Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (8 page)

I will send my trunk & suitcase by advance passenger on Tuesday 26
^th 
probably
. 
 
My bicycle will have to be left here as the back peddling brake did break & coming adrift got mixed up in the 3 speed hub & locked the back wheel throwing me off & smashing all the gears.  It will take a couple of months to repair
probably.

I will want dirty whites (Tennis things) & shirts & socks washing & Pyjamas & New blue suit & dress cloths taking up to the Lakes, but those I could chose for myself on Thursday 5
^th
& bring up with me on Friday 6
^th
in the (Hudson or YOUR Standard if either is left) or on a Bean chassis & bring Dick with me or by train as far as I can (or on the Clyno?!!!)  If you could leave me a small trunk I could chose all my things & bring them which would save you a lot of packing & looking out of clothes.’

Poor Lilian!  She despaired of his untidiness and chaos in his personal affairs but there was little she could do at this stage to change him.

In amongst all these organisational arrangements he suddenly has a random thoughts about cars and instructs her: ‘
Never
get
Dunlop
tyres for your
Standard
get
Goodyear
or
Firestone
.’  Only after this does he get around to inviting her and Willie down to Shrewsbury for the Bumpers Races.  Taking place after Henley as they did, the Bumpers Races were not always popular with the boys who had performed at Henley but Sandy, typically obsessed by rowing and, moreover, by his loyalty to his house, had been busy preparing for them with his usual gusto.  As he had succeeded in crippling his own bike he was forced to borrow another in order to be able to race up and down the tow path coaching his house IVs.  But this too was not without complications.  ‘Since Henley I have had nothing but bad luck (& I haven’t broken a mirror)’ he admitted. 

I had quite intended to live on the 4 ½ shillings I have left till you come down at the bumpers but while coaching a boat 2 days ago on Mr Kendall’s bicycle I had the misfortune to nearly run over a child on the tow path & in my attempt to stop smashed the back brake.  It must have been in a very fickle condition but the fact remains I broke it & it was up to me to get it repaired at once.  It was a beastly bowden coir brake & without a workshop I could not do it myself.  I got it done & they charged 4/6.   I argued with them for about 10 minutes but could make no impression (it ought have cost 1/6 at the outside). The net result was that I had to borrow 4/0 & was left with ½ which won’t even pay for this letter to be posted.

The letter goes on in extraordinary detail about his financial commitments for the few weeks before he sees Lilian again.  He needed money to tip the Shrewsbury boatmen, anxious to be on the right side of them as he was to be Captain of Boats in 1921, he owed Kitch money from Henley and required journey and pocket money for the camp he was going on immediately after the end of term. ‘I expect you will be absolutely fogged by this letter’,  he concluded, ‘I am pretty fogged with all these arrangements & preparations for the Bumpers, tubbing 3 boats & doing the “Higher Certificate” at the same time.  If I have not brain-fever already I will have soon.’  This is vintage Sandy.  His energy and enthusiasm for everything he does just bursts out of the letter.  But there is also, tucked away amongst the humour and chaos of his thoughts, a genuine kindness and generosity towards others.  He is concerned to acknowledge the very hard work that the boatmen have done for the VIII throughout the summer, both in preparation for Henley and also on the house boats.  He also takes the trouble to tip the House John.  Then there are the little digs at his mother which he cannot resist: ‘Talking of Henley I have my accounts to give of it & will leave it to your judgement what you think ought to come out of my pocket.’  He goes on to list in great detail the expenditure he had incurred at Henley, including repair of a broken canoe paddle.  He explains this as well.  ‘The last named Broken canoe paddle was a most unfortunate accident and came from trying to race another canoe on Sunday afternoon before the races. As you see after paying Kitch & the Mission boats I had £2 one for July & one for Henley & also you will see that those went on unfortunate accident & 2 prs white socks & a very little frivolity which is quite natural after 6 weeks of strict training & hard work.’  A little frivolity! Lilian knew all about Sandy’s little frivolities and probably disapproved of them but there was nothing she could do now to rein him in.  Henley is physically draining for the oarsman but there is plenty of opportunity to let off steam after the racing and I strongly suspect that Sandy was a leading light in the post-race frivolities.

