Sandy Irvine disappeared en route to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924 with fellow climber George Mallory. Photo / Mount Everest Foundation via Getty Images
Sandy Irvine disappeared en route to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924 with fellow climber George Mallory. Photo / Mount Everest Foundation via Getty Images
Sandy Irvine and George Mallory disappeared on Everest in 1924, sparking a century-long mystery.
“My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock-step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest,” Irvine’s fellow climber, Noel Odell, recalled.
It is impossible to know what would have been going through the mind of the 22-year-old, who was accompanying the famous mountaineer George Mallory on a quest to reach the peak of the world’s highest mountain for the first time.
Two years earlier Mallory, Howard Somervell, and Edward Norton had climbed to 26,985ft (8225m) on the mountain’s North Ridge, without using supplemental oxygen – setting a new record for the highest climb in history.
The sock with Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine's name tag that was recently found on Everest. Photo / Jimmy Chin, National Geographic Image Collection
Irvine would have felt a huge honour of being selected, no doubt, and a tremendous excitement at being given a shot at glory – for himself, his party, King and country. Odell noted he was determined to go “all out”.
But at that moment, in the thin air, he would have been struggling for every breath, dehydrated with a sore throat, sunburnt, tired, and all too aware of the bitter cold trying to penetrate his windproof gabardine jacket.
Like every mountaineer, he would not have been thinking of the summit – still some 800 vertical feet away – but been focusing on the next step, the next place for his ice axe, perhaps repeating simple words of encouragement to will himself onward.
Andrew Irvine, rear far left, and George Mallory, rear second left, with their guides and fellow climbers. Photo / Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images
We shall never know, for Irvine and Mallory never returned to tell their story. Odell stared transfixed by the sight which disappeared as quickly as it came. “The whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.”
In the 100 years since their disappearance, the mystery of whether the pair reached the summit of Mt Everest has beguiled the public. Mallory, the dapper and handsome mountaineer, was already well known internationally, famous for his quip “because it’s there”, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest.
For many years, Irvine’s own contribution to the story has remained in Mallory’s shadow. The discovery of his boot, his name tag clearly visible on his woollen sock, changes that, thrusting him into the limelight. So who was Andrew “Sandy” Comyn Irvine?
Andrew Sandy Irvine (1902-1924), Alongside George Mallory, Irvine famously disappeared en route to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. Photo / Getty Images
‘Almost illiterate’
Born in 1902 to a historian father, he grew up in Birkenhead and was educated at Shrewsbury where he excelled at sports and rowing in particular, less so at traditional academic subjects.
“He was almost illiterate,” says Mallory biographer Peter Gillman. “He couldn’t spell very well but he was incredibly talented and visionary in technical matters.”
He was almost certainly dyslexic, but thanks to his scientific and engineering mind, he was accepted to read chemistry at Merton College, Oxford, (where his diary has been digitised and can be viewed online).
A practical joker, Irvine kept a chemistry lab at home and once set off some dynamite underneath the seats of his younger siblings Alec and Thurstan. “He was fun and cheeky,” says his biographer and great-niece Julie Summers, author of Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine.
But it was his sporting prowess and technical know-how that caught the eye of the Everest committee selectors. These were establishment men who made up the Mount Everest Committee, formed by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society to co-ordinate and finance the 1921 British Mount Everest reconnaissance expedition and subsequent efforts to climb the mountain. It was chaired by the finely moustachioed and famous explorer of Tibet, Sir Francis Younghusband.
“He [Irvine] was an exceptionally good oarsman,” says Summers. “He rowed in the Oxford Cambridge boat race in 1922 and 1923, which Oxford won, and was ‘as strong as a horse’ as described by Edward Norton, who was the leader of the 1924 expedition. Strength wise he was very powerful.”
Just shy of 6ft (1.82m), he weighed about 11 and a half stone (73kg). And it was this physique that first caught the eye of the mountaineer Odell, who spotted him training in the build-up to the boat race in Putney in early 1923. “Odell was sent down to Putney to find two fit young men to go on an Arctic expedition to Spitsbergen,” says Summers.
Irvine had very little mountaineering experience, but he distinguished himself on the trip, a 30-day east-west crossing of the Arctic island – and not only with his physical stamina. “Odell was really struck by Sandy’s physical and mental strength. He didn’t mind at all the sort of privations of being up in the high Arctic and also by his ability to fix anything that broke.”
It was that technical ability that would prove so useful on Everest, says Gillman. “He was very talented in terms of his technical ability. He could do all the things that Mallory couldn’t.”
