Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  But without doubt the most exciting find of all was once again linked to Mount Everest. In March 2001 my cousin John Irvine was having a clear out when he chanced upon an envelope at the very back of a drawer and underneath a pile of papers. It had A.C.I. written on it in pencil. He rang me to tell me he had found this package and he thought I might be interested in some negatives which had, amongst other things, a photograph of Sandy on his motorbike on Foel Grach above Llanfairfechan. There was also a faded typewritten note in a frame, which had come from Sandy’s workshop at Park Road South. It read:

  Police Notice

  Any person entering this abode is liable to

  a fine of 2/- (unless special permission is

  obtained from the caretaker).

  Any person found borrowing anything & not re-

  placing it exactly as it was found is liable

  to a fine of not less than 1/6 & costs.

  By order

  Caretaker Lilian Irvine

  Owner A C Irvine

  After Sandy’s death the notice had hung in Kenneth’s workshop and then, finally, in John’s. Sandy was protective of his own property but it seemed to run in the family as Hugh had complained bitterly in a letter to his mother from Shrewsbury ‘Sandy has probably pinched all my scarves and shoes...’. Only Mrs Killen, the housekeeper, and Lilian had keys to the workshop.

  A letter from Sandy to Lilian written on 24th June 1923 from Oxford carried the surprising news that Sandy had performed well in ‘Schools’, the end of year examinations at Oxford. ‘I don’t think my own tutor ever expected it,’ Sandy wrote to Lilian cheerfully, ‘he always said that he thought I could pass Chemistry but was very doubtful about the Physics; as it was he tells me the examiner who corrected my Chemistry was much impressed with the way I answered the big questions which were more ‘finals’ standard than ‘prelim’ standard and which they do not expect to be attempted by most people. Personally I found them the easiest because I could deduce or invent what I didn’t know while the usual prelim questions are all hard facts which one knows or doesn’t know!’ He had gained 87% and was within two marks of the top candidate, with which he declared himself delighted but added wryly ‘the only draw back is that now they will expect much more from me than if I had only just scraped through!’

  The envelope also contained a handful of climbing photographs amongst the negatives, taken it would appear, by Sandy on an expedition in North Wales. The brothers had no form of climbing protection other than two belts buckled together with which Hugh was photographed hauling Kenneth up onto Adam and Eve on Tryfan’ summit.

  I asked if there was anything else and John told me that there were two type-written letters from Everest Base Camp, dated 30th April and 18th May 1924 which began ‘My dear Peter…’ I almost jumped out of my skin. In May 2000 I had found an exchange of letters between Willie Irvine and Arnold Lunn, who taught Sandy to ski Mürren. In one of them Arnold thanked Willie for returning the letters Sandy had written to his son Peter from Base Camp. The original letters that Arnold had sent to Willie were later destroyed in the Second World War and when I first met Peter in 1999 he told me of his great regret that they had ever been taken from him. I had therefore just wondered in May 2000 whether Willie might have had the letters copied and that I would find them. In the event they did not come to light and I had to tell Peter so. I had no proof that a transcript had ever existed but what had given me hope were the copies of George Mallory’s letters home to Ruth from Tibet. Willie was such a meticulous historian and he valued source material so highly that I was certain that he would have had the contents recorded before returning the letters to Arnold Lunn. He had. And they had reappeared. They had been saved for posterity by Kenneth. It was a moment to savour.

  All of a sudden I was catapulted back to 1924 Everest Base Camp where Sandy sat scribbling away in order to catch the post which was due to leave the following day. ‘My dear Peter,’ he wrote, ‘Just a line to tell you how the expedition is getting on. You will have heard the disaster about General Bruce having to go back.

  ‘We arrived here yesterday in miserable weather but today has been perfectly wonderful and everyone working like niggers sorting out stores for the high camps.

