Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (22 page)

In addition to their discussions about the oxygen apparatus, Unna and Sandy spent some time considering the possible inclusion of a brazing lamp, in addition to the other primus stoves that would be required on the mountain.  Sandy argued for the inclusion of the lamp which would be helpful if any welding were required.  Unna gave permission for these special primus burners to be made only at the very last minute, and Sandy directed Condrup Ltd to make him two on 26 February with instructions that he needed them in Liverpool two days later.  They were duly delivered, but only after two of Condrup’s men had worked through the night on his behalf.

During the last few weeks of the Michaelmas Term at Oxford Sandy was working and living flat out.  He was the toast of several clubs and attended at least one dinner a week. He was elected to the Oxford University Mountaineering Club and the president, in a rather droll obituary, wrote ‘I never climbed with him; in fact the only climb I ever saw him do was from a box at the Winter Garden Theatre onto the stage.’

Everyone at Merton had heard of the success of the Spitsbergen expedition and was very proud to know that he was to be included in the 1924 Everest expedition.  Several people voiced their opinions and concerns about his undertaking, but he brushed them off, replying that if he had to die there would be no finer death than in an attempt to conquer Everest.  This was not just sheer bravado; the lessons of the history of British exploration were still fresh in people’s minds, not to mention the appalling losses of the First World War, when so many young men lost their lives.  Sandy knew precisely the risks he was approaching and he did it with zeal and commitment. 

One tradition at formal dinners was for the men, during the port drinking, to circulate their menus for signature.  At the Merton College Spitsbergen Dinner given on 8 December 1923 all the members of the expedition signed Sandy’s menu with a variety of messages of good luck.  His Shrewsbury friend Ian Bruce drew a sketch of Everest with a motorbike close to the summit, a reference to his motorcycling exploits on Foel Vras four summers earlier. 

The next event for his calendar was a skiing trip to Switzerland over Christmas.  At the beginning of November he took up Odell’s suggestion and wrote to Arnold Lunn in Mürren.  He asked Lunn several questions about winter snow conditions and told him that he was anxious to learn to ski in the shortest possible time in order to prepare himself for Everest by studying snow and ice in the high Alps.  Lunn replied that he would be delighted to teach him and invited him to Mürren for three weeks over Christmas and New Year.  Sandy sent Lunn a telegram announcing that he would arrive on 23 December at 3.40 p.m. and would make his way to the Palace Hotel where he was to be staying and where the Lunn family lived. 

Mürren (5400 feet) is situated just above the great cliff that overhangs the Lauterbrunnen valley in Switzerland.  Access to the village in the 1920s was via a steep funicular railway from Lauterbrunnen (2687 feet.) via Grütsch (4885 feet.).  It was widely regarded as one of the grandest railways in Switzerland.  Mürren was a favourite Alpine centre of eminent Victorians and, in the early twentieth-century, as the cradle of Alpine ski-racing.  Arnold Lunn spent a good proportion of his adult life in Mürren and was deeply emotionally attached to the mountains.  It was this instinctive love that he shared with Sandy and which for him singled out Sandy as a mountaineer in the making.

The British were the first to introduce skiing into the Bernese Oberland and it was a travel agent, Lunn’s father, Sir Henry Lunn, who was the first to popularize winter sports.  He succeeded in persuading the local hoteliers to open their hotels for his clients as early as December 1902, and in 1910 he opened Mürren as a winter sports centre.  Arnold Lunn wrote in his memoirs: ‘I arrived in the Oberland exactly one year after the first pair of ski had appeared in Grindelwald.  In my life-time I have seen skiing evolve from the pursuit of a few eccentric individuals into the sport of masses.’

When Sandy arrived in Mürren in 1923 British skiing was no longer in its infancy.  Alpine skiing developed in Norway where cross-country skiing was considered to be the sport.  The Norwegian attitude to downhill sections is embodied in the official instructions issued in the early part of the twentieth-century by the Norwegian ski association to competitors taking part in cross-country racing: ‘When going downhill one should regain breath and rest as much as possible.  Avoid falling as it both fatigues and lowers the spirit.’  In 1924 the rigorous approach to ski discipline was at the point of being superseded by intrepid young men and women, who, rather than slavishly following the curriculum which taught stem kick turns, telemark turns and Christianas were eager to ski straight downhill at speed. There is something in the mentality of the British that forces them to challenge accepted ideas, whether in pursuit of sport or risk.  It was obvious that skiing around the mountain rather than down it simply wasn’t going to be of lasting interest to the British skier. 

In 1921 Sir Kenneth Swan and Arnold Lunn were entrusted by the Ski Club of Great Britain with the organization of the world’s first downhill ski race.  The following year Lunn astonished the Alpine world by setting a slalom race in Mürren where the competitors were expected to weave in and out of poles on a set course.  Slalom had been practised in Norway, using trees, but not in a serious race capacity.  It was a full eight years after Swan & Lunn organized the National Championship that another country decided to adopt the idea of downhill ski-racing.

By the winter season 1923/24 there were several ski-races on the calendar, which were proving increasingly popular with the young British contingent who met together in the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club.  In January 1924 the Kandahar Ski Club was formed and Sandy was elected one of the first members.  Another early member of the club was Tony Knebworth, a contemporary of Sandy’s from Oxford.  Knebworth knew Sandy slightly as he was at Magdalen with Hugh and had come across Sandy at a lunch the previous summer.  The club existed to promote downhill and slalom ski-racing and to campaign for their international recognition by the Fédération Internationale de Ski (FIS) and took its name, at the suggestion of Sir Henry Lunn, from Lord Roberts of Kandahar, a general with a distinguished career in India and a friend of Lord Lytton, Tony Knebworth’s father and President of the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club.  The Kandahar downhill ski race was first run in 1924 when Tony Knebworth won the Challenge Cup.

