Read Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Online

Authors: Julie Summers

Tags: #Mountains, #Mount (China and Nepal), #Description and Travel, #Nature, #Adventurers & Explorers, #Andrew, #Mountaineering, #Mountaineers, #Great Britain, #Ecosystems & Habitats, #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #Irvine, #Everest

Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (2 page)

With renewed energy and determination Sandy helped Hazard escort Geoffrey Bruce and all spare porters down to Camp III where they arrived at 4:30 p.m.  He immediately set to work on two oxygen apparatus, checking that flow meters, valves and mouthpieces were working.  He cannibalised a third set to take a spare mouth piece and found some spare valves which he carefully packed into his zip pockets ‘just in case’.  He was determined that it would not be the oxygen apparatus which gave out, as it had been for Geoffrey Bruce and George Ingle Finch on the 1922 expedition.  He’d already written to his mother from the trek: ‘It will be a great triumph if my impromptu ox.ap. gets to the top, I hope it does…’.   As he worked away in his tent, strewn as usual with all manner of tools, bits of frames, spare nuts and bolts he felt a huge surge of thrill that he would, after all, have a crack at the summit as he had so desperately hoped.  He was feeling fitter than he had for many days and was confident that, despite his excruciatingly burned face, he would perform well.   The four days he had spent at the North Col had convinced him that he was fully acclimatized.  By the time he turned in for the night he had two oxygen sets almost ready.

That night he got very little sleep.  The sunburn that had been giving him trouble for weeks had been greatly exacerbated by the scorching sun at Camp IV.  ‘A most unpleasant night when everything on earth seemed to rub against my face and each time it was touched bits of burnt and dry skin came off which made me nearly scream with pain’ he wrote in his diary the following morning.  Sandy knew that he would have to cope with the excruciating discomfort of taking the oxygen mask off his face which brought with it, each time, a whole new layer of skin.  He could cope with pain, however, he knew that from his rowing career.

‘Restful morning in camp,’ Sandy wrote that day.  He observed one man, a porter presumably, coming down from above the North Col into Camp IV and then a party leave the Col upwards.  It was Odell and Hazard, the two scientists, going to V, Odell in search of fossils and Hazard for air and exercise.  Mallory arrived in camp mid- morning and outside Sandy’s tent they sat discussing their summit assault.  Mallory had now been above the North Col on two occasions and knew better than anyone what to expect.  At lunchtime Mallory left Sandy fiddling with the oxygen carriers and went over to Bruce who was concerned with rallying porters.  Eight were willing to carry food, bedding and oxygen cylinders to Camp VI.

After an early tiffin on 4 June, Mallory and Sandy set off up to Camp IV.  Sandy was pleased with his performance and wrote in his diary: ‘We took exactly 3 hrs going up which included about ½ hr at the dump selecting and testing oxygen cylinders.  I breathed oxygen all the last half of the way and found that it slowed breathing down at least three times (using 1 ½ litre/min).  George and I both arrived at the camp very surprisingly fresh.’  At Camp IV they were greeted with the news that Hazard had failed to see any trace of Norton and Somervell.  Mallory took the glasses from him and thought he could spot tracks about 700 feet below the summit.  ‘I hope they’ve got to the top,’ Sandy wrote that afternoon in his diary ‘but by God I’d like to have a whack at it myself’.  By evening Norton and Somervell were back in camp.  They had reached a height of 28,000 feet – 1000 feet short of the summit – but had been forced to turn around as time was growing short and each was nearing the end of his physical strength.  Odell and Hazard were also at IV, preparing to send Sandy and Mallory off the next morning.  What a change in fortunes in two days.  Now it was Sandy’s opportunity.  As he turned in on the night of 5 June in the tiny tent he shared with Odell he spoke again of his delight at the challenge he was about to face.  Just before he went to sleep he wrote his final diary entry: ‘My face is perfect agony.  Have prepared 2 oxygen apparatus for our start tomorrow morning.’

The next morning after a breakfast of fried sardines, biscuits and hot chocolate, served to them in their tent by Odell and Hazard, Sandy and George Mallory left the North Col at 8:40 a.m. with eight porters.

‘The party moved off in silence as we bid them adieu,’ Odell wrote ‘and they were soon lost to view amidst the broken ice-masses that concealed from view the actual saddle of the North Col and the lower part of the North Ridge of the mountain.’

