Fearless on Everest
The Quest for Sandy Irvine
By Julie Summers
Sandy Irvine
Published by Iffley Press, Oxford, 2011
ISBN 9780956479518
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
© 2000 Julie Summers
The moral right of Julie Summers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988
All rights reserved.
Other titles by Julie Summers
The Colonel of Tamarkan, Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai
(Simon & Schuster, London 2005)
Remembered: a history of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission
(Merrell, London 2007)
Stranger in the House: women’s stories of men returning from the Second World War
(Simon & Schuster, London 2005)
Remembering Fromelles
(Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 2010)
www.juliesummers.co.uk
For Sandy
Foreword
Family Tree
Prologue
A Family Legend
No Soap in the Bath
Into the Blue
The Fight with Everest
Walking on Metaphorical Air
Bound for Darjeeling: The Tittle Tattle of Travel
Under the Finest Possible Auspices: The Trek Across Tibet
Trust in God and Keep Your Powder Dry
Going Strong for the Top
In The Shadow of The Peak
Epilogue
APPENDIX 1
APPENDIX 2
Postscript 2001
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Brave heart at peace – youth’s splendour scarce begun
Far above earth encompassed by the sky.
Thy joy to mount, the goal was all but won.
God and the stars alone could see thee die.
Thou and thy comrades scaled the untrodden steep
Where none had ever ventured yet to climb
Wrapt in heroic dreams lie both asleep
Their souls still struggling past the bounds of time
Till God’s loud clarion rends the latest morn
Sleep on! We mourn not for ‘tis God knows best
Then rise to greet the glad eternal dawn
Flooding with flame the peaks of Everest
F. T. Prior, 1924
It seems to me nothing short of extraordinary that the interest in Sandy’s Irvine’s life has not diminished. When I wrote the original book in 2000 I thought that the ‘and Irvine’ of the Mallory and Irvine mystery would soon be consigned within the pages of a book to the dusty shelves of old shops and that interest would fade. How wrong can one be? In August 2011 an announcement hit the press of a new expedition to go and find his body, which an American amateur historian believes he has located somewhere high up on the mountain. I think that means that some six or even eight expeditions have been launched since Mallory’s frozen body was found on Mount Everest in 1999.
When asked, as I am every time this story reappears, whether I want Sandy’s body found I say no. Politely. Actually, I want to go on record as being more emphatic than that. I want to say loudly: ‘No, leave him alone. His life and death are part of the rich and enduring mystery of Mount Everest. He was a beautiful young man who died in the flush of youth. I have no desire to see images of his blackened, bird pecked corpse lying exposed on the mountain.’ Sensationalising his memory by such means would lessen the memory of his extraordinary life and his and Mallory’s final climb. Whether they made it to the summit or not is of little consequence. Their heroic achievement is something to respect and celebrate.
This book, the first full length biography I wrote, is a very personal portrait of Sandy Irvine. It is not without its flaws but I stand by it as an exploration of his brief but action-packed life.
Julie Summers
Oxford, October 2011
Everest Camp IV, 23,500 feet Monday 2 June 1924
air temperature 32° F, sun temperature 120° F
Sandy Irvine sat outside his tent, shoulders hunched, his hat pulled down over his ears, his scarf shielding his badly sunburned face. His skin had been severely blistered by the sun, and the wind on the North Col had so cracked his lips that drinking and eating had become painful and unpleasant. It was 10 a.m. and he had been up for five hours. There were no other climbers in camp. George Mallory and Geoffrey Bruce had set off two days earlier in an endeavour to climb the final 5500 feet to Everest’s summit. That morning at 6 a.m. Col. Edward Felix Norton and Howard Somervell had left to make their own attempt to scale the summit of the world’s highest mountain.
