Mallory and Irvine: the long-playing mystery

Few controversies have generated quite as much debate as the one over whether George Mallory and Andrew Irvine were the first men to summit the world’s highest mountain. For 85 years, various hypotheses have been forwarded, drawing on evidence of the weather, oxygen and time to determine whether Everest was conquered on June 8, 1924 or May 29, 1953. Mallory and Irvine were last seen at 12.50 pm by Noel Odell of the team, moving at a cracking pace about 800 feet below the summit. Then the clouds shrouded them and they never returned.

The discovery of Mallory’s body in 1999 brought closure of sorts to the tragedy but no one was closer to the truth. We now know Mallory slipped and broke his right ankle, a death warrant at that altitude. But that raises more questions. How did such an experienced mountaineer and Everester — this was his third attempt — slip? He was found at a lower altitude than when Odell last saw him. So it is reasonable to conclude that he died on the descent. One theory has it that he slipped because he was descending in the dark.

 

If he were, there’s a possibility that he and his novice climbing partner could have summitted later than expected and started their descent late — Odell’s account suggested that they were three hours from the summit and would have been pushing it on the descent.

Likewise, no photo of his wife was found among the other items in his pockets. Mallory had resolved to place it on the summit, and since it wasn’t there, it is possible he had achieved his goal.

Long before Jeffrey Archer tried to rehabilitate this drama in novel form, the story of Mallory and Irvine featured in Boy’s Own adventure stories. It was Mallory who immortalised Everest when he told a reporter why he wanted to climb the world’s highest mountain: “Because it’s there” (the story is apocryphal: Mallory’s friends said he was incapable of such brevity of speech).

Two years after the tragedy, the eccentric explorer Francis Younghusband, the first chairman of the Mount Everest Committee of RGS, wrote The Epic of Mount Everest covering Mallory’s expeditions, which the Society largely sponsored. It became a bestseller and is the book most quoted on the controversy.

What keeps the Mallory and Irvine controversy alive when summitting Everest has been reduced to expensive guided tours? Partly the romance, which Younghusband’s book did much to perpetuate. All of Britain was rooting for him; the exploits of the expeditions were followed in the Times.

But there is also a degree of nationalist chagrin. The British were the world’s most storied explorers but had been pipped to the North and South Poles. A Briton summitting the world’s highest peak would have restored national pride.

Also, it was the British expeditions that established the north face route to Everest (in those early days expeditions could approach Everest only via Tibet — the southern route was inaccessible because Nepal was closed to foreigners). It was Mallory who spotted the Western Cwm, the snow-filled depression on the south face, and suggested that that might be the more accessible way up the mountain.

It was. Twenty nine years later, Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, on his seventh expedition up the mountain, shook hands on the summit of Everest. The route they took via the Khumbu Glacier, the Western Cwm and the Hillary Steps on the south face came to be known as the “Milk Run” because it is the easiest of the climbs up Everest .

That a member of a tiny Commonwealth country and a representative of a former colony should have succeeded when the cream of British manhood may have failed probably rankles.

But Mallory wouldn’t have grudged them their victory. He most of all would have appreciated Hillary’s comment to his team leader John Hunt when he made it back to base camp: “Well, John, we knocked the bastard off.”