Evidence on Everest

As someone who has himself been on eight Everest expeditions himself, Mr Hoyland would surely have had plenty to discuss with the great New Zealander, whose courage and spirit he has so long admired.

But what is really remarkable about Mr Hoyland's assaults on the world's highest mountain, is that they have been undertaken to bring about a total reassessment of Hillary's place in history.

For he has spent more than 20 years trying to prove that Hillary was not the first man to reach the summit of Everest - a feat that has always been viewed as one of the last century's defining moments.

Mr Hoyland, a television producer, has always maintained that it was reached almost 30 years before Hillary and Tenzing, by the mountaineering pioneer George Mallory and a 22-year-old Oxford student called Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine.

While he has risen within the BBC ranks to make programmes such as Dragons' Den, Mr Hoyland's quest to prove that Mallory and Irvine died only after reaching the summit has dominated his life.

It has led him to return again and again to the Himalayas.

He has climbed Everest wearing replica gear to that worn on the fateful 1924 expedition simply to discount the myth that 1920s climbers were ill-equipped to reach the summit.

His search for the bodies was crowned with the discovery of Mallory's body on the north face of Everest in 1999.

The death of Hillary last month, aged 88, has done nothing to deter him from a path that he hopes will end with the eventual discovery of the the body of the Oxford undergraduate, who long ago upset dons by climbing the walls of Merton College chapel.

Irvine's body, he believes should present the irrefutable evidence that has proved so maddeningly illusive.

For he believes the chemistry student was carrying the camera that the pair took with them to record their historic moment on the roof of the world.

This Kodak Vestpocket camera has come to obsess him since he learnt of it from his relative, Howard Somervell, who had been on the 1924 expedition and was one of the last to see the pair heading for the summit.

"I was first told about the camera at the age of 12. Somervell told me that he had lent his camera to Mallory for the final assault," said Mr Hoyland. Apparently, Mallory had lost his own at some stage earlier in the expedition.

Experts at Kodak have indicated that if the film had been exposed and then kept at sub zero temperatures, there was an excellent chance that, with careful handling, any photographs taken could be developed.

Little wonder, then, that it has become the holy grail of mountaineering.

When we spoke, Mr Hoyland was attending a BBC 'hostile environment' course being held near Reading.

But it turned out to be nothing to do with surviving Himalayan blizzards.

He is shortly flying out to make a documentary series about world religions and would be filming across the Middle East.

"They are teaching us how to avoid getting into trouble and getting ourselves kidnapped," he said matter of factly.

But his mind is seldom far away from Everest and the death of Hillary has stirred him to contemplate one final search for Irvine's body in three or four years' time, perhaps to bring his career with the BBC to a spectacular end.

He has also been greatly encouraged to go up Everest for what would be the ninth time after finally meeting a Chinese climber who maintains he saw Irvine's body.

This expedition is said to have followed the 1924 route along the upper north-east ridge.

"He was one of the climbers on a 1975 expedition. They went up a different way than climbers do now. He saw something flapping and it was a body with clothes. It was hidden in a crack in the rocks. Irvine's body was the only one it could have been where they were.

"I believe that if I can find Irvine's body, I will find the camera," said Mr Hoyland.

Based on the information he was given, he puts his chances of finding the body at 50-50.

The position given to him - which he declines to discuss in detail - fits in with his own theory about how Mallory and Irvine met their deaths.

The pair had been spotted just 800ft from the summit by Noel Odell on June 8, 1924, who reported that they were "going strong for the top".

The expedition which Mr Hoyland joined in 1999 found Mallory's body, lying face down, covered in loose rocks and slate, the skin like alabaster, the bare hands brown and burnt by the sun at 27,000 ft. It was about 400 yards off their route.

Mr Hoyland believes that having reached the summit, the two men began their descent with darkness closing in.

But Mallory slipped, the rope snapped and he dropped to his death.

The theory is supported by the fact that Mallory's goggles were in his pocket, for at night there would be no risk of snow blindness.

The boot-top fracture of Mallory's left tibia and fibula offers the clearest evidence that he had fallen and then slid some distance down the snow slopes.

Alone, the far less experienced Irvine battled on high above in the blackness until he was unable to continue.

The discovery of his corpse would surely give this remarkable young Englishman the kind of heroic status his courage deserves.

The son of a Birkenhead man, Irvine arrived in Oxford in 1922 to read chemistry. He was said to be shy and unassuming but his noted strength saw him win a place in the Oxford Boat Race crew.

It was a chance meeting by the Thames at Putney with a member of the expedition that was to lead to his eventual selection on what promised to be the greatest climb in history.

At 21, he was chosen not so much for his mountaineering but his genius as a mechanic.

His work on oxygen apparatus was particularly invaluable and his last term at Oxford was spent working on oxygen apparatus.

At 38, Mallory was the undisputed star of British mountaineering.

Irvine's selection for the final assault, however, must have come as a shock.

But as he waited for his date with destiny on Everest, one of his surviving letters shows that something else preoccupied him - finding digs in Oxford on his return.

He wrote to the master of Merton: "I was unsuccessful getting rooms out for next October as none of the landlords would promise me a room without signing a contract, which I was not certain enough of being back in October to sign. If there did chance to be a spare room anywhere in college it would save an awful lot of worry."

Many of his letters were discovered thanks to Irvine's great niece Julie Summers, an author and historian, who lives in Iffley.

She had badgered her cousins to search an attic at the family home in north Wales A new and updated edition of her book Fearless on Everest: The Quest For Sandy Irvine is published this week.

She said: "I think people will go on searching for Sandy's body. It is the greatest mountaineering mystery and as long as people are interested, groups will keep going back."

Ms Summers is frequently asked if she wants Sandy's body to be found.

"It is not a question I find easy to respond to," she writes at the end of her book. "Frankly the memory of his life is of far more significance and interest to me than how he died, although my interest does extend as far as the camera or other concrete evidence that might be found on the body.

"Only by confirmation of the details of their final climb via photographic or written evidence would I be prepared to believe that they had reached the summit.

"The one piece of consolation I have, as Graham Hoyland pointed out, is that we might one day know whether Sandy and Mallory stood on top of the world, but no one will ever be able to prove conclusively that they did not."

Ms Summers well recalls Mr Hoyland telling her that trying to find Irvine's body was like trying to find a needle in not one, but