Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine by Julie Summers Page A

as well.  B.N.C. had a walk over the rest of the time & won easily.  Blast it.
     
    The ability to perform well even when he was clearly below par was something he proved on several occasions during his life, most significantly and repeatedly on the Everest expedition in 1924.
    At the end of the letter he congratulates Dick on winning a motor race but cautions him with a tale which is very telling of his attitude to life.  ‘A man at New College has just had both eyes taken out (one was left on the road) & his whole face smashed in.  And never lost consciousness, poor fellow, I should rather be killed than live like that.’
    Unsurprisingly Sandy was again selected to row in the university boat and this year the president was his friend Gully Nickalls, son of the even more famous Guy.  Coaching followed the same procedure as the previous year, with the initial training taking place on the home waters in Oxford under the supervision of Dr Bourne who has also made some improvements to the 1923 boat.  After six weeks there the crew moved to Henley, where they stayed in Leander Club and were coached by Horsfall.  During the period at Henley Gully Nickalls developed jaundice and his place at 7 had to be taken pro tem by Geoffrey Milling.  The press followed the boat and assessed its progress in long columns in the Times on a twice-weekly basis.  The paper’s special rowing correspondent, although very critical of individual oarsmen and once again of their personal faults as he saw them, was nevertheless impressed by the crew and claimed it to be the best Oxford boat crew since 1911.  In 1922 they were compared only with the 1912 crew. 
    Oxford Boat Race Crew, 1923 (Sandy third from right)
     
    By the time the crew arrived at Putney on 6 March, Nickalls was sufficiently recovered to row half-days with Milling acting as spare during the afternoon sessions.  From the middle of March onwards there was real interest in the two crews on the tideway.  The press sensed that this might be the year that Oxford fought back and regained the lead from Cambridge who had won the last four races.  The coaching of the Oxford boat was handed over to Harcourt Gold who was to put the finishing touches to the crew and was renowned for his ability to do so.  Old Blues were out in force to study the Dark Blues form, piling onto the coaches’ launch when they could while other followers braved the cold winds and grey skies to watch the progress of the training from the banks of the river.  One lady I heard from, who was then a girl of fourteen, remembers watching Oxford in 1923 as they came off the water and carried their boat to the boat house.  She was rather overwhelmed by the sight of these splendid specimens in their rowing shorts and sweaters.  ‘They were almost like gods,’ she said, ‘we just stood and stared in awe and admiration.  And there was Sandy, one of them , smiling at me .’
    As Sandy was busy training for the Boat Race his friend George Binney was fully occupied with trying to put together a second Oxford University expedition to Spitsbergen.  He had organized the first trip in 1921, which had been a qualified success as they had had much trouble getting through the pack ice.  This time, with the benefit of experience, he had put together a much stronger team and his plans, stores and equipment were both better thought-out and more up to date.  Using the good contacts he had made in the Alpine Club in 1921 he was again fortunate to recruit Noel Odell as geologist, R. A. Frazer as surveyor and, at the last minute, Dr Tom Longstaff as medical officer and naturalist to the team.  He set about selecting other, younger, men from the university to make up the sledging and exploration teams.  As President of the Myrmidon Club Binney had had the opportunity to get to know several very strong, athletic types whom he considered to be serious contenders.  He suggested to Odell that it might be worth taking Geoffrey