Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (6 page)

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 money; 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.

The impact of the war had a dislocating effect on the school in that boys left at odd times to join up and the casualty lists marked the end of many promising lives.  For Sandy the reality of the war came home when Hugh was enlisted in 1917.  He joined the Royal Artillery and spent three months training near Exeter before he went out to fight in France.  In 1918 a German high explosive shell landed in a gas dump close to where he was standing. The shells didn’t explode but they burst and he and a lot of other soldiers were splattered with liquid mustard gas.  The gas got on the collar of his uniform and it soaked through the cloth burning the skin on the back of his neck badly.  He had an open wound all down his back which never really healed and he was troubled by it for the rest of his life.  My father once told me that Hugh had to have the wound dressed twice a day by a nurse until he died.  A few weeks after Hugh was injured, Sandy’s cousin Edward was killed at Arras.  His body was never recovered and he was one of the half a million dead of the Great War to have no known grave. He is commemorated on panel one of the Arras Memorial.  He was a twenty-year old medical student at Aberdeen University.  The family felt the loss of this gentle young man.

Sandy himself was too young to enlist but an engineering problem occupied him for the greater part of the autumn of 1917. His interest in war machinery was probably sparked in part by Baker who, assisted by Higgins, the school laboratory steward, is credited with inventing a very early form of delayed-action bomb – an invention intended to spare lives but to damage property.  At any rate, Baker did not discourage Sandy although the hours he spent in the labs must have been to the detriment of his schoolwork.

Shrewsbury School had acquired a German machine gun which had been captured by the British.  History does not relate how it was that the gun came to be at the school, but it became the focus of Sandy’s attention for a matter of many weeks.   He had heard that the equivalent British weapon had suffered some considerable numbers of very awkward stoppages.  Guns would jam and the result was that as much as half the machine gun force could be out of commission at any one time.  Sandy was given permission, presumably by Baker, to strip the gun down and study its mechanics.  He dismantled it entirely in the school workshops and spent endless hours making minute observations about the mechanisms.  It is an example of his extraordinary ability to focus on a problem and worry at it like a terrier with a rat until he found an explanation or came up with a solution. What he in fact established and what he suggested was that the different manufacturers of the ammunition were making their ammunition to a slightly different size.  This was not necessarily because they intended to but because in making 10 million rounds or 100 million rounds the dies that made the bullet cases would distend.  If the case for the bullet was too big it became a tight fit in the gun and the result would be a stoppage.  Whether or not this find was ever passed on to the War Office is not known but it encouraged him to go on and find solutions to other problems concerned with the machinery of war.

Following his work on the German machine gun, Sandy turned his attention to aeroplanes, having heard from Hugh of some of the problems experienced by the Royal Flying Corps.  He invented, apparently from scratch, an interrupter gear which would permit a machine gun to fire through the propeller without making holes in it.  A logical and simple solution to a real problem.  He also designed a gyroscopic stabilizer for aircraft and caused a small stir by sending off beautifully worked up designs for these two inventions to the War Office in London.  The War Office had been sent many proposals during the course of the war but it was most unusual for such an accomplished design to be submitted by a fifteen-year-old school boy. Unfortunately both had been anticipated in essence by the British inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim but Sandy received most warm congratulations from the authorities and instructions to go on trying.  His ability to find solutions to problems was so wholly accepted within the family that no one considered his achievements as particularly remarkable.  When later a lot of fuss was made about his redesigning an oxygen system for the 1924 Mount Everest expedition no one was surprised that he advocated a complete rebuild of a system which had itself been designed by some of the most respected brains in the Flying Corps. 

Despite the war family life continued in very much the same way as it had done prior to 1914.  Willie, at forty, did not enlist but he became an officer in the Birkenhead volunteer force and was awarded the rank of captain in recognition of his contribution.  In their usual generous and hospitable spirit, the Irvine family invited Dick Summers to join them on their family holiday in Summer 1917.  Thereafter he became a regular visitor and spent holidays with them every year until 1923.  The family was very kind to him and he was regarded quite quickly as simply another son or brother.  He joined in all activities with pleasure and had the added attraction of having access to a motor car which he would bring along, thus giving them all even greater freedom than they found on their bicycles.