  ‘My particular job has been to improvise the oxygen apparatus, as out of the eleven supplied not a single one was fit to use when taken out of their cases and after several days work I’ve only got four safe to use, so I have had to redesign the whole thing and throw most of the instruments or the apparatus away. It has been a long and rather heart-breaking job with the few tools I happened to bring of my own, but it’s nearly finished now. I hope to be able to report 6 new design and four old fit for use.’

  Peter had been fascinated by all the mechanical aspects of the Everest expedition and had questioned Sandy closely when they sat together at dinner in Mürren in January 1924. Sandy knew that Peter would be interested in what he had been doing. This description of the work he had done during the trek is less angry than his outbursts in his diary but is nevertheless a heart felt expression of his feelings towards what he had sometimes described as the ‘infernal apparatus’.

  He went on to give Peter exact details of the climbing plan:

  ‘Norton and Somervell are making the first non-oxygen attempt on May 17th from Camp 7 at 27,300 feet. Mallory and I are to make the first Oxygen attempt on the same day from Camp 6 at 26,800 feet. The idea is for them to leave the North Col the day before Mallory and I and spend one night at Camp 5. 25,000 ft. and another at 27,700 while we spend only one night at 26,800. The mountain looks wonderfully easy from here in the evening light.’

  ‘Mallory and I leave on May 3rd to go up to Camp 3 to acclimatise and climb a bit of the way up the North Peak to try and spot camp sites. After 3 or 4 days there we come down to Camp 1 to rest and then go up for our attempt. Weather permitting.’

  ‘We are all sitting in the Mess tent writing letters for tomorrow’s Dak or eating bulls eyes to help digest the Yak meat we had for dinner tonight. It’s great fun this expedition, you would love it if you were a bit older!’

  This tiny vignette of life at Base Camp rather caught me by surprise. I could just imagine the scene with Sandy sitting along side Mallory, Norton and Odell, all hunched over the table in the mess tent in the failing light, together but isolated in their private worlds as they committed their thoughts and feelings to letters and diaries.

  Throughout this letter one can sense Sandy’s excitement at being part of the climbing team chosen to make an assault on the summit despite his frustration with the oxygen.

  ‘You will probably hear the result of the 1st attempt before you get this letter I hope it will be to say that at any rate the Oxygen party reached the top. I really hate the thought of it. I’d give anything to make a non-oxygen attempt. I think I’d sooner get to the foot of the final pyramid without oxygen than to the top with it. Still as I’m oxygen mechanic I’ve got to go with the beastly stuff to look after it. After all I’ve got nothing to complain about being in the first party.’

  Did he really think that it was ‘unsporting’ to climb with oxygen or was he just aware of the fact that the apparatus was likely to fail and that that may scupper the whole attempt? I suspect a bit of both. Interestingly, Odell used this exact quote in his obituary in November 1924 and I do wonder whether Odell too had seen these two letters which Arnold Lunn had sent to Willie.

  He signed off the first letter in high spirits ‘I’ll write sometime and tell you what the climb was like if the altitude doesn’t do me down before I get to the North Col!! Cheerio Peter. Did you pass the Q1 before the season was over? Ad montem! Sandy Irvine.’ The Q1 was a skiing examination, which Peter would be taking and it touched him deeply at the time that Sandy had remembered to ask him about it.

  In the second letter, written nearly three weeks later on May 18th, Sandy described the appalling conditions the party had encountered below the North Col and detailed the injuries sustained by t
he team:

  ‘My dear Peter,

  This must be a very short letter as I am due to start up the glacier in a few minutes.

  ‘You will probably have seen all about our bad luck in The Times. I spent five days up at Camp III in most terrible conditions, a gale blowing night and day with night temperatures as low as minus 21½ F. For about three nights we had a blizzard varying between 45 and 54 degrees of frost. The driven snow was so fine that it came through everything. Each morning our tents were inches deep in snow. All our porters were sick and had to be sent down. Odell and Hazard failed to read the North Col, and after another day of it we got orders from Norton that all camps were to be evacuated.

