partnership of surveyors in London, where on only his second day he was invited by pre-war Everest mountaineer, H W ‘Bill’ Tilman, to join an expedition to explore the Himalayan region around Annapurna II and IV. His new business partners told him he must go or he would never forgive himself, and allowed him to take five months off work. Getting to the Himalayas then involved an arduous journey by boat and train to India and then walking across the border into Nepal. In 1952, John Hunt was preparing for the British Everest expedition, having received a year’s permit for 1953 from the Nepalese government. As they were both members of the Climbers and Alpine Clubs, Hunt knew Emlyn Jones well and selected him for the reserve team, who were to make a second bid to climb Everest in the autumn if the spring attempt failed. Emlyn and the rest of the reserve team had tickets for a ship to India in July and had their equipment and food lists prepared, when he received a phone call on 1st June to inform him of the successful attempt by Hillary and Tenzing and telling him to cancel all travel plans. ‘You will understand that in the general rejoicing that followed the news,’ he wrote, ‘that there were four of us whose joy was slightly dulled, as we had lost our chance of having a go ourselves.’ But he concluded ‘It is just as well we didn’t go because equipment in those days for a post monsoon attempt made the chances pretty slim.’ In 1959, he returned to Nepal to lead a team of six climbers on the British Sola Khumbu expedition, an attempt to climb and undertake cardiovascular research on the strikingly beautiful ‘giant fang’ of Ama Dablam, towering to 22,494ft a few miles south of Everest. The peak had been photographed on the 1953 Everest expedition and was described by John Hunt as seeming ‘utterly inaccessible, outrivalling the most sensationalist aspects of the Matterhorn’ (in Europe). Emlyn’s wife, Louise (née Hazell) had also been due to go on this expedition but was pregnant and remained at home. He returned to the UK in good time for the birth of their daughter. Deciding to attempt the precipitous north-east spur of Ama Dablam, they established Camp 3 at 19,850ft on a route almost devoid of any level ground, setting up one tent no more than one yard from a vertical drop. The expedition ended in tragedy when two of the party, George Fraser and Mike Harris, disappeared near the summit. They were last seen less than a thousand feet from the summit, but clouds came over and they
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