8th June 2024 had been a date fixed in the events diary of the Royal Geographical Society for quite some while. Years, in fact. In the knowledge that this was the exact centenary of the disappearance of George Mallory and Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine on Everest, still ‘going strong for the top’, leaving us all wondering whether they might, possibly, have made it to the summit.
This commemorative day fell on a Saturday, which was a bit of a worry. The Himalayan Trust UK usually holds its fundraising events on a Thursday evening – a model tested and proven. Would people give up family gatherings and kids’ football matches on a sunny summer’s Saturday afternoon to attend?
Those of us on the steering committee decided, ‘yes, maybe’, and emboldened one another to go with a multi-speaker 5hr event in place of our annual early evening lecture, with a film and family gathering for descendants of the 1924 expedition members thrown in.
We needn’t have feared. A respectable 600+ people attended. The film produced by the Alpine Club with support of the Mount Everest Foundation, Everest Revisited 1924-2024, set the scene: wonderful archive footage of sherpas and porters, the polymath Howard Somerville and military man Ted Norton, who led the expedition, perching with sketchbooks in hand at every opportunity, and of course, the sprightly figures of Mallory and Irvine themselves.
There followed our deputy chair John Walton talking eloquently on the work of the Himalayan Trust UK in Taplejung and three speakers selected for their expertise on the 1924 Everest expedition. Julie Summers, great niece of Sandy Irvine and author of his biography, Fearless on Everest, spoke movingly and with obvious pride of a much-loved uncle lost at the tender age of 22.
Graham Hoyland recounted meeting his distant cousin Howard Somerville as a small boy and being transfixed by Somerville’s tale of a Kodak Vest-pocket camera that he had given Mallory as he prepared for the final summit bid and which might just hold the secret of their final hours.
And Leo Houlding talked about the making of the IMAX film The Wildest Dream on Everest in 2007, in which he dressed in replica clothes worn by Irvine and, with Conrad Anker, removed the aluminium ladder bolted to the technically challenging Second Step by the Chinese to gauge whether Mallory and Irvine might have climbed it.
Oh, and I nearly forgot, a late-comer to the party, Tom Newton-Dunn, broadcaster and great-nephew of George Mallory, stepped on stage and spoke amusingly about a book of Mallory’s letters just published, with reference to Mallory’s scattiness and Winchester schoolboy eagerness to smash Eton at cricket.
And then, long awaited, there was our keynote speaker Wade Davies, the acclaimed anthropologist from Vancouver. We were properly over the moon that he accepted our invitation. Author of Into the Silence, the Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest, he is one of the most, if not the most authoritative voice on the subject and brilliantly contextualises the 1920s expeditions in the era immediately following the First World War. Of course, it was a blow that two days prior to the event he told us that he couldn’t attend in person. But his reasoning was conclusive in the moment; a family medical emergency meant he couldn’t possibly board a plane, and we loved him all the more for his compassion and for his professional dedication. He delivered his talk on Zoom and held us spellbound, one moment quietly weeping at the horrors of the Somme, the next laughing out loud at the entangled divorce goings-on of one of the more colourful characters on the 1922 expedition. Wade successfully brought to life the expedition characters with all their humanity, ambitions, vulnerabilities, pioneering spirit, and courage. They were the generation of our grandfathers, he reminded us.
All speakers then got back on stage to debate, with input from the audience, if we were now in a position to answer the question every one would like an answer to or if, given what we heard that evening, we really don’t need to know …
And perhaps the most beautiful thing was the gathering of 1924 expedition member grandchildren and other family members in the room: more than 30 Mallorys, eight Irvines, eight Nortons, and a handful Somervells and Morsheads. Most touching, George Mallory’s grandson Stephen Mallory flew over from South Africa, and his granddaughter Susie Robertson from New York. They are first cousins and this commemoration of their grandfather’s extraordinary life was the first time they had met.
