Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (13 page)

Amongst the provisions that had been donated to the expedition was Australian tinned meat, Oxford marmalade and sausage, biscuits from Reading, grapenuts, and a consignment of port.  They were also well prepared with large quantities of pemmican, which is basically an emergency ration food comprising dried meat and fruits pounded and bound with fat.  It keeps for a long time and is useful as it contains much nutriment for little bulk.  Reliable sources assure me that it tastes horrible.  In addition there were porridge, cocoa, prunes and raisins, sugar, brandy and tobacco.  Other essentials that had been donated to the expedition, Binney reported, included a complete wireless telephony transmitting and receiving set, a portable gramophone, and a set of épees for fencing, adding ‘which is about the only strenuous sport that can be indulged on a 100-ton sealing sloop’.  The press was quick to pick up on the gramophone and A. T. Wilder’s Hawaiian guitar and were delighted at the prospect of what might be transmitted via the wireless set.

Despite the amusement at the expense of the party, it was an expedition that was credited with having a serious aim and, on one occasion when Binney’s dispatches were not getting through owing to problems with the wireless, there was real concern expressed in the press for the safety of the members.

In a move that was to prove to be the death knell of her first marriage and deeply shocking to the family, Marjory had decided to accompany Sandy as far as Tromsö.  Her infatuation with him had gone far further than it had with any of her previous flirtations with Army and RAF officers.  She persuaded her friend, Dora Fox, described by my cousin as ‘another
femme fatale
’ to join her.  They saw the trip to Norway as a great and amusing adventure and behaved in a manner that appeared singularly unseemly for someone of Marjory’s status, although it must have been great fun for the two of them and the other members of the expedition. 

They left Chester, missed their connection in Manchester but were fortunate to find that a later train would get them to Newcastle on time for the evening sailing.  The expedition members were travelling steerage but the women had first-class cabins so special arrangements were made for the whole party to eat together in the first-class dining room aboard the ship.  Geoffrey Milling was not amused by the state of his cabin and complained, in his diary, that it was ‘a filthy hole smelling like a rabbit hutch and surrounded by drunken Norwegians’.  But he soon cheered up at dinner when he discovered that Dora was entertaining and amusing company.  Sandy was equally scathing about his berth: ‘cabin was minute & smelt like a badger house, Bunks as hard as nails.’  However, as he was making night-time forays to a first class cabin he spent his time on the SS
Leda
in rather more comfort than his friends.  When I was reading through Sandy’s Spitsbergen notebooks in Merton College Library I was amused to see that he had noted these visits, admitting that on the last night he had crept into Marjory’s cabin at 5am and made love to her three times before breakfast.  This sensational detail did not make its way into his official expedition diary.  They arrived at Bergen two days later and boarded the
Midnatsol
, in which they would sail to Tromsö.  The accommodation on this boat was much more to their liking, Sandy sharing a comfortable cabin with Odell and Ian Bruce.  As they sailed up the coast they stopped at Lodingen and then Svolvaer, where Sandy and Odell climbed the highest peak south-west of the town, which afforded them glorious views from the top. 

The following day they arrived in Tromsö where they met their sealing sloop and, after a farewell dinner given by the ladies in the Grand Hotel in Tromsö, the adventure began in earnest.  All the men had enjoyed having the ladies along to add a bit of colour and entertainment to the boat trip.  Odell noted that the dinner was a ‘very jovial occasion’; Milling wrote ‘Marjory Summers and Dora Fox saw us off – I was very sorry to leave them.  They have done a great deal to make life amusing so far this trip.  Dora, especially, is first class.’  Sandy made no mention of his feelings in his diary but drew a beautiful, fluid pencil sketch of Marjory’s head in profile in his notebook for that day.  Was he in love with Marjory or did he just see the affair as an entertaining diversion?  From the drawings and other notes in his diary I suspect that she had, if briefly, captured his heart.

The job of shifting boxes from one boat to another and checking stores was something that took up a great deal of time on the expedition.  Sandy, Milling, Binney and Odell spent over twelve hours on 21 July counting, checking, repacking.  Sandy packed 2240 biscuits by hand, Milling noted.  The
Terningen
, their sloop for the next six weeks, was finally loaded and ready to sail at 1 a.m. on 23 July.  It was not a particularly auspicious start as the mist was so thick the ship’s compass could not be swung properly; then Sandy, A. T. Wilder, and Odell had to spend some time fixing and adjusting the wireless.  In vain.  As soon as they reached the open sea they encountered a huge swell with high winds and the aerial blew down almost immediately.  The rough sea took its toll on the expedition members and they all retired to their bunks for four days, ‘sick as hell and doped out on opium’.  When the storm abated and the sea became calm they awoke to find themselves in a new world of startling   beauty.  Binney wrote in his dispatch the following day:

All were soon on deck, even the worst sailors among us, to see the wonderful first glimpse of a mysterious land of ice and snow and jagged mountain peaks.  The first impression to the mind of a newcomer to this strange part of the globe is one of awe at the grandeur of the ice and snow, and the thought that it is all new and thousands of years behind the world we know in geological formation and development.  The mountains are reminiscent of the Alps but the barrenness and bareness is new.  Glaciers bigger than the biggest in Switzerland sweep down right into the sea.

Sandy cutting Tom Longstaff’s hair

Odell, visiting Spitsbergen for the second time, was still moved by the extraordinary beauty and vastness of the scenery.  One senses that he was deeply fascinated by every aspect of the Arctic.  He notes with real enthusiasm that Binney had found a beetle in a warm spring, which was identified by the scientist, Elton, as being the furthest north such a beetle had ever been found and only the third such beetle to be found in Spitsbergen.  On 28 July they dropped Longstaff, Elton, Brown, Wilder and Frazer on the Reindeer Peninsula for hunting.  Wilder shot two reindeer and Longstaff found sanderlings’ eggs.  The reindeer meat was cooked and made a good meal on the boat. 

