Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine

by Julie Summers

  There are two recognized ways of climbing a mountain. One is known as Alpine style and the other as Siege style. The former requires the climber to carry with him everything he requires for an ascent and descent. The latter, which has been more or less uniformly adopted for climbing Mount Everest since the 1920s, requires the party to ‘lay siege’ to the mountain. Camps are established gradually en route for the summit and the climbers make forays from Base Camp to increasingly higher camps in order to acclimatize and give themselves the best chance of success on summit day. This also gives the porters time to carry food, equipment, tents and bedding to the high camps in preparation for a final push. There have been some notable Alpine-style assaults on Mount Everest, on of the most famous being that of Reinhold Messner in 1980 when he climbed the North Face of Everest alone with no support from Sherpas and with no fixed camps to aid him.

  In 1922 Bruce had decided that at least five camps would be needed on the mountain in addition to the Base Camp at 17,800 feet. For the whole of May loads were ferried between Base Camp and Camps I, II and III and cooks were installed at each camp and the stores of food, oxygen and bedding were sent ‘up the line’, carried by teams of Sherpas and, frequently, by the climbers themselves.

  The original plan had been for Mallory and Somervell to make an attempt on the summit without oxygen followed by an oxygen attempt by Finch and Norton. Stomach troubles had been a recurring theme at Base Camp and Finch, suffering from dysentery, was laid low in his tent for several days. Bruce and the climbers were concerned that the monsoon would soon be on them so the plans were changed. Mallory, Somervell, Norton and Morshead took a team of nine porters up to the North Col from where they planned to set off early the next day and to climb into the uncharted territory of the upper mountain.

  The night before this first attempt Mallory wrote to Ruth ‘I shall feel happier, in case of difficulties, to think that I have sent you a message of love … It’s all on the knees of the gods, and they are bare cold knees.’ The plan was to set a Camp V at 27,000 feet from where they would make their summit bid. In the event they had a very difficult time of it with bad weather, high winds and the Camp V was in fact established at 26,000 feet on precarious platforms manufactured out of stones which they dug out of the frozen ground. After an extremely uncomfortable night Norton, Somervell and Mallory left Camp V. Morshead, who was feeling too ill to continue, elected to remain in his tent and await their return. The terrain was treacherous, tilting slabs covered in snow and their progress was woefully slow as they struggled to breathe in the thin air. By two o’clock Mallory realized that their mission was hopeless and elected to return, collect Morshead and descend to the North Col. Mallory concluded, as he told the Royal Geographical Society and Alpine Club Joint meeting in London later that year, ‘It would have been an insane risk to climb to the utmost limit of one’s strength on Mount Everest and trust to inspiration or brandy to get one down in safety.’ They had nevertheless set a new height record of 26,985 feet, nearly 400 feet higher than the record of the time.

  Finch, meanwhile, having recovered from his illnesses, was determined to make his own summit attempt with oxygen and enlisted as a climbing companion Geoffrey Bruce. Although Bruce had absolutely no mountaineering experience Finch considered him to be strong, athletic and have the right mental attitude. The two of them and a non-commissioned officer, Lance-Corporal Tejbir, set off with porters and spent several days at Camp III preparing the oxygen apparatus. Finch made one or two forays testing out the oxygen and was delighted with the speed of their progress using the bottled gas. On 24 May they left for the North Col and, having reached it at 8 a.m. set off to make a new camp, higher, he hoped, than the previous high camp of Mallory’s party at 26,000 feet. High winds prevented him reaching this height and they had to settle for a camp 500 feet below. All that night and the following day they were pinned in their tents by the fierce winds but at last the wind abated in the afternoon and Finch decided that the following day would be their summit attempt. Tejbir was unable to struggle beyond 26,000 feet but the other two carried onwards and upwards, reaching a height of 27,300 feet. At that point Bruce’s oxygen ceased to flow and Finch saw him stumbling dangerously. He grabbed Bruce by the shoulder, saving him from falling backwards into oblivion and led him to the relative safety of a small ledge, giving him his own oxygen while he rigged up a T-piece to enable them both to breathe from his set. Bitter though it must have been for Finch it was obvious that the two men could not possibly continue upwards and he was deeply concerned that Bruce was at the limit of his strength. They roped up and set off back down to Camp IV where they arrived ‘deplorably tired’ at about 4 p.m.

