Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Read Free Page A

and spread it more widely in the form of a book.  Sandy’s brief life had been filled to the brim with energy, activity, humour and kindness and as the research progressed it became clear that there was far more to know about Sandy Irvine than anyone had hitherto guessed.
    This book is a personal quest to find out more about a young man who died in the flush of youth alongside one of mountaineering’s greatest legends.  His name is inextricably linked with that of George Leigh Mallory yet very little has so far been written about his short but full life.  It was Audrey Salkeld who gave me the confidence and impetus to go ahead and tackle the project. ‘Get inside his head, Julie, I want to know what he was thinking.’  A challenge I couldn’t refuse.
    When I started the research I carefully sifted what we had: letters, photographs, press cuttings, Sandy’s passport and a few other items of memorabilia, which over the years had been dispersed over several Irvine family members.  It was wonderful material, but I felt convinced that evidence relating to the Everest expedition was missing.  I asked various members of the family to check in their attics and desks, rack their brains and talk to their siblings.  All of them assured me that I had what was available and that Willie Irvine would have destroyed anything else as he was so saddened by the death of his son.  Rather grudgingly I accepted this version of events, and went on with my research into other areas of his life.
    What was missing, presumed destroyed, was all the correspondence leading up to his leaving for Everest in February 1924 and everything to do with the expedition subsequent to that date.  It niggled away at me all through the winter.  In April I spent an evening with my uncle Bill Summers who told me a number of stories about visiting Willie Irvine, his grandfather, in his Welsh home outside Corwen after the Second World War.  He had just passed his driving test and loved any excuse to drive, so motoring to Grandfather once a week gave him an opportunity for a good long run in his car and convivial company at the end.  Like all the grandchildren, he was extremely fond of his grandfather and one of his pleasures was to fetch and carry books for the old man from his library, which was distributed in bookshelves throughout the house.  He was always struck by the fact that Willie knew where every book was to be found and by the extraordinary care he took over his research.  Every archaeological find he ever made was meticulously catalogued, labelled and preserved in cases in the study.
    Bill recalled very clearly seeing an ice axe hanging in the gun room at Bryn Llwyn and asked Willie what it was. ‘That was Sandy’s,’ he replied, in a voice which did not invite further questioning.  ‘It came back from Everest without him.’  There was a similar story with Sandy’s binoculars, with a boat he had made after a family holiday in 1917, and with his gun.  In other words, Willie Irvine had kept a lot of memorabilia from Sandy’s life and although no one was allowed to touch the objects, nor to talk to him about Sandy, they existed and were safely stored.  This set me thinking again.  Willie Irvine was an archaeologist and historian by leaning, although he had been a businessman all his working life.  He followed these former interests with enthusiasm in his retirement and it suddenly didn’t make any sense to me at all that he would have destroyed anything to do with Sandy.
    I knew, from my research at Merton College, Oxford, home of Sandy’s diaries and a few letters since Willie’s death, that his sister-in-law, Agnes Davies-Colley, had been involved after Sandy’s death in fielding some of the correspondence.  The story had always been explained to me that Sandy’s mother, Lilian, was so distraught by the loss of her son that she could not face the letters of condolence or contact with the other members of the 1924