Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  After the memorial service and meeting in London the family returned to Birkenhead, the only outstanding arrangement being the sorting through of Sandy’s possessions and his will. Hugh took responsibility for the legal matters, as Sandy’s executor, and settled all the accounts which were still to be paid. He and Willie went through the suitcases that Odell had packed at Base Camp and sorted what should be kept. Sandy’s spare ice axe turned up in the post a few weeks after the suitcases had arrived. It simply bore the label ‘Irvine: Birkenhead’ in Odell’s neat handwriting. This axe was the one Bill Summers saw hanging in the gun room at Bryn Llwyn twenty-five years later. The label was preserved in an envelope along with all the other papers that had come back from Everest. I suspect Willie threw nothing away.

  The years after Sandy’s death were busy ones for the family. Willie retired from business in 1926, shortly before his father died aged 91, and he and Lilian moved from Birkenhead to Bryn Llwyn in 1927. Evelyn married Dick Summers in 1925 and Hugh Kit Paterson in 1926. Then followed grandchildren which kept Lilian both happy and fulfilled. All the five children led full and active lives. Hugh became senior partner in the law firm, Slater Heelis in Manchester; Kenneth qualified as a GP and lived and worked all his life in Henley. He became a member of the Alpine Club and was always a keen climber and regular visitor to the Pen-y-Gwryd hotel in Snowdonia. Alec spent a part of his working life in India and moved to Bryn Llwyn in the 1970s. He continued to keep in touch with Odell and was the member of the family who was most keen to pass on his memories of Sandy to his children. Tur lived at Bryn Llwyn until he married. Like the others he studied at Magdalen College after which he went into the Church, becoming the Dean of St Andrew’s, Dunkeld and Dunblane in 1959, an office he held until he retired in 1983.

  In 1931 Evelyn received a small package from India. It came from George Wood Johnson, a prominent member of the International Kangchenjunga expedition and had been given to him by Lobsang, one of Sandy’s porters in 1924. In the package was a small piece of material bearing Sandy’s name in English and Nepali which had wrapped in it twenty tiny Himalayan garnets. Willie wrote to Odell about the package who replied ‘I was interested to hear about the garnets, but cannot understand how they were “recovered” on Kangchenjunga by Lobsang! I think myself it must be that Lobsang made a little collection of these stones in the Kangchenjunga neighbourhood as a present & a recollection of Sandy.’ Evelyn kept the garnets safely tied up in the piece of material and when she died my father found them amongst her most personal possessions.

  The scrap of material which had contained the garnets

  In 1925 the official expedition book appeared entitled The Fight For Everest: 1924. It is a wonderful and vivid account of the whole expedition from the outset to the trek back to Darjeeling. All the expedition members contributed to the book and in Norton’s piece, which considers the characters of the two climbers who died, he wrote of Sandy:

  Young Irvine was almost a boy in years; but mentally and physically he was a man full grown and able to hold his own with all modesty on terms with the other members of our party, who averaged twelve years older than he. One more invaluable characteristic was his turn for things mechanical, for in this respect he was nothing short of a genius, and he became our stand-by in dealing with the troubles and difficulties we encountered over this year’s oxygen apparatus, and, for the matter of that, in every department – from a lampshade to a rope ladder.

  He shares with Odell the credit of having show us all how to ‘play for the side’, stifling all selfish considerations, for nothing in the record of 1924 was finer than the work these two put in as ‘supporters’ at Camp IV.

  Sandy Irvine’s cheerful camaraderie, his unselfishness and high courage made him loved, not only by all of us, but also by the porters, not a word of whose language could he speak. After the tragedy I remember discussing his character with Geoffrey Bruce with a view to writing some appreciation of it to The Times; at the end Bruce said: ‘It was worth dying on the mountain to leave a reputation like that.’ Men have had worse epitaphs.

  Sandy and Mallory became legendary figures. Their final hours were minutely scrutinized by the press and public alike, and whenever anything to do with climbing Everest was written, their names appeared and accounts of their climb were published.