  With two successive height records attained, one with and one without the use of supplemental oxygen it might have seemed sensible to call it a day. All the climbers, with the exception of Somervell, had suffered in one way or another from frostbite, enlarged hearts and a variety of other complaints. Mallory, who was suffering from a frostbitten finger, was nevertheless determined to put together another team for a final summit attempt. Although he never admitted it, he was galled by the fact that Finch had climbed higher than he had and was determined to have another crack at the summit, unable to turn his back on the mountain until climbing was rendered impossible by the onset of the monsoon. Very much against the express wishes of Tom Longstaff, who declared all the climbers unfit to climb, Mallory and Somervell sought a second opinion from Dr Wakefield, which he gave in their favour. Quickly they collected together as strong a team of Sherpas as they could muster and set off with Crawford, who had not been involved in either of the earlier attempts and was therefore fit. They climbed to Camp III which they found in a terrible state, the tents full of snow and the stores all buried. By 5 June, when further snow fell, they were seriously questioning their decision but on the 6 the weather cleared and they decided to press on the following day. On 7 June the weather appeared to be holding. The three men lead fourteen porters on four separate ropes up towards the North Col. Mallory was aware that the snow was in an unstable condition and was at pains to test the condition of it along the first part of the route. It seemed to be satisfactory and so they pressed on. Shortly after lunch he heard an explosion like gunpowder and knew instinctively it was an avalanche. The avalanche had broken a little above them and enveloped the whole party in tons of snow. Those men on Mallory’s rope were only relatively lightly covered and were able to extricate themselves but the second roped group of nine were hurled a hundred feet down the face and over a sixty-foot ice cliff. The fall alone had killed most of them and the first roped party were able only to extricate two of the nine men alive, they having sustained relatively minor injuries.

  Mallory and Somervell were devastated. ‘Why, oh why’, lamented Somervell ‘could not one of us Britishers have shared their fate?’ When Mallory returned to England his spirits were low. Not only had he been beaten by the mountain but he had also the burden of guilt for the deaths of the seven porters to bear. He felt it very acutely because almost more than any other man on the expedition, with the exception of General Bruce, he had been concerned for the welfare of the porters. To Ruth he wrote: ‘The consequences of my mistake are so terrible; it seems impossible to believe that it has happened for ever and that I can do nothing to make good. There is no obligation I have so much wanted to honour as that of taking care of those men.’ Mallory sought to assure his friends in the Alpine world that the accident had not been due to recklessness and received support from Geoffrey Young and Younghusband, but the event cast a sorry shadow over the 1922 expedition. In the weeks that followed Hinks was quick to blame Mallory for the disaster but others found the case far less clear cut. Bruce, as expedition leader, had been under pressure to achieve results this year and many people felt that this too had contributed to the decision to make a final attempt. Mallory concluded that probably the main cause of the accident was his ignorance of the snow conditions: ‘one generalizes from too few observations
.’

  He was unable to put Everest from his mind as the committee in London had arranged for him to give a series of public lectures both in Britain and, later, the USA. Public interest in Everest had grown to such an extent that it was almost inevitable that there would be another expedition to the mountain – the only outstanding question was when? A post mortem of the 1922 expedition was held and the lessons learned were recorded and analysed. General Bruce felt optimistic that another assault could and should be made. He was a great advocate of the porters and attributed much of what he felt to be the success of the 1922 expedition to their strength and ability to carry loads to camps as high as 25,000 feet.

  Hinks was keen to send a party back in 1923 but others were in less of a hurry, pointing out that work needed to be done on the oxygen apparatus and, more importantly, funds would need raising for a third trip to the Mountain. It was therefore agreed to set a new date of Spring 1924.

