Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  I had quite intended to live on the 4 ½ shillings I have left till you come down at the bumpers but while coaching a boat 2 days ago on Mr Kendall’s bicycle I had the misfortune to nearly run over a child on the tow path & in my attempt to stop smashed the back brake. It must have been in a very fickle condition but the fact remains I broke it & it was up to me to get it repaired at once. It was a beastly bowden coir brake & without a workshop I could not do it myself. I got it done & they charged 4/6. I argued with them for about 10 minutes but could make no impression (it ought have cost 1/6 at the outside). The net result was that I had to borrow 4/0 & was left with ½ which won’t even pay for this letter to be posted.

  The letter goes on in extraordinary detail about his financial commitments for the few weeks before he sees Lilian again. He needed money to tip the Shrewsbury boatmen, anxious to be on the right side of them as he was to be Captain of Boats in 1921, he owed Kitch money from Henley and required journey and pocket money for the camp he was going on immediately after the end of term. ‘I expect you will be absolutely fogged by this letter’, he concluded, ‘I am pretty fogged with all these arrangements & preparations for the Bumpers, tubbing 3 boats & doing the “Higher Certificate” at the same time. If I have not brain-fever already I will have soon.’ This is vintage Sandy. His energy and enthusiasm for everything he does just bursts out of the letter. But there is also, tucked away amongst the humour and chaos of his thoughts, a genuine kindness and generosity towards others. He is concerned to acknowledge the very hard work that the boatmen have done for the VIII throughout the summer, both in preparation for Henley and also on the house boats. He also takes the trouble to tip the House John. Then there are the little digs at his mother which he cannot resist: ‘Talking of Henley I have my accounts to give of it & will leave it to your judgement what you think ought to come out of my pocket.’ He goes on to list in great detail the expenditure he had incurred at Henley, including repair of a broken canoe paddle. He explains this as well. ‘The last named Broken canoe paddle was a most unfortunate accident and came from trying to race another canoe on Sunday afternoon before the races. As you see after paying Kitch & the Mission boats I had £2 one for July & one for Henley & also you will see that those went on unfortunate accident & 2 prs white socks & a very little frivolity which is quite natural after 6 weeks of strict training & hard work.’ A little frivolity! Lilian knew all about Sandy’s little frivolities and probably disapproved of them but there was nothing she could do now to rein him in. Henley is physically draining for the oarsman but there is plenty of opportunity to let off steam after the racing and I strongly suspect that Sandy was a leading light in the post-race frivolities.

  The hospitality was not one way, however, and soon after Sandy had begun at Shrewsbury he was invited to spend time during the holidays at the Summers family home at Cornist Hall in North Wales with Dick. Cornist Hall is not one of North Wales’s most beautiful houses but what it lacks in architectural merit it makes up for in size and position. It was not a modest house. At Cornist there was a tennis court, a swimming pool, a beautiful walled rose garden (which still exists) and extensive grounds leading down towards Flint with views over the Dee estuary.

  What Cornist also boasted were garages with gleaming cars, tenderly cared for by the chauffeur, Dick and HS. Cars have been an inevitable cause of friction, delight and disaster in our family ever since they were invented. HS had been an early owner of a motor car and in 1907 had been spoken to firmly by a Chester magistrate for driving down Bridge Street without due care and attention. He had accidentally put his foot on the accelerator rather than the brake pedal, ploughing into a flock of sheep and killing several of them. He was advised thereafter to leave the driving to his chauffeur. Dick’s elder brother Geoffrey was also a keen motorist and a great deal more accomplished than his father. He had taught Dick to drive at the age of seven. It was at Cornist that Sandy learned to drive a car and under Geoffrey and Dick’s supervision became a very able driver.