  ‘I came down to II with George Mallory and got rather a nasty touch of the sun on the glacier as we came down a long trough sheltered from the wind with a leaden sun beating down on us. Nevertheless, I had to forget all my troubles next morning as a report came in to the camp of an accident on the glacier. We had to turn out and bring back a porter with a broken leg, while I had to go up towards Camp III to meet the rest of the party evacuating and hurry the doctor (Somervell) down to the sick man.

  ‘The same day half the Sahibs went right through to the Base Camp and all the rest to Camp I. One porter had both feet and legs very badly frost-bitten. We did not expect to save much below his knees but fortunately today the Doctor reports that he may be saved as far as his heels.

  ‘One of our N.C.O.s suddenly got paralysis at Camp II probably due to a clot on the brain from frost bitten fingers. The poor fellow died within ½ a mile of the Base Camp being brought down on a stretcher.’

  Despite the nature of the news he was telling Peter Lunn, Sandy appeared to be in good spirits and his account of the meeting with the High Lama, although brief, has a typical humorous twist.

  ‘Two days later we went down to the Rongbuk Monastery (porters, cooks and all) to be blessed by the chief Lama. It was a very impressive ceremony. The old Lama was very sensible and told the porters to work hard – obey their Sahibs and look after themselves. He then prayed for fine weather as he thought it was a devil on the mountains making this quite exceptionally bad weather. By a curious coincidence the very next day was perfect and so we decided to start right away on the following day.’

  I like this tongue in cheek account of the visit to the monastery and particularly the implication that the mountain goddess had been touched by the Lama’s words into calling for better weather. He went on,

  ‘Norton, Somervell, Mallory, Odell, Shebbeare and two lots of porters started up yesterday, while Hazard, Noel and I go in a few minutes, and Geoffrey Bruce, (and Beetham (if he’s well enough) follow tomorrow and Hingston stays at Base as Doctor.

  ‘I go right through to the North Col in 4 days if Mallory has been able to break a track from III to IV the day I arrive at III. Then I come down and rest at III with George and go up again to the North Col for a couple of days and VI for one day and reach the summit on Ascension Day we hope!

  In haste, Sandy Irvine’

  Arnold Lunn wrote in his obituary notice to Sandy in 1924 ‘few young men would have had enough imagination to realise the joy which such letters would cause, or enough unselfishness to make the real effort to write them among all the excitements of that great adventure.’ Reading the letters for the first time in March 2001 I was able to understand just how Peter’s father must have felt. The letters are fresh, optimistic and exude a liveliness which some of the accounts in his diary and his letters to Lilian do not. Peter Lunn was, after all, only nine years old and Sandy wrote in a straightforward and direct way, telling not only the disasters but also the joys of the expedition and the letters sum up his whole approach to life. Finding and reading them has closed the chapter for me on Sandy’s Everest experiences.

  After John Irvine had sent the letters to me I rang Peter Lunn, who was in his winter quarters in Mürren. I spoke to him while he was down at dinner and, unable to contain my excitement, I burst out that we had found the letters. Peter’s reaction was one of quiet but unmistakable delight, ‘well, that’s magnificent’ he said. I sent him copies of the letters the next day and he wrote by return: ‘you can imagine my excitement opening the envelope containing the letters from Sandy. I was deeply touched by the two personal comments to me in the 30 April letter. Sandy was one of the most modest and unassuming of men. This is indeed proving a ‘magical story’.’

  I believe that Sandy recognised in Peter Lunn something of himself at that age. Serious, considered, slightly shy but with an inquisitive mind that yearned to find answers to the myriad of questions racing around in his head. As a child Sandy had longed to be heard but in his early youth he had always been treated as the ‘one to keep an eye on’. If ever there was a prank or a bit of trouble it was assumed that Sandy had been involved and was more than likely at the bottom of it too. I think he felt kept down by his family and in particular by his elder brother Hugh. So he was able to pay Peter Lunn the compliment he was probably himself never paid, at least until he got to Shrewsbury, to be listened to. In this he showed not only great humanity and humility, but also a rare understanding of young people.

