Donald Sinclair and his wife Beatrice were the proprietors of the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay. Cleese and the other Monty Python stars stayed there in 1970.
Something is missing in the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel â George. Thatâs the name of a shrunken head from Peru, which I remember seeing in the Smoke Room a decade ago. Itâs just as well itâs gone â such a grisly trophy had surely outlived its shock value â but itâs also a surprise. To quote the Talking Heads song, the PyG is a heaven âwhere nothing/ nothing ever happensâ. Yet something has happened and someoneâs head has disappeared.Â
This creeper-smothered hotel fits snug as a plug in the socket of Snowdonia. The head was brought here by George Band, and he was brought here by an endeavour that crowned the new Elizabethan age. He was part of the expedition on which Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay completed the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, on May 29 1953. In the preceding months the climbers had based themselves at the PyG and trained in the mountains. Four days after Hillary and Tenzing stood higher than anyone had before, t