Sandy had cooked breakfast for them, a ‘very cold and disagreeable job’ he had confided in his diary. ‘Thank God my profession is not a cook!’. He had padded around in the snow, filling Thermos flasks with liquid, helping the climbers to check they had everything needed for two days above the North Col. He was left breathless by every exertion as he struggled to breathe in the oxygen-depleted air. As Norton and Somervell left he felt a great wave of frustration well up inside him. For six weeks he had lived with the belief that he would be making that final assault on Everest’s peak, but six days earlier, after a second retreat from the mountain, the plans had had to be radically revised.
In the absence of sufficient fit porters to carry loads above the North Col, Norton, expedition leader, had announced that there would not be an attempt on the summit using oxygen. The medical officer, Hingston, had examined all the men and declared Geoffrey Bruce the fittest and Sandy second, but with lack of mountaineering experience between them they could not make up a climbing party. Thus Mallory, as climbing leader, had been forced to make the decision that Sandy should be dropped in favour of Bruce, the fitter man. It was a bitter disappointment and one Sandy found hard to bear. Two days later he was fulfilling the role of support delegated to him and Noel Odell by Norton, the first time this task had been officially designated. ‘Feel very fit tonight,’ he had written, ‘I wish I was in the first party instead of a bloody reserve.’ As Norton and Somervell disappeared out of sight he saw the goal he had set himself, his own private challenge, slip from his grasp. There was no getting away from it, he was devastated.
Watching Karmi the cook fiddling with the primus stove he reflected on the last few weeks when he had graduated from youngest member on the expedition, ‘our experiment’ as General Charles Bruce had called him, to one of the four key climbers who, it was planned, would be spared a great deal of the hard work in a bid to keep them fit for their assault on the summit. So many things had conspired against them. With a great number of the porters badly affected by the altitude, there had been problems getting the higher camps stocked, but it was principally the weather that had defeated them. They had had to contend with subzero temperatures in the camps where in the 1922 expedition climbers and porters had basked in the sun and drunk fresh water from the little streams that ran down the glacier. This year everything was frozen solid. Twice they had been forced by atrocious weather to retreat to the lower camps. Still they were undaunted but the number of fit men had drastically diminished. Now two oxygen-less attempts were being made above him. All his hard work on that infernal apparatus had gone to waste, he rued, and he was left with the feeling that, for the very first time in his life, he was facing a major personal defeat.
Looking up again he was suddenly aware of movement above camp. Dorjay Pasang, one of Mallory’s climbing party, was on his way down. Suffering
badly from the altitude he had been unable to go on beyond Camp V so Bruce had sent him back down with a note to say the others were intending to press on without him. Sandy reached for the field glasses and above Pasang he could clearly make out the figures of Mallory and Bruce. He was surprised. They were returning. He had certainly not expected to see them so soon. A hundred thoughts raced through his mind as he set two primus stoves going for the returning party. He grabbed a rope and set off to meet them above the Col.
‘George was very tired after a very windy night,’ he recorded in his diary that evening, ‘and Geoff had strained his heart. The porters had been unable to stand the wind and even Camp V was short of what they wanted in altitude.’
As he escorted the exhausted men back into camp he wondered whether Norton and Somervell would be faring better above them. He served out quantities of hot tea and soup, helped the climbers to take off their boots and to get inside their tents. He could sense that Bruce was depressed at the outcome, whereas Mallory seemed preoccupied and Sandy found it impossible to read his thoughts.
Just before retiring, Mallory turned to him: there would be another attempt. The two of them would climb with oxygen in three days time, providing the weather held. Sandy should go down to Camp III to prepare the oxygen apparatus and he would join him the following day after a rest. Sandy was delighted. He could scarcely believe that luck had turned again, this time in his favour. At that moment Odell, John Hazard and a small group of porters appeared from the lower camp and Sandy bounded over to Odell, his old friend and mentor, and told with evident boyish delight of the third attempt, the chance that he had little thought would now come his way. Odell recalled later that Sandy ‘though through youth without the same intensity of mountain spell that was upon Mallory, yet was every bit, if not more, obsessed to go “all out”’.