Sandy Irvine and George Leigh Mallory were never seen alive again.

 

One cannot imagine Sandy content to float placidly in some quiet back-water, he was the sort that must struggle against the current and, if need be, go down foaming in full body over the precipice.

 

Jack Peterson to W. F. Irvine, 22 June 1924

I have no recollection of how old I was when my father first told me the story of Uncle Sandy.  I must have been about five or six and I dimly remember wondering what he would have been like, this mysterious uncle who disappeared on the upper slopes of the world’s highest mountain.  I knew his brothers and sister fairly well, and to me they were all inconceivably old and immeasurably tall.   They were all very kind to me but I was a little daunted by their dry wit and humour, which, as I was only a child, went slightly over my head.  My grandmother Evelyn, Sandy’s only sister, was a beautiful woman and I loved her very much.  She was kind and gentle, with a lovely smile and a soft, almost musical voice.  She was very fond of her grandchildren and I, as the eldest granddaughter, felt a certain responsibility to behave like a mini-grown-up in her presence.  She used to let me go into her raspberry nets and pick (and eat) as many raspberries as I wanted.  They were the best raspberries I have ever tasted, pale pink and sweet. I never asked her about Uncle Sandy; she was not the kind of person a young child would quiz.  I don’t know whether my father had asked me not to question her, but I do remember reading the poem written in his memory which was framed and illuminated above the drinks cabinet in my grandparents’ house.

When I was six we went on a camping holiday to North Wales.  My father had purchased a piece of land, not six miles from Bala, from his paternal grandfather,  Willie Irvine, Sandy’s father, and it was called Creini.  Willie bought the land for its remoteness and beauty and when he died my father took it over because he could not bear to see it go out of the family.   My mother was pregnant with my younger brother and we older three children had a marvellous time by the lake, paddling and swimming and exploring the old boat house below a rocky outcrop which we christened Mount Everest.  We thought it extraordinarily high and very dangerous.  We tried to climb it from the south side, but my parents knew a safer route down a grassy slope from the north side and then up to the summit and we frequently had picnics on top, looking down onto the lake.  Over the years the rock has shrunk, as childhood memories so often do.  In reality it is only a fifty foot rock and grass pitch of no particular severity (in climbing terms).  But it is still Mount Everest and we still picnic on it.

Uncle Sandy was a family legend.  His story has been passed down through the generations but I knew little more about him at thirty-six than I had done at six.  When I myself was expecting our third son, in California, my husband Chris said it was time to find a name for the unborn child, whom we knew to be a boy.  We had settled on Johnston as a middle name – it was a name from my husband’s family and we thought it was suitable for a third son.  The problem with the first name was solved when Chris, who was lying in the bath two days before the birth, announced that we would have to come up with a name that would suit a fair haired boy as we seemed to give birth predominantly to blonde, blue-eyed boys.  He suggested we should call him Sandy after my great-uncle and I thought it a splendid idea.  Our Sandy was born in September 1997 in Stanford, California.

My father, I think, was delighted but was amused that we had assumed the name to be a shortening for Alexander whereas in Uncle Sandy’s case it was a shortening for Andrew.  Soon after the birth I was walking with a friend in Palo Alto when we came upon a book shop specializing in mountaineering books.  In the window was a large, glossy volume
Everest: The History of the Himalayan Giant
.  I suggested we should go into the shop to have a look and, sure enough, the book contained, amongst many other sumptuous pictures, a black and white snapshot of Uncle Sandy and George Mallory, taken by Noel Odell on 6 June 1924, leaving Camp IV on their way to the summit of Mount Everest.  I bought the book.  There was more information here than I had known as a child, but the basic story was the same.  After that I read
The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine
by Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel.   Here was a book with some real information about Uncle Sandy and now I was determined to find out more.  I wrote to Audrey and she wrote back, almost by return, giving me what information she could and pointing out that I should talk to my cousin Julia Irvine, daughter of Sandy’s younger brother Alec.  He, it transpired, had written a brief history of Sandy’s early life which was published in a book by Herbert Carr entitled
The Irvine Diaries
.  Alec had also become the keeper of the majority of the Sandy Irvine memorabilia.  A large, black deed box contained letters, photographs, newspaper cuttings, copies of the
Alpine Journal
and
British Ski Year Book
from 1924, all of which referred to Sandy.

