Marine Commando who fought insurgents in Aden and later became a formidable mountaineer
Mike Banks thrived on adventure. A marine commando specialising in cliff assault who battled with communist insurgents in the Radfan mountains of Aden and a mountaineer who made significant crossings and climbs in Greenland and the Himalayas, he was also a writer with a sensitive pen who expressed a profound love of wild places and the companionship he found exploring them.
Banks was a captain in the Royal Marines when, in 1958, he and Tom Patey, the renowned mountaineering doctor from Ullapool, climbed Rakaposhi (25,550ft; 7,788m) at the western end of the Karakoram range. It was a demanding first ascent of a summit that had already rebuffed half a dozen attempts, one of them by Banks, who had been turned back by storm, avalanche, frostbite and snow blindness. He went on to lead a joint services expedition to Mount McKinley (20,322ft; 6,194m), the highest summit in North America, which he reached in a daring lightweight push with two other Service climbers.
In an active retirement and appointed MBE, Banks led Saga-sponsored trekking expeditions to the Himalayas and became the oldest man, aged 77, to climb the Old Man of Hoy, a towering sea stack off the Orkney Islands. A foray into politics as the Liberal candidate for Plymouth Devonport in 1974, against David (now Lord) Owen, was rather less successful and he never returned to the hustings.
Michael Edward Borg was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire, in 1922, and spent his childhood in Malta where his father worked as an engineer. He returned to Wiltshire when he was 14 and finished secondary education before deciding on a career in the Royal Marines.
An independently minded man, he changed his name to Banks by deed poll and was commissioned in 1941. After two postings in battleships that showed little sign of heading for battle he volunteered for a more active service and joined 42 Commando just before the landing on the Arakan coast of Burma, an experience that introduced him to the cruel realities of war against the Japanese.
At the end of hostilities, Banks joined the Commando Cliff Assault Wing based on the rocky tip of Cornwall which led him to the wider world of mountaineering and the summits of the Alps. A beginners course run by the Alpine Club took him to the Bernese Alps which he and a friend extended with a swift ascent of the Matterhorn. Royal Marine fitness and a natural aptitude for the sport allowed him quickly to build an impressive list of alpine routes. Banks later commanded the cliff assault unit in the 1950s after its relocation to the Commando School at Bickleigh, near Plymouth.
The Aden conflict saw his most active military engagement when his mountaineering skills were called upon in the harsh desert landscape of the Radfan around Jebel Haqla. On one of several epic encounters, Banks led his X Company in a night-time attack on the 1,600ft heavily defended ridge and, in the action against dissidents in the Wadi Dhubsan, he was ordered to take his company down some 3,000ft of rock and scree, again under cover of darkness, and advance on the narrow wadi floor.
Dawn revealed a growing army of dissidents on the high ground who opened fire on Banks’s marines, inflicting a number of serious casualties. The rebels also succeeded in shooting down an Army helicopter that had ignored urgent signals to turn away. Banks survived to remember the Radfan war as a hard, hand-to-hand struggle.
He also took part in a two-year British North Greenland Expedition, a joint military-civilian effort making a scientific study around Dronning Louise Land. As mechanical transport officer, his task was to take four Weasel tractors from the coast at Dronning Maud Land on a long transit to the expedition base camp.
Driving the tractors across heavily crevassed landscape proved more difficult than he expected. When his lead machine plunged into a hole in the ice, to be left dangling on a rope attached to the following tractor, fuel leaked into the cab threatening an explosion and his co-driver was trapped beneath a mound of fallen baggage. Both men escaped uninjured. The expedition did useful scientific work and Banks successfully climbed a number of unexplored summits.
His work earned him the Polar Medal with Arctic clasp. Banks retired from the Royal Marines in 1968 with the rank of major.
His love of challenging adventure, which he described in a number of notable books with brisk military titles, was undiminished and clearly described in this passage: “From a summit you can only go down. You must go down, weary and content, back into your everyday life, and so with me. Yet I keep my summit happiness and Arctic stillness within me to treasure. As I trudge a city street back in my everyday life, I watch people bustling about me seeing no further than the width of the road. I dream for a moment: in my ears echoes the howl of a husky as he points his muzzle to the frosty stars, in my eyes are the mountain distances, the moving clouds and the sparkle of dawn light on virgin snow. This has been my journey and I cannot say where it will end. The one sure thing is that it has been a good journey and I do not regret a single step of it.”
His wife, Pat, predeceased him. There were no children.
Mike Banks, MBE, Royal Marines commando, mountaineer and author, was born on December 22, 1922. He died on February 9, 2013, aged 90
'Бій відлунав. Жовто-сині знамена затріпотіли на станції знов'
