Tag: Sandy Irvine

When Worlds Collide

Posted on by Julie Summers

For the first six months of 2024, I was busy and taken up with two projects. The first was the centenary celebration of the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine on Mount Everest on 8 June 1924. The second was the completion of my biography of British Vogue which was in the final stages of proofs, and we were looking to pin down the pictures. It was a delightful juxtaposition. I enjoyed flitting between exquisite photoshoots by Nick Knight and Mario Testino in Vogue and the chilly black, white and blue world of the high Himalaya. While the book proofs were being tweaked and the index completed, I took part in several events to mark the Everest 100th anniversary. The first was at Shrewsbury School in February, the day the expedition set off from Liverpool on 29 February 1924. Then a seminar day on 26 April at Merton College, Oxford (Sandy Irvine’s college) on the day he got his first sighting of the mountain from Pang La Pass 100 years ago.

Sandy Irvine 1923 The Warden & Fellows of Merton College, Oxford

And finally the major celebration at the Royal Geographical Society in London, organised by Rebecca Stephens and the Himalayan Trust. This took place on 8 June, the exact date the two climbers were last seen by Captain Noel Odell ‘going strong for the top.’ It was an extraordinary and moving event and we all felt that the centenary of the greatest mountaineering mystery of all time had been well and truly put to bed. I even announced my intention to retire from Everest-related matters.

And so I returned to the rarified air of high fashion and Vogue history. Over the summer I finalised the selection of images for the plates section, saw the final proofs off to the setters and then, as readers of this blog will know, I was fortunate enough to see the book coming off the presses on 3 September. After a short but lovely walking holiday in Greece, I returned to a frenzy of pre-publication activity for the Vogue biography. There was a glitzy launch at Iconic Images Gallery in London and a Q&A with former Vogue editor, Alexandra Shulman at the V&A at which we discussed Vogue, clothes and other things that matter.

One of the issues we talked about was how all of us make fashion choices every day, even if we think we are not interested in fashion. We make a decision about whether it’s a jeans or dress day, whether it’s warm enough to wear shorts or a skirt without tights, whether we’re trying to dress to impress or simply to wear clothes appropriate for the task in hand. Our clothes tell others so much about who we are, what we are doing, and in the case of history, to what time period we belong. Audrey Withers, Vogue’s editor in the 1940s and 1950s, said she could date a dress to a season and tell you what was going on at the time politically and economically.

Imagine my surprise when I received a call one morning the following week from a high-altitude filmmaker in Kathmandu who wanted to talk about an old boot he had found in a glacier on Everest a few days earlier. The boot was leather with nails (for grip), meaning it had been used for climbing. There was a thick woollen sock poking out from the boot – brown and cream (café au lait?) which meant the wearer had been clear that he or she wanted to keep their feet warm at altitude. Actually, I knew it was a ‘he’ because no women were on Everest in the era of nailed leather boots. It matched in type, design and weight, the boot found on George Mallory’s body in 1999. Could it possibly be a boot belonging to Sandy Irvine? If so, that would blow all the most recent theories of the Chinese removing Irvine’s body from the mountain to smithereens. How could we possibly prove it? Simple, as it turns out. Stitched perfectly onto the sock was a Cash’s name tape: A. C. IRVINE.

This incredible find, made by climber/filmmaker Jimmy Chin when he was on his way down from the upper mountain, has opened up the whole mystery of Mallory and Irvine for the second time. And in the centenary year, a quarter of a century after Mallory’s body was found by Chin’s friend and mentor, Conrad Anker, in May 1999. The fact that Chin found only a boot and sock (with the foot too) is tantalising and begs the question as to what happened and where is the rest of Sandy Irvine’s body. I have studied the mystery of Mallory and Irvine for nearly 30 years, and I have spoken to many climbers, filmmakers, mountaineering historians, glaciologists and artists. I know that objects caught in glaciers are moved, crushed and spat out by the slow-moving rivers of ice. Andy Parkin, an artist in Chamonix, specialises in sculptures created from found and recycled objects, often crushed and changed by the Mont Blanc glacier. I knew from conversations with him how things can reappear years after they fell into the ice.

Mallory replica clothing recreated by Mike Parsons & Mary Rose from fragments found on his body in 1999 (Mountain Heritage Trust)

Those who know the story of Mallory and Irvine well are aware of the sighting of ‘an English Dead’ by a Chinese climber in the 1970s. The body, as he described it to a Japanese climber a decade later, was sitting upright, as if asleep, and was wearing old fashioned clothing, puttees and red braces. Mountaineering historians Audrey Salkeld and Thomas Holzel concluded this could only be Sandy Irvine. They set off to find out if that was indeed the case, but their search was not successful. When Eric Simonson’s Anglo-American expedition set off in 1999 to search for Irvine’s body they contacted my father, Peter, and asked for a DNA sample so they could identify the remains if they found them. In the event, the climbers stumbled upon the remains of George Mallory. Photographs of his frozen body ricocheted around the globe and a whole new generation of Everest enthusiasts became hooked on the story.

