Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (9 page)

This was all far from life in Park Road South where Sandy and Evelyn, on return from their boarding schools, found their younger brothers growing up rapidly.  They were tolerated by Evelyn and Sandy but if they stepped out of line and interfered with the older pair there could be trouble.  All three younger brothers recalled being made by Sandy to stand on a pile of sticks or a plank over bricks while Sandy ignited home-made gunpowder that he had placed beneath.  They were always eager to be involved in Sandy’s test so readily agreed to participate.  There would be a blinding flash and whichever brother was in for the treatment would be fired off the pile.  The ‘experiment’, as he and Evelyn called it, could be construed as a kind of initiation.  The youngest, Tur, actually sustained a perforated ear drum as a result of the ‘experiment’. 

Sandy rowed again at Henley in 1921 where the school VIII achieved a great but masked achievement.  They became only the second school ever to break the seven minute barrier, the first having been Eton in 1911, and this rowing as the losing crew against Pembroke College, Cambridge in the semi-final of the Ladies Plate.  Pembroke had already set a very fast time the day before against Trinity College, Oxford, winning by the tiny margin of six feet and had set a new course record for the Ladies’ of 6 minutes 55 seconds.  They matched this time in their race against Shrewsbury which they won by three-quarters of a length which means that Shrewsbury would have crossed the finishing line in 6.57 or 6.58 minutes.  A stupendous effort and an extraordinary achievement.  ‘Think for a moment what it must have felt like at the Mile’, Richard Owen wrote to me, ‘rowing 40, just down, boys against men, and everything to go for and nothing to lose against the crew that had already broken the course record the day before!’ There was another hidden consolation for Sandy: his crew had again showed itself faster than his brother’s Magdalen crew, which ultimately won the Grand that year, when they returned a time of 7.15 half an hour earlier.  Kitch, who always kept coaching notes, recorded that Sandy and Smith had ‘out-rowed’ the other oarsmen: as stern pair they had put up a rhythm and a pace that the others could not match.  Both Sandy and Smith had the experience of knowing that they could push themselves beyond the limit and come through, as they had proven in 1919 and went on to prove in 1923 as adversaries.

Sandy’s last year at Shrewsbury was a very busy one.  As head of Moore’s House and Captain of Boats he had his work cut out for him.  In addition to this he was meant to be studying for his Higher Certificate, which he had to pass in order to earn a place at Oxford.  The tenor of his term as Head of House was unusual in the context of the public school traditions of the time.  Rather than pushing the new boys around and issuing punishments he preferred to encourage them and not only if they were good at sport.  Of one of his quieter contemporaries who had not excelled in any field at the school he wrote in the House fasti, or record book: ‘Quiet and persevering, he knew his own mind and made a good monitor.’  Of his friend Ian Bruce, who took over responsibility for the house rowing after Sandy had left he wrote: ‘Captaincy passes to I. R. Bruce who we feel sure will leave no stone unturned or water unchurned in his efforts to put Moores at the Head of the River’ (a reference to the fiercely contested inter-house boat races which took place each summer).

Sandy had great patience with the boys in the years below him and showed them acts of kindness and generosity which one does not always associate with a nineteen-year- old school boy. When I was going through the letters of condolence I found one from a woman called Muriel Roberts whose son had been a first year at Shrewsbury when Sandy was Head of House.  Hesketh, the boy, had been dangerously ill in a nursing home in Shrewsbury and Sandy had made the effort to call and enquire about him daily.

When Hesketh was to have visitors Sandy used to come & sit with him, & cheer him up, & really helped him get better.  Then sweetest of all, Sandy found out that Hesketh had no appetite, & little parcels kept arriving anonymously. – it was Sandy.  Said he thought Hesketh might be tempted to eat.  His sweetness used often to bring tear to my eyes.  Then it was so lovely as Sandy was a preposter & school idol, and my boy a new nonentity!  He told me the many little yarns in which you & your husband figured, & Evelyn appeared to be the apple of his eye.  He brought her to Criccieth to see us.  Sandy was everything that a young man should be, & if my boys grow up to be half as fine a character as he was - & is – I shall not have brought them up in vain.

Sandy’s friendly and generous nature, which this letter shows, was a key part of his character.  He had inherited his father’s warm and unselfish attitude towards people but he was never a do-gooder and he loved daring escapades.  A famous or, rather, infamous story stems from this period.  The Alington Hall at the schools was used as a gymnasium.  There was a very narrow ledge below a metal beam, well below the height of the gallery in the hall.  On the beam was inscribed ‘Thou shalt not be found out – 11
^th
commandment’.  Sandy persuaded a younger boy to swing him on a rope until he was able to land on the ledge and standing on it, precariously balanced, he wrote on the wall ‘A C Irvine Capt. March 29
^th
1921, W F Smith Sec’.  At that time Sandy was Captain of Boats at the school and Smith was the Secretary.  The story acquired a somewhat legendary status and over the years a few other bold boys added their names to Sandy’s and Smith’s.  When Hugh Irvine visited the school in the late 1920s he was shown the signature by Edward Oliver, the School Engineer, who was evidently both proud and impressed.