With renewed energy and determination Sandy helped Hazard escort Geoffrey Bruce and all spare porters down to Camp III where they arrived at 4:30 p.m. He immediately set to work on two oxygen apparatus, checking that flow meters, valves and mouthpieces were working. He cannibalised a third set to take a spare mouth piece and found some spare valves which he carefully packed into his zip pockets ‘just in case’. He was determined that it would not be the oxygen apparatus which gave out, as it had been for Geoffrey Bruce and George Ingle Finch on the 1922 expedition. He’d already written to his mother from the trek: ‘It will be a great triumph if my impromptu ox.ap. gets to the top, I hope it does…’. As he worked away in his tent, strewn as usual with all manner of tools, bits of frames, spare nuts and bolts he felt a huge surge of thrill that he would, after all, have a crack at the summit as he had so desperately hoped. He was feeling fitter than he had for many days and was confident that, despite his excruciatingly burned face, he would perform well. The four days he had spent at the North Col had convinced him that he was fully acclimatized. By the time he turned in for the night he had two oxygen sets almost ready.
That night he got very little sleep. The sunburn that had been giving him trouble for weeks had been greatly exacerbated by the scorching sun at Camp IV. ‘A most unpleasant night when everything on earth seemed to rub against my face and each time it was touched bits of burnt and dry skin came off which made me nearly scream with pain’ he wrote in his diary the following morning. Sandy knew that he would have to cope with the excruciating discomfort of taking the oxygen mask off his face which brought with it, each time, a whole new layer of skin. He could cope with pain, however, he knew that from his rowing career.
‘Restful morning in camp,’ Sandy wrote that day. He observed one man, a porter presumably, coming down from above the North Col into Camp IV and then a party leave the Col upwards. It was Odell and Hazard, the two scientists, going to V, Odell in search of fossils and Hazard for air and exercise. Mallory arrived in camp mid- morning and outside Sandy’s tent they sat discussing their summit assault. Mallory had now been above the North Col on two occasions and knew better than anyone what to expect. At lunchtime Mallory left Sandy fiddling with the oxygen carriers and went over to Bruce who was concerned with rallying porters. Eight were willing to carry food, bedding and oxygen cylinders to Camp VI.
After an early tiffin on 4 June, Mallory and Sandy set off up to Camp IV. Sandy was pleased with his performance and wrote in his diary: ‘We took exactly 3 hrs going up which included about ½ hr at the dump selecting and testing oxygen cylinders. I breathed oxygen all the last half of the way and found that it slowed breathing down at least three times (using 1 ½ litre/min). George and I both arrived at the camp very surprisingly fresh.’ At Camp IV they were greeted with the news that Hazard had failed to see any trace of Norton and Somervell. Mallory took the glasses from him and thought he could spot tracks about 700 feet below the summit. ‘I hope they’ve got to the top,’ Sandy wrote that afternoon in his diary ‘but by God I’d like to have a whack at it myself’. By evening Norton and Somervell were back in camp. They had reached a height of 28,000 feet – 1000 feet short of the summit – but had been forced to turn around as time was growing short and each was nearing the end of his physical strength. Odell and Hazard were also at IV, preparing to send Sandy and Mallory off the next morning. What a change in fortunes in two days. Now it was Sandy’s opportunity. As he turned in on the night of 5 June in the tiny tent he shared with Odell he spoke again of his delight at the challenge he was about to face. Just before he went to sleep he wrote his final diary entry: ‘My face is perfect agony. Have prepared 2 oxygen apparatus for our start tomorrow morning.’
The next morning after a breakfast of fried sardines, biscuits and hot chocolate, served to them in their tent by Odell and Hazard, Sandy and George Mallory left the North Col at 8:40 a.m. with eight porters.
‘The party moved off in silence as we bid them adieu,’ Odell wrote ‘and they were soon lost to view amidst the broken ice-masses that concealed from view the actual saddle of the North Col and the lower part of the North Ridge of the mountain.’
Sandy Irvine and George Leigh Mallory were never seen alive again.
One cannot imagine Sandy content to float placidly in some quiet back-water, he was the sort that must struggle against the current and, if need be, go down foaming in full body over the precipice.
