Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine Page 4

  Hugh was very much the grown-up boy on this holiday and he saw to it that the two younger children did what they were told and behaved in a seemly manner. Frequently he was allowed to ride with Aunt Edith into Ross-on-Wye while Evelyn and Sandy were obliged to stay at the house and play in the garden with the other cousins. This never bothered them. On the contrary it meant they were left to their own games, with Evelyn joining in all the more ‘boyish’ activities. She was rather snooty about her girl cousins and their lack of knowledge of boys’ sports, complaining that in a football match between the boys (Cambridge) and the girls (Oxford) ‘of course the boys won because most of the girls knew nothing about football hardly’. She was always keen to be involved in everything the boys did and once prevented from joining the boys - when Hugh was riding in the donkey cart and Sandy pedalling beside them – she remained up a tree and sulked.

  Three extra children was a a burden for Aunt Edith, especially as the Irvine children appeared to have boundless energy. Clearly at a loss one afternoon as to what to do with them, she invited them to collect dandelion heads for her, offering them one penny (about 50 pence in today’s money allowing for inflation) for every 100 dandelions. After Sandy and Evelyn had both earned 3d she put the rate up to 1d for every 500 dandelions. Evelyn collected dandelions all afternoon and Sandy noted with some awe, that she had collected 20,000 heads. Evelyn put it at a rather more conservative figure of 2300.

  The hero of the holiday for Sandy was cousin Jack who, at about fifteen, was considered to be very grown-up and experienced. He allowed Sandy to use his powerful telescope and explained to him what was happening during an eclipse that they witnessed during their stay. He treated Sandy with a degree of respect that he wasn’t used to and Sandy responded well, showing genuine interest and enthusiasm for everything he was shown – from dead rats to hatching chickens. Jack also played the organ and one day while he was practising in the church he allowed Sandy and Evelyn to sit either side of him and operate the stops, pulling them out and pushing them in as instructed. I imagine that the workings of the organ were of far more interest to Sandy than the music Jack was playing.

  The following summer Willie decided to take the whole family to stay in Peel on the Isle of Man. It was a great success and they had planned a further visit to Peel in 1914 but were unable to go because of the outbreak of the First World War. The highlight of the holiday for Sandy were the trips they made on a racing yacht called the Genista. He was so impressed by this boat that on his return to Birkenhead he made a scale model of it, enlisting the help of one of the maid’s friends. This was carvel-built, the stakes being the wooden slats from old-fashioned venetian blinds, with riggings and sails. It was an accurate copy and he gave it the same name as the yacht. The model Genista outlived Sandy by many years. It was kept in the study at Bryn Llwyn and no one was allowed to play with it. Years later Alec observed one of my cousins looking at it and said, ‘It’s not bad for a boy of eleven I suppose, but what that boat really deserves is a Viking funeral.’ I am sure Sandy would have heartily approved of the sentiment. He would never have liked to think that the family had put him or anything he made on a pedestal. In the recent find the model was discovered, somewhat altered but essentially in good condition, although without its rigging. Alec was right – it wasn’t bad for a boy of eleven.

  Sandy had persuaded Willie to let him have a workshop in the back yard at Park Road South and it was here that he made his models and carried out his scientific experiments. Willie was not particularly practical but he could see that Sandy had a real flair for engineering and science. Sandy guarded this room fiercely and possessively, not allowing anyone to enter it without his permission. He wrote anxiously to his mother on one occasion, ‘tell Mrs Killen not to let anyone into my room because she knows where the key is’.

  He used the workshop all his life, designing bits for the family cars, fixing household tools and making models. When he sailed for Everest in February 1924, he left behind him a disassembled 1922 oxygen apparatus on which he had been working avidly at Oxford and then at home for nearly four months. When Willie returned it to the Royal Geographical Society in 1924, he wrote to the Secretary, Arthur Hinks, that Sandy had been working on it right up until the day he sailed for India. He added that he wasn’t sure all the bits were there, so completely had Sandy dismantled it.

  In July 1914, the house was full of Irvine cousins from Aberdeen who had come to share a holiday at Peel. During dinner – always a very formal occasion – Willie returned from the telephone, in those days a new and awesome invention. Still clutching his spotless napkin, he went slowly upstairs to the schoolroom where the assembled children were playing after supper. Such a visit was almost unprecedented. He looked grim: ‘We shan’t be going to the Isle of Man, children,’ he said. ‘England is at war with Germany.’

  The five older children, Hugh, Evelyn, Sandy and their two cousins Edward and Lyn, were dispatched to stay at the Davies-Colley family home, Newbold, outside Chester. The house was owned by Lilian’s bachelor brother Tom who had inherited it from his uncle and was supposed to be haunted. The house is a large brick mansion with a turreted tower at the front and a further, slightly lower octagonal tower at the back overlooking the gardens. The house was built in the sixteenth century but has so many nineteenth-century additions that it is difficult to form a view of what it might once have looked like.

