On the Trails of a Century of Mystery–Together

There is no mystery more compelling than the unsolved mystery of George Mallory, Sandy Irvine, and their legendary 1924 Everest expedition. There are many theories about what happened, but the definitive answer of them being the first people to reach the summit is unknown.

Julie Summers, the great-niece of Sandy Irvine, and Jochen Hemmleb, the world’s foremost authority on the 1924 Everest Expedition, team up in their new book, The Everest Mystery, to explore the life of Sandy Irvine, his relationship with George Mallory, and the many theories swirling around the expedition. They share with The History Reader below what brought them together to write their book, which ended up being a perfect partnership match just as Irvine and Mallory were 100 years ago.

The news came as a shock. On October 8, 2024, Julie Summers in Oxford received a call from award-winning American filmmaker Jimmy Chin, telling her that he and his team had recently found an old leather mountaineering boot emerging from a glacier at the base of Mount Everest’s north face. The boot had contained a foot and a sock bearing a name tape: A.C. Irvine—Julie’s great-uncle, who had disappeared close to the summit of the world’s highest mountain with his partner, George Mallory, a century earlier. Mallory’s body had been discovered in 1999, but this was the first time any remains of Sandy Irvine were found. Three days after the phone call, Jochen Hemmleb went through the same emotional rollercoaster when he found out about the discovery on the Internet. Jochen, a writer and filmmaker in the field of mountaineering, had been fascinated by the mystery of Mallory and Irvine since his teens. He had been one of the instigators and members of the expedition that found Mallory and had undertaken three more searches for Sandy Irvine. And he had been a friend of Julie for 25 years. About a fortnight later, Julie suggested that together they should take another long, fresh, and all-encompassing look at the life of Sandy Irvine and mountaineering’s greatest riddle.

To start our journey, we felt is was necessary to go back as close to 1924 as possible. The library of Merton college, Irvine’s alma mater, holds his memory and is Julie’s home ground. Going again over his diary, letters and drawings of the oxygen set he had improved and modified for the Everest expedition gave us renewed and intimate insights into Sandy’s character and the events from 100 years ago. Personal conversations with the grandson of Noel Odell, who had recommended Sandy for the expedition and ranked among his closest friends, as well as with the granddaughter of his expedition colleague John Hazard connected us with central parts of his social circle. At the nearby Museum of Natural History and Bodleian Library we consulted the personal letters and memoirs of Lawrence Wager and Percy Wyn-Harris, the two climbers who had found Sandy’s ice-axe on Mount Everest in 1933. They gave us insights into the terrain and the decision-making processes Sandy and Mallory would have encountered. To carry our readers further up the mountain and through time, we could draw upon Jochen’s nearly forty years of research in the mystery of Mallory and Irvine. This included the history of the early Chinese expedition, who possibly discovered both climbers’ bodies in 1960 and 1975, the finding of Mallory in 1999, the discoveries of the 1924 Camp VI and an old pre-war woollen mitten high on Everest in 2001, and the recently revealed recovery of an old crampon at 8580 m, which is now potentially the highest trace found of Sandy so far. A breakthrough moment, however, was the personal conversation we had with Christopher Norton, one of the grandsons of 1924 expedition leader Edward Norton. It was as if he channelled the thoughts of his grandfather, thus providing a hitherto overlooked insight into the minds of Norton, Mallory and Sandy during the final days of the expedition. This gave substance to previous educated guesses, assumptions and theories – and suddenly, from the perspective of over a century, the whole story could be told with an unprecedented level of detail and became so much more streamlined and obvious than it had seemed to us before. It renewed our respect not only for the extraordinary feats the climbers accomplished in 1924, but also for the intelligence and observation skills that went into their planning.

The result of our shared journey as authors outlines what we believe is the most likely scenario of what happened to Sandy Irvine and George Mallory in 1924. Moreover, it establishes Sandy Irvine’s rightful place in history as a fully-fledged expedition member, skilled engineer, and adventurous, fun-loving young man in his prime. It was particularly satisfying to combine our respective expertise: Julie’s personal and intimate knowledge of Sandy Irvine’s family, and Jochen’s detective-like enquiry into the mystery of Sandy’s and Mallory’s disappearance. It was a perfect match, just as our two main protagonists were.