  Dick’s interest in cars extended beyond those he drove himself and he fed Sandy endless information about the merits or otherwise of certain models that the Irvine family was considering acquiring. The family did not own a car until 1916 when they took delivery of a second-hand chocolate-coloured 1914 Briton which was immediately nick-named the Choccy Bus. When Hugh joined the RAF in 1917, the duty of chief motor mechanic fell to Sandy, Willie being entirely impractical in matters mechanical. The Choccy Bus was desperately unreliable and by 1919 the frequent breakdowns and near-disasters, such as the steering habitually sticking at full left lock, ceased to be accepted as either funny or inevitable. Sandy was deputed to scour the motoring journals for a newer and more reliable marque. This he did with his usual dedication and Dick was more than helpful in supplying the literature. They pored over every publication they could find, checking prices and delivery times, comparing performance and the availability of spare parts. Sandy wrote long and confusing letters home to his parents, blinding them with science and enthusing about the relative attributes of different makes. He wrote to his father in November 1919 ‘I have just heard that Padmore has just got his new Austin, which was ordered as far as I can gather a few weeks before ours. If there is no chance of getting one for years how would it be to try & get a Varley-Woods at £660 or an Angus-Sanderson at £450?’ He had convinced himself, nevertheless, that the Austin was the vehicle for them and ultimately advised his father that ‘the Austin will be well worth waiting for if there is any chance of getting it before the summer holidays’.

  As it happened the Austin never materialised and Willie purchased an Essex in addition to the Standard that he had bought for Lilian. The family were now the proud owners of two cars and were about to acquire a third. This elicited further correspondence from Sandy on the subject of motoring. To his mother he wrote: ‘I’m glad you like your Standard & I’m sure you will like the Swift much more when it comes. It’s much comfier on bad roads & will last for ever as is shown by Geoffrey Summers’s which is 6 years old & as good as new, perfectly silent & wonderfully easy to control.’

  Dick had introduced Sandy to Harry Ham, chief car mechanic in the Summers’ passenger car garage at the Works, in about 1918 and Sandy became a regular visitor to his workshop, asking him endless questions and tinkering with anything Harry would let him get his hands on. Such was the respect that the mechanic had for Sandy’s practical skills that when the Essex needed, in Sandy’s opinion at least, substantial work doing on it to cure the rattles and bangs, he helped Sandy rebuild the car almost completely in the summer of 1920. The pistons were replaced, the bearings scraped – a job requiring considerable skill - and together they cut out the rivets and bolted the chassis with a view to curing the ‘rock’. When the bolting was finished, Sandy picked up one end of the car and shook it vigorously to see that he had eliminated the rattles. Not the action of a weakling. He said that the engine was so improved that when some road-hog in a bull-nosed Morris cut in on him near Queensferry, Sandy chased him in reverse, overtook him and delivered a long lecture on selfish driving. After that the Essex continued to give good service to the family ending up in a Welsh scrapyard in 1926. It apparently did not occur to Sandy to send through notice of his modifications to the manufacturers as to how he and Mr Ham had solved the squeaks and bumps in the car. This was in contrast to Dick who was constantly haranguing car makers with his ideas and suggestions, mostly on the subject of petrol consumption about which he was decidedly fanatical.

  Another attraction for Sandy at Cornist was HS’s second wife, Marjory. After his wife had died in 1906 HS had immersed himself in business but in his private life he was lonely. In 1916, on a visit to London a doctor friend told him over a nightcap in the Liberal Club of a pretty young girl who was a patient of his, currently recovering from an appendix operation. Her name was Marjory Agnes Standish Thomson, a chorus girl with a small part in a revival of the musical Charley’s Aunt. He suggested HS pay her a visit and
from the moment he saw her he was completely captivated. She was very pretty, with dark hair, bright blue eyes and a charming, sunny personality. After only three visits he proposed to her and she agreed to marry him. When she told her friend and fellow chorus girl, Elsa Trepess about HS, Marjory enthused ‘He’s very rich, I’ll marry him, yes, I’ll marry him and we’ll have a marvellous time. But don’t tell the nurses!’ Harry Summers was middle-aged, squat and balding and could not have been her ideal choice, but he was rich and kind and Marjory envisaged a marvellous life of pleasure and luxury. They were married in January 1917, shortly after his fifty-second birthday, and at 19 she became mistress of Cornist Hall. The marriage was doomed from the start: Marjory was far closer in age to HS’s children. ‘So far as I was concerned,’ Dick wrote later, ‘I was always very good friends with Marjory, and as I grew up I found her quite amusing, but of course she had no idea of looking after a person of my age.’

