Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  The conditions that confronted them when they emerged from their tent on the morning of the third day were as bad as any they had encountered on the early part of the journey: ‘The snow was the very worst for ski-pulling adhering in large clods to our ski and making the worst of travelling. We were all very stiff and out of condition after three nights and two days in inactivity in a very damp tent.’ In addition, Odell had strained a muscle in his shoulder shortly after they had left their last camp and was unable to assist with the towing of the sledges which made far more work for the other three men. After several hours of trudging along in the snow and fog the view began to clear and they were rewarded with a stunning view of Klaas Billen Bay, their final destination. Sandy and Milling erected the sails onto the sledges and made excellent forward progress in the strong wind, although controlling the sledges on ski was rendered difficult by the condition of the snow. There were several mishaps but no calamities. Odell and Frazer were skiing slightly ahead of the sledges with the object of finding the best route. ‘The mist cleared and the delicate pinks and ultra-blues of the horizon and sky, the pure ivory white of the fresh snow and the deep blues and browns of the surrounding crags made a scene of the utmost beauty and rarity and probably only to be seen in a region such as this.’

  After running in tandem some distance and having fairly frequent spills, the sledges being blown over with the freshening wind, they lashed them together broadside-on with the sails swung out on either side for stability, and Sandy and Milling managed them, while Frazer and Odell skied separately. They found the glacier relatively smooth and all but the widest crevasses were filled with snow making their progress quite easy. They pitched their final camp on a rocky outcrop above Billen Bay in glorious sunshine. ‘The view was grand in the extreme with the N. face of Mt Terrier right opposite, the imposing group of Urmston Mt Robert & Cadell to the right of it, and beyond the dark stormy waters of ice Fjord a perfect glimpse of the mountains back of Advent Bay drawn out to Mount Starachin at the entrance to Ice Fjord, 60 miles away, reflecting the golden evening sunlight.’

  An hour after they crawled into their sleeping bags a terrific storm blew up with hurricane force winds which snapped the guy ropes on Sandy and Odell’s tent causing it to collapse on top of them and trap them. They were rescued by Milling and Frazer who braved the storm and, after a very heavy struggle, succeeded in righting the tent and making it secure. They then lay awake for the next nine hours as the storm raged, wondering whether the tent and poles could survive the onslaught. They were amazed that the fabric of the tent was robust enough to withstand the battering and Sandy was impressed when Odell informed them it was made of the same material, aeroplane fabric, as used for the higher Everest tents. Sitting in a tent, miles from rescue, is an alarming experience. There are many accounts of how people have survived such storms and they all share the same theme – the tremendous noise of the wind snapping at the fabric, tugging at the ropes and wondering, just wondering when the storm will abate.

  At about 9 a.m. the storm blew itself out and the party emerged tired and dazed to a wild day with angry storm clouds hugging the surrounding summits. Despite their relief at having survived the night intact they were sad to leave their last camp and head for the relative civilization of the Terningen.

  They arrived at the Mount Terrier moraine towards evening after a painful journey across morasses, hummocky ice and gaping crevasses through which they had to weave a careful course. Sandy spotted the Terningen in the distance and fired off several rounds with his rifle in case they could be noticed. It was at about this time that Longstaff, scouring the moraine with his telescope, trained it on the party. Contact. As they made their way over the ice and dirt coves Odell noted that they had hardly changed their position since 1921, amazed at the very slow progress of the Nordenskiold glacier. They found a 1921 jam tin beside one of the hummocks. A little further on they found an abandoned sledge with tins with Russian writing on them. They concluded that this would have been the sledge left by Vassilier and Backlund on their journey to Cheydinnes in 1901. Odell adds: ‘Sandy took bearings from the sledge’s position onto known points in order to compare it with the position at which actually abandoned by the Russians and so obtain a measure of the rate of flow of the glacier over the period.’

  About a mile on they spotted a man on the glacier, who turned out to their relief to be Longstaff. He was soon joined by Binney, Summers and Bruce and, eventually, Elton. The meeting that followed was an emotional one with exchanges of stories and news of discoveries. With extra hands to assist they were able to cover the remaining bad ground to the shore in two and a half hours, their arrival at the motorboat captured on cine-film by the camera-ready Summers.