Jack Peterson to W. F. Irvine, 22 June 1924
I have no recollection of how old I was when my father first told me the story of Uncle Sandy. I must have been about five or six and I dimly remember wondering what he would have been like, this mysterious uncle who disappeared on the upper slopes of the world’s highest mountain. I knew his brothers and sister fairly well, and to me they were all inconceivably old and immeasurably tall. They were all very kind to me but I was a little daunted by their dry wit and humour, which, as I was only a child, went slightly over my head. My grandmother Evelyn, Sandy’s only sister, was a beautiful woman and I loved her very much. She was kind and gentle, with a lovely smile and a soft, almost musical voice. She was very fond of her grandchildren and I, as the eldest granddaughter, felt a certain responsibility to behave like a mini-grown-up in her presence. She used to let me go into her raspberry nets and pick (and eat) as many raspberries as I wanted. They were the best raspberries I have ever tasted, pale pink and sweet. I never asked her about Uncle Sandy; she was not the kind of person a young child would quiz. I don’t know whether my father had asked me not to question her, but I do remember reading the poem written in his memory which was framed and illuminated above the drinks cabinet in my grandparents’ house.
When I was six we went on a camping holiday to North Wales. My father had purchased a piece of land, not six miles from Bala, from his paternal grandfather, Willie Irvine, Sandy’s father, and it was called Creini. Willie bought the land for its remoteness and beauty and when he died my father took it over because he could not bear to see it go out of the family. My mother was pregnant with my younger brother and we older three children had a marvellous time by the lake, paddling and swimming and exploring the ol
d boat house below a rocky outcrop which we christened Mount Everest. We thought it extraordinarily high and very dangerous. We tried to climb it from the south side, but my parents knew a safer route down a grassy slope from the north side and then up to the summit and we frequently had picnics on top, looking down onto the lake. Over the years the rock has shrunk, as childhood memories so often do. In reality it is only a fifty foot rock and grass pitch of no particular severity (in climbing terms). But it is still Mount Everest and we still picnic on it.
Uncle Sandy was a family legend. His story has been passed down through the generations but I knew little more about him at thirty-six than I had done at six. When I myself was expecting our third son, in California, my husband Chris said it was time to find a name for the unborn child, whom we knew to be a boy. We had settled on Johnston as a middle name – it was a name from my husband’s family and we thought it was suitable for a third son. The problem with the first name was solved when Chris, who was lying in the bath two days before the birth, announced that we would have to come up with a name that would suit a fair haired boy as we seemed to give birth predominantly to blonde, blue-eyed boys. He suggested we should call him Sandy after my great-uncle and I thought it a splendid idea. Our Sandy was born in September 1997 in Stanford, California.
My father, I think, was delighted but was amused that we had assumed the name to be a shortening for Alexander whereas in Uncle Sandy’s case it was a shortening for Andrew. Soon after the birth I was walking with a friend in Palo Alto when we came upon a book shop specializing in mountaineering books. In the window was a large, glossy volume Everest: The History of the Himalayan Giant. I suggested we should go into the shop to have a look and, sure enough, the book contained, amongst many other sumptuous pictures, a black and white snapshot of Uncle Sandy and George Mallory, taken by Noel Odell on 6 June 1924, leaving Camp IV on their way to the summit of Mount Everest. I bought the book. There was more information here than I had known as a child, but the basic story was the same. After that I read The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine by Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel. Here was a book with some real information about Uncle Sandy and now I was determined to find out more. I wrote to Audrey and she wrote back, almost by return, giving me what information she could and pointing out that I should talk to my cousin Julia Irvine, daughter of Sandy’s younger brother Alec. He, it transpired, had written a brief history of Sandy’s early life which was published in a book by Herbert Carr entitled The Irvine Diaries. Alec had also become the keeper of the majority of the Sandy Irvine memorabilia. A large, black deed box contained letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings, copies of the Alpine Journal and British Ski Year Book from 1924, all of which referred to Sandy.
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