Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (26 page)

Hazard was also a climber.  He was an engineer; a close friend and war-time colleague of Morshead, veteran of the 1921 and 1922 expeditions, and had served in India as a sapper.  He kept himself very much to himself on the expedition and was only really able to get on with Odell, although he and Sandy did occasionally ride together on the march through Tibet.  Sandy should have had a lot in common with Hazard, an engineer and therefore sharing many of the same interests, but the age difference and Hazard’s character seemed to prevent any kind of relationship establishing itself.  Hazard, sadly, became the fall guy on the 1924 expedition in the way Finch had in 1922.  He was heavily criticized for more than one of his actions during May on the mountain.  Somervell commented later that Hazard ‘built a psychological wall round himself inside which he lives.  Occasionally he bursts out of this with a “By Gad this is fine” – for he enjoys (inside the wall) every minute of the Tibetan travel, and even hardship.  Then the shell closes to let nothing in.’

Sandy’s next letter home was again full of enthusiasm for the voyage and for the beautiful scenery they passed.  He had not been particularly impressed by the Rock of Gibraltar but the Atlas Mountains really caught his attention. ‘The sea is a most marvellous blue here & the snow on the Atlas Mountains looked magnificent though they must have been 70 miles from where we passed if not more.  We were in sight (quite close in places) of Africa for about 1½ days but now we don’t see land again till Port Said at 2 p.m. tomorrow Sunday.’ He added that he hoped the shops wouldn’t be shut there as he had no bathing suit and the crew had put up a canvas swimming pool on the after deck for the passengers who were not disembarking in Port Said.  The fact that they were to be reduced in number by 200 pleased everyone as there would be far more room on board and Sandy considered they would be a very cool & jolly party thereafter.  In the absence of much else to report he told Lilian that one passenger so far had died but he had missed the funeral which was a disappointment.

The ship docked in Port Said on Sunday 9 March.  The shops were closed and no swimming trunks could be found.  Sandy was not impressed by the town and wrote to Alec, ‘Tell mother that Port Said is quite the ugliest, dirtiest least interesting town I’ve ever seen.   Its only redeeming feature is that those long brown bean things that aunt Gertrude sent Hugh & E & me for swords when we were young grow on trees all down the main street.’

From Port Said the ship sailed through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea.  Here the temperature rose considerably and the heat left them all feeling languid and limp.  The ship was sailing at sixteen knots and the wind was the same speed with the result that there was no air on board and the cabins became insufferable in the afternoons.  From the deck they were rewarded with marvellous displays of ‘flying fish that looked like small swallows flying or rather gliding very close to the water and schools of porpoises quite 500 at a time, a fascinating sight especially as we got quite close to one lot.  The Phosphorescence in the Red Sea was wonderful & I caught quite a lot in my bath once.  No one fell over board’, Sandy added, ‘so the voyage was fairly uneventful – a mad man on board tried to commit suicide but unfortunately I didn’t see it!’

Four days later they arrived in Bombay.  The bustling, busy port intrigued Sandy.  His senses were assaulted by a wealth of new impressions, as he wandered around, slightly dazed and finding his land legs after three weeks at sea.  He took photographs of the dockers unloading the ship and watched with amusement as their heavy boxes of equipment were bundled onto groaning carts and pushed off towards the station.  This was his first taste of India and he loved it.  His next letter, written from Darjeeling, talks of the great adventure of the train journey across the country.   The journey from Bombay took five days and the men slept on the train. The trip left some of them feeling tired and short of sleep.  Sandy, however, did not seem to suffer at all and was in high spirits when he wrote to Lilian. ‘Just a line to say all is going very well.  We wasted no time getting here spending 5 nights only & all in trains between Bombay & here.  The temperature was well over 100° F in the shade while we were crossing to Calcutta & 99 in the shade at Calcutta.  It was wonderful to get out of the train at wayside stations at 11 or 12 p.m. & see India by a full moon & just cool enough to live in shirt sleeves.’ The train, having no corridors, had to stop to allow the passengers to get off and walk to the restaurant car for their meals.  The guard discovered one morning that Sandy had overslept and missed breakfast.  To his great amusement the guard stopped the Bombay to Calcutta mail train while he got dressed and walked down to the restaurant car for his meal.  As there were so few passengers on the train the four of them were more or less at liberty to choose where they would like the train to stop for their lunch or dinner, so they picked spots where the scenery was most beautiful or the wayside attractions the most amusing. 

