Discovering the real Sandy Irvine

But it was his athletic ability and technical know-how that caught the attention of the Everest selection committee. These were established men who formed the Mount Everest Committee, founded by the Alpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society to coordinate and finance the British Mount Everest exploration expedition of 1921 and the subsequent effort to climb the mountain. The famous Tibet researcher Sir Francis Younghusband with the fine mustache presided.

“He (Irvine) was an exceptionally good rower,” Summers said. “He rowed in the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race in 1922 and 1923, which Oxford won, and was “as strong as a horse,” as Edward Norton, the leader of the 1924 expedition, described it. In terms of strength, he was very strong.”

He was just under 1.80m tall and weighed around eleven and a half stone. And it was this physique that first caught the eye of the mountaineer Odell when he spotted him while training in advance of the Putney Boat Race in early 1923. “The Arctic Expedition to Svalbard,” says Summers.

Irvine had very little mountaineering experience, but he excelled on the journey, a 30-day east-west crossing of the Arctic island – and not just through his physical endurance. “Odell was truly impressed by Sandy's physical and mental strength. He didn’t mind the hardships of being in the high Arctic, nor his ability to repair anything that broke.”

Free pairing

It was this technical skill that would prove so useful on Everest, says Gillman. “He was technically very talented. He could do all the things Mallory couldn’t.”

Despite being the most gifted climber of his generation, Mallory was notoriously hopeless when it came to equipment. For example, the use of a Primus stove – an essential piece of equipment for such expeditions – was a mystery to him.

“It was a very nice, complementary pair,” says Gillman, adding that Irvine was particularly adept “with oxygen.” Irvine's drawings of oxygen flow meters had caught the committee's attention before his selection. He designed a pressure vessel for the expedition and commissioned a company in Birmingham to build it. He also sketched out a lightweight ice pick he would need. “He was very practical,” says Summers.

“The great thing he did was take the clutter out of oxygen equipment, simplify it and make it lighter,” Gillman adds. This proved to be one of the crucial factors in convincing Mallory to use oxygen on the expedition.

The partnership was harmonious, but also unusual. Mallory, along with many other expedition members, was a veteran of World War I, where he served as an artillery officer. He had been lucky to be sent home from the Somme (due to the recurrence of an old climbing injury) and to have missed Passchendaele due to a motorbike accident. (John de Vars Hazard, who reached the North Col that forms the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier on Everest's northern slope in 1924, did so with bleeding wounds from the Somme that soaked the tunic of his climbing gear.)

In contrast, Irvine was too young to have served in the war. Yet he would have keenly felt the presence of the battle-hardened men who had become immune to the fear and reality of death on their journey to Everest.

When Mallory and Irvine set out from Camp IV on the North Ridge at 25,200 feet (7,681 m) at 8:40 a.m. on June 6 in excellent weather, it was the expedition's third and final summit attempt. On June 7, both climbers ascended to Camp VI at 26,700 feet (8,138 m) using oxygen equipment that Irvine had modified. The next day, Odell spotted them on the second of three steps, a 120-foot rocky climb, about 800 feet from the summit – but he couldn't be exactly sure.