Who was the first to climb Everest? The mystery of George Mallory and who got to the summit first

Even though officially Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first men to summit Everest in May 1953, George Mallory is just as famous, and the mystery remains as to whether he beat them to the top. Like James Dean, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix or his own hero, the poet Percy Shelley, Mallory is one of the good who died young, like all those dead soldiers from WWI, destined to ‘never grow old’. 

I’ve been fascinated by his story for many years, and the mythology that grew up around him after his mysterious death a century ago in 1924. I’ve written several other climbing books and made mountaineering documentaries for the BBC but there’s no other character quite so compelling. 

Mallory had star quality in bucketloads. He was handsome and charismatic, a brilliant climber and skilled speaker. His name was his destiny: ‘George’, the dragon slayer, ‘Mallory’, echoing Thomas Malory, the first chronicler of the Arthurian legend. Mallory was the beating heart of three British expeditions, the climber who kept going when everyone else wanted to turn back. 

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But was he an obsessive egotist driven by ‘summit fever’, or as his team-mate Edward Norton wrote: ‘the most formidable opponent that Everest has or is ever likely to encounter’? 

In many ways, Mallory was a typical middle-class British mountaineer. A vicar’s son, he learned to climb at public school, and practised in the Alps and North Wales. But there was much more to him than that. His friends were artistic and unconventional: Duncan Grant the painter, Lytton Strachey the historian, John Maynard Keynes the economist, Rupert Brooke the poet. In his famous essay The Mountaineer as Artist, Mallory compared a climb in the Alps to a great symphony with all its highs and lows. For the 1922 official Everest account, he penned one of the most lyrical descriptions of Everest ever written, describing it as a “prodigious white fang excrescent from the jaw of the earth”. In 1923 he told a journalist that he was willing to risk his life for Everest, “because it is there”. 

But climbing wasn’t his only passion. Mallory was an idealist, a Fabian who dreamt of working for the League of Nations and creating a new type of school where children would thrive. In the Himalayas, however, he had one focus: to get to the top of Everest. Mallory wasn’t interested in Tibetan culture, he didn’t want to collect Himalayan flowers, all he wanted to do was climb.

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His impatience sometimes got the better of him. In 1922, Mallory agitated for a third attempt after the first two failed, but it ended in disaster with seven porters dying in an avalanche. He was wracked with guilt, but it didn’t stop him doing it again two years later with Andrew Irvine, the youngest member of the team. Mallory’s flaws were obvious to those around him.

In 1922 the expedition doctor, Tom Longstaff, called him a “great, stout-hearted baby”, while the expedition leader, Charles Bruce, wrote that Mallory was a “great dear but he forgets his boots on all occasions”. 

But for all his flaws and chaotic style, Mallory’s charisma and his obsessive pursuit of the summit won over his detractors and future admirers. When his body was found high on Everest in 1999, he was once again front-page news, the world willing his discoverers to find proof that he had gone all the way. In the end they didn’t and in the years since then, there have been repeated attempts to find the body of his partner, Andrew Irvine, and a Kodak camera that might contain evidence that he and Mallory had reached the top together. 

In the latest twist to the saga, it’s claimed that both bodies and the elusive camera were spirited off the mountain by the Chinese authorities. But if the possibility of finding photographic proof has gone, does no-one now believe Mallory and Irvine could have reached the summit? Absolutely not. 

On the 100th anniversary of his disappearance and death, Mallory is once again in the headlines. A Hollywood movie has been on and off the cards for the last 10 years and there’s even a musical doing the rounds, Mallory and the Mountain. Even if definitive proof may never be found that he reached the top of Everest, it’s equally impossible to prove that he didn’t get there. 

Like all great legends, Mallory is continually reinvented by new generations of mountaineers and acolytes: in the 1920s he was called the ‘Galahad of Everest’; today we can see him for what he was: a complex, fascinating, heroic but contradictory figure, the unresolved quality of his story forever drawing us back to him.

Mick Conefrey is an award-winning author and filmmaker. 

Fallen: George Mallory: The Man, The Myth and the 1924 Everest Tragedy by Mick Conefrey is out now (Atlantic Books, £22).You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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