Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (11 page)

Sandy’s exploits were never malicious and he was not given to boasting; they were just the result of his irrepressible high spirits and his constant need to push himself.  He despised pretension and was extremely impatient with anyone who was prone to boasting.  Once, when a friend of Hugh’s turned up to see them at home in a new car, Sandy became infuriated by the endless bragging of the car’s owner and determined to teach him a lesson.  He disappeared from the room and when it came time for the young man to leave he discovered that his precious car had been put up on blocks by Sandy, upon the pedestal he had metaphorically placed the car himself.  The man was big-headed and needed taking down a peg or two in Sandy’s opinion.

When Sandy returned to Oxford for the Michaelmas term in 1922 his mind was once again focused on rowing.  This year he was able to go through the proper procedure, as he saw it, first rowing in the ‘Varsity Fours for Merton and then the University Trial VIIIs.  He wrote to Dick Summers:

I’m so sorry I didn’t write to let you know about altering the date of our visit to Town, but I have been for the last week in a Nursing Home with rather bad blood poisoning.  I only came out yesterday.  It was darn bad luck getting it.  It started three days before the 1
^st
round of the ’Varsity IVs.  So I didn’t dare to see a doctor as I knew he would stop me.  I felt like death when we had to row & we lost to B.N.C [Brasenose College] by
1/5
sec.  No average person could judge a timed race with signals to 1/5 sec.  Still it was just as well.  B.N.C. had a walk over the rest of the time & won easily.  Blast it.

The ability to perform well even when he was clearly below par was something he proved on several occasions during his life, most significantly and repeatedly on the Everest expedition in 1924.

At the end of the letter he congratulates Dick on winning a motor race but cautions him with a tale which is very telling of his attitude to life.  ‘A man at New College has just had
both
eyes taken out (one was left on the road) & his whole face smashed in.  And never lost consciousness, poor fellow, I should rather be killed than live like that.’

Unsurprisingly Sandy was again selected to row in the university boat and this year the president was his friend Gully Nickalls, son of the even more famous Guy.  Coaching followed the same procedure as the previous year, with the initial training taking place on the home waters in Oxford under the supervision of Dr Bourne who has also made some improvements to the 1923 boat.  After six weeks there the crew moved to Henley, where they stayed in Leander Club and were coached by Horsfall.  During the period at Henley Gully Nickalls developed jaundice and his place at 7 had to be taken pro tem by Geoffrey Milling.  The press followed the boat and assessed its progress in long columns in the
Times
on a twice-weekly basis.  The paper’s special rowing correspondent, although very critical of individual oarsmen and once again of their personal faults as he saw them, was nevertheless impressed by the crew and claimed it to be the best Oxford boat crew since 1911.  In 1922 they were compared only with the 1912 crew. 

Oxford Boat Race Crew, 1923 (Sandy third from right)

By the time the crew arrived at Putney on 6 March, Nickalls was sufficiently recovered to row half-days with Milling acting as spare during the afternoon sessions.  From the middle of March onwards there was real interest in the two crews on the tideway.  The press sensed that this might be the year that Oxford fought back and regained the lead from Cambridge who had won the last four races.  The coaching of the Oxford boat was handed over to Harcourt Gold who was to put the finishing touches to the crew and was renowned for his ability to do so.  Old Blues were out in force to study the Dark Blues form, piling onto the coaches’ launch when they could while other followers braved the cold winds and grey skies to watch the progress of the training from the banks of the river.  One lady I heard from, who was then a girl of fourteen, remembers watching Oxford in 1923 as they came off the water and carried their boat to the boat house.  She was rather overwhelmed by the sight of these splendid specimens in their rowing shorts and sweaters.  ‘They were almost like gods,’ she said, ‘we just stood and stared in awe and admiration.  And there was Sandy, one of
them
, smiling at
me
.’