During Mürren’s first winter season (1910-11) there was no railway up to the Allmendhubel, so the skiers had to climb up for the skiing.  It was not until after the Second World War that the Schilthorn cable railway was constructed.  From the Schilthorn summit you can ski down to Mürren and also to Lauterbrunnen, a vertical descent of 7200 feet, making it one of the longest downhill runs accessible from mechanical transport.  In 1923/24 the Allmendhubel still provided the only ski lift in Mürren.  That year there was a great deal of snow and the runs down into Mürren were in excellent condition.  But Lunn was at heart a skier who preferred the ‘off piste’ and he observed in his book the
Bernese Oberland
that ‘the best ski-ing, like the best things in life, have to be paid for in the currency of climbing’.  Sandy’s determination to try glacier skiing, even at his relatively novice level, is another example of his taste for adventure and his desire to pit his will against the elements rather than taking the tamer option of skiing ‘on piste’.  The real beauty of skiing away from the pistes is that you are alone, far from the crowds and often in a scene of such sublime beauty that it is difficult to go back to the hurly-burly of the ski village.  Sandy had already developed a deep passion for the mountains in Spitsbergen and I have no doubt that he would have returned to the Alps regularly had he lived.

When he arrived in Mürren Sandy had almost no experience of skiing.  It is true that he had spent part of the Spitsbergen expedition on ski but this had involved mostly traversing on the level and dragging heavy sleds.  When situations had arisen permitting him to ski in Spitsbergen for pleasure rather than as a mode of transport he had greatly enjoyed it and could readily see the appeal of skiing downhill.  Lunn found him eager, enthusiastic but a complete novice without any knowledge of even the most basic turn.  He was delighted with Sandy’s progress and wrote: ‘He spent his first day on the practice slopes. I showed him a Christiania and a Stem Turn, and after a couple of attempts he brought off both turns.  He is the only beginner I have ever known who brought off at his first attempt a downhill Telemark, or rather a step Telemark, which is by the way a far easier turn for the novice to master than the ordinary downhill Telemark.’  Sandy pushed himself hard and turned out to be a diligent pupil, mastering all the basic turns he required to take his elementary test.  ‘The test was started on the steep slope just above the half-way station of the Allmendhubel.  Irvine took this straight and his time was thirty seconds.  The next candidate took five minutes.’  Lunn observed.

Sandy on ski, Mürren

Sandy was staying, along with a hundred or so other winter sports enthusiasts, including Knebworth, at the Palace Hotel in Mürren, owned and run by Lunn.  In view of his elevated status as a member of the Everest expedition, he was accorded the honour of a place at the Lunn table in the dining room.  This was of considerable embarrassment to him and Peter Lunn, Arnold’s then nine-year-old son, recalled that he ‘kept away from all praise if he could and would not let anybody get into any skiing book the fact he was going on Everest’.  Dinner was a formal affair and Sandy initially found himself somewhat overawed by the company.  Lunn persisted with Sandy and eventually succeeding in breaking through the barrier of his shyness and was delighted to find that Sandy proved to be fine company with an attractive, hidden sense of humour.

When he first joined our table, he resisted all attempts to draw him into general conversation, but once his shyness had worn off, he proved excellent company.  His humour was latent, but only needed a sympathetic environment for its full expression.  He had a knack of recalling things which had tickled him so that their humour was not dissipated in the telling.  Many people who can see the funny aspect of life do not possess the necessary technique for recapturing the humour of an incident which they have witnessed.  Very pathetic are their attempts to reinforce an unconvincing narrative by assuring us with an emphasis which becomes more poignant as their failure becomes more marked, that if we’d been there we’d ‘have screamed with laughter.’ Irvine never failed to recapture and to convey to his audience the essence of those things which had tickled his fancy.  He had an odd way of laughing.  It was a silent laugh, visible but not audible, a long low reverberating chuckle which lit up his face with sunny merriment.  And as his normal expression was grave, the contrast was all the more striking.

Two weeks into the holiday Sandy entered the Strang-Watkins Challenge Cup for slalom running.  He elected to take part in order to gain experience and was not expected to do well as there were several skiers in the field who were considered to be stronger and had considerably more skiing experience.  One of the other competitors, an Englishman by the name of Emmet, won the Alpine Ski Challenge Cup, an open slalom race, a few days later.

Once again Sandy surprised everyone including Lunn, who recorded: ‘Irvine did not do very well on hard snow, but on the soft snow section he ran down with a combination of dash and certainty which would have been surprising in a man who had been skiing for ten seasons, and won the Cup.  A few days later he passed his Second Class Test, within three weeks of learning his first turn.  His must be a record.’ Sandy was delighted with his win and wrote enthusiastically to Odell: ‘I was awfully pleased with myself and put it all down to getting used to the feel in Spitsbergen.’

He was not in the least concerned that he spent a huge amount of his time falling, something which quickly earned him the nickname of the Human Avalanche.  ‘I took the Nose Dive straight my 2
^nd
day’, he told Odell in the same letter, ‘& Lone Tree my 3
^rd
& stood which shook some of the expert skiers to the core.’ Sandy was in his element, captivated by the beauty of the Alpine scenery. ‘Aren’t the mountains wonderful?’ he enthused, ‘Just asking to be climbed and real Spitsbergen colouring in the evening.’  He wrote to Arnold Lunn on his return to Oxford in January 1924: ‘When I am an old man I will look back on Christmas, 1923, as the day when to all intents and purposes I was born.  I don’t think anyone has
lived
until they have been on ski.’