Cabinet of Curiosities: Mystery on Everest 1924

When I look around my office I realise that I am a serial offender when it comes to curiosities. I can’t resist them. I have a shelf, as you can see, full of little objects that mean something to me. 

A gold medal awarded to my great-great uncle for Classics at University College London. Amazing considering his father was illiterate; an origami butterfly made by my youngest son when he knew I was disappointed by a book proposal being turned down (haven’t we all been there?) and a note from my Dad when I stood up to speak impromptu.

The most curious object I used to have in my office, which is now in the collection of Merton College, Oxford, is a copper pressure kettle. It is a beautiful object in its own right – about 9” or 23cm high and sits on a frame under which a burner is placed to heat the water. It came back from 23,500 feet on Mount Everest in July 1924, just a few weeks after my great-grandfather had received the devastating news that his son had been lost somewhere close to the summit. He and his climbing partner, George Mallory, were last seen by Captain Noel Odell ‘going strong for the top’ at 1pm on 8^th June. Although Odell made valiant efforts to find the two climbers he failed and the nature of their deaths was unknown for 75 years. The mystery of Mallory and Irvine, Sandy Irvine being my great-uncle, has fascinated generations of climbers and Everest-watchers ever since. There was something romantic in the heroic British failure and it was a full 29 years later that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay finally reached the top of the world from the south, rather than the north, side of Everest.

Sandy Irvine in his dark blue rowing blazer 1923

Did the two men reach the top? Was 22 year old Sandy Irvine the youngest Briton ever to stand on the billiard table sized summit? We will probably never know the answer. Even the discovery of Mallory’s frozen remains in 1999 did not provide an answer. If anything, it added more questions to the mystery. His watch and altimeter were broken in the removal of the artefacts from his body so we do not know how high they climbed nor at what time Mallory fell. For that much we do know. He was wearing a light weight walking rope around his waist, which means he was roped to Sandy Irvine. The rope was broken, probably on a rock, by the fall. He fell several hundred meters and broke his ankle and knocked himself out with a blow to his forehead. He probably died within half an hour and may never have regained consciousness. Sandy’s body has never been found and there is still speculation that if someone does come across his remains they might find the camera he was carrying and it might, just might, have a photograph of the summit. Or not. Even if they do find the camera and it does not have a photo of Mallory waving a flag, it does not mean they didn’t make it. The camera might have malfunctioned, Sandy might have been too hypoxic to take a picture. No, the only way we will ever know for certain that they did not reach the summit is if they find a note in Sandy’s pocket saying: ‘blow it, we didn’t make it’.

Sandy with mark IV Oxygen Apparatus at
Shekar Dzong © RGS with IBG

But why the pressure kettle? Sandy Irvine was practical and inventive. His role on the expedition was to look after the oxygen equipment. He redesigned the 1922 set in his room at Merton in the autumn of 1923 but Siebe Gorman ignored his suggestions and sent the 1922 design. When Sandy caught up with them in Calcutta he was disgusted and spent the whole of the trek across Tibet fashioning brand new sets in his tent-cum-workshop. They worked. They were 30% lighter and much more efficient and robust. The expedition leader was impressed when he, Mallory and Odell tried them out on rocks below Shekar Dzong. Sandy made a rope ladder to help the porters scale an ice-wall between camps 3 and 4 and the pressure kettle had been his attempt to design a device that would make water boil at a higher temperature than the normal 70°C on Everest. It was delivered by a Birmingham company the night before he left Liverpool for India on 29 February 1924.

When Odell had to go through Sandy’s possessions and discard what they could not carry back to Britain (they had a bonfire at base camp the morning they left) he kept the kettle as a reminder of Sandy Irvine’s brilliant practical mind and his sense of humour. The kettle has been in the family ever since and we are very proud of it. When I showed it to Chris Bonington last autumn he had tears in his eyes as he held it. He said he felt a powerful connection to Mallory and Irvine through it. A curious but wonderful object. The mystery endures and long may it last.