  Great debate raged over the ‘last sighting’ by Odell who, over the course of the following years, changed his story in the light of so much interest and informed opinion. His initial diary entry states that he saw the two men ‘at the foot of the final pyramid’. This was altered by the time he arrived at Base Camp and in his dispatch to the Times he wrote the now renowned paragraph in which he described the tiny black spots silhouetted against the snowcrest beneath a rock-step in the ridge. A few months later he had changed his story again. Scrutiny of his sighting and subsequent analysis convinced him, it would appear, to rethink. In his account in the Fight for Everest: 1924 he wrote, ‘I noticed far way on a snow slope leading up to what seemed to me to be the last step but one from the final pyramid, a tiny object moving and approaching the rock step. A second object followed, and then the first climbed to the top of the step. As I stood intently watching this dramatic appearance, the scene became enveloped in cloud once more, and I could not actually be certain that I saw the second figure join the first.’

  People immediately latched on to Odell’s change of mind. They pointed out that the ‘last but one’ rock step was what is now known as the Second Step, a fifteen-foot vertical slab of rock, not in itself insurmountable, but a technical pitch at an altitude when the human brain is functioning at a mere fraction of its normal capacity and where a climber’s strength is almost completely played out. It was inconceivable, in the minds of experienced mountaineers of the day, that this obstacle could have been overcome. Even if Mallory had been technically able to climb the rock step, what of Sandy? Surely his inexperience would have held them back, they argued. Now there is a ladder up the second step, put there by the Chinese in the 1970s which greatly eases a climber’s passage on this route to the summit. When an American climber called Conrad Anker ‘free climbed’ the Second Step in 1999, that is to say without using the ladder, his initial reaction was that he felt sure Mallory could have done it too and radioed this message down to his expedition leader, Eric Simonson, at Advance Base Camp. Not only did Anker, an experienced rock climber, succeed in climbing the step, but he did so with considerable speed. Anker later changed his mind, however, and in his written account of the adventure concluded that it unlikely that Mallory and Sandy could have made it up the step. It seems to me that the one thing that is certain about opinions people form high up on Everest is that they are never certain.

  Some proposed that Odell had seen nothing at all – black rocks in the snow, perhaps a chough (a hardy bird which flies happily at that altitude) – and others suggested he had been hallucinating. All these claims Odell countered fiercely. He had for the whole of his life superb eyesight and, as a geologist, knew the difference between a rock and a human body, nevertheless the more that people queried his original sighting, the more unsure he became. When he wrote to Willie Irvine in 1934 he was still convinced – or at least prepared to tell Willie – that Sandy and Mallory had made it to the summit, but by the time he met my father twenty years later he thought it unlikely.

  A couple of years after Sandy’s death a bizarre letter arrived out of the blue from a man named Sir Oliver Lodge who claimed, via a medium, to have been in touch with Sandy ‘from the other side’. Lodge had written a book about the subject of messages from the dead and sent Willie a proof of the book for his information. In his measured reply Willie dismissed Lodge’s theories completely saying that the tone of the message did not at all accord with his and other’s memory of Sandy: ‘the complete absence of any reference to Mallory who was his leader is very difficult to understand. If there was one outstanding feature in his character it was his natural modesty. Another marked characteri
stic was his horror of the dramatic & one feels sure that any account he might give of the disaster would be plain to the point of baldness.’ That was his last written word on the subject of his son to anyone but Odell for thirty years.

  In 1933, however, a further, far more substantial piece of evidence came to light after another British expedition attempted to reach the summit of Mount Everest. It was an unsuccessful bid but a small stir was caused by the climber Percy Wyn Harris who came down from the upper mountain with an ice axe he’d found lying on some flat slabs at about 27,500 feet. It could only have been left by either Mallory or Sandy in 1924 and Wyn Harris believed it marked the site of a fall. Once again the story was revived and opinions aired in the press. Initially it was believed to have been Mallory’s axe but later it was identified by Odell as Sandy’s owing to the three horizontal markings on the handle just below the head.