By September 1998 I was back in Britain.  I told my father of my burgeoning interest in Uncle Sandy and he unearthed, quite to my surprise, a bundle of papers and photographs.   That Christmas saw a further development.  John Irvine, son of Kenneth, another of Sandy’s brothers, sent my father twenty-five black and white photographs of Sandy dating from 1916 to 1924, including two – well-known - of him at Everest Base Camp working on the oxygen apparatus.

Winter turned to spring.  On 3 May 1999 I awoke, as usual, to the seven o’clock headlines on BBC Radio 4.  I was annoyed that I had forgotten to switch the alarm off as it was a bank holiday and I had planned to have a lie-in.  I listened, half asleep, to Charlotte Green reading the news.  The third item brought me to life: ‘Climbers on the north face of Mount Everest have found the body of the veteran climber George Leigh Mallory…’  I sat bolt upright in bed, my heart pounding.  Thoughts tumbled around my head as I tried to make sense of what I had just heard.

I knew that the BBC had part-funded an expedition on Everest that spring to search for the camera that Howard Somervell, a 1924 expedition member, had lent to Mallory on his last climb towards the summit.  Like the 1999 climbers, however, I had rather assumed that they would find the body of Sandy Irvine which, they believed, had been spotted by a Chinese climber at about 8200 metres in 1975.  To have found Mallory, however, was of monumental significance to the climbing world, throwing new light on where the fatal accident may have happened, its timing and its possible cause.

In the days and weeks that followed the find rumours and theories abounded in equal measure.  It was only when the climbers of Expedition 8000, led by the respected American guide Eric Simonson, gave their press conference in Kathmandu that the full facts about the find were revealed.  There had been no camera; the further search for Sandy Irvine had not been possible for a variety of reasons, including bad weather and heroic rescue efforts of stricken climbers from other expeditions on the part of Simonson’s team.  The objects they had recovered from Mallory’s body, letters, a knife, a pair of goggles, a watch with a broken hand, a broken altimeter, a handkerchief, were all put on display for the first time.

The media briefly buzzed, three books were written as a direct result of the expedition’s findings, and yet we still knew very little more about what happened to Mallory and Sandy.  Questions remained unanswered and still the climbing community could not agree on whether or not the two men were the first to stand on the summit, twenty-nine years before Hillary and Tenzing.  Hillary, ever the gentleman and in a typical show of generosity, said that he would not mind if his record had been broken, but he pointed out that to conquer a summit really you have to descend successfully.  On balance, the majority in the climbing world concluded that they could not have succeeded.  The factors of weather, clothing, oxygen and sheer height and distance would have proven too much for the two men in the daylight available.

The discovery of Mallory’s body had caught the Mallory and Irvine families almost completely unawares.  It seemed sensible now to assemble and document all the material relating to Sandy Irvine under one roof as speedily as possible.  The family set up a trust to take care of the memorabilia, such as it existed, and to deal with queries, questions and requests. I was asked by the trustees, all grandchildren of Willie Irvine, to curate the collection of material and to set about finding out as much information as possible about their uncle.

By the early autumn of 1999 I had collected over three hundred photographs, twenty-three original handwritten letters, articles, press cuttings and much other information besides. I wanted to share this amazing collection with all my Irvine relatives but there was no practical way to do so.  Instead I decided to try and spread it more widely in the form of a book.  Sandy’s brief life had been filled to the brim with energy, activity, humour and kindness and as the research progressed it became clear that there was far more to know about Sandy Irvine than anyone had hitherto guessed.

This book is a personal quest to find out more about a young man who died in the flush of youth alongside one of mountaineering’s greatest legends.  His name is inextricably linked with that of George Leigh Mallory yet very little has so far been written about his short but full life.  It was Audrey Salkeld who gave me the confidence and impetus to go ahead and tackle the project. ‘Get inside his head, Julie, I want to know what he was thinking.’  A challenge I couldn’t refuse.

When I started the research I carefully sifted what we had: letters, photographs, press cuttings, Sandy’s passport and a few other items of memorabilia, which over the years had been dispersed over several Irvine family members.  It was wonderful material, but I felt convinced that evidence relating to the Everest expedition was missing.  I asked various members of the family to check in their attics and desks, rack their brains and talk to their siblings.  All of them assured me that I had what was available and that Willie Irvine would have destroyed anything else as he was so saddened by the death of his son.  Rather grudgingly I accepted this version of events, and went on with my research into other areas of his life.

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