One of those I spoke to frequently was Graham Hoyland, who was key to the 1999 expedition and is a relative of another member of the 1924 Everest team, Howard Somervell. In 2011 we were discussing yet another expedition planning to try to find Irvine’s body and he said: ‘I think it’s unlikely that they will find anything. There has been a lot of avalanche activity and probably landslides in the region of old camp VI. I reckon your great uncle will have been sluffed off the mountain and into the glacier.’ I distinctly recall that word sluffed. Since then, other expeditions have tried to find Sandy Irvine’s remains and all have failed. One recent expedition leader, Mark Synott, has gone on record to allege that the Chinese had taken Sandy Irvine’s body off the mountain. In the Daily Mail in April 2024 he is quoted: ‘We now have multiple sources all essentially saying the same thing: the Chinese found Irvine, removed the body, and are jealously guarding this information from the rest of the world – all to protect the claim that the 1960 Chinese team was the first to reach the summit…’

Well, that’s one theory that is well and truly put to bed now. Sandy Irvine’s body was never removed from Everest. That the boot is his, there is no doubt, thanks to the name label on the sock. And just for fun, the invoices for both the boot and the lambswool socks are in the archive of Merton College, Oxford. There is even a photograph of Sandy drying his socks at Shekar Dzong in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society. Sometimes history comes together beautifully, like a perfectly knitted woollen. And it turns out that clothes do matter.

Irvine’s bill for boots

These two images courtesy Sandy Irvine Archive, The Warden and Fellows of Merton College, Oxford

Mallory & Irvine 1924-2024: commemorating the greatest mountaineering mystery of all time

Posted on by Julie Summers
Mallory & Irvine leaving Camp IV on 6 June 1924, taken by Noel Odell (C)Royal Geographical Society

On Saturday 8 June 2024 over 600 people gathered at the Royal Geographical Society in London to mark the 100th anniversary of the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Among the crowd were more than 30 members of the Mallory family, 8 Irvines and a good showing of Odells, Nortons, Somervells and Morshead (from the 1922 expedition). It was a great event and one charged with more emotion than I had expected.

It all started with a reception for the family members where at least sixty of us gathered in the entrance hall. It was fun to renew friendships and meet other expedition party relatives. It is not often you can walk up to someone and ask boldly ‘so, who are you?’ and get a friendly response of ‘I’m a Norton/Somervell/Odell.’ Meantime a film made by the Alpine Club, Everest Revisited 1924-2024, which looks at the 1920s Everest expeditions, was premiered in the lecture theatre. It focuses on all the participants, including the sherpa and porters, as well as the two well-known protagonists. It offers a fascinating mixture of archive footage, interviews including Chris Bonington, Stephen Venables, Dawson Stellfox, and Leo Houlding in Mallory replica clothing, and thought-provoking commentary from Ed Douglas comparing the 1920s expeditions with today.

Leo Houlding, Graham Hoyland and I each gave a short illustrated talk to shed light on various aspects of the 1924 expedition. Leo talked about making the IMAX film The Wildest Dream on Everest in 2007. He remembered Conrad Anker calling him out of the blue in 2006 and asking him how he would like to play Sandy Irvine. ‘The easiest decision of my life’, he told us. Filming is a lengthy process and no more so than for IMAX which requires huge cameras, batteries and other gear, and a lot of hanging around as shots are set up. Tedious at the best of times but dangerous on Everest. Seeing the footage of him hugging his toes in a tent after standing out in the snow and wind at some bewilderingly high altitude brought home the intensity of the cold on the mountain. His description of climbing the second step without the use of the Chinese ladder was particularly fascinating to the eager experts in the audience. He summited late in the season – on 14 June 2007 – so the IMAX team could be assured of an empty summit.

Leo Houlding warming his toes with all his might (C)Leo Houlding

Graham led us into the story of his relative, Howard Somervell, who famously gave George Mallory his Kodak Vestpocket camera as he prepared to leave Camp IV with Sandy Irvine for the final summit bid. The question of whether, if the camera is ever found, there will be a film to be developed has continued to fascinate Graham – and tens of thousands of others. What he also brought to our attention were Somervell’s notes on barometric pressure on Everest which proved that the pressure was as low on 8/9 June 1924 as it was during the great storm of 1996 that killed so many climbers. Both Leo and Graham believe it is unlikely the two climbers made it to the summit, though not impossible.