Sandy Irvine (left) and George Mallory at Base Camp, Everest,
April 1924. © Royal Geographical Society with IBG

Fearless on Everest was first published in 2000. I was inspired to write the book having named my youngest son Sandy as, like his forbear, he had blond hair and blue eyes. We were living in California and I saw a picture of Mallory and Irvine in a bookshop window. I became interested in a story I had only ever heard as a child and about which I knew very little. Research led to a fascinating cache of letters, an album of family photographs and finally, a trunk in the attic. That was in 1999. On 4th May I woke up to hear Charlotte Green reading the seven o'clock news: 'Climbers on Mount Everest have found the frozen remains of ...' I nearly jumped out of my skin. I thought they had found Sandy, who I knew they were looking for. '...George Mallory.' For the climbers it was like looking for the treasure map and finding the treasure. But for our family it was relief that Sandy's mortal remains were still hidden on the mountain. There they remain and I, for one, hope with all my heart he is never found. The mystery is so much more romantic for remaining unsolved. And besides, I want to remember him as he looked: young, handsome and curious.

A Blustery Obsession by Julie Summers

Like many of my fellow countrymen and women, I am fixated by the weather. The shipping forecast can fill me with overwhelming excitement when there are gales in all areas. The poetry of the Beaufort Scale and the thought of rugged Rockall, stuck out in the Atlantic, battered by storms nearly all year round, seems to me a perfectly beautiful juxtaposition of nature versus man. So you can imagine my delight when I chanced upon a brilliant book entitled The Wrong Kind of Snow. Published in 2007, it is written by two weather enthusiasts who are anything but armchair boffins. Robert Penn developed his passion for the weather while riding a bicycle around the world and Antony Woodward was born in the back of a Landrover in the middle of a snowdrift in 1963, a notoriously hard winter, he adds. I know. I remember it. My mother had a car crash just up the road from my grandparents’ house and it made a very big impression on me, aged 3. I recall the car skidding on the ice and careering into a car coming up the hill in the opposite direction. It was my first memory of a drama and it was caused by the weather.

Penn and Woodward’s study covers every type of weather event and describes the British Isles as the most weather-affected place on earth. I was not sure I was ready to believe that until I plunged deeper into this fascinating book, which gives a daily account of the weather, drawing statistics from the last three hundred years and anecdotes from the last two thousand. Given the unseasonally warm, damp British December of 2015 and early January 2016, I was amused to read that Sydney Smith, a nineteenth century clergyman, complained on 7 January 1832: ‘We have had the mildest weather possible. A great part of the vegetable world is deceived and beginning to blossom, not merely foolish young plants without experience, but old plants that have been deceived before by premature springs; and for such, one has no pity.’

Daffodils flowering near Wittenham, Oxfordshire 26 Dec 2015

I too felt bewilderment and little sympathy that daffodils were flowering in late December. Yet on that same date, in 1982, the temperature recorded in Braemar in Scotland was -22.6C. Extremes of weather indeed.

Unable to resist a childish urge to see what happened on my birthday, I looked up 3 October and was not disappointed. ‘After weeks of storms and heavy seas in the Channel, a far southerly wind carries the massive invasion fleet of William, Duke of Normandy, to England in 1066. He lands at Pevensey completely unopposed.’ Why unopposed? Because King Harold had concluded that the long delay and roaring northerly gales had put William off and the invasion would be postponed until the spring. How wrong he was, and how extraordinary to think that 1066 might never have happened, or even become 1067.

William the Conqueror, October 1066 (C) Bayeux Tapestry

The weather is the backdrop to our lives, affecting everything we do and often the way we feel. A wash-out in June can pour misery onto a barbecue party while a bright crisp day in October can lift the spirits for me in a way that no spring day can. I am frequently struck by how much weather is used both in fiction and non-fiction. Indisputably one of the most famous weather events launches Bleak House: ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. . .’ and so on. Such a brilliant evocation of the literal and literary meaning of fog. Many authors of fiction, historical or contemporary, use the weather to describe moods, feelings and portents. In Wuthering Heights a powerful storm strikes on the night that Heathcliff runs away: ‘…the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind, as well as thunder, and either one or the other split a tree off at the corner of the building: a huge bough fell across the roof, and knocked down a portion of the east chimney-stack, sending a clatter of stones and soot into the kitchen-fire.’