Sandy left Shrewsbury with his reputation as a sportsman and an example to the younger boys intact.  One master, Freddie Prior, wrote of his time at Shrewsbury in the house fasti, somewhat prophetically: ‘He had a remarkable capability for leadership and unusual determination.  He had a genius for organisation and any arrangements to be made could be left in his hands.  Above all things a practical person, resourceful in an emergency, always rising to the occasion with some ingenious device for avoiding or overcoming every obstacle.’

It sometimes happens when one is endeavouring to select a man for a particular job that the very kind of man one has been seeking turns up.

Noel Odell November 1924

In the summer of 1919 the family rented Gladys Cottage in Llanfairfechan, a coastal town situated opposite Angelsey, about six miles west of Colwyn Bay, and a popular holiday resort for the Cheshire middle classes in the early twentieth century.  Llanfairfechan is dwarfed by the mighty Penmaenmawr quarry which produced most of the stones for the cobbled streets of Lancashire in the nineteenth century.  In the early twentieth century the quarry was in full swing and the miners, used to the seasonal work the quarry offered, built houses that they inhabited in the winter and let out to guests in the summer.  The railway from Chester was diverted via Llanfairfechan in 1868 and the resort took on its present character from that time.  It is still essentially a Victorian village with a very pretty front onto the sea and the village backs onto the hills behind that lead, eventually, to the Carneddau, Wales’s northernmost range of mountains.

Sandy had minutely organized the travel arrangements to Llanfairfechan. The family arrived by car, train and he by motorbike complete with sidecar, to Alec and Tur’s delight.  The holiday was spent walking, scrambling and biking in the hills.  Kenneth was now old enough to join in with Sandy and Evelyn.  Four years younger than Sandy and five years older than Alec, he was what he as an adult described as a ‘staircase child’.  He was strong, athletic and fearless with a great sense of humour and this endeared him to their friends. Sandy even let him ride his precious motorbike.

The two youngest boys looked up to the three eldest with more than a touch of awe.  Hugh was, after all, twelve years older than Alec and fourteen years older than Tur.  Evelyn they adored as an older sister, but Sandy was really special to them.  More than either of the other two he was fun.  Alec recalled the utter thrill he felt when Sandy put him in the sidecar of his motorbike and took off up into the hills above Gladys cottage.  He couldn’t see out very well but the occasion made a deep impression on him, one which in later life, when thinking about Sandy’s motorbike, he recalled with great glee.

It was with the sidecar attached that my own happy memories are concerned. Llanfairfechan was, in those days, the centre of a number of small bridle-ways just big enough for a motor-bicycle combination. My younger brother and I were often pressed (to our great delight) in to “hold the sidecar down”. My recollection is looking over the side of the sidecar down onto the top of fir trees, and of bracken flashing by at our nose level. But I have never been back again to make the great mistake of refurbishing those early memories.

The motorbike, a Clyno, had been acquired for Sandy two years earlier and he was very proud of it.  His parents despaired of his adventures on the bike and tried, in vain, to stop him from undertaking some of his more hair-raising exploits.  One day during the holiday Sandy had the bright idea that he should attempt to ride the Clyno over the Carneddau and back to Llanfairfechan, something no one had apparently attempted before.  He went against the express wishes of Lilian and Willie but when he set his mind on proving something to himself he was not easily deterred.  There was no mountain track up to the ridge and the way was entirely pioneered by him.  On the summit of Foel Vras, the third highest of the Carneddau, he came upon a couple who were walking across the range.  Unsure of his exact bearings he enquired politely whether he was heading in the right direction for Llanfairfechan.  The man replied that he was and Sandy thanked them and went on his way.  The couple, Noel and Mona Odell, who were on a walking and climbing holiday in North Wales, were very struck by what Odell later described as the intrepid young motorcyclist.  Sandy’s feat attracted great attention locally and at least three newspapers carried the story of the young man who had been brave enough to take a motorcycle into the mountains.  One of the local papers reported: ‘Mr Andrew Irvine, son of Mr Fergusson Irvine, of Liverpool, who is staying at Gladys Cottage, Llanfairfechan, has ridden a motor-cycle to the top of Foel Vras, which is 3000 ft high.  There is hardly any track up the mountain which is very steep.’ Sandy, who shied away from bragging, nevertheless carried this press cutting in his wallet, which was returned from Everest by Odell after his death, so there must have been a certain amount of quiet personal pride in his achievement.

