It is almost 100 years since climbers, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, vanished into the clouds high on Mount Everest and were never seen alive again. Their disappearance sparked the greatest mystery in mountaineering. We will never know if they reached the summit and exactly what caused their fateful accident. Listen to Mick talking about his new book, Fallen, Mick Coneferey, as he tells his intriguing version of the story.
Mick Conefrey is an award-winning writer and documentary maker. He made the landmark BBC series Mountain Men, Icemen and The Race for Everest to mark the 60th anniversary of the first ascent. His previous books include Everest 1922, Everest 1953, the winner of a LeggiMontagna award, The Last Great Mountain, the winner of the Premio Itas in 2023, and The Ghosts of K2, which won a US National Outdoor Book award in 2017.
In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the ‘Galahad’ of Everest, he was lionised in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge. Handsome, charismatic, daring, he was a skilled public speaker, an athletic and technically gifted climber, a committed Socialist and a supremely attractive figure to both men and women. His friends ranged from the gay artists and writers of the Bloomsbury group to the best mountaineers of his era. But that was only one side to him. Mallory was also a risk taker who according to his friend and biographer David Pye, could never get behind the wheel of a car without overtaking the vehicle in front, a climber who pushed himself and those around him to the limits, a chaotic technophobe who was forever losing equipment or mishandling it, the man who led his porters to their deaths in 1922 and his young partner to his uncertain end in 1924.
George Mallory and Sandy Irvine
So who was the real Mallory and what were the forces that made him and ultimately destroyed him? Why did the man who denounced oxygen sets as ‘damnable heresy’ in 1922 perish on an oxygen-powered summit attempt two years later? And above all, what made him go back to Everest for the third time?
Based on diaries, letters, memoirs and thousands of contemporary documents, Fallen is both a forensic account of Mallory’s last expedition to Everest in 1924 and an attempt to get under his skin and separate the man from the myth.