I took the audience back to Sandy’s childhood so that they could get some sort of picture of the man who has always stood in Mallory’s shadow. When he wrote to his wife, Ruth, from the voyage to India, Mallory said of Sandy Irvine ‘he’ll be one to rely on for everything except, perhaps, conversation.’ This phrase has been quoted over the last 100 years to condemn poor Sandy Irvine as a slightly thick if very able sportsman. Nothing could be further from the truth, and I had fun talking about his wild childhood adventures, his engineering genius evident even at school and his great rowing prowess. I didn’t dwell on his love affairs as they have been well-covered, but believe me, he was active on all fronts.

A meeting to decide who would be invited to the 1924 expedition (C)Alpine Club

After the break Dr Wade Davis zoomed in from Vancouver to give us the most extraordinary and moving talk about the Everest team members from all 3 expeditions of the 1920s. All but a handful had been involved in the First World War. He talked movingly about how Dr Arthur Wakefield (doctor in 1922) had lost his faith after witnessing only 37 survivors of the more than 800 men from his regiment from Canada who were slaughtered on the first day of the Battle of the Somme; how Howard Somervell, on duty as a young surgeon that day, saw six acres of injured and dying men; how Colonel Edward Norton took part in almost every campaign in the War. It was a tour de force and at times it was almost too painful to contemplate what those men had witnessed. Wade is brilliant and he was able to offer light relief when discussing how the expedition members were chosen. George Finch was an Australian with a very colourful married life who was left out of 1921 on account of being off his food, tired and having lost weight (he was in the middle of a second, untidy divorce). He was allowed to go in 1922 and performed well but was dropped in 1924 with no reasonable explanation. Though this did leave a gap which was filled by Sandy Irvine. What came out of this talk was the humanity and bravery of the expedition members, but also the sadness of the loss of Mallory and Irvine. He quoted Edward Norton’s remarks at Base Camp in the aftermath: ‘We were a sad little party. We accepted the loss in that rational spirit which all of our generation had learnt in the Great War … but the tragedy was very near: our friends’ vacant tents and vacant places at table were a constant reminder to us.’

Norton wrote a letter to Sandy’s parents after their deaths, and I thought it would be fitting to quote from it at some length. I still find it moving today:

“Much that your son was to us I have already written of in various communiqués to the Times – From the word go he was a complete & absolute success in every way.  He was spoken of by General Bruce in an early communiqué as our ‘experiment’ – I can assure you that his experimental stage was a short one as he almost at once became almost indispensable – It was not only that we leant on him for every conceivable mechanical requirement – it was more that we found we could trust his capacity, ingenuity & astonishingly ready good nature to be equal to any call.  One of the wonderful things about him was how, though nearly 20 years younger than some of us, he took his place automatically without a hint of the gaucherie of youth, from the very start, as one of the most popular members of our mess. 

The really trying times that we had throughout May at Camp III & the week he put in at Camp IV were the real test of his true metal – for such times inevitably betray a man’s weak points – & he proved conclusively & at once that he was good all through – I can hardly bear to think of him now as I last saw him (I was snowblind the following morning & never really saw him again) on the North Col – looking after us on our return from our climb – cooking for us, waiting on us, washing up the dishes, undoing our boots, paddling about in the snow, panting for breath (like the rest of us) & this at the end of a week of such work all performed with the most perfect good nature & cheerfulness.

Physically of course he was splendid – as strong as a horse – I saw him two or three times carry for some faltering porter heavier loads than any European has ever carried here before. He did the quickest time ever done between some of the stages up the glacier – one of his feats was to haul, with Somervell, a dozen or so porters loads up 150 feet of ice cliff on the way to the N. Col. As for his capacity as a mountaineer the fact that he was selected by Mallory to accompany him in the last & final attempt on the mountain speaks for itself.” As Norton himself said to Geoffrey Bruce when discussing Sandy Irvine, ‘men have had worse epitaphs.’

As we were marking the centenary in London, other commemorations were taking place around the country. In Birkenhead Dr Philip Walton put a candle in the window of 56 Park Road South, as Sandy’s mother had done in Wales when he disappeared. A light to show him the way home.

A candle in the window of 56 Park Road South

At Chester Cathedral’s evensong the choir and congregation processed to the stained-glass window in the cathedral’s cloisters dedicated to Mallory & Irvine. There they sang Psalm 121 and said prayers ‘in remembrance of their journey’.

Window in the cloisters of Chester Cathedral

Merton College flew the college flag at half-mast – a rare honour  – and someone had laid flowers at the Irvine memorial in the college gardens. I had unveiled a blue plaque to Sandy Irvine on the wall of 56 Park Road South on Friday and the mayor of Birkenhead did the same for Mallory at 34 Slatey Road. It is extraordinary how this story of the disappearance of two men a century ago still touches people and moves them.