  At the shore Binney regaled them with port, digestive biscuits and chocolate which they all found delicious to an amazing degree after a month on a diet of pemmican and dried fruit. As they were loading up the motor boat and dinghy they were alarmed by a series of dramatic ice falls from the glacier, some of which caused miniature tidal waves that threatened almost to upset the boats. An hour later they were safely aboard the Terningen after a beautiful run down Adolf Bay in the motor boat, and were sitting down to a splendid dinner in their honour.

  After four days’ sailing, catching up on sleep and food, playing bridge, shaving, getting stores and equipment sorted they arrived in Tromsö where Binney and Summers arranged for them to take one step closer to civilization organizing rooms in the Royal Hotel, where after hot baths they were entertained by Geoffrey Summers to a champagne dinner in honour of his and Milling’s birthdays.

  By rights this should have been the end of the expedition but their ship was delayed by five days so entertainment, in the form of adventure, of course, had to be found.

  A suggestion arose to tackle a fairly serious rock climb just north of Tromsö in the intervening days before they sailed for Bergen. A team of four climbers, Odell, Sandy, Summers and Milling, took a small boat down the fjord to where they disembarked, had breakfast on the shore and set off at 5 a.m. for the mountain. It was a walk of about five miles through forest and over boulders. When they arrived at the foot of the rock face, 1000 feet above sea level they were presented with a fifty pitch climb to the 5’500ft summit. Odell and Sandy took it in turns to lead up the rock face while Summers and Milling followed. It would be putting words into Sandy’s mouth to say he was frustrated by the slow progress on the face of the group as a whole, but twice in his notebook he records his and Odell’s climbing rates to be considerably faster than those of the other two. After twelve hours of strenuous climbing up difficult and often treacherous rock, they were forced to concede defeat and turned to descend, only three hundred feet from the summit. Odell lectured them on the importance of a sensible turn-around time and on the significance of conserving sufficient energy for the descent, a critical and valuable lesson for Sandy. The descent was hard work and took over five hours, scrambling over boulders and down slippery tracks, through the forest and back to the shore where they all fell asleep waiting for the boat to collect them and take them back to Tromsö.

  Odell, Milling and Sandy Irvine on the summit

  The Spitsbergen expedition for Sandy had been a great success. He had had a taste of many of the types of hardships he would encounter on the Mount Everest expedition and had shown himself to be, in every area, an excellent team member. His mechanical expertise had been called upon when it was left to him to fix the aerial aboard the Terningen, but also en route whilst sledging when many small running repairs were effected without the slightest problem. He had proved himself to be fit, able and above all to exhibit at all times excellent humour despite the cold and the damp, the frustrations of hauling the sledges across difficult ground and living in the primitive conditions under which he was only able fully to undress and dry out on one single occasion. If Odell had needed any convincing that Sandy was the right person to recommend for inclusion in the 1924 team he had had ample reason to feel
his choice had been fully validated by Sandy’s performance on the sledging party. Moreover, during the long hours they had spent holed up in their tent towards the end of the expedition, when he and Odell had discussed at great length the subject of the oxygen apparatus, it became clear that in Sandy he had discovered a man who would be capable of helping to produce and maintain functioning apparatus.

  Although a place on the 1924 Mount Everest expedition was not in Odell’s gift, he knew that any recommendation he might make to the committee would be considered. There was the added bonus for Sandy that Tom Longstaff, on whom he had already made a very good impression, despite the hair cut, was appointed a member of the independent selection committee that considered, in the Autumn of 1924, the make-up of the climbing team.

  Notes in the back of Sandy’s Spitsbergen diary, 1923

  Sandy did not need to be asked twice and Odell offered to put his name forward if someone could be found to second the proposal. Clearly Longstaff was out of the question because of his place on the selection panel. No one in Sandy’s circle would have had any clout with the Mount Everest committee itself, but Odell, once again, was able to produce a useful contact for him in the shape of George Abraham, the Keswick photographer whom he had known for over a decade. Odell recommended to Sandy that he should make contact with Abraham, whom Sandy knew only slightly in his capacity as a photographer. He agreed to do this and asked Odell in what other ways he should prepare himself for the expedition. As his only experience of snow had been in the Arctic Odell suggested that he might consider going to the Alps in the winter for some skiing and climbing in order to learn more about snow and ice conditions. Again he had a useful contact and put Sandy in touch with his old friend and the doyen of British skiing in the 1920s, Arnold Lunn.

