Penelope Hemingway examines the knitwear worn by George Mallory on his ill-fated 1924 Everest expedition
HISTORIC KNITTING ARTEFACTS
ONE HUNDRED years ago, on June 8th or 9th, two men disappeared into the clouds above
the north (Tibetan) face of Mount Everest, “going strong for the top,” and only a
few hundred feet from the summit, according to Noel Odell -
who was fated to be the last person on earth to see George Mallory and Sandy Irvine
alive.
The men were part of the third Royal Geographical Society-funded expedition to Everest; two previous expeditions had taken place in 1921 and 1922, and George Leigh Mallory was the only member of the 1924 team to be on his third trip to Everest. Handsome, absent-minded, charismatic, and a freethinker, the mountaineer George Mallory was aged 37 at the time of his disappearance.
Seventy-five years on from the 1924 Expedition, in 1999, a team of American climbers, with BBC and PBS film-makers alongside, set out to search for Mallory and Irvine, as part of the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition.
Climber Conrad Anker did a supremely Mallory-like act and struck off alone way below
the designated search zone. In the subsequent BBC film, The Wildest Dream, Anker recalled: “... I stopped, turned around and there was a patch of white. It
wasn’t snow, it was matte -
a light absorbing colour, like marble. As I got closer, I realised this was the body
of one of the pioneering English climbers, frozen on the mountainside…”
The climber was face down, his head and one arm almost buried under scree, his arms stretched out above his head. Like all of Everest’s lost, he was frozen into the mountainside. It would be totally impossible to bring down a body from that height. But as he was face down, it was possible to check the label in his shirt collar. It read “G. Mallory”.
Essential kit
The Mountain Heritage Trust’s Mallory Clothing Replica Project, 2002-2006, examined whether the clothing worn by George in 1924 could have supported a summit bid. Many modern climbers, used to high-tech clothing, were dismissive of the likelihood of any climber being able to scale the roof of the world wearing wool, silk and gabardine.
Earlier 1920s expeditions had established that standard Alpine clothing would be workable for up to around 7000 feet, but above that, the vicious winds dictated more windproof fabrics. In the book The Assault on Mount Everest, 1922, Mallory wrote that “a light shetland ‘woolly’, and a thin silk shirt… added