Merton College, Oxford, 8 June 2024

It has been a great journey and a huge joy to be involved in a quarter of a century of the Mallory and Irvine story. Now I am going to hand over to the next generation. I have loved getting to know great men and women from the world of mountaineering, including the wonderful Rebecca Stephens who led the event on Saturday on behalf of the Himalayan Trust. I am proud to call her a friend.

What can I say but thank you?

For anyone interested, there are exhibitions about Sandy Irvine and George Mallory at the following venues:

Merton College Oxford – see www.merton.ox.ac.uk for details

Birkenhead Park Visitor Centre https://birkenhead-park.org.uk/events/sandy-irvine-from-birkenhead-to-everest/

The Alpine Club, http://www.alpine-club.org.uk/events/past-future-exhibitions/1276-everest-1924

Remembering Helen McCrory

Posted on by Julie Summers

I only met the magnificent Helen McCrory once, for an hour and a half, in a tiny room above a shop in Tottenham Court Road. But that meeting left an indelible impression on me and I will never forget the magic of her presence. I had been hired as the historical consultant on the film Woman in Black 2 and after working on the script I was asked to meet Ms McCrory and Phoebe Fox. I arrived early for our meeting and was not quite sure what to expect. They arrived together and before Helen had taken off her coat and sat down opposite me the questions began. Who was I? What had I written? What were my credentials for advising them on life in London in the Second World War? She was not impressed with Jambusters but when I mentioned that I’d written Fearless on Everest she looked at me sharply and said: ‘Sandy Irvine? The one who climbed with George Mallory? Oh that is exciting. My husband is mad about the Mallory and Irvine story. I must get him a copy of your book.’ I don’t know if she ever did but I was fascinated to learn that Damian Lewis is interested in the Everest 1924 saga.

After that we settled down. Phoebe Fox was relaxed and chatty, Helen McCrory the consummate professional. She was not there to waste her or my time and her questions were searching and intelligent. We talked about her character, Jean Hogg, and how she would get inside her head and understand what she was thinking. The conversation moved from her personality to her physical presence. What would she be wearing? A suit or a dress with a cardigan, I suggested. ‘No, I mean what would she have been wearing underneath all that?’ A corset, I said. ‘A corset? Surely that is Victorian?’ I replied that in 1940 over a third of the female population wore corsets and someone the age of Jean Hogg probably would have been one of that third since it was mainly younger women who were happy to cast corsets aside for the new-fangled bra and pants. That really captured her interest. ‘So when were bras invented?’ Well, it’s a complicated story but suffice it to say that it was only in the mid-1930s that they were mass-produced for the European market. ‘Oh I like that,’ she said. ‘So what sort of corset would Jean Hogg have worn?’ The question almost caught me off guard but then I remembered talking to my friend Marion Platt whose grandmother was a corset wearer. Marion had described watching the old lady (probably in her fifties) taking off her stays at night, rolling them up and putting them carefully on her bedroom chair. So I told Helen the story and described the simple stays that Marion’s grannie had worn.

Helen McCrory and Phoebe Fox in Woman in Black 2

‘How would that have made her look? I mean, how would it have affected her posture?’ She sat up on her chair, straightened her back and asked ‘Like this?’ ‘Not quite so stiff,’ I replied. She moved her body around, feeling for the right sort of pose. It was stunning to watch. She had perfect control over her poise and as she moved her body around, making minute changes to her posture she morphed from beautiful, natural Helen McCrory into middle-aged, spinsterish Jean Hogg. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, nor could Phoebe Fox. It was mesmerising. And then it was all over. She relaxed, smiled oh so warmly and thanked me for helping her to get inside the head and body of her character.

When she stood up to go I realised how petite she was, yet her presence was enormous. I have met other actors since, but none has made my heart beat as fast as Helen McCrory. I have watched her on television many times and I always feel a tiny sense of pride that I once met this great, wonderful, clever, beautiful professional woman whose brilliance has touched so many and whose life has been extinguished way too early.

The Mystery of Sandy Irvine

Posted on by Julie Summers

Sandy aged 21 photographed for the Oxford University 1923 Blue Boat

96 years ago, today, 8th June 1924, my great uncle stepped into the pages of history. He was the nd’Irvine of the greatest mountaineering mystery of all times, the junior climbing partner of the great George Mallory. From the moment of their disappearance, somewhere close to the loftiest spot on earth, Mallory and Irvine’s names have been inextricably linked. The question everyone wants to know is this: were Mallory and Irvine the first men to stand on the summit of Mount Everest, 29 years before Hilary and Tenzing?