As Sandy was busy training for the Boat Race his friend George Binney was fully occupied with trying to put together a second Oxford University expedition to Spitsbergen.  He had organized the first trip in 1921, which had been a qualified success as they had had much trouble getting through the pack ice.  This time, with the benefit of experience, he had put together a much stronger team and his plans, stores and equipment were both better thought-out and more up to date.  Using the good contacts he had made in the Alpine Club in 1921 he was again fortunate to recruit Noel Odell as geologist, R. A. Frazer as surveyor and, at the last minute, Dr Tom Longstaff as medical officer and naturalist to the team.  He set about selecting other, younger, men from the university to make up the sledging and exploration teams.  As President of the Myrmidon Club Binney had had the opportunity to get to know several very strong, athletic types whom he considered to be serious contenders.  He suggested to Odell that it might be worth taking Geoffrey Milling and Sandy Irvine as two of the strongest for the sledging party.

The remaining members of the expedition were A. T. Wilder and Basil Clutterbuck from Merton and from other Oxford colleges Elton, T. C. Gundry, and E. Relf.  Geoffrey Summers, Dick’s elder brother, who had been granted leave from the steel works to accompany the expedition, was to be in charge of the cine filming.  There was still one space to be filled.  Sandy immediately suggested that Binney recruit his friend, Ian Bruce, who was studying at Cambridge, but who was equally strong and athletic and had a taste for adventure.  Binney agreed and asked Sandy to approach him.  Bruce was delighted to be asked but somewhat anxious about the arrangements.  His mother had had endless questions for him when he put the proposition to her and in a letter to Sandy he asked for reassurance on several points: ‘Re our Poling expedition!  I wrote to my mater as soon as I got your letter and the first thing she said to me was “Is there going to be a doctor with you?” just like her to ask.  By the way, if we do go to the North Pole I hope I’m not the only Tab [Cambridge man].’ Sandy reassured Bruce in his anxieties and was eventually able to send him the good news that they would be accompanied on the expedition by Tom Longstaff, who had returned the previous autumn from the 1922 Everest expedition.  This evidently calmed Mrs Bruce who gave her permission for her son to go. Bruce concludes his letter to Sandy ‘I’m coming up for the Boat Race, so I
may
see you then.  I suppose you’re hard at it now, I wish you personally beaucoup de luck, but may your split-arse boat sink during the race.’

On the Wednesday before the race Odell met Milling and Sandy at the Norman Hotel, Putney where the Oxford crew was having a champagne dinner.  Binney had suggested the two of them as likely candidates for his sledging party and Odell came to Putney with the express purpose of checking them out.  He knew that they were splendidly fit but he wanted to assure himself of their suitability for inclusion in what would be surely the toughest aspect of the trip.   He sat between the two of them and had a very amusing evening by all accounts.  Both men were enthused about the Spitsbergen expedition and delighted at the prospect of being included in the sledging party.  Odell later recalled this first meeting when he asked them to join and referred particularly to Sandy’s alacrity: ‘He seemed at once to typify all that I was looking for and all that is so essential in the make-up of one that is to be not merely a useful, but also a genial, companion under the trying conditions of the Arctic.  Adventurer by nature that he was, he jumped at the idea though I must admit I abundantly emphasized the labour and hardships of sledging, and spoke little of the delights of skiing over virgin glaciers, and exploring unknown peaks.’  Odell also suggested that Sandy might join him for a climbing weekend in North Wales over Easter.  Geoffrey Summers, who was to be in the climbing party, had already mentioned this possibility to Sandy who had again responded with his usual eagerness and Odell left Putney that evening with five tickets for the Boat Race and two recruits to his sledging party. 

The Boat Race was held on Saturday 24 March 1923.  The
Times
rowing correspondent assessed the two crews and came down slightly in favour of the Oxford boat believing them to be the better crew by a small margin.  He was much taken by the new design of their boat, which was held to be an excellent craft, sixty feet long, 24¾ inches at its widest point, and 9 5/8 inches at the greatest depth. 