  Equipped with these names and a list of reading material, Sandy returned to England from Spitsbergen as fired up as he had ever been in his life.

  I have never known a man so entirely dominated by the spirit within him.

  E. F. Norton, on Mallory

  When I first began to consider writing about Sandy Irvine I realized that I would have to tackle the subject of the greatest Everest legend of all time, George Leigh Mallory. His and Sandy’s names have become inextricably linked as a result of what befell them on 8 June 1924 but the lives of the two men had no bearing on each other until they met in Liverpool in February of that year. When Mallory first climbed in the Alps, Sandy was only two years old. My greatest concern, however, was that I would find myself standing in judgement over Mallory and blaming him for the death of my great-uncle. In fact I now do not hold him responsible for Sandy’s death because I believe that by the time they made their final climb in the attempt to reach the summit Sandy, ever his own man, was possessed of the same determination to climb the mountain as Mallory.

  George Mallory’s name is so intimately entwined in the story of the early Everest adventures, his presence so great and his spirit so dominating that he cannot be dismissed with a brief résumé of dates and achievements. In his adult life he was consumed by two overwhelming and ultimately conflicting passions – his love for his wife and his obsession with Everest. At least three biographies of Mallory exist and he has featured in many other books, so that his life is as well documented as Sandy’s is not.

  George Herbert Leigh Mallory was the elder son of the Revd Herbert Leigh-Mallory, a devout and conventional man, who was rector of the parish of Mobberley, a Cheshire village about twelve miles due south of Manchester. He was born in June 1886 and was followed by a sister and brother, his older sister Mary having been born in 1885. His childhood was spent in Mobberley from which time there exist a number of stories about his fearless climbing pranks. At seven he was banished to his room at tea time for unruly behaviour and was shortly thereafter discovered climbing about on the church roof. ‘Walls, roofs and trees seemed to be his natural playground. No very unusual one, it is true, but … at this early age he was scarcely affected by any sense of personal danger.’ Other anecdotes survive that point to his undertaking activities with the minimum margin of safety. This trait in his character inclined him, later in life, to catch trains with a matter of seconds to spare, infuriating his friends but pleasing him as he had not wasted any unnecessary time. He was described by his earliest biographer, David Pye, as a ‘dashing rather than a good driver of motor-cars’.

  In September 1900 he won a scholarship to Winchester College where he turned out to be a good pupil, an able athlete and a talented gymnast. His academic forte was in mathematics but he took up History with a view to obtaining a scholarship to Cambridge. His judgement was sound and in 1905 he was awarded an Exhibition to Magdalene College Cambridge.

  His school days at Winchester brought him into contact with Graham Irving, his housemaster and one of the first men to adopt guideless climbing in the Alps. In 1904 Irving invited Mallory and his friend Harry Gibson to join him at his summer home in the Alps. Mallory was eighteen. He had no climbing experience at all and had not shown the least interest at Winchester in matters to do with mountaineering, but after two exciting climbs with Irving including a traverse of Mont Blanc, he was enthused and converted to the cause. From that moment climbing became one of the dominating forces in his life. It gave him release in times of strain, a challenge when one was lacking in his working life and, in the end, the avalanchine passion that cost him his life. The following summer he was again invited to join Irving, this time in Arolla, with two other schoolboys, one of whom was Guy Bullock.

  After that summer Mallory went up to Cambridge and it was a few years before he was able to go back to the Alps. At Cambridge he developed his ideals as an aesthete and became involved in debating and political discussions which he relished. He had a glittering circle of friends, many of whom had connections with the Bloomsbury set. In addition to his academic and political interest, Mallory continued with sport at Cambridge, rowing in the Magdalene College boat in the Easter terms.

