Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Read Free

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