It was a perfect spring day on the Saturday; a relief after the weeks of cold and rain, and the spectators turned out in their tens of thousands along the banks of the Thames.  The Irvine and Summers family had teamed up for the race and were standing on the roof of Willie’s younger brother Leonard’s ice factory in Beaver Lane, Hammersmith where they had an excellent view of the middle part of the course.  Odell and his guests were also watching from the factory roof, which was so crowded that he never actually met up with the families. 

Oxford won the toss and chose Surrey, the more southerly station, with Cambridge on Middlesex. This gave Oxford the advantage of the big long bend after Hammersmith Bridge, but Cambridge had the best of the water off the start and then again over the punishing last section from Barnes Bridge to Mortlake.  Cambridge rated slightly higher off the start but come the mile, Oxford had staved them off and had actually taken a lead of a few feet.  When the crews reached Hammersmith and the cheering family crowd, Oxford were half a length in the lead, although Odell thought it was closer to a length and a quarter, from his perspective at least.  At Chiswick, Oxford had increased their lead to two lengths, and there looked to be a chance they might even have the race well in hand.  But Cambridge, magnificently stroked by W. F. Smith, Shrewsbury’s stroke and Sandy’s Vice Captain from the 1921 Henley epic, put on a tremendous spurt to defend his water, and suddenly started to eat into Oxford’s lead.  As the crews came round the long, insidious final bend still in Cambridge’s favour, Oxford found that little bit extra and held out, getting home by three-quarters of a length in 20 minutes 54 seconds – just two seconds between the crews.  It had been a titanic struggle, deemed by all the critics to have been nothing short of magnificent.

Judging by the photographs of the crews seconds after they crossed the finishing line, Sandy was completely rowed out.  He lies slumped over his oar in a state of utter exhaustion.  He had given his usual 110 per cent.

News of the result was received on the ice factory roof via messenger and scenes of great jubilation could be heard as the Irvine party celebrated.  The triumph, and the relief, in the Oxford camp were immense.  It was their first win since 1913, also won by three-quarters of a length, and was to be their last until 1937.  That evening the two crews joined seventy other old Blues for the traditional twelve course Boat Race Dinner at the New University Club.

Not only was the outcome of the race a great triumph for Oxford but Merton took enormous pride in the win.  It was to be a quarter of a century until Merton College could boast another rowing blue and it was not until 1952 that a Merton man was in the winning boat.  That year there were three and one of them was C. D. Milling, son of Geoffrey Milling, who was able to conclude a piece of family business and achieve what his father was deprived of in 1923.  For the record the Race, rowed in a blizzard, was the closest and arguably most exciting Boat Race of the century, when Oxford won by a canvas, or ten feet.

After the victory of the Boat Race and the heady celebrations on the Saturday evening, Sandy joined Odell on the Sunday for an excellent lunch in Whitehall.  Very much the toast of the party, he was in splendid form, turning a deaf ear to any of Odell’s dire warnings about the hardships he and Milling might encounter on the Spitsbergen voyage.  He was delighted, too, at the prospect of spending the Easter weekend climbing in North Wales in the company of Odell, Geoffrey Summers and his brother Hugh.  From the lunch they wandered over to the Metropole Hotel, where they had tea with the Dick and Geoffrey Summers and their stepmother, Marjory.  Sandy returned to Oxford for further post-Boat Race celebrations while other members of the party dispersed in all directions, the Summers crowd heading back up to North Wales to make preparations for the climbing team’s arrival at Highfield.

Born in 891, Geoffrey Summers was Dick’s elder brother.  He inherited from his mother a remarkable musical talent and distinguished himself not only by accompanying her from the age of 11 when she played concerts but by being the first amateur pianist in Britain to perform the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto in public, a work that makes enormous demands on the soloist.  He spent all this working life in the family steel works, as was expected of him, but he was never at ease with the cut and thrust of business: at heart he was sensitive, an artist.  He had learned to climb while he was a student at Cambridge. Initially suggested to him by his doctor as a diverting pastime, he was soon almost as devoted to the sport as he was to music, and became a very able rock climber.  He met Odell at the Alpine Club and over the years they became close friends although he was never in the same class of mountaineer..