When Odell met Sandy on top of the Carneddau he was twenty-nine and at the peak of his strength and fitness.  He had been a member of the Alpine Club since 1916 and was considered to be a climber of some note, having made difficult ascents in the Alps, including the Aiguille du Tour in the Mont Blanc range in 1908 at the age of eighteen.  Like many climbers Odell had begun his career in the back garden.  As a very young boy he started climbing elm trees with his sisters and soon graduated to illicit roof climbing at the family house in Brighton in his early teens.  On a family holiday in the Lake District when Odell was fourteen he made a secret and unauthorized ascent of Causey Pike, a fell near the western shore of Derwent Water, which he thereafter termed his ‘nursery slope’.  Even this modest 2000ft hill provided a slight challenge: it was a very hot day and he became thirsty, so he took a drink for a mountain beck only to discover a few feet further higher up a dead sheep lying in the water.  Needless to say on his return to the family he was considerably unwell.

Eventually his family was forced to acknowledge his love of climbing and in 1910, at the age of twenty, he was introduced by his father to the brothers Ashley and George Abraham of Keswick.  George was a gifted and respected photographer, but he was also an able climber.  Before the First World War the Abraham brothers had published a book on rock climbs in Wales that at the time had provoked something of an ideological debate.  Some argued that climbers should seek routes for themselves rather than relying on publications to guide them, others were less discreet and were plainly annoyed that their territory had been invaded by ‘outsiders’, climbers from the Lake District.  George arranged for Odell to be given climbing instruction by George Woodhouse, a teacher from Sedburgh School.  Together they climbed many of the famous Lakeland crags including Raven Crag and Bowfell Buttress. 

With climbing skills more finely honed Odell returned to the Alps where he did twelve seasons in the company of some of the best known Alpinists of the day.  It was on one of these trips that he climbed with R. A. Frazer, with whom he later made two trips to Spitsbergen, one of the Norwegian islands inside the Arctic Circle. Odell was not only admired by his fellow climbers, he was loved by them.  As a man he was genial, easy-going and loyal.  He never forgot his friends and was, for the whole of his life, a great letter writer. 

In the summer of 1920 Sandy again encountered Odell in North Wales.  This time he was with Evelyn.  According to Odell they shared a car with a mutual friend who was driving them to climb Tryfan.  Strangely neither party made themselves known to the other although they both record the fact that the meeting took place.  Evelyn at that stage was wearing her hair in a bob and was often dressed in shorts and was on more than one occasion taken for a boy, something she rather relished.  They ran up Tryfan in plimsolls, passing Odell and his climbing partner who were better equipped with hobnailed boots and proper climbing gear.  Evelyn used to love telling the story of this escapade when the two of them were seriously frowned upon by the ‘real’ climbers who were overheard to say ‘bloody young fools!’ as she and Sandy ran past them.

The following year the family borrowed a house from a business associate of Willie’s called Crow How, a beautiful Lakeland stone house about half a mile outside Ambleside.  It had ten bedrooms and extensive gardens so there was plenty of room for guests.  That year they were joined by four of Evelyn’s friends from school, including Audrey Pim who was a talented amateur photographer.  She captured much of the atmosphere of the holiday in her photograph album, recording meticulously all the places they visited, the excursions they made and the sports they played.  Apart from tennis and golf, at which Sandy and Audrey teamed up and won convincingly, they also made their way into the hills.  Typically, where Sandy was involved, these trips frequently turned into outings with an interesting added dimension.  Sandy, Evelyn and Kenneth, accompanied by John Bromfield and Audrey, climbed Helvellyn via Striding Edge.  The trek is a good four hours from Glenridding, at the southern end of Ullswater, and the exciting bit of the climb comes close to the end via the spectacularly precipitous Striding Edge, a rocky arête or ridge, which drops away on one side some 600 feet to Red Tarn and on the other side some 1000 feet into the valley of Patterdale.  Even under the most perfect and windless conditions it is a strenuous pull uphill from Glenridding and then a very alarming few hundred feet along the ridge, which is not for the faint-hearted nor those with no head for heights.  Sandy had elected to climb the arête at sunset, which added a certain drama and excitement and meant that as they ran down the back side of the mountain towards Thirlmere they were descending in the dark.  It must have been pitch dark by the time they reached the summit.  Audrey snapped a beautiful shot of Striding Edge from below just as the sun was disappearing over the summit horizon.