But what of the non-fiction writers? The weather has an impact on events for us too and I usually take note of extreme examples. When in April 2014 I was asked to help out with developing a storyline to turn my non-fiction book Jambusters about the Women’s Institute into the drama series, Home Fires, for ITV I was cross-questioned on every possible aspect of the early months of the Second World War. It is a topic I know well, having written six books about the era. The script writer was teasing me, trying to catch me out, and on one occasion he thought he had won: ‘What day did it start snowing in 1940?’ he asked. I replied immediately, January 28th. 'How on earth did you know that?’ he asked. Well, it’s quite simple really. There had been plans to hold a big agricultural meeting in London on 31^st January but it had to be cancelled because of the ice storm and extreme snowfall that had led to travel chaos. Trains were stranded all over the country, their points frozen solid, birds died on the wing and wild ponies on the hills in north Wales were entombed in ice. There were 12 foot snow drifts in Lancashire and Bolton was almost completely cut off. How could I possibly have overlooked a weather event like that? 

I wrote last month about my great uncle, Sandy Irvine, who was last seen close to the summit of Mount Everest in 1924. He disappeared in cloud at 12:50, probably the result of a dramatic storm high on the mountain, and was never seen again. That weather event almost certainly accounted for his demise. At the opposite end of the spectrum, moonlit nights during the Second World War spelled danger of a different kind. The ‘Bombers’ Moon’ meant that the terrifying menace of aerial bombardment was at its most dramatic when the pilots could see their targets. Every diary I have ever read that spoke about bombing talked of the terror of moonlight.

Far, far away from Britain, in the jungles of Thailand on 3^rd September 1944 prisoners of the Japanese stared up at the sky in horror as the Royal Air Force bombed the railway sidings just 100 yards from their camp on the Death Railway. The bombers came back again and again and the prisoners could hear the bombs whistling overhead not knowing whether they would fall in or outside the camp.  Splinters tore through the flimsy bamboo and attap of the huts. ‘The earth shook and shivered as we lay in the shallow ditches, not knowing whether the bombs were in or only around the camp,’ wrote Lieutenant Louis Baume. Once it was over and the dust settled, the moon offered them a view of a hideous scene, bathed in ghostly silver: ‘in front of the hospital lay rows and rows of corpses, broken and bloody.  Around the huts, in the grass and on the paths lay others, killed as they ran for cover.  Alone, with his sword trailing in the dust behind him and with tears in his eyes, the Japanese guard drifted and paused, helplessly saluting the dead.’ The power of that image haunted me when I visited the site of the camp in 2003. Yet the strongest voice I heard in my head was that of Louis Baume insisting that nothing could break the men's spirit. Their first concern was how many men they could get to the hospital hut to be saved by the new miracle drug that had been delivered to them by the Red Cross earlier that week: penicillin. 

A hospital hut at a camp on the Thai-Burma Railway
drawing by Stanley Gimson, 1943

How extraordinary that on that September date sixteen years earlier, Alexander Fleming had returned home from his holiday to discover that the unseasonably cold, damp weather had caused piles of culture dishes smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria to grow greenish-yellow mould: penicillin was discovered. Without that damp spell the injured men in the steaming rain forest in Thailand might not have survived. So, for good or for ill, I continue to be fascinated and obsessed by the weather.

Now, where is my radio? I need to listen to the shipping forecast.

Out with the Old . . . by Julie Summers

Hang on, hang on. It is all too easy at the back end of the year to get over enthusiastic about throwing things out. I love having a good sort through my shelves and cupboards but I do wonder if I get carried away and throw out something precious. Or more to the point, something that might be precious to others in the future. At the beginning of this month I had the great good fortune to have a behind the scenes visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The curator of Early Modern Manuscripts, Mike Webb, produced a small number of treasures to illustrate various stories about life during the seventeenth century. One of the objects he showed us was an accounts book kept by Mary Gofton, previously Lady Sandys, between 1645 and 1649. In this little volume she listed every item of expenditure she made. They range from £2 11s 6d for ‘16 yards of selver and gold lace for my morning cotte’ (mourning coat) to 2s 6d for a ‘play thinge for nick and miles’ (her grandsons), while on other occasions she made huge donations to her children, such as £2,000 to her son stuard in March 1647, the equivalent of £250,000 or $375,000 in 2015. 

Account book of Mary Gofton (née Hanbury,

afterwards Lady Sandys,

afterwards Richardson), 1645-1649

Shelfmark: MS. Eng. e. 3651

Several things struck us powerfully about this book. First, the cover was utterly unprepossessing.If one had seen it in a junk shop it would have been easy to overlook it. Secondly, it was written in the vernacular rather than ‘secretary script’ which is how men of letters were taught to write. Women did not need that skill.