Two decades ago, I published a biography of Uncle Sandy, as he was always known in our family. It caused a little stir at the time and added yet one more book to the more than 1,000 written about Mount Everest since the 1920s. Sandy was only 22 when he died, Mallory 37. Sandy had had little mountaineering experience while Mallory was judged to be one of the best rock climbers of his generation. All the odds were against Sandy Irvine being an equal partner to Mallory. Yet I found evidence in letters, which had been hiding in a trunk in the attic of a house in North Wales for three quarters of a century, that Mallory had selected Sandy as his climbing partner as early as mid-April 1924. He wrote to his mother on 24th:

I have provisionally been chosen to do the first oxygen climb with Mallory.  Norton & Somervell doing Non ox. on same day.  It will be great fun if we all 4 get to the top at the same time!  I say provisionally because I don’t know that I will be fit at 26,500 ft yet (our kicking off camp). The weather has behaved in a most peculiar manner so far – no one knows if it is a good sign or not.

Prior to this, mountaineering historians had offered a variety of views as to why Mallory chose Irvine, some suggesting it was a physical attraction. I was always of the opinion that Mallory had accepted that it was necessary to use oxygen for the last 3,000 feet of the climb, based on the experience of the 1922 expedition. Sandy, who was a technical whiz when it came to fixing the oxygen sets, was the obvious person to take along if he proved himself at altitude. Mallory had good reason to think he would, as he had shown he was as strong as an ox on the trek and had performed well on the high passes in Tibet. The other thing that Mallory understood was that Sandy, as a top-class rower, would have the courage to push himself to his physical limit. It was a good combination.

Mallory (left) and Sandy Irvine leaving Camp IV on 6 June 1924. It was taken by Noel Odell as they made the final tweaks to their kit. c. Royal Geographical Society

So off they went, on 6th June 1924, to Camp V and the following day to Camp VI, their high camp, which in reality was a tiny two man tent which Sandy instantly turned into a makeshift workshop to prepare the oxygen apparatus for their early start the next day. We will never know for sure what happened when they left their tent but Noel Odell, climbing in support and one camp behind, spotted what he believed was a tiny figure climbing over a patch of white snow just a few hundred feet below the summit. He watched and saw a second figure joining the first. Then the summit was enveloped in cloud and when it lifted 15 minutes later there was no sign of the two climbers. They had disappeared from view.

From that day onwards people have thought, written, argued about what happened and how far they got. Some believe they made it to the summit and died on the descent, others are sure they were thwarted by the Second Step, a steep rock face that now has a ladder attached to it for easier passage. In May 1999, George Mallory’s frozen body was found in the snow some 1,500 metres below the summit. He had taken a fall, broken his ankle and cut his forehead. The discovery of notes in his pocket, a watch (broken), altimeter (broken) and other objects threw no light on the question of whether they got to the top or not. In fact, it raised more questions than it answered.

Sandy’s pressure kettle, designed so he could have a hot cup of tea. It was one of the few objects that came back from the mountain without him.

In four years’ time it will be the 100th anniversary of their climb and disappearance. Surely there will not be anyone still interested in their story. When I wrote my book in 1999, I was able to meet three people who had known Sandy Irvine, but they are all long dead. We have no more information now than we had after Mallory’s body was found. Yet still this mystery – British mountaineering’s greatest – continues to fascinate people. There have been no fewer than a dozen expeditions in the last 20 years which have set out with the express aim of finding Sandy’s body and answering the question for once and for all. None has succeeded.

Recently a young filmmaker, Archie Price Siddiqui, made an eight minute film about the last climb of Mallory and Irvine. It is a very accomplished piece of work and I thought I would share it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0G-RVEnT-E&feature=youtu.be. What it proved to me, if indeed I needed convincing, is that the mystery continues to fascinate people.

This was sent back to my grandmother, Sandy’s sister, in 1933. In this scrap of cloth she found 20 Himalayan garnets. It was a present from Karma Paul, the translator on the expedition who had had the most to do with Sandy while dealing with the porters on the trek.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that I think the reason why the question of whether Mallory and Irvine made it to the top of Mount Everest in 1924 still intrigues us is because we love stories and better still, we love mysteries. Some people have tried to explain it away as a celebration of glorious British failure but, frankly, I think that is rubbish. Their deaths came six years after the end of the bloodiest war in history. There was little appetite for glorious failure in Britain in 1924. Believe me, I’ve spent the last six months writing about it for the Royal British Legion. No, this is all about mystery and storytelling. When people ask me if I want Sandy’s body found so we will finally know whether they were the first men to stand on the summit of the earth I say: ‘No. It’s a mystery. Let us leave it at that.’