Whenever they had a moment to themselves during one of their frequent stops up the coast, Odell, Sandy and sometimes the two Geoffreys (Summers and Milling) would leave the main party and climb some rock, crag or glacier bank as could be found in the immediate vicinity.  The climb they made on a glacier on 28 July was the first time Sandy had experienced ice climbing and despite falling into a crevasse made good progress.   Some larger crevasses are easy to spot, but others open and close relatively quickly and as none of them knew the ground they were covering the crevasses would have added some spice to the adventure.  Milling, a novice climber, was rather overawed by the technicality of climbing using ropes, but he was enthusiastic, if wary of the crevasses, and enjoyed the rock section towards the top of the climb.

Up to this point the expedition had enjoyed the relative comfort of the boat which was warm, dry and they had had access to good food.  Despite sea sickness during the first few days and the broken aerial, everything else had gone very much to plan.  Their luck changed when they arrived at Whalenberg Bay which they found to be blocked with ice and plans for landing for their journey into North East Land were frustrated.  Anchored just north of the Eastern Foster Isles, they discovered, however, that they could land on the New Friesland side just south of Cape Duym.  Sandy and Odell left the boat after lunch to reconnoitre and returned convinced this would be a good place for the sledging party to land.  That afternoon, July 30, they made their landing on the ice, using an unreliable and faulty motorboat to ferry the sledges and stores to the shore.  Before they finally set off they returned to the sloop for a dinner of eider duck and reindeer and were then rowed ashore towards midnight by Binney and Geoffrey Summers, who took a cine-film of the landing. 

They set up camp not far from the landing spot and went to bed in glorious sunshine at 4.15 a.m.  There were four of them in the sledging party: Odell as geologist, Frazer as surveyor and Geoffrey Milling and Sandy as cooks, assistants, camp secretaries and for providing the often required brute strength.

Although August is deemed to be the best month for getting to Spitsbergen from the point of view of the accessibility through the pack ice, it is a notoriously bad time of year for mist.  On the positive side, there is sun for almost twenty-four hours a day, so the expedition could make use of the clearer night-time sunshine and sleep through the mistier daytime light. 

Odell, Milling and Frazer sitting on an expedition sledge

For the first ten days of the journey they worked and travelled by night and slept during the day to get the best of the weather.  During the day the mist and fog tended to descend and made their survey work as well as their travel difficult.  By night, as the temperature dropped, the mist would clear and they would have bright light by which to trek and work.  The camp had to be set up each ‘evening’ and struck each day after breakfast, and to begin with this process took several hours until they got themselves organized.  They had two sledges each weighing over 500 lb to which were lashed boxes of food, equipment, two tents plus a spare, sleeping bags, clothes, cookers, skis, crampons and cameras.  At the outset they used crampons to walk on the snow and ice.  A crampon is a device that fixes to the bottom of a boot for walking on hard-packed snow and ice.  In the 1920s the crampon was made of two articulated metal plates that attached to the underside of the boot by means of leather straps.  The front plate had six or eight spikes about 3 to 4 centimetres long and the back plate four spikes.  They were a fiddle to put on and had to be accurately fitted to the boots for maximum effect.  One of Sandy’s jobs on the boat had been to see that each sledge party member had crampons that fitted and to ensure that ski bindings were correctly adjusted to their ski boots. 

He quickly took responsibility for overseeing that the supplies were checked, that all the equipment was kept in working order and the tents were properly erected each day.  He made long lists in his notebook detailing the exact contents of the food boxes, so that if they decided to leave one sledge behind and proceed with the other, as they did on several occasions, they would not find themselves without anything vital.  He seems to have succeeded as nowhere in the diaries is there any complaint about a lack of pemmican or raisins.  He was frustrated, however, by several defects in the equipment they had and made a list in the front of his notebook for future expeditions to include socks that don’t shrink and felt for under his sleeping bag.

They were living off a diet of pemmican and dried fruit, with biscuits for pudding.  Geoffrey Milling was put in charge of the cooking and he took on this often unpleasant task without complaint.  Water was no problem for them but snow had to be melted if they were unable to find a camp site by a stream.   When they were confined to their tents by wind or snow they would take it in turns to crawl out of the tents, collect snow, fire up the cooker and prepare food and drink for the others.

After the first few of days they realized that their progress on foot with crampons was slow.  Both the sledges had sails and they tried erecting the sails and using the wind to help them cover ground more efficiently, but the going was rough and the ice ‘hummocky’ which meant that the only real method of progress was to pull the sledges behind them.  Sandy wrote in his diary that the worst aspect of pulling the sledges in the early part of the journey was the fact that the ice had melted in the sun and the ground was very wet underfoot with frequent morasses or bogs; ‘Exceedingly heavy going in soft snow & bad hummocks with sledge constantly bogged down made progress very slow … all the glaciers look very black & many morasses kept our feet very wet & cold.’  Odell also noted the bad going and wrote: ‘Our Shackelton canvas boots let the water in badly and proved quite useless for this part of the journey over lower glaciers.’  If the sun didn’t come out when they set up camp it meant that they had to put on wet socks and boots the following day.  When the weather was bright, however, they could hang their clothes out to dry and the camp quickly took on the look of a shambolic laundry room with boots hanging from the skis, underwear on the guy ropes and socks strung between the tents.