  The finding of the axe disturbed Willie’s memories and he wrote to Odell in 1934 asking for his opinion on the find. Odell’s reply was another of the letters I found May 2000. Although it does not say anything new as far as the experts are concerned, it is nevertheless interesting that Odell believes that Sandy had shared his idea for identifying his kit with the horizontal markings with Geoffrey Summers. It therefore confirmed beyond doubt, in Odell’s and the family’s minds, that the ice axe was indeed Sandy’s. What no one could really agree upon, however, was the significance of the axe in the position it was found. Odell told Willie ‘I am prepared to believe that they may have overcome the 2nd step, and actually reached the summit, as previously argued, and that the axe was dropped accidentally, at the spot where found, during their descent in the dark.’ Odell visited Willie on his way up to Harlech in March of that year to discuss the find in more detail but there was little Odell or anyone else could say to shed light on the final outcome of events ten years previously.

  Willie seemed to be content to let the matter rest thereafter and took no further part in any communication about Sandy’s role in the 1924 Everest expedition. He was well into his sixties and working hard in retirement on his historical papers. However, he kept an Everest file in amongst his other papers and when he was approached in 1957 by an American journalist who wanted to write a biography of Sandy he replied politely that having consulted members of his family ‘they all agree that this should be left to me to do as I have all the material, besides the personal memory. I have collected a good deal of information and am still gathering small additional material.’ By now he was eighty-eight and the book was never written.

  In 1953 the summit of Everest was finally reached from the south side in a triumphant and magnificent ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. For several years their achievement naturally outshone anything else in connection with Everest for they had proven that the mountain could be climbed. Further ascents followed and the mountain has now been climbed over 700 times. The North Col route was climbed in 1960 by the Chinese but it was not until 1980 that a European ascended Mount Everest from the north. This time it was Reinhold Messner, the South Tyrolean climber, who climbed the route alone and without oxygen. It was hailed as one of the most extraordinary climbs of all times. In a delightful twist of fate Messner happened to be sitting in Dehli airport at five o’clock in the morning, on his way back to Germany, at the same time as Bill Norton, son of E. F. Norton. Bill was with a party of trekkers who were returning from the Himalaya and one of his group recognized Messner. Bill’s brother, Dick, had already written in 1978 to congratulate him and Peter Habeler on their first oxygenless ascent of the mountain so Bill felt able to go over on this occasion to talk to him. Messner was initially sceptical suspecting he might be from the press but soon realized who he was and in the ensuing conversation Bill was able to congratulate him on having beaten his father’s height record, from the north side, without oxygen.

  It seems that every new generation revives the interest in the ‘Mallory and Irvine’ legend and forty years after the ice axe was found a Chinese climber came across an ‘English Dead’ about ten minutes from his own Camp VI. He described to a Japanese climber, Ryoten Yashimoro Hasegawa, in 1979 a body with a hole in its cheek, lying on its side ‘asleep’ at 27,000 feet, wearing old-fashioned clothing which disintegrated when he touched it. The Chinese climber, Wang Hong Bao, was tragically killed in an avalanche the following day so no further questions could be asked. When Hasegawa related the story it hit the headlines all over the world. This was the first piece of new evidence since the ice axe was found. The experts concluded it could only possibly be the body of either Mallory or Sandy as Tibet had closed its borders to all Western climbers before the Second World War and there were no other British fatalities at that height.

  An American historian businessman and part-time climbing historian, Tom Holzel, had become so fascinated by the story that he decided to put together an expedition to the north side of Everest in 1985 in an attempt to locate the body which, based on his research, he concluded must be that of Sandy Irvine. By this time Willie Irvine was dead, as were Hugh and Evelyn so it fell to Alec to field the enquiries, which he did with his usual dry wit. Alec had already contributed to the only book on Sandy, a brief history of his life with excerpts from his diaries both on Spitsbergen and Everest, entitled The Irvine Diaries, published in 1979. At that time he was without doubt the person with more knowledge of Sandy than anyone else alive, although he had been but thirteen in 1924.