Page beginning 16 March 1647

The result is that her spelling is wonderfully arbitrary but the voice is entirely hers. Reading the descriptions of her expenditure, Mike Webb was able to reconstruct her speech through her spellings and we were amazed but thrilled to hear the gentle ‘burred’ accent of a seventeenth century gentlewoman from Gloucestershire. How Mary Gofton’s book has survived is a mystery and it is nothing short of a minor miracle that it was not thrown out in a New Year spring clean in any one of the intervening 367 Januarys.

When I was working on my first book Fearless on Everest, about the disappearance of Sandy Irvine with George Mallory on Mount Everest in 1924, I had a stroke of luck with a find of material that too might have ended up in the bin. Sandy was my great uncle, though of course I never knew him. 

Willie Irvine, 1877

I did however once meet his father, my great-grandfather, Willie Irvine, when I was a baby. There is a photograph of me aged about 9 months with legs like sausages sitting on the old man’s knee. He was 93 and died not long after the photograph was taken.  Fast forward 38 years and I was living in California with my young family. Our third son had been born in Stanford and we called him Sandy after his namesake because, like him, he was blonde haired and blue-eyed. A few weeks after he was born I was walking down the high street in Palo Alto when I saw a photograph in a bookshop window. It was the last photograph of Mallory and Irvine taken the morning they left camp IV to head for camps V and VI before launching their bid on the summit on 8 June 1924. They disappeared in a blanket of cloud at about midday, last seen by Noel Odell in what is probably the most famous sighting in mountaineering history. They were, in his words, ‘going strong for the top.’ We came back to Britain in 1998 and the following year George Mallory’s frozen remains were found by an Anglo-American team and interest in the mystery of Mallory and Irvine soared.

Sandy Irvine, Spitsbergen 1923

There are more than one thousand books written about Everest and almost every single one of them alludes to their story. However, Sandy was merely the historical cipher to the great George Mallory and little was known about him. So little, in fact, that almost nothing existed in the public domain other than his sparse Everest diary and a few notes in the Royal Geographical Society archives. When I asked various family members whether anything else existed I was shown a handful of lovely family photographs and a dozen or so letters from Sandy to his family. He wrote to his mother telling her about his rowing triumphs and to his aunt, who was about to go into hospital to have an operation: ‘Dear Aunt Ankie, I’m dreadfully sorry to hear you are going to be cut up tomorrow.’ But nothing from Everest. The story went that Willie Irvine had thrown everything away, so sad was he after Sandy was killed on the mountain.

Sandy Irvine (left) with Willie, Evelyn (my grandmother) and older brother Hugh, 1904

Willie Irvine was an amateur historian and I know that historians of any shape or size hate throwing things away. So I persisted in my questioning and eventually my cousin went to the family home in North Wales and there, in the attic, she found a black trunk and in this trunk was a slim foolscap folder. It was fastened with a blue ribbon and on the front it said, in Willie’s tidy handwriting, ‘ACI Everest 1924’. Andrew Comyn Irvine, Sandy’s full name. It was one of the most exciting discoveries of my life. In this file were 11 long letters from Tibet and the mountain; photographs taken en route and developed in a dark-room tent at base camp; notes about the capricious oxygen apparatus which Sandy was responsible for and bills for his Everest clothing.

The trunk, found 75 years after Sandy's death

The fact that this trunk had not been thrown out is almost unbelievable. The house had been sold after Willie’s death and run as an old people’s home. Then Alec Irvine, Sandy’s younger brother, bought the house back in the late 1970s and by the luck of the stars no one had bothered to clear out the attic. The letters, in particular, gave me Sandy’s voice. He wrote as he spoke, in a breathless and impatient way. When he couldn’t find the words to describe something he would draw it. The letters were literally priceless to me for my book. And for posterity?

Sandy's letter to his mother from Sikkim, en route to Everest

Well, they now reside in the archives at Merton College Oxford and I can only hope that in 300 odd years they will still be there, as Mary Gofton’s accounts book is in the Bodleian, to help someone to hear a voice from the past.

So, when you are throwing out the old to make space for the new, just ask yourself if in doing so you are condemning something not only to the bin but to silence…