  In 1909 he was introduced by a mutual acquaintance to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, ten years Mallory’s senior and at that time at the peak of his Alpine career. Not only was Young regarded as the foremost Alpine mountaineer of his generation, he was also credited with being responsible for encouraging British rock climbing and held regular ‘meets’ in North Wales when he would invite prospective and seasoned climbers to join him. They would stay in the Pen-y-Pas hotel in Snowdonia and spend long days on the cliffs while the evenings were devoted to socializing and impromptu theatricals. Mallory was quickly included in Young’s inner circle although he was not apparently at ease with the sociability as Young. What he shared with the older man, however, was a deep love and understanding of the mountains. This perhaps is one of the clues to Mallory’s personality. He climbed with feeling, above all.

  He joined Young in the Alps in the Summer of 1909 where the two of them did several training climbs before setting off with Donald Robertson for a traverse of the Finsteraarhorn by the difficult southerly arête. There were several anxious moments during the climb including an instance when Mallory, accidentally forgetting to attach the rope to himself and delicately perched on a tiny foothold, was surprised by a clatter of rocks when Robertson slipped as he was attempting to reattach the rope. Mallory turned round to see what was happening and Young closed his eyes, sure that the next thing he would hear was Mallory tumbling down the 5000-foot glacier. Mallory, however, had supreme balance, and remained safely on the rock face, apparently completely unconcerned by the incident. Young wrote later ‘he was as sure-footed and as agile in recovery as the proverbial chamois’. The security of the rope meant little to him. The fact that he forgot to tie on when making that climb is an example of his absent-mindedness, something he was noted for even on the Mount Everest expeditions. In one of the last notes he sent down from the high camp on 6 June 1924 he wrote that he had left his compass in the tent at Camp IV. Such forgetfulness may be an endearing trait on the one hand but in the context of mountaineering i
t can be dangerous in the extreme.

  On leaving Cambridge he worked in various temporary jobs and spent a few months in the South of France perfecting his French. Eventually he settled down and accepted a post at Charterhouse School as an assistant master. He believed in the ‘civilizing force of education’ and encouraged the boys in independent thought. He promoted extramural activities and taught about world affairs and literature, all of which were considered extracurricular, but to which he attached great importance. All this time he was climbing regularly in Wales and in the Alps. In 1911 he made an ascent of Mont Blanc which was, for him, as much of an emotional experience as it was a feat of mountaineering. He wrote a long article in 1914 entitled ‘The Mountaineer as Artist’ which was published in the Climbers Club Journal. In this article he distinguished between two types of climber: ‘those who take a high line about climbing and those who take no particular line at all’. He described the importance of climbing to the former type, of which he regarded himself as a member, that it is more than just an athletic pursuit: ‘…Every mountain adventure is emotionally complete. The spirit goes on a journey just as does the body, and this journey has a beginning and an end, and is concerned with all that happens between these extremities.’

  In 1914, when taking part in some amateur dramatic production in Godalming, he encountered the Turner sisters, whom he had previously met at a dinner party. Their father, Thackeray Turner, was a local architect and had built a beautiful home in the style of Lutyens in Godalming. Mallory became a regular visitor to the house and enjoyed not only the company of the three girls, Marjorie, Ruth and Mildred, but also that of Turner himself. They would have long discussions about art history, a subject that interested him deeply since his meeting and subsequent friendship with the English impressionist painter Duncan Grant. When the Turners invited him to join them in Venice for the Easter holiday he leapt at the chance. Venice was glorious, but Ruth Turner had captured his heart and within a week of returning to England he proposed to her. They were desperately in love and married in the July, only a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War, spending their honeymoon in Cornwall. Ruth’s beauty, Mallory claimed, was Botticellian: she had a rounded, tranquil face with large blue eyes and wore her hair in a style which reminded him of the Pre-Raphaelites. As a personality she was honest and completely lacking in guile. His friends were as enthusiastic as he was and agreed they made a good-looking, ideal couple. They settled down to life in Godalming and Mallory continued with his teaching. Ruth herself was a gifted rock climber but the birth of their children prevented her from joining Mallory other than very infrequently, so that his climbing was essentially his private pursuit, although he did not exclude her from his thoughts and decisions about it.