The hospitality was not one way, however, and soon after Sandy had begun at Shrewsbury he was invited to spend time during the holidays at the Summers family home at Cornist Hall in North Wales with Dick.  Cornist Hall is not one of North Wales’s most beautiful houses but what it lacks in architectural merit it makes up for in size and position. It was not a modest house.  At Cornist there was a tennis court, a swimming pool, a beautiful walled rose garden (which still exists) and extensive grounds leading down towards Flint with views over the Dee estuary. 

What Cornist also boasted were garages with gleaming cars, tenderly cared for by the chauffeur, Dick and HS. Cars have been an inevitable cause of friction, delight and disaster in our family ever since they were invented.  HS had been an early owner of a motor car and in 1907 had been spoken to firmly by a Chester magistrate for driving down Bridge Street without due care and attention.  He had accidentally put his foot on the accelerator rather than the brake pedal, ploughing into a flock of sheep and killing several of them.  He was advised thereafter to leave the driving to his chauffeur.  Dick’s elder brother Geoffrey was also a keen motorist and a great deal more accomplished than his father.  He had taught Dick to drive at the age of seven. It was at Cornist that Sandy learned to drive a car and under Geoffrey and Dick’s supervision became a very able driver.

Dick’s interest in cars extended beyond those he drove himself and he fed Sandy endless information about the merits or otherwise of certain models that the Irvine family was considering acquiring. The family did not own a car until 1916 when they took delivery of a second-hand chocolate-coloured 1914 Briton which was immediately nick-named the Choccy Bus.  When Hugh joined the RAF in 1917, the duty of chief motor mechanic fell to Sandy, Willie being entirely impractical in matters mechanical.  The Choccy Bus was desperately unreliable and by 1919 the frequent breakdowns and near-disasters, such as the steering habitually sticking at full left lock, ceased to be accepted as either funny or inevitable.  Sandy was deputed to scour the motoring journals for a newer and more reliable marque.  This he did with his usual dedication and Dick was more than helpful in supplying the literature.  They pored over every publication they could find, checking prices and delivery times, comparing performance and the availability of spare parts.  Sandy wrote long and confusing letters home to his parents, blinding them with science and enthusing about the relative attributes of different makes.   He wrote to his father in November 1919 ‘I have just heard that Padmore has just
got
his new Austin, which was ordered as far as I can gather a few weeks before ours.  If there is no chance of getting one for years how would it be to try & get a Varley-Woods at £660 or an Angus-Sanderson at £450?’  He had convinced himself, nevertheless, that the Austin was the vehicle for them and ultimately advised his father that ‘the Austin will be well worth waiting for if there is any chance of getting it before the summer holidays’.

As it happened the Austin never materialised and Willie purchased an Essex in addition to the Standard that he had bought for Lilian.  The family were now the proud owners of two cars and were about to acquire a third.  This elicited further correspondence from Sandy on the subject of motoring. To his mother he wrote: ‘I’m glad you like your Standard & I’m sure you will like the Swift much more when it comes.  It’s much comfier on bad roads & will last for ever as is shown by Geoffrey Summers’s which is 6 years old & as good as new, perfectly silent & wonderfully easy to control.’