  Holzel had enlisted the help of the highly respected historian Audrey Salkeld to research the history of the 1920s climbs and she visited Alec to obtain from him as much information as she could about Sandy. The resulting book The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine became, for several years, the last word on the subject. Holzel and Salkeld’s search took place on Everest in the autumn of 1985. They took with them to Tibet the climber and high altitude cameraman David Breashears in the hope that any find could be documented and a film made for television. It was a high-minded undertaking and had, at its heart, the memory of the two climbers. The search was hampered by the snows that lay on the mountain after the monsoon and they were unable to conduct a proper investigation. Nothing was found that year and interest waned a little. Then, in 1999, an Anglo-American search expedition was mounted, inspired in part by BBC Graham Hoyland’s quest to find the camera which he believed his great-uncle Howard Somervell had lent Mallory. Using research undertaken by a German student, Jochen Hemmleb, they made the astonishing discovery of Mallory’s body on the upper slopes of the mountain. Like others before them they had expected to find Sandy not Mallory, but in mountaineering terms the find was all the more significant for it being the body of the more famous of the two men.

  The news broke on 4 May 1999 and the press poured over the details as they came out of Tibet. Opinions were aired loudly on the television and radio, in the newspapers and, for the first time, on the Internet. Netbrowsers could zoom in on the desiccated remains of the legendary George Leigh Mallory. Once again he had become common property. It was a deeply distressing time for the Mallory family and pretty worrying for the Irvines too, as the expedition planned to go back up to the site where Mallory lay to continue their search for Sandy. The expedition had been hoping to find Somervell’s Kodak Vestpocket camera which he had lent to Mallory for the final assault, Mallory having lost his own at some stage earlier on the expedition. Kodak had indicated to Holzel in 1986 that if a film had been exposed and then kept at the subzero temperatures, which are the norm above 27,000 feet, it might still be possible, with careful handling of the camera, to develop any photographs that had been taken. The camera was not found on the body but other items were, and these gave rise to great excitement amongst the mountaineering community. The snow goggles found in his pocket might have meant the men were descending in the dark, the notes made on the back of an envelope recording oxygen pressures in the numbered cylinders might indicate that they went up on three and not two cylinders, as previously supposed. These and other finds, however, raised
more questions than they answered and the mountaineers were no nearer knowing what happened on 8 June 1924 than they had been before. The find spawned several books on the subject, almost all with conflicting conclusions and there is still deeply divided opinion on whether or not Mallory and Sandy had made it to the summit before they died.

  Whilst some experts argued that the body Wang Hong Bao found was in fact that of Mallory, others were more sceptical as the description given by the Chinese did not at all match with what was found in May 1999. For one thing, the body was lying in a completely different position from that in Wang’s description and for another, Mallory had, apparently, no hole in his cheek. Therefore, many – but not all – concluded Sandy must still be up there.

  In spring 2000 a further search for his body was launched, again by Graham Hoyland who this time joined the New Zealander Russell Brice’s expedition. Appalling snow and storm force winds during the whole of May and part of June prevented a high altitude search and the question of whether or not Mallory and Sandy were the first to stand on the top of the world remains unanswered. I can only assume that there will be further searches, for it would seem that the mystery as to whether they reached the summit twenty-nine years before Hillary and Tenzing continues to fascinate people.

  I am frequently asked if I want them to find Sandy’s body and it is not a question I find easy to respond to. Frankly the memory of his life is of far more significance and interest to me than how he died, although my interest does extend as far as the camera or other concrete evidence that might be found on his body. Only by confirmation of the details of their final climb via photographic or written evidence would I be prepared to believe that they had reached the summit. The one piece of consolation I have, as Graham Hoyland pointed out, we might one day know whether Sandy and Mallory stood on top of the world but no one will every be able to prove conclusively that they did not.