  Initially Marjory rather enjoyed her new life. She entered Cornist like a whirlwind, startling the staff right, left and centre with her extravagant ways and her sometimes impulsive and impatient manner. HS tolerated her independence since her vivacious nature brought the light and laughter into his life that had been lacking. But before long, life at Cornist began to pall and Marjory was bored. She turned her attentions to the young officers at the nearby army camp at Kinmel and RAF Sealand, close to the steel works. She used to invite them to dine and party at Cornist, entertaining on a flamboyant scale and making serious inroads into the wine cellar. Marjory took immense pleasure in teaching her guests to dance to the latest tunes and many a young man learned to foxtrot at Cornist. She also liked the blues and introduced Dick’s friends, as well as the officers, to the delights of dancing the blues with her, but her pièce de résistance was the twirl. Cornist was alive with the sounds of dancing and laughter late into the night, such a dramatic contrast to the house when HS was at home.

  For Sandy, Marjory added an exotic sparkle to his visits to Cornist. She introduced him to the kind of entertainment that would have been frowned upon by his parents. She took him and Dick to the theatre in Liverpool and London, they drove out in the Rolls Royce for extravagant picnics, and of course she taught him to dance. Dick was always glad to have Sandy to accompany him when Marjory was entertaining and Sandy was always quick to admit how much his friendship with Dick had enriched his own life: ‘I never in my life will be able to repay you for all your kindness & the good times you have given me.’ He wrote later, ‘Just think for one moment what I would be like if I had never met you – probably never seen Town at all, certainly no Theatre – no workshop – no fun with cars – no Brooklands – no priceless holidays in the Lakes.’ And no Marjory.

  This was all far from life in Park Road South where Sandy and Evelyn, on return from their boarding schools, found their younger brothers growing up rapidly. They were tolerated by Evelyn and Sandy but if they stepped out of line and interfered with the older pair there could be trouble. All three younger brothers recalled being made by Sandy to stand on a pile of sticks or a plank over bricks while Sandy ignited home-made gunpowder that he had placed beneath. They were always eager to be involved in Sandy’s test so readily agreed to participate. There would be a blinding flash and whichever brother was in for the treatment would be fired off the pile. The ‘experiment’, as he and Evelyn called it, could be construed as a kind of initiation. The youngest, Tur, actually sustained a perforated ear drum as a result of the ‘experiment’.

  Sandy rowed again at Henley in 1921 where the school VIII achieved a great but masked achievement. They became only the second school ever to break the seven minute barrier, the first having been Eton in 1911, and this rowing as the losing crew against Pembroke College, Cambridge in the semi-final of the Ladies Plate. Pembroke had already set a very fast time the day before against Trinity College, Oxford, winning by the tiny margin of six feet and had set a new course record for the Ladies’ of 6 minutes 55 seconds. They matched this time in their race against Shrewsbury which they won by three-quarters of a length which means that Shrewsbury would have crossed the finishing line in 6.57 or 6.58 minutes. A stupendous effort and an extraordinary achievement. ‘Think for a moment what it must have felt like at the Mile’, Richard Owen wrote to me, ‘rowing 40, just down, boys against men, and everything to go for and nothing to lose against the crew that had already broken the course record the day before!’ There was another hidden consolation for Sandy: his crew had again showed itself faster than his brother’s Magdalen crew, which ultimately won the Grand that year, when they returned a time of 7.15 half an hour earlier. Kitch, who always kept coaching notes, recorded that Sandy and Smith had ‘out-rowed’ the other oarsmen: as stern pair they had put up a rhythm and a pace that the others could not match. Both Sandy and Smith had the experience of knowing that they could push themselves beyond the limit and come through, as they had proven in 1919 and went on to prove in 1923 as adversaries.

