HENRY OSMASTON, soldier, forester, geographer, university lecturer, dairy farmer, explorer and mountaineer was a rare phenomenon. A genial polymath, he was also gifted with a single (and occasionally bloody) minded determination to look beyond the next hill and with the necessary physical and mental resilience for this.
Most of Osmaston’s immediate forebears had worked in India, predominantly as forestry officers. There they seemed to specialise in eliminating man-eating tigers, (though his father, for a change, shot a lady-killing bear). Perhaps to even things up, one uncle got eaten by a crocodile. With these genes, it is no surprise that he chose forestry as a career but, by the time he finished at Oxford in 1948, the Raj had ended.
He therefore joined the forestry service in Uganda. There he spent the next 15 years, having first married Anna (aka Mouse) ,who, besides producing four remarkable children, remained his sheet-anchor and ballast over two generations.
Forestry officers are usually tough, never sedentary, often reflective with inquiring minds, busy with the day-to-day, but always with the long-term perspective of the great forests in them. Osmaston fitted these criteria to a T. He worked diligently at the protection and utilisation of Uganda’s forests, so vital to the fragile ecology of tropical Africa. By his own admission he often drove his superiors crazy with his perfectionism: he was prone throughout his life to missed deadlines. But the results were so carefully researched and so well suited to their purpose that he inspired nothing but respect and affection, not only from his colleagues, but also from the indigenous inhabitants.
Apart from his forestry duties, his main interest in Uganda was its mountains, from the cloud-wreathed Ruwenzori range on the Congo border (identified with Ptolemy’s “Mountains of the Moon”) to the volcanoes and sharp Inselbergs on the baking plains above the Great Rift Valley.
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He was first introduced to these by Anna, who was probably a better climber than he was before the children intervened. But Osmaston lost no time in imprinting his own personality on the Mountain Club of Uganda, of which he was President before Uganda’s independence. Although he took part in many climbing and scientific expeditions, both in East Africa and afterwards, as a mountaineer, he was really more of an individualist than an expedition man.
He was prone to set out after lunch on all-day climbs to measure the Rwenzori glaciers, having to be rescued by torchlight, with which he had neglected to provide himself. His first ascent of Philip Peak on Mount Stanley ended on the wrong side of the mountain with nothing to eat except dried spinach. His climbing companion complained, but Osmaston seemed to regard the diversion as normal.
He could also be persistent in pursuit of his goals. He had first tried with Anna to climb the 1,000ft Inselberg of Amiel in the north of Uganda, but having been beaten back by a thunderstorm, they made good use of their time and their daughter Amiel was born nine months later. This, however, was not enough and ten years later he tried the Inselberg again, this time with the same Ruwenzori climbing companion, who had the misfortune to be stung by a scorpion. For Osmaston, however, this was no reason to abandon the climb a second time. His colleague was instructed to cut the end off his thumb and whirl it round until the poison had run out.
He took an impish delight in climbing absurdities, such as the formation of the Uganda Ski Club, whose first “Championships of the Equator” were seriously reported in the international press. The only girl present won the ladies race and the only African (later a distinguished Ugandan High Commissioner in London) the closed Uganda national championship, despite having to be held up by both arms to complete the course.
But the life of a practical colonialist was never enough. After leaving Uganda he pursued his parallel academic vocation, producing, with the same infuriating but effective deliberation, what his Oxford examiners described as the best DPhil thesis they had ever seen. Thus equipped, Osmaston became a geography don at Bristol University and in the course of his career produced more than a hundred papers, ranging from Problems of Quarternary Geomorphology to the Desirability of Owning Three Pairs of Boots. As if this was not enough, he also bought and managed a working dairy farm outside Bristol.
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If the Bristol geography department thought that it had appointed a run-of-the-mill academic, they were, however, due to be disappointed. He led his students on a series of expeditions, including a gorge in Majorca where they were stranded and had to be rescued after three days, and a killing blizzard on Mount Xixabangma in the Himalayas. This expedition and another to the Siachen region of the Karakoram crowned, and ended, Osmaston’s mountaineering.
But they did not end his scientific curiosity and thirst for exploration. His casually asking why a colleague was studying Tibetan during a departmental meeting led to two decades of involvement with Zangskar in Ladakh. Throughout his life, his international colleagues were (albeit seldom against their will) swept along by his enthusiasm. When, at a conference in 1987 in East Germany, he proposed the International Association of Ladakh Studies, they fell meekly into line and later unanimously elected him as its president.
Although apparently physically inexhaustible, Osmaston sometimes pushed himself beyond the limit. On one expedition he had to be strapped to the back of a yak and brought back for three days with no apparent pulse. On another to Ethiopia, near his 80th birthday, he developed a pulmonary embolism.
A week before he died he had completed a marathon revision of his crowning work, the second edition of his Guide to the Ruwenzori, first published in 1972.
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Henry Osmaston, forester, explorer and mountaineer, was born on October 20, 1920. He died on June 27, 2006, aged 85.