  In the summer of 1923, soon after Mallory returned from his three month lecture tour of the USA, he was offered a position at the Board of Extra-Mural Studies in Cambridge. It was the type of break he had been waiting for and he threw himself in the role of assistant secretary and lecturer to the Board with his usual energy and dedication. As soon as he was installed he and Ruth began to make plans to move herself and the children to Cambridge where they would settle down and begin a new life.

  Subject to Medical Examination I have been finally accepted so I’m again walking on metaphorical air.

  Sandy Irvine to Dick Summers, 26 October 1923

  Sandy returned from Spitsbergen towards the middle of September 1923 and headed straight for Cornist Hall to see Marjory. Dick was also at Cornist when he arrived. He had spent the summer motoring in Switzerland, the excuse for the visit having been that he wished to consult a doctor about his fear that he had contracted tuberculosis. He had not, in the event, and thus he had spent a very happy month with his friend Keith Robinson driving over as many Alpine passes as they could find. On this visit he had met and fallen in love with a young Danish heiress called Thyra and he took great pleasure in showing Sandy the photographs and in telling him all about her. She had swept him off his feet.

  Marjory was delighted to have the two of them for company, life having been very dull since her Norwegian trip, and she immediately threw a big party to celebrate their return. One morning, shortly after his arrival at Cornist, Sandy was seen coming out of Marjory’s bedroom in the early hours of the morning by Mr France, an old friend of HS. It was a deeply embarrassing moment for them both. Nothing was said but France immediately sent a telegram to HS which read ‘Sorry to say things are not going well at Cornist’. Finally, HS was persuaded to take notice of the gossip surrounding his young wife. Marjory had overstepped the limit of what he could accept; she had become recklessly indiscreet in her pursuit of Sandy’s affections and HS asked her to leave Cornist, instituting divorce proceedings against her in the spring of 1924. He made a very generous settlement on her of £3000 per annum for the rest of her life on the condition that she would not come within twenty miles of Chester. She agreed and the divorce was finalized in 1925. It was a matter of great embarrassment between the Irvine and Summers families. The subject was never openly discussed within the family, although little comments made here and there over the years indicate that it was never forgotten. In fact, it was suppressed to such an extent that my father didn’t learn that HS had even remarried until he was in his teens and of Marjory’s affair with Sandy he learned even later. Evelyn told him that Marjory was a thoroughly bad lot and that it was she who had made all the running in the relationship. Dick was always rather more generous towards Marjory as he’d found her entertaining as an adolescent but the affair between Sandy and her had placed him in a difficult and embarrassing position, not least as his brother Geoffrey had appeared to condone the relationship and was always delighted to see Marjory and Sandy together at Highfield.

  Marjory married again three times. First a colonel at the Tower of London, then a Mr Trebers who drank heavily and finally a fellow officer of Trebers’s, Murray whose name she bore at the time of her death in Kirkcudbrightshire in the late 1950s. Upon her death the money she had received from HS was returned to the family and divided between the grandchildren. It was known as Majory’s Millions. She had spent very little of it and some people in the family believed that right to the end she retained a measure of love and sympathy for HS. Others point out less generously that her other husbands were as rich as or richer than HS and that she had no need for the money. Elsa Trepess’s opinion of her friend Marjory was that she ‘was just a rather shallow person, very pretty, never vicious, never wanting to pay anyone back. She was a butterfly.’

  Sandy maintained contact with Marjory until he left England in February 1924. She joined him at a college dinner in November 1923 and they met fairly regularly in London at the Jules Hotel in Jermyn Street where she had lodgings, spending three days there at the beginning of February 1924. He only mentioned her once in correspondence after she left HS and that was in a letter to Odell when he referred to a telephone conversation in which she asked Sandy to pass on her love. What the state of the relationship was towards the end must always be a matter for speculation. Sandy received a letter from her in May 1924 and replied the same day but that is the only mention of her again. I personally think he viewed her as a delightful diversion and, probably in the end, as something of a liability. For him there could never have been a future in the relationship. In the days when such things mattered far more than they do today, Marjory simply wasn’t the right type of girl and he would have been under great pressure from the family to end the relationship and find the right sort of partner, one who would be acceptable to them all.