The highlight of the journey for Sandy was the ride from Siliguri to Darjeeling where the railway leaves the plains of India behind and rises into the mountains, entering into an entirely different world.

The last bit of train journey 6 a.m. – 11.30 a.m. climbing 7000 ft up to Darjeeling in a motor rail coach on a 2 ft gauge railway doing most terrifying curves & traverses of cliffs & swaying about the whole time was most delightful.  Starting up through very impressive & terribly thick jungle quite impossible to penetrate without the greatest difficulty & all hung with creepers some quite smooth just like hundreds of cords hanging from the branches & some thick & wound together like enormous cables.  All the way just enough clearance for the train & a cart track.

The colours, smells and the people made a deep impression on him. Every phase of vegetation was represented from coniferous evergreens to tropical jungle.  The brilliant coral blossoms of the cotton trees were contrasted with the ever deepening blue of the sky as the railway climbed higher and higher.  They passed bazaars and villages and, just beyond Ghoom, were rewarded with a first glimpse of the Himalaya.  From there the train brought them into Darjeeling, the capital city of Benghal.  At 7000 feet above sea level it is set in a forest of oaks, magnolia, rhododendrons, laurels and sycamores.  ‘And through these forests’, Younghusband wrote a few years later ‘the observer looks down the steep mountainsides to the Rangeet River only 1000feet above sea level, then up and up through tier after tier of forest-clad ranges, each bathed in a haze of deeper and deeper purple, till the line of snow is reached; and then still up of the summit of Kangchenjunga, now so pure and ethereal we can scarcely believe it is part of the solid earth on which we stand; and so high it seem part of the very sky itself.’

Sandy, Mallory, Beetham and Hazard arrived on Saturday 23 March where they were to spend four days packing and sorting their clothing and equipment, meeting the other expedition members who had gathered from all over.  They were staying at the Mount Everest Hotel and it was here that Sandy met up with Odell, who had travelled from the Persian Gulf. ‘Odell is here in great form & looking very fit’, he told Lilian.  They immediately fell into reminiscing about the Spitsbergen expedition and Sandy confessed in his letter to Milling a week or so later that he was certain the other members had become heartily fed up of their banter and continual references to Milling and to Spitsbergen.  It must have been a relief for Sandy to see Odell again and to be able to share with him all the impressions he had gained during the five-week journey from Britain.

This was Sandy’s first opportunity to meet the other members of the expedition, several of whom knew each other from 1922.  The expedition leader was General Charles Bruce, younger son of the first Baron Aberdare.  He had been a soldier since the early 1880s and as a keen mountaineer had taken part in a number of early expeditions to the Himalaya between 1890 and 1910.  He had long advocated the training of Indians in mountain techniques with a view to forming a body of porters and guides as were commonly used in the Alps in the nineteenth century.  Charlie Bruce was a man of enormous physical strength.  His mountaineering feats were highly regarded until long after his death.  His character was as large and rounded as his figure.  Younghusband had once described him as ‘an extraordinary mixture of boy and man … you never know which of them you are talking to’.  His joie de vivre, his perpetual good humour and enthusiasm were coupled with a singular competence and shrewdness.  He was a no-nonsense leader and his meticulous planning and organizational skills were well known and widely respected.  He was a unanimously popular choice of leader and was particularly liked by the local peoples with whom he had a good empathetic relationship. Bruce was a superb raconteur and at once put Sandy at his ease.  He was a keen observer of human nature and had an ability to describe a situation with much humour, observing with obvious delight the idiosyncrasies of the human condition.  Writing the expedition dispatches gave him enormous pleasure and he and his typewriter-operator, one of the transport officers, would frequently be heard laughing loudly ‘as they sought just the right phrase to shock or baffle poor Hinks’. Bruce’s attitude occasionally infuriated Hinks, to whom in 1922 he had famously quipped, when complaints were made about the expenditure he was incurring, ‘Captain Noel will be arriving in Darjeeling with a box 40 feet long and I am currently scouring the country for an adequate mule.’  On another occasion, when the expedition was running short of funds, he had written to Hinks: ‘Please note that I am doing my best for this expedition.  I have interviewed the Viceroy, I have preached to Boy Scouts, and I have emptied the poes in a Dak Bungalow.  This is the meaning of the term General.  They are cheap at home, they are more expensive out here.  Hurry up with that thousand [£] please.’  Bruce’s boyish humour was infectious.  He laughed uproariously at his own jokes and his ‘ready fund of bawdy stories made him extremely popular wherever he went.  It was said that his wheezy laugh was a tonic the length and breadth of the Himalaya.’ Sandy loved these stories and sorely missed Bruce after he was forced to return to Darjeeling.  Bruce had once described Sandy as ‘our splendid experiment’.  He wrote after the expedition: ‘He rapidly ceased to be an experiment for we found that with a young body he possessed a mature judgment, combined with a very remarkable handiness and adaptability as a practical working engineer.  All these valuable qualities, combined with infinite stamina and infinite unselfishness, made Irvine a very great asset to our party.’  High praise indeed from Bruce.

