Andrew Irvine

Andrew "Sandy" Irvine was one of the mountaineers (the other being George Mallory) who attempted to make the first ascent of Mount Everest. He was born in Birkenhead on 8 April 1902, and was educated at Birkenhead School, Shrewsbury School and Merton College, Oxford. He was a keen sportsman and excelled at rowing, and was a member of the crew that won the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race in 1923.

Related Topics:
George Mallory - First ascent - Mount Everest - Birkenhead - 8 April - 1902 - Birkenhead School - Shrewsbury School - Merton College, Oxford - Rowing - Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race - 1923

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Irvine was compassionate, expressive, shy and creative. He was also being immensely fit and strong, and possessed a natural engineering genius to fix or improvise almost anything mechanical. During the First World War, whilst still a schoolboy, he submitted to the War Office a design for an interrupter gear which would allow a machine to fire from a propeller plane without damaging the blades.

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In 1923 he was chosen for a university expedition to Spitzbergen, where he excelled on every front; and, recommended by the Spitzbergen expedition leader, Noel Odell, he was selected for the forthcoming 1924 Everest expedition when he was still a 21 year old undergraduate on the grounds that he might be the "superman" that the expedition felt it needed.

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His companion and friend George Mallory later wrote home, having set sail for the Himalayas, that Irvine "could be relied on for anything except perhaps conversation". He was later to make major, crucial, innovations to the expedition's professionally designed oxygen sets that radically improved their functionality, lightness, and strength. He also maintained the expedition?s cameras, camp beds, primus stoves and many other devices. He was universally popular and respected by his elder colleagues for his ingenuity, companionability and unstinting hard work.

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The ascent itself took place in early June, and the last day that the climbers were seen was 8 June 1924. Keen-sighted expedition colleague Noel Odell reported seeing them at 12.50 p.m. ascending one of the major "steps" on the ridge and "going strongly for the top" but no evidence thus far has proved conclusively that they reached the summit. They never returned to high camp and died somewhere high on the mountain. It is still uncertain if they ever reached the summit, and Irvine's body has never been recovered.

Related Topics:
8 June - 1924

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In 1999, Mallory's body was found at around 28,000 ft (8,530 m) on the North Face of Everest by an American expedition. Two details noted when Mallory's body was discovered further fuelled the speculation as to whether the pair did in fact reach the summit that day in 1924:

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• Firstly, Mallory's daughter has always said that Mallory carried a photograph of his wife on his person with the intention of leaving it on the summit when he reached it. This photo was not found on the body when it was discovered. Given the excellent preservation of the body and its garments, this lack points to the fact that he may have reached the summit and deposited the photo there.
• Secondly, Mallory's snow goggles were in his pocket when the body was found, indicating that he was killed at night. This implies that he and Irvine had made a push for the summit and were descending very late in the day. Given their known departure time and movements, had they not made the summit, it is unlikely that they would have still been out by nightfall.

While indeed tantalising, neither of these details are conclusive in themselves. What may possibly provide concrete evidence would be the recovery of images contained in the cameras that the men were carrying. Unfortunately, neither of the two cameras that the expedition carried have been found. Many have speculated that Irvine may have been carrying one of the cameras when they were killed. Experts from Kodak have stated that if one of the cameras is found with film, there is a good chance that the film could be developed to produce "printable images" due to the nature of the black and white film that was used and the fact that it has in effect been in "deep freeze" for over three-quarters of a century.

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In 1975, a Chinese climber named Wang Hongbao had reported seeing the body of an "old English dead" near the summit. Tragically, he was killed in an avalanche a day later, before the location could be precisely fixed. Current information indicates to most analysts that the body he saw would have been Irvine's. Inspired by the importance of the discovery of Irvine's body and the invaluable camera, high-altitude research expeditions spent weeks on Everest in 2001, 2004 and 2005 but were able to shed little further light on what had previously been known about his fate; speculation and debate continues, as does what is known in mountaineering circles as "The Mystery of Mallory and Irvine".

Related Topics:
1975 - Wang Hongbao - Avalanche

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Andrew Irvine: References ►