Dick had introduced Sandy to Harry Ham, chief car mechanic in the Summers’ passenger car garage at the Works, in about 1918 and Sandy became a regular visitor to his workshop, asking him endless questions and tinkering with anything Harry would let him get his hands on.  Such was the respect that the mechanic had for Sandy’s practical skills that when the Essex needed, in Sandy’s opinion at least, substantial work doing on it to cure the rattles and bangs, he helped Sandy rebuild the car almost completely in the summer of 1920.  The pistons were replaced, the bearings scraped – a job requiring considerable skill - and together they cut out the rivets and bolted the chassis with a view to curing the ‘rock’. When the bolting was finished, Sandy picked up one end of the car and shook it vigorously to see that he had eliminated the rattles. Not the action of a weakling.  He said that the engine was so improved that when some road-hog in a bull-nosed Morris cut in on him near Queensferry, Sandy chased him in reverse, overtook him and delivered a long lecture on selfish driving.  After that the Essex continued to give good service to the family ending up in a Welsh scrapyard in 1926.  It apparently did not occur to Sandy to send through notice of his modifications to the manufacturers as to how he and Mr Ham had solved the squeaks and bumps in the car.  This was in contrast to Dick who was constantly haranguing car makers with his ideas and suggestions, mostly on the subject of petrol consumption about which he was decidedly fanatical.

Another attraction for Sandy at Cornist was HS’s second wife, Marjory.  After his wife had died in 1906 HS had immersed himself in business but in his private life he was lonely.  In 1916, on a visit to London a doctor friend told him over a nightcap in the Liberal Club of a pretty young girl who was a patient of his, currently recovering from an appendix operation.  Her name was Marjory Agnes Standish Thomson, a chorus girl with a small part in a revival of the musical
Charley’s Aunt
.  He suggested HS pay her a visit and from the moment he saw her he was completely captivated.  She was very pretty, with dark hair, bright blue eyes and a charming, sunny personality.  After only three visits he proposed to her and she agreed to marry him. When she told her friend and fellow chorus girl, Elsa Trepess about HS, Marjory enthused ‘He’s very rich, I’ll marry him, yes, I’ll marry him and we’ll have a marvellous time.  But don’t tell the nurses!’ Harry Summers was middle-aged, squat and balding and could not have been her ideal choice, but he was rich and kind and Marjory envisaged a marvellous life of pleasure and luxury.  They were married in January 1917, shortly after his fifty-second birthday, and at 19 she became mistress of Cornist Hall. The marriage was doomed from the start: Marjory was far closer in age to HS’s children.  ‘So far as I was concerned,’ Dick wrote later, ‘I was always very good friends with Marjory, and as I grew up I found her quite amusing, but of course she had no idea of looking after a person of my age.’

Initially Marjory rather enjoyed her new life. She entered Cornist like a whirlwind, startling the staff right, left and centre with her extravagant ways and her sometimes impulsive and impatient manner.  HS tolerated her independence since her vivacious nature brought the light and laughter into his life that had been lacking.  But before long, life at Cornist began to pall and Marjory was bored.  She turned her attentions to the young officers at the nearby army camp at Kinmel and RAF Sealand, close to the steel works.  She used to invite them to dine and party at Cornist, entertaining on a flamboyant scale and making serious inroads into the wine cellar. Marjory took immense pleasure in teaching her guests to dance to the latest tunes and many a young man learned to foxtrot at Cornist.  She also liked the blues and introduced Dick’s friends, as well as the officers, to the delights of dancing the blues with her, but her pièce de résistance was the twirl.  Cornist was alive with the sounds of dancing and laughter late into the night, such a dramatic contrast to the house when HS was at home.

For Sandy, Marjory added an exotic sparkle to his visits to Cornist.  She introduced him to the kind of entertainment that would have been frowned upon by his parents.  She took him and Dick to the theatre in Liverpool and London, they drove out in the Rolls Royce for extravagant picnics, and of course she taught him to dance.  Dick was always glad to have Sandy to accompany him when Marjory was entertaining and Sandy was always quick to admit how much his friendship with Dick had enriched his own life: ‘I never in my life will be able to repay you for all your kindness & the good times you have given me.’ He wrote later, ‘Just think for one moment what I would be like if I had never met you – probably never seen Town at all, certainly no Theatre – no workshop – no fun with cars – no Brooklands – no priceless holidays in the Lakes.’ And no Marjory.