Norton, the deputy leader of the expedition, was a distinguished soldier.  He had been the great ‘find’ of the 1922 expedition and had proved himself to be a strong and able climber who acclimatized well.  He was born in Argentina but was brought back to England as an infant.  His education was at Charterhouse and the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich; he was commissioned in 1902 and fought in France and Belgium during the First World War, taking part in many of the most famous campaigns – Aisne, Marne, Ypres, Loos, the Somme and Arras.  He had been awarded every medal for bravery with the exception of the Victoria Cross. After the war he commanded D battery in India and it was here that he first came to the notice of General Bruce.  As an adolescent he had spent much time scrambling over steep, loose ground on the slopes above the family chalet in Sixt in the Haute-Savoie.  He and his brother would chase up the hills after chamois, mastering the difficult ground and often finding themselves on slopes onto which the local hunters would not venture.  It was this which he believed made him feel confident on the tricky slopes above the North Col on Everest.  He came from a family with a distinguished mountaineering background, his grandfather being the Alpine pioneer and President of the Alpine Club, Sir Alfred Wills, who had made the first ascent of the Wetterhorn in the nineteenth century.   Norton was later awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and in 1937 acted as ADC to King George VI.  In 1938 he was commanded the Madras District and was appointed CB.  He retired in 1942 as Lieutenant-General after a spell as acting governor and commander-in-chief of Hong Kong.  Norton was summed up in an article which appeared in the
Times
in Spring 1924.  ‘Besides his ability as a climber, Major Norton, who was decorated with the D.S.O. and the Military Cross in the war, is known as a keen soldier and a devoted follower of the sport of pig sticking; he has a good knowledge of botany, a quick eye for the habits of birds, and knows how to paint them.’  Integrity was the essence of his character, Longstaff wrote after Norton’s death in 1953.  He was a charming companion and a born leader. 

Norton had arrived earlier than the rest of the expedition in Darjeeling and Sandy did not have the opportunity to meet him properly until they were on the trek as he was forced to rush off to Kalimpong with Shebbeare, the transport officer, to receive and forward the heavy baggage as it arrived.  Norton took his role of deputy expedition leader very seriously: he was a quartermaster without equal and his efficiency and energy meant that when the unthinkable happened and Bruce was invalided out he was able to take over leadership without a hitch.  He had made several suggestions and alterations to the organization of the march since 1922, one of which was to redesign the mess tent, a very popular move which every member of the expedition commented on in their diaries and letters. The organization and the writing of dispatches home, which most people, particularly Hinks, conceded he wrote better than Bruce, took up a great deal of his time during the trek and so it was not until they got to the mountain that Sandy really had an opportunity to get to know him better.  Norton was the only member of the expedition who was taller than Sandy.  He stood a towering six feet four inches.  He was slim, lithe and athletic.  His face was handsome; he had a long nose, in which, Mallory claimed, he had a dint as a result of the sunburn he contracted in 1922.  His efficient air hid a very generous and kind character and although Sandy was initially somewhat daunted by him he soon gained confidence and the two of them developed a good understanding.  Norton could not resist pulling Sandy’s leg, particularly about hygiene matters for which Sandy was a stickler but he was also quick to compliment him on his work on the oxygen apparatus and other mechanical matters.