Mallory & Irvine – 100 Years

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2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the first British attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest. But did you know that both George Mallory and Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine both spent time in their childhoods in Birkenhead?

To commemorate this anniversary we will welcome Julie Summers to the Williamson for a talk on Sandy Irvine, his life at Park Road South, Birkenhead, and his role in this historic expedition. Julie will speak about Sandy’s early life in Birkenhead, his rowing career and his successful crossing of the Norwegian Island of Spitsbergen before focusing on the 1924 Mount Everest expedition. There is no mystery in British mountaineering more famous than the story of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine. Julie will give background to the early Everest expeditions (1921, 1922) before zooming in on 1924 and sharing her thoughts on whether or not the two Birkenhead men reached the summit of the world’s highest mountain 29 years before Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary.

Julie Summers is Sandy Irvine’s great niece and biographer. She started working on the 1924 Mount Everest expedition over 25 years ago and published Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine in 2000. It remains in print. Since then she has written 13 more works on non-fiction, worked a stint as the Chairman of the Mountain Heritage Trust and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.