Hidden Secrets

Posted on by Julie Summers

Poppies of Remembrance at the Thiepval Memorial, Somme © Brian Harris

The build up to Remembrance Day always reminds me of the importance of memories. I’m talking here about national memories as much as personal ones. Two organisations most closely connected in the public’s imagination to memories in this context are the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who I worked for part-time from 2005 to 2015 and the Royal British Legion, who I will be working for from now until 2021. Both these great bodies focus a significant part of their work on remembering the individual servicemen and women who died in the service of their country. They do much else besides but both have outstanding archives that tell the story of the organisation and the people involved in them.

Menin Gate, Ypres, where over 54,000 names of the missing are recorded © Brian Harris

Having spent all my working life using archives I thought it would be a moment to reflect on the importance of archives and their role in preserving the nation’s memories, the world’s memories in some cases. If I asked anyone to name, say, three archives that would be places to consult when writing about the Second World War they would probably come up with Imperial War Museums, National Archives and the National Army Museum. You might not expect to find anything relevant to that topic in the archives of, for example, Barings Bank or Burberry or even the Met Office. But let me assure you that you can find material in the most unexpected places.

I am a regular visitor to the national collections such as Imperial War Museums and the National Archives but I also enjoy visiting the smaller archives that focus on one single issue, such as the Alpine Club or the Henry Moore Foundation. I did a quick calculation and jotted down the names of 38 archives I have visited in the last few years and I do not think that is close to the total I have consulted one way or another over the course of my working life.

It is hard to have a favourite because all archives are wonderful in their own right but one stands out for me as an experience I will never forget. I was writing The Colonel of Tamarkan, the biography of my grandfather, Brigadier Sir Philip Toosey, who was the senior British officer at the bridge camp over the river Kwai in Thailand. He spent all his working life at Barings Bank in Liverpool bar a few years in the early 1920s. Fortunately he did not live long enough to see it disgraced and then absorbed by ING in 1995. I wrote to bank in the hope that they might have kept personnel files from the Barings’ days and got a response by return to say that they had and I was welcome to visit. I made an appointment and set off with a spring in my step and a notebook and pencil in my bag.

Phil Toosey in Peru, 1935, on business for Barings

I arrived at an enormous glass and concrete building in the city and felt distinctly out of place among so many dark suits coming and going at great speed. The receptionist phoned through to the archives for me and there soon appeared the archivist himself, dressed in a brown tweed suit and wearing reassuringly thick glasses. He ushered me through the atrium and towards a brown domestic-sized door through which I stepped as if into another world. In fact, it was another world. It was an office full of old-fashioned filing cabinets and shelves bulging with books and folders. I was completely enchanted. The old office had apparently been transplanted lock, stock and barrel into the new building.

Toosey, February 1946, six months after being released from captivity and three months after arriving back in Britain

Sure enough the material was as good as the archive promised it should be. An entire personnel file on Toosey, including a fascinating exchange of a dozen or more letters between his boss, the Liverpool Agent for Barings, Alan Tod, and Evelyn Baring in London. So concerned were they for Toosey’s welfare (read mental health in today’s parlance) that they decided what he needed post-war was perspective with which to begin his new life after three years as a prisoner of the Japanese.

They sent him to South America as a roving ambassador for the firm but really with a view to giving him a chance to find his feet again. It worked and he was forever grateful to Barings. So was I. What a treasure trove and so beautifully preserved. On the surface the file had nothing to do with the history of the bank but in reality it had everything to do with it. The bank was run by men, and a very few women, who were individuals with personal history, characters, foibles and in this case, a war record.

Other archives have been equally valuable and nothing is more thrilling than finding something that even the archivist did not know was there. In the Royal Geographical Society I found a piece of paper slipped into the back of a notebook which had not been unfolded for years. Very carefully the archivist and I took it out and read it. It made us laugh. It was a memo sent from camp 3 to camp 2 on Everest in 1924. Written by Edward Shebbeare, one of the support team, it read: ‘I’ve been out on the glacier for hours looking for Beetham. Either he is lost or he is with you. If the latter, he’s a bugger for not letting me know.’

For that book I also found the now famous trunk in the attic that contained all Sandy Irvine’s correspondence from the trek and the mountain from where he was never to return. There were photographs, sketches of his changes to the oxygen sets and, hauntingly for me, the final letter he wrote to his mother on 26th May 1924. The trunk was in a family attic in North Wales and it was the most significant archive find of my life. Until 2018, that was. But that is still under wraps and will be revealed in February when Dressed for War is published.

