Book review – Everest 24: New views on the 1924 Mount Everest Expedition

Ronald Turnbull reviews Everest 24 – a coffee table book stuffed with magnificent panoramas celebrating an historic expedition 100 years later.

Today we take it for granted that a serious mountaineering expedition is going to come back with exciting, inspiring, beautifully composed photos. Modern cameras make it possible and modern sponsorship pathways make it essential. But 100 years ago? A hundred years ago, it was just the same as this chunky coffee-table book from the Royal Geographical Society shows.

Main image: Camp at 20,000ft – the last day | Credit: George Mallory (1921)

Here are the photos from the 1924 expedition itself, the one where George Mallory and Sandy Irving maybe got to the top 29 years before Ed Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (but also, maybe, didn’t). The last photo of the two of them setting out from the North Col; Mallory and Edward Norton in their woven Burberry jackets climbing without oxygen at 8100m on the North Ridge; Norton, again oxygen-free, at 8573m with the summit just the height of Castle Crag Borrowdale above him. If you didn’t know these photos already, you’ll have seen plenty of them in this anniversary year, though probably not so crisply reproduced as they are in this book.

But also, here are magnificent panoramas caught by Mallory himself on the exploration of 1921. He lugged the massive 8″ x 10″ format camera up to various high passes, only to find he’d been putting the glass plates in back to front and had to lug the massive camera all the way back up there again.

Bentley Beetham, the one who put up those lovely little climbs above the oak trees of Borrowdale: he went down with dysentery and couldn’t climb, so passed the time by taking another fine set of photos.

But the highlight of the book is the coloured lantern slides by the professional photographer John Noel. His attempts at very early colour photography failed, but he made detailed colour notes on the spot, and hand tinted his slides with specialised watercolours to produce beautiful images in ochre, beige and turquoise green.

After 100 years, there’s not much new to say about Everest in 1924. The book pays special attention to the indigenous climbers, the porters who by 1924 had become the ‘Tiger’ team of high-altitude support climbers.

There’s an introductory chapter about the mapping of the mountain, with an impressive photo of Lambton’s Great Thodolite, the half-ton monster that helped to measure Everest from 100 miles away in India.

There’s some charming 1920s ephemera by way of invoices from Burberry and flyers for John Noel’s kinematographical presentation – the 35mm movie footage itself is sadly lost.

The RGS is an august corporate body, and any racy or controversial aspects of the expedition are given a very light touch. There’s nothing here about George Mallory’s love life within the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group, the ructions caused by John Noel’s highly commercial attitude to his photography, or the Himalayan Committee’s dislike of the brash Australian approach of the oxygen expert George Finch.

There’s nothing at all about the awkwardness of the 1921 expedition with its twin sponsors, the RGS itself and the Alpine Club, and their quite conflicting aims. And nothing at all on the question that interested us all: did Mallory and Irvine make it to the top?

Never mind. There will be many, many books and magazine articles in the coming year covering all that juicy stuff. But for now, clear the top of your coffee table for some seriously splendid images of what it was actually all about.

So – did George Mallory make it to the top? Ronald rounds up all the evidence (the sighting by Odell, the empty oxygen cylinders etc) and comes to his own conclusion in his Substack newsletter ‘About Mountains’.

Everest 24: New views on the 1924 Mount Everest Expedition is published by Royal Geographical Society (hardback, £25)

When contributors to The Great Outdoors aren’t out walking, some like to relax with a good book. Read their outdoor book reviews and discover your next adventurous bedtime story.