  If at the planning stage for this book I was struck by how much Sandy managed to crowd into his twenty-two years I am not one bit less so now. I am left with the overwhelming image of a man of great character and modesty, of humour and strength, but above all of somebody who felt compelled to give his all in whatever he did. Peter Lunn wrote to me in November 2000 and had the following to say:

  ‘Child monarchs get into the history books; successful Olympic competitors hit the headlines but are quickly forgotten. Sandy must be the youngest person ever to achieve by his own efforts a truly enduring fame. In the long history of human endeavour there are hardly any enigmas more intriguing than what Sandy and Mallory did when they vanished upwards so close to the loftiest spot on earth. Perhaps we shall one day have the proof that they did stand on the summit 29 years before anybody else.’

  I feel that Peter had it right when he used the word ‘magical’ to describe the story, which developed around Sandy Irvine’s life. I could hardly have hoped for Sandy’s rowing blazers to re-emerge, nor to see captured on film the recollections of a ninety-two year old man, nor especially to find the letters to Peter Lunn. Yet they all materialised in the space of six months. Is that it, now, I wonder?

  Sandy Irvine’s life, brief though it was, had impact from school to the river, from the ice fields of the Arctic to the mountains of Tibet, from Birkenhead to Bombay. When I started to research the book I began to understand just how many people had in one way or another been affected by his life and death.

  The Sandy Irvine Trust was set up in 1999 to preserve memorabilia relating to Sandy’s life and to benefit mountaineering charities by monies accrued through publication permissions and donations. Its three trustees are all nephews or nieces of Sandy and they act on behalf of the now very large family, dealing with all matters that arise in connection with his memory. John Irvine, in his role of Chairman of the Sandy Irvine Trust, has been extremely encouraging, for which I would like to thank him.

  My family, both Irvine and Summers, have been marvellous in their support and enthusiasm. They have shared personal memories and stories, made available material and photographs, most of which has never been published before, and I am very grateful to them all but reassure them that the conclusions I have drawn in the book are entirely my own. My particular thanks go to Julia Irvine who has stood by me throughout and been a true friend. It was she who made the great find of the Everest letters and I truly appreciate the way in which she made them available to me so quickly. Also to my uncle, Bill Summers, who shared with great generosity his own material on Sandy and his memories of Willie, Lilian and Evelyn. We spent a happy evening down memory lane over a bottle of wine and many of the stories about cars come from this meeting.

  I had the great privilege to meet two people who knew Sandy in the 1920s: my cousin Ann Lake
, daughter of Geoffrey Summers, who had a number of lovely memories she shared with me, and Peter Lunn who was nine when he met Sandy in Switzerland in 1923. Peter has kindly given permission for me to quote in full the letter he sent to Lilian after Sandy’s death which turned up in the trunk of material we found in May 2000.

  I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Audrey Salkeld for her immense patience with me. She has been unfailing in her support and wonderfully generous in her advice. It was she who encouraged me to put pen to paper in the first place. She put me in touch with many key people concerned with the Everest story including Peter Odell, grandson of N. E. Odell, who has been so kind in giving me information relating to his grandfather and recalling anecdotes about Sandy told to him by his own father. Through Audrey I also came into contact with Sandra Noel, daughter of the expedition photographer, Capt. John Noel who was most generous in lending me photographs for the book, and Dick and Bill Norton, sons of Colonel Edward Felix Norton. They very kindly gave me permission to read their father’s 1922 and 1924 diaries, which provided a fascinating background to the picture of Tibet. I feel very fortunate to have been able to meet such exceptional people and am extremely grateful for their support.

  Peter Gillman, biographer, with his wife Leni, of George Leigh Mallory, has been wonderfully helpful and I am very grateful to him for all his advice given at a time when he was completely occupied with their own book.