Kenneth Mason (geographer)

Kenneth Mason was born at Sutton, Surrey, the son of Ellen Martin (née Turner) and Stanley Engledue Mason, a timber broker.^[3] He was educated first at Homefield Preparatory School, where he was savagely beaten, but regarded such treatment with equanimity, offering the opinion that "If every silly ass that grows a beard and sits down in the London roads to demonstrate had been well and truly beaten when young, he too might have learned sense!".^[4] Mason went on to Cheltenham College, where he excelled in Mathematics and prepared for exams required to enter the army. He was successful and joined the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1905.^[5] Mason married Dorothy Helen Robinson in 1917 and they had two sons and one daughter. Devoted to the Drapers' Company, Mason became its Master in 1949.

Mason was commissioned into the Royal Engineers as a second lieutenant in 1906, then sent to the Royal School of Military Engineering where he learned surveying, mechanics, topographic sketching, musketry, revolver shooting, and ballistics. He was posted to the Survey of India in 1909 and, having sailed for Karachi, helped to pioneer stereoscopic techniques that were to revolutionise cartography using aerial and land-based photogrammetry. 1910-1912 saw him directed by Sir Sidney Burrard to execute precise triangulation in Kashmir that would link up British mapping of India to surveys performed in Russia. The work involved learning climbing techniques, and Mason also taught himself to ski, coordinating large teams of men and pack animals working in hazardous locations. As he recalled in an oral history of life under the British Raj broadcast by BBC Radio:

I never lost a man in any of my survey operations. I had one man who, against my instructions, and against the line that we were taking on a snow mountain with a cornice, went to look over the edge. He was carrying my tiffin basket, and I saw the cornice break off, and I saw him go down, and I went to the edge to look and see what had happened to him. He must have fallen at least a thousand feet or more. Finished up on a snow slide. He then picked himself up, looked for the tiffin basket and collected the things that had fallen out of the tiffin basket and came back to the mountain on his own, all up the right way, the way that we had taken, and delivered my tiffin at about tea time.^[6]

With the outbreak of the First World War, Mason's military service took him to France. He saw action in the Neuve Chapelle sector and Loos before, in January 1916, landing at Basra, Iraq. In action connected to the relief of Kut, he led a night march to the flank of the Dujailah redoubt, and was subsequently awarded the Military Cross. He entered Baghdad as Intelligence Officer with the Black Watch. He was promoted to Brevet-Major and three times mentioned in dispatches.

Following the Armistice, Mason was the first to take motor cars across the Syrian Desert. He then returned to India and, in 1926, began preparing for his most important scientific project, the exploration of the Shaksgam Valley in Xinjiang, China.^[7][8] The valley lies to the north of Baltoro Muztagh, a subrange of the Karakoram mountain range that includes K2, the second highest mountain in the world.

In the context of long-running political rivalry between world powers that became known as the Great Game, over several decades interest of the British Imperial authorities in this unmapped and uninhabited territory had been growing, because it provided access to the Aghil Pass linking China to Ladakh, India.^[9] However, the only westerner to see the valley had been Francis Younghusband, whose book The heart of a continent : a narrative of travels in Manchuria, across the Gobi Desert, through the Himalayas, the Pamirs, and Chitral, 1884-1894^[10] had first inspired Mason as a schoolboy to pursue a career in geography. Now, Younghusband encouraged Mason to follow in his footsteps.

With support from the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), Mason set out from the south, surveying using a photo-theodolite and aiming to reach the Shaksgam Valley from the Karakorum Pass. He explored the Aghil range in the Karakoram fault system and confirmed the source of the Shaksgam river, then planned to follow the valley downstream. However, when several glaciers blocked the valley and had to be bypassed, Mason's expedition ended up in a similar looking valley, parallel and northeast of the true Shaksgam valley. By the time Mason realized the mistake, supplies were running low, and the only option was to retreat so he named the previously unknown valley Zug Shaksgam (“false Shaksgam”). Mason returned to Europe with great quantities of data representing the first attempt to apply stereographic techniques to both small scales and great distances. His results, plotted in Switzerland using what, at the time, was the world's most advanced Stereoplotter^[11] were acclaimed as brilliantly successful, winning him the 1927 RGS Founder's Medal.

In 1928, Mason and Geoffrey Corbett convened a group to co-found The Himalayan Club, "To encourage and assist Himalayan travel and exploration, and to extend knowledge of the Himalaya and adjoining mountain ranges through science, art, literature and sport."^[12][13] Mason edited the club's journal until 1940.