William Walter McLean (b. May 7th, 1899) was the son of the Rev. William McLean, some time vicar of St. Giles’, Bodiam, Kent. William Walter and his brother attended Repton School, William taking a keen interest in sport, and both went on to become doctors after service during WWI, William eventually establishing a medical practice in the West End. William spent the summer of 1919 climbing with Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877-1959), the Cambridge economist, and made an ascent of the Rochers route over Mont Blanc with Pigou and another party that included George Mallory and his climbing partner Harold Porter. The earliest of the photograph albums contains small snapshots of the ascent, including images of Pigou and Mallory that are duplicated in Harold Porter’s diaries of the period (held by the Alpine Club). Mallory himself mentioned the climb in his lecture to the Alpine Club in May 1920 (‘Our 1919 Journey’, AJ 1920, in which McLean is mentioned by name).
The McLean family had a strong interest in mission work - the Rev. McLean had been a C.M.S. missionary in India - and in the early 1930s William McLean was appointed to a position with the English Mission to the Jews in Jerusalem. Before he had taken up the position, he also received an invitation to join the new Everest expedition under Hugh Ruttledge, as a second medical officer (the chief officer being Raymond Greene, brother of the novelist Graham Greene). McLean joined the expedition, on which he made extensive use of both his medical knowledge and climbing experience: he is mentioned several times in Ruttledge’s official account of the expedition (Everest 1933), as also in the diary of expedition member C. G. Crawford (published in the Alpine Iournal, 1934). The archive includes letters written to his family from Base Camp and camps 1 to III, describing the journey to Everest, and his experiences while there. The photograph albums record his departure from Europe, arrival in India, and passage to Base Camp; there are also high altitude images from each of the camps up to Camp IV, presumably all taken by McLean himself.
Following his return from the expedition, McLean commenced medical work in the Jerusalem mission. During this time he met Dr. Susan Shanks Crosley of the American Mission Hospital, Deir-ez-Zor, Syria; they were married at St. Giles’, Bodiam, in England, the service being officiated by McLean’s father, the vicar. The couple returned to Palestine, and the later material includes an album of images taken during a tour of the Holy Land, and a book presented to them in December 1944 “on their departure from Palestine, after twelve years of devoted service in the medical and missionary cause of the Holy Land”, with the names of their friends and fellow workers. A geological specimen in the archive nicely encompasses McLean’s twin interests: A piece of rock collected during the Everest expedition lettered “EVEREST 1933” to the plinth, itself stone taken from the Dead Sea - thereby connecting the highest and lowest land regions on the planet, as recorded by the notes to the base: “Everest stone +29,028ft 1933 Dead Sea Stone -1,286ft” .

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