So when you think about remembrance, or just national memory, spare a thought for the wonderful archivists up and down the country and all over the world who take care of this precious material. If it had not been for organisations understanding the value of keeping material for the future and for archivists cataloguing, preserving and caring for it, the history of our lives would be greatly impoverished. An archive might be kept under a bed (yes, I’ve seen those) or in a cupboard in a private house. It might be in the corner of an office or in an attic. Material might be stored in cellars, attics, barns, stables or in carefully monitored air-conditioned buildings. It is all important and valuable. How this will be kept in the future in this, our digital age, I do not know. But for now I acknowledge archivists at every level because they deserve our gratitude.

These precious diaries are stored in a family collection

Desperately Seeking Someone

Posted on by Julie Summers

Researching non-fiction is a bit like being a police detective, I imagine. Sniffing out clues and piecing together a story that brings the facts to the fore in a convincing way. I also imagine it must be near impossible to put a perfect case together as life is not neat and linear. It is chaotic, veering off in this or that direction and leaving traces which sometimes lead to vital clues and at other times a dead end. I will stop with the police analogy as I am out of my depth, basing my knowledge on Agatha Christie or PD James’s crime fiction.

The trunk in the attic © Julie Summers

However, I am in the right part of the stream when talking about sniffing out clues about people’s lives for my non-fiction books. I am known as the ferret by my irreverent god-father. Others might describe me as a nosey-parker but whichever sobriquet you choose, the truth is that I am persistent in my pursuit of facts. In 2000 I found a trunk in the attic which no one in the family believed still existed. In this now famous trunk I found a blue foolscap folder, tied with a blue ribbon, and the title ACI Everest 1924 which gave me eleven letters written by Sandy Irvine to his mother, father and sister from the Mount Everest expedition. Also in the file were photographs, drawings, invoices for clothing and notes on his work on the truculent oxygen sets for the climb: all unseen for over seventy-five years. It was the archive find of my writing career to date and brought the book to life in a way that I had not anticipated. Suddenly I had this young man’s voice and it was thrilling.

When I was writing the biography of my grand-father, Philip Toosey, who was the colonel who built the bridge on the river Kwai, I had more material than I could possibly have wished for. There are collections all over the world charting the Death Railway from all sides of the story. Military histories focussing on the fall of Singapore are outnumbered by autobiographies from Prisoners of War in the Far East by about ten to one. And my grandfather had added to this mass by recording thirty hours of conversation with Professor Peter Davies on reel-to-reel tapes in the early 1970s. Having an embarrassment of riches can be almost as off-putting as having too little material. You have to work very hard to find the individual personal voice among so many.

Toosey in his study at Heathcote c. 1974. This is here he and Peter Davies did the bulk of the tape recordings © Toosey Family

Eventually I did but in the most peculiar way. Every time Peter Davies went to interview Toosey, as he was universally known, he would start with ‘Well, Brigadier, today we will talk about …’ and then he would give a topic such as Baring’s Bank, Dunkirk or the Allied bombings of POW camps. One day I happened to be chopping carrots for my children’s lunch when Toosey himself announced the topic of the day: ‘Well Peter,’ he said, clearing his throat and bracing himself for what came next: ‘Today I would like to tell you about my experiences with women.’ ‘Oh heck,’ I thought, ‘what do I do now?’ Should I turn off the tape or fast forward it in order to preserve my grandfather’s privacy or should I listen, like a diligent historian? I listened, of course. And the listening was rewarded with the following: ‘Like most Englishmen, I could write the story of my sex-life on a postage stamp.’ I got off light there, I thought with relief.

Alex Toosey 1949 © Toosey Family

He then did go on to talk a bit about brief encounters in Piccadilly and Peru but his focus was on my grandmother, who he met in 1930 and married the following year. He described her as ‘formidable’. She was known as the regimental sergeant major and ‘we all love and respect her.’Over the course of the next two years I got to know this man who was in awe of his wife. I had known him as a child, of course. He died when I was fifteen. But that does not give you the kind of knowledge you need as a biographer. The tapes helped me to understand him in a way that no books ever could. Sometimes he would laugh when telling a story, at other times his voice would break, particularly when he was speaking of the men’s suffering in the prison camps. However, most impressive of all was his energy, his love of life and his determination not to be beaten down, however ghastly the circumstances. At the end of the war he was on a panel screening prison guards for war crimes. Some he had to condemn and it was not something he took any pleasure in. Revenge was not in his character.