  Sandy’s last year at Shrewsbury was a very busy one. As head of Moore’s House and Captain of Boats he had his work cut out for him. In addition to this he was meant to be studying for his Higher Certificate, which he had to pass in order to earn a place at Oxford. The tenor of his term as Head of House was unusual in the context of the public school traditions of the time. Rather than pushing the new boys around and issuing punishments he preferred to encourage them and not only if they were good at sport. Of one of his quieter contemporaries who had not excelled in any field at the school he wrote in the House fasti, or record book: ‘Quiet and persevering, he knew his own mind and made a good monitor.’ Of his friend Ian Bruce, who took over responsibility for the house rowing after Sandy had left he wrote: ‘Captaincy passes to I. R. Bruce who we feel sure will leave no stone unturned or water unchurned in his efforts to put Moores at the Head of the River’ (a reference to the fiercely contested inter-house boat races which took place each summer).

  Sandy had great patience with the boys in the years below him and showed them acts of kindness and generosity which one does not always associate with a nineteen-year- old school boy. When I was going through the letters of condolence I found one from a woman called Muriel Roberts whose son had been a first year at Shrewsbury when Sandy was Head of House. Hesketh, the boy, had been dangerously ill in a nursing home in Shrewsbury and Sandy had made the effort to call and enquire about him daily.

  When Hesketh was to have visitors Sandy used to come & sit with him, & cheer him up, & really helped him get better. Then sweetest of all, Sandy found out that Hesketh had no appetite, & little parcels kept arriving anonymously. – it was Sandy. Said he thought Hesketh might be tempted to eat. His sweetness used often to bring tear to my eyes. Then it was so lovely as Sandy was a preposter & school idol, and my boy a new nonentity! He told me the many little yarns in which you & your husband figured, & Evelyn appeared to be the apple of his eye. He brought her to Criccieth to see us. Sandy was everything that a young man should be, & if my boys grow up to be half as fine a character as he was - & is – I shall not have brought them up in vain.

  Sandy’s friendly and generous nature, which this letter shows, was a key part of his character. He had inherited his father’s warm and unselfish attitude towards people but he was never a do-gooder and he loved daring escapades. A famous or, rather, infamous story stems from this period. The Alington Hall at the schools was used as a gymnasium. There was a very narrow ledge below a metal beam, well below the height of the gallery in the hall. On the beam was inscribed ‘Thou shalt not be found out – 11th commandment’. Sandy persuaded a younger boy to swing him on a rope until he was able to land on the ledge and standing on it, precariously balanced, he wrote on the wall ‘A C Irvine Capt. March 29th 1921, W F Smith Sec’. At that time Sandy was Captain of Boats at the school and Smith was the Secretary. The story acquired a somewhat legendary status and over the years a few other bold boys added their names to Sandy’s and Smith’s. When Hugh Irvine visited the school in the
late 1920s he was shown the signature by Edward Oliver, the School Engineer, who was evidently both proud and impressed.

  Sandy left Shrewsbury with his reputation as a sportsman and an example to the younger boys intact. One master, Freddie Prior, wrote of his time at Shrewsbury in the house fasti, somewhat prophetically: ‘He had a remarkable capability for leadership and unusual determination. He had a genius for organisation and any arrangements to be made could be left in his hands. Above all things a practical person, resourceful in an emergency, always rising to the occasion with some ingenious device for avoiding or overcoming every obstacle.’

  It sometimes happens when one is endeavouring to select a man for a particular job that the very kind of man one has been seeking turns up.

  Noel Odell November 1924

  In the summer of 1919 the family rented Gladys Cottage in Llanfairfechan, a coastal town situated opposite Angelsey, about six miles west of Colwyn Bay, and a popular holiday resort for the Cheshire middle classes in the early twentieth century. Llanfairfechan is dwarfed by the mighty Penmaenmawr quarry which produced most of the stones for the cobbled streets of Lancashire in the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century the quarry was in full swing and the miners, used to the seasonal work the quarry offered, built houses that they inhabited in the winter and let out to guests in the summer. The railway from Chester was diverted via Llanfairfechan in 1868 and the resort took on its present character from that time. It is still essentially a Victorian village with a very pretty front onto the sea and the village backs onto the hills behind that lead, eventually, to the Carneddau, Wales’s northernmost range of mountains.