Mallory, despite being the most gifted rock climber of his generation, was famously hopeless with equipment. Using a Primus Stove – an essential piece of kit for such expeditions – was beyond him, for example.
“It was a very nice complementary pairing,” says Gillman, adding Irvine was particularly adept “with the oxygen”. Irvine’s drawings of oxygen flow meters had caught the eye of the committee prior to his selection. For the expedition, he designed a pressure kettle and got a company in Birmingham to build it. He also outlined a lightweight ice axe that he would need. “He was very practical,” says Summers.
“The great thing he did was to sort out the mess of the oxygen equipment, simplify and lighten it,” adds Gillman. That proved one of the crucial factors in persuading Mallory to use oxygen on the expedition.
But while the partnership was harmonious, it was also unusual. Mallory, along with many of the other members of the expedition, was a veteran of World War I where he served as an artillery officer.
He had experienced the good fortune of being sent home from the Somme (because of the recurrence of an old climbing injury) and missed Passchendaele thanks to a motorbike accident. (John de Vars Hazard, who reached the North Col, which forms the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier on the north slope of Everest in 1924, did so with bleeding wounds from the Somme soaking the tunic of his climbing gear.)
Famously the last image taken of George Mallory, left, and Sandy Irvine leaving for the North Col of Everest. The pair were to disappear into the mists never to be seen again alive again. Photo /Royal Geographical Society via Getty Images
By contrast, Irvine was too young to have served in the war. Still, he would have keenly felt the presence of the battle-hardened men who had become immune to the fear and reality of death as they made their way up Everest.
When Mallory and Irvine set off in excellent weather from Camp IV on the North Ridge at 25,200ft (7681m), on June 6, at 8.40am, it was the expedition’s third and final attempt at the summit. On June 7, both climbers, using oxygen sets Irvine had modified, ascended to Camp VI at 26,700ft (8138m). It was the following day that Odell spotted them on the second of three steps, a 120ft rocky climb, some 800ft short of the summit – but he couldn’t be sure exactly.
“Mallory, the most experienced member of the expedition chooses the youngest member. In a way, I think Irvine was a reflection of how Mallory saw himself 10 or 15 years before. It was a lovely romantic pairing, youth and age going together,” says Gillman.
That heroic ideal of two men going off to face their deaths in the noblest traditions of the era is one of the reasons the story has remained in the public imagination alongside the stories of other great explorers like Captain Scott of the Antarctic, who perished in 1912.
For the Irvine family, however, the tragedy of their disappearance hit hard. “My grandmother, who was closest to him in age and who adored him, wouldn’t let anybody speak about him after his death,” says Summers. “She kept a picture of him by her bed, and she said to her son, William, there will never be another man like him.”
One source of comfort to the family were some letters his mother received after his death saying how he’d been supportive to younger boys at Shrewsbury. “He had a very nice reputation as a kind boy to the younger kids,” says Summers. “He never believed in corporal punishment, which was quite unusual then.”
The discovery of Irvine’s foot this week brings mixed feelings for his descendants, says Summers. “I’ve always been on record to say, if they ever found him, they would leave him on the mountain. The older generation, the family felt it was his grave.”
She says she has no desire to see his foot returned to Britain, but would rather it was buried, with respect, in the same way Mallory’s body was laid to rest beneath some stones on the mountain after it was discovered by climbers decades later, in 1999.
As to the enduring question of whether the pair reached the summit, most mountaineers believe the discovery of the boot is unlikely to provide conclusive answers. The only thing that could do as much is a Kodak Vest Pocket camera Irvine was thought to have been carrying. It had initially been given to Mallory, but many believe he would have passed it on to his junior climbing partner because of his own aversion to anything technical.
“The camera could hold the key to the whole mystery, but finding one boot doesn’t actually get us much nearer to finding the camera,” says Gillman.
Most mountaineering experts today believe the pair did not make the summit, even if in their hearts, they want it to be true. As it stands, New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepali Sherpa Tenzing Norgay remain the first people on record to have scaled the mountain, on May 29, 1953.
Doubtless there will be those who will want to renew efforts to find the rest of Irvine’s remains and pursue the tantalising prospect of discovering the camera, or hand-written note that could yet be in a pocket – items which could, perhaps, rewrite the history of achievement on the world’s tallest peak.
But not everyone wants conclusive proof. “Something that’s so endearing about their mystery is that we’ll never actually know,” says Gillman. For the foreseeable future, it is the image of the pair, heroically pushing on for the summit, that must endure.