  The Vauxhall with Dick Summers driving, Sandy in the back with the Abraham sisters. Photo by George Abraham, 1923

  As Dick and Sandy were both due to return to their respective universities towards the end of September, Dick suggested that they should have a couple of days motoring in the Lake District before they left the north for the Michaelmas term. This suited Sandy’s needs perfectly as he was anxious to get in contact with Odell’s friend, George Abraham, as soon as possible to put in motion a recommendation for the Everest expedition. In an adventure born of very much the same spirit as Sandy’s Foel Grach motorbike escapade in 1919, Dick planned an attempt to make the first crossing in a motor car, in both directions, of Wrynose and Hardknott passes. Sandy contacted George Abraham in Keswick who, it transpired, had driven from Eskdale to Little Langdale via the passes in June 1913. His daughter, who had accompanied him with her younger sister and mother on that journey, recalled her shock at seeing ‘car rugs and mats going out wholesale to give a grip to the wheels on the atrocious surface, and of dodging from the back to the front of the car to lay the next mat or rug for further progress.’ Abraham was so enthusiastic about Sandy’s suggestion that he offered to join them on the trip and record it in photographs. He also brought his two daughters with him.

  By any measure the crossing of Wrynose and Hardknott passes in a 1920s car was a fairly ambitious undertaking. The road from Langdale to Eskdale rises steeply from almost sea level to the top of Wrynose pass, marked by the Three Shire Stone at 1277 feet, down through Wrynose Bottom at 763 feet and then over Hardknott pass, also 1277 feet and down into Eskdale. The road is now metalled and has fewer hairpin bends than it had in the 1920s when it was merely a drover’s track, partly grass and partly large loose stones, but it is still only passable in good weather conditions and is often closed for weeks in the winter. Within this area the fells are some of the highest, roughest and grandest in Lakeland. They are volcanic in origin and there is much naked rock in evidence. The views are breathtakingly spectacular and the drive of some eleven miles is one of the most exciting drives in the Lake District.

  After motoring up from Cornist, Dick and Sandy spent the night in Keswick, dining with Abraham. Sandy made a good impression and t
alked to him at great length about the excitement and adventure of the Spitsbergen expedition. He described the climbs he and Odell had done, emphasizing how he had enjoyed the ice climbing and adding that it was his most fervent hope that he would be considered for the Everest expedition. Abraham agreed to write to his friend, C. E. Meade, who was a member of the Mount Everest Committee, and put Sandy’s name forward.

  The following day the five of them drove from Keswick to Ambleside in Dick’s Vauxhall 30/98 and from there into Little Langdale from which valley the passes lead. The weather was fine but there was a chill wind and they were all wrapped up in heavy coats, hats and scarves. At the foot of Wrynose Sandy helped Dick to fix chains to the rear tyres of the car as the drover’s road was not only steep and winding, with hideous 180˚ bends, but also extremely slippery. Dick relied on Sandy’s mechanical knowledge for the excursion and knew that if anything went wrong with the engine or any other part of the car he would be able to depend on his friend to fix it. In fact everything went smoothly but the photographs show Sandy sitting in the back of the car with the two girls looking decidedly nervous on the steeper sections of the road. Bill Summers, the family’s expert on cars, reminded me that the car had no brakes on the front wheels so, despite the chains, it would have been a fairly ‘hairy’ ride, especially on the downhill sections. Dick added front brakes to the Vauxhall in 1924 but I do not know whether that had anything to do with the Wrynose and Hardknott crossing. Abraham’s elder daughter, Enid Wilson, recalled: ‘the most lasting recollections of that trip – much less strenuous than the first – was of the superb driving and performance of the car, and of the evening light as we came back down Wrynose into Little Langdale’.