Saito at Toosey’s grave, Landican Cemetery, 1984 © Toosey Family

A Japanese guard who had given him a serious beating for allowing some prisoners to escape in 1942 came up in front of him. Toosey insisted he should be set free without punishment. He knew that this man, Sargeant-major Saito, had had to punish him because he had flagrantly disobeyed Japanese orders. He also knew that Saito had saved him from a far worse fate: cross examination by the Kempi Tai (the Japanese secret police). Saito finally came to Britain in 1984 to pay his respects to Toosey. He visited his grave and wrote to Patrick, Toosey’s son, after the visit: ‘I feel very fine because I finish my own strong duty.  One thing I regret, I could not visit Mr Philip Toosey when he was alive.  He showed me what human being should be.  He changed the philosophy of my life.’ By the time I finished the book I believe I had my man.

Now I am embarked upon a third biography, separated in time by fifteen years and eleven books, and yet the task is the hardest to date. Audrey Withers was Vogue’s editor from 1940 to 1960. She was married twice and worked in later life as a volunteer for the Liberal Democrats. She received an OBE in 1954 and the Bi-centenary medal from the Royal Society of Arts in 1961. Yet despite being a public figure and publishing an autobiography, she has succeeded in remaining almost completely in the shadows. So reticent was she about personal matters that she filleted her father’s archive before she gave it to Somerville College, Oxford, removing all copies of personal letters referring to her. It is tantalizing to say the very least.

So I am have to piece together the jigsaw puzzle that will, I hope, paint a portrait of this remarkable woman by reading biographies and autobiographies of all the people she worked with. The relationship she enjoyed with the American photographer, Lee Miller, was the closest one she had during the war. Lee became Vogue’s war correspondent and I discovered recently that it was Audrey who worked hard to get her press accreditation so that she could go to France in 1944. Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth David gave me clues about Audrey’s interest in fresh and home-grown ingredients, while Hugo Vickers revealed that Audrey had been instrumental in persuading Vogue to reinstate Cecil Beaton as a photographer on the magazine after he had fallen foul of Condé Nast in 1938. Audrey’s own autobiography is more revealing for what it leaves out rather than what it includes and I am only now realizing that this is useful as it gives me clues about what mattered to her.

Valuable resources, which she could not destroy, are letters in the Condé Nast archives in London and New York. She was a prolific correspondent, as was Edna Woolman-Chase, the editor-in-chief of Vogue. Edna once complained that Audrey wrote too many memos and they were too long. That might be so but they are invaluable to me. These are full of detail of everyday life in London in the 1940s and 1950s. They give glimpses of personalities and offer reminders that famous photographers or writers, such as Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Elizabeth David, were real human beings with feelings, foibles and fury. I have a rich palette for the Vogue years and I am fortunate to have access to this material.

Of her private life, however, there is precious little. Here she did indeed succeed in hiding a great deal. Husband number one is a shadowy figure ‘who was never without a girlfriend’ and who has eluded my most determined efforts to track him down. There is minimal material from the 1911 census and an announcement of his second marriage in 1964. I know where and when he was born and died but apart from that there is almost nothing. When I say almost nothing, I do know one or two things that are revealed by the official records. I know, for example, that he did not volunteer for service at the outbreak of the war, unlike Audrey who was a driver for the Auxiliary Fire Service. That is recorded on the National Register from September 1939. He was working as a salesman for a bookshop in London, which would not have been a reserved occupation and he was only thirty-two. That strikes me as strange and I hope eventually to find out why.

Jock Stewart, c. 1948, in London © Julie Summers

There is one fuzzy photograph of Jock, taken at a wedding just after the war. He is about six feet tall which I worked out from comparing the height of the taxi behind him, the woman to his left and taking into account perspective and the height of a London pavement. He is quite good looking and well-dressed but his shoes are not shiny, so that tells me that he had not been in the military. He has thinning fair hair, large ears and full lips. The way he carries his hat and umbrella tells me he is a man with confidence. I would so love to find another picture of him, though. A younger Jock. But none appears to exist.

I also know that he described himself as ‘head’ of the household at 31 Blomfield Road in the 1939 register. The other occupants of the house, which was divided into three flats, were his wife, Elizabeth Stewart, his parents and a spinster who lived on the top floor. I realized that Audrey compartmentalized her life to such an extent that she had two names. At home she was Elizabeth Stewart while at work she was Audrey Withers. She recorded her occupation as ‘journalist’ while her mother-in-law is ‘unpaid domestic help.’ It was then I understood her mother-in-law kept house, did the shopping, cooking, washing and ironing while Audrey worked long hours at Vogue, often not returning until 10pm, something she had mentioned more than once in letters. Slowly a picture of the domestic life in Blomfield Road began to emerge. I even managed to work out which floor Audrey lived on from a chance remark about moving downstairs to sleep in her parents-in-law’s sitting room during the Blitz.

This is the work that will occupy me for the rest of this year and I confess that I love it. I shall find my subject, as I did with my other two biographies, and it will all come together in the end. In the meantime, where are the passenger lists for Southampton-New York for April 1938?

 

 

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