  When the children arrived at Newbold they found that Uncle Tom was away all week in Manchester, returning only at the weekends. They were given a free rein to roam in the extensive grounds, being looked after mainly by the housekeeper and the groom. The housekeeper they never saw but the groom took full charge and planned many outings in the trap. Hugh had a shotgun and they all had fishing rods, so their days were filled with outdoor activities and there was never a moment to be bored. Hugh and Sandy climbed up to the top of the tower and threw home-made spears into the gardens and filled Uncle Tom’s salute cannon with black powder and gravel which they fired hopefully at the rabbits that cropped the short grass between the formal yew hedges. They discovered to their joy that nobody very much cared when they went to bed so after supper they played steps on the lawn until it was too dark to see. Such freedom was new to Sandy and Evelyn and they greatly relished it.

  There were no newspapers at the house and all of them apart from Hugh were completely oblivious of the war until Uncle Tom took them to Beeston Castle, a medieval fort perched high on a hill some ten miles from Newbold. On the way they saw cars with flags on them and heard talk of fierce battles being fought in France. It seemed a world away from their own idyllic existence and none of them, with the exception of Hugh and possibly Edward, had really any idea what it all meant. Within four years two of them would have fought in France, one dead and one wounded.

  Newbold held great attraction for the children but there were frightening things about the house which deeply impressed them. Half-way up the stairs was a large painted cut-out of a woman peeling apples into a bowl, two-dimensional but highly coloured. Newbold had no electricity, being lit by oil lamps, so when it was time for the children to go upstairs they had to collect a candle. These were lined up on a table at the bottom of the stairs with a candlestick for each child and a box of matches. Evelyn said she remembered that she and Sandy always dashed breathlessly up the stairs because as they passed the Apple Woman with their flickering candles the light danced on the image and it gave the impression that she was moving.

  The greatest attraction for Sandy at Newbold was the room containing all Uncle Jack’s Crimean uniforms including his sword, his folding candle lantern, and his tent that really captured his imagination. Sandy had a photograph of the room in his album and it was a place where he loved to spend time alone. In addition to the war regalia, there were also telescopes and microscopes, gyroscopes and all sorts of other unidentifiable things with wires, wheels and whirring parts. This room he found irresistible and there was no one at Newbold to tell him
to keep out. Whenever the other children noticed he was missing they would be certain to find him there, studying the workings of this or that machine, poring over diagrams in the dusty books which lined the walls. The hours he spent in the room reinforced his already great interest in adventure and invention.

  Towards the end of the first summer of the war, Evelyn and Sandy spent two weeks in Glasgow with their McNair cousins, Willie’s sister Helen having married a Dr McNair in the 1890s. The McNairs were an adventurous bunch and they had an exciting time which Sandy relayed in a rather breathless and hurriedly written letter to his mother, a style that became his own whenever he had some great experience to describe. ‘I am having a splended time one day we went fore an eight hour voyage down the Clyde and round Bute we saw on the Clyde about 90 Cruisers and 15 Torpedo Destroyers being built and a Light Cruisers seemed to be garding the mouth; Bute was awfuly nice’. The spelling and lack of punctuation probably contribute to the breathless impression, but the experience on the Clyde was a great one for him and he drew on the letter four exquisite and perfectly observed sketches of a naval destroyer that they had seen. He told his mother that everyone up in Glasgow was talking about the Russians and he was very excited by the whole atmosphere, wishing madly that he could be on a destroyer ‘like Uncle Leonard’. It was on this holiday that the McNair cousins christened him Sandy, on account of his fair hair and his name Andrew. ‘Sandy Andy’ is what he became on the holiday and he liked Sandy so much that he decided to change his name. It was typical of him, even at that age, to seize upon something that appealed to him, to take it seriously and ensure that everyone around him recognized its importance to him. Up until this date he had used his full name, Andrew, but on his return from Glasgow he announced solemnly to the family that from this day onward he wished to be known by everyone as Sandy. They abided by his wish and only rarely after that did anyone ever refer to him as Andrew.

  When Willie Irvine came to choose a school for his sons he elected to send them away rather than to have them educated in Birkenhead as he had been. He chose Shrewsbury School for several practical reasons. First and foremost it was on the excellent train line from Birkenhead and Chester but, secondly, it served as the public school for the North Wales, Midlands and Liverpool areas. Since 1913 there have been over twenty Irvine and Davies-Colley sons, nephews and grandsons educated at Shrewsbury but none of them has had as spectacular a career at the school as Sandy.

  He went up in the autumn of 1916 and from the very outset he thrived. Released from the formal and rigorous upbringing to which Lilian had subjected all her children, he flourished in the congenial public school atmosphere. He found that he was able to give vent to the energy that had been building up inside him and the means of expression he found was in sport. His life at Shrewsbury was a truly happy one and he gave back to the school as much as he got out of it, winning the admiration of the boys and masters alike.

  In the nineteenth century Shrewsbury had had an excellent academic reputation in the Classics. At the beginning of the twentieth century Moss, the headmaster of forty- two years’ services retired and was replaced by the Revd C. A. Alington, who, unlike Moss and many of his predecessors, was an Oxford rather than a Cambridge man. He was thirty-five and had spent his time since Oxford as a Master at Eton. He was described by one historian as a breath of bracing and invigorating air, and certainly the changes he introduced at the school affected every possible aspect of life there. The masters, both old and new, responded to Alington’s challenges to introduce a wider culture and vivify teaching methods, so that by the time Sandy arrived in 1916 the school was a stimulating, challenging and, above all, exciting place. He found himself in a world that was never dull and full of changes. From the outset he was completely enthused by the whole experience.

  One of the outstanding aspects of Shrewsbury for Sandy was the potential for athletics. It quickly became apparent that he was an exceptionally gifted sportsman and to his delight this was encouraged and highly valued. He represented the school in cross-country running, athletics and, most significantly and with the most conspicuous success, rowing. Sandy’s rowing career was by any measure an impressive one. His passion for a sport in which passions run high anyway was absolute, and he was as committed to rowing as it was possible to be. He was extremely fortunate that his time at Shrewsbury coincided with the true flowering of the English Orthodox style of rowing and the school’s meteoric rise to fame at Henley that resulted from it.

  One of Alington’s sincerest desires during his tenure as Headmaster was to raise the standard of rowing at Shrewsbury and to see them beat his old school, Eton. To this end he succeeded in appointing two exceptionally strong rowing coaches straight from Oxford, Evelyn Southwell and Arthur Everard Kitchin. Southwell was killed in the Great War but Kitchin, or ‘Kitch’ as he was known to his colleagues (the Bull to the boys) remained at Shrewsbury for the whole of his working life. He was the premier exponent of the English style of rowing, a brilliant coach and his success with the Shrewsbury crews was partly down to his meticulous dedication to preparation and training. He more than fulfilled Alington’s ambition over the years and in 1912 Shrewsbury School’s First Eight was racing at Henley for the first time in its history.

  Social contact prior to Shrewsbury had been mainly with his own large family; here Sandy met for the first time boys from different backgrounds and cultures and he formed over the years many friendships. His loyalty to his friends was absolute and he valued this more highly than anything else. The closest and most enduring friendship he established was with Richard Felix (Dick) Summers, whom he met on the fives court in their first week of term. Dick was small, dark haired, anxious and very shy, completely the opposite to Sandy, but they hit it off immediately. Over the years they shared many pleasures, a great deal of fun and some anxious times. ‘We had very much in common’, Dick wrote years later, ‘both being mechanically minded and interested in cars, and both having the same sort of ideas and ideals. He was undoubtedly the best of the family, although like all of us he had his faults.’

  Dick was the youngest son of Harry Summers, a steel magnate from Flintshire who ran the family works, John Summers & Sons, on the banks of the River Dee. In May 1889 ‘HS’, as he was known all his life, married Minnie Brattan, the daughter of a Birkenhead architect. They had four children, three boys and a girl, of whom Dick was the youngest, and enjoyed an affluent and happy life. Then came a blow from which the family only ever partially recovered, Minnie was nursing HS, who had contracted viral pneumonia, when she contracted septic pneumonia and died a few days later.

  Dick grew up essentially an orphan. After Minnie’s death HS devoted himself more wholeheartedly than ever to the steel works and when he wasn’t there or in London on business he would be in the workshop at his house, Cornist Hall in Flint, making grandfather clocks, his other great passion. Dick was brought up at Cornist, alone with Nanny Blanche Barton. She did the very best she could for him, but was far more indulgent of him than his own mother would have been and he reached adulthood claiming that he never ate anything that flew, swam or crawled.

  Dick had no recollection of why HS sent him to Shrewsbury when his brothers had both been to Uppingham, but it was in many ways a lucky break for him. On the positive side, he was an able sportsman, he had a gentle, dry sense of humour and he knew and understood about cars. This last helped to form part of the enduring bond between Dick and Sandy and the Irvine and Summers families became closely linked from that time on, producing two deep friendships, a passionate love affair and a long and happy marriage.

  Sandy, through his friendship with Dick, came into contact with wealth on a scale he had not hitherto encountered. Although his family was ‘comfortably off’, there was no room for extravagance on Willie’s income with six children to feed and educate. The Summers family, by comparison, was extremely wealthy and had ostentatious properties and big fast cars. Sandy always respected Dick for being totally unspoiled by his mo
ney; it had not bought the family happiness. ‘There are few people in the world it hasn’t spoiled’, he wrote to Dick in 1923, ‘and I think quite candidly that you and Geoffrey are the only two people that it hasn’t affected in the least. I don’t often say nice things about people but I generally tell the truth!’

  Shrewsbury School was divided into a number of houses and over the next decade all the Irvine boys joined No. 6, or Moore’s House, under J. B. Baker, a chemistry master with a distinctly enlightened outlook. Baker was also something of an inventor and he succeeded in capturing Sandy’s imagination and encouraged him to follow his engineering interests at the school, often at the expense of his other academic work. Sandy’s academic interest was sporadic and he concentrated on those areas that were of real interest to him. He was easily influenced by the enthusiasm of his teachers in the scientific subjects, but Latin, Greek and Literature were of neither interest nor use. What he really enjoyed was working on an engineering problem in the school laboratories and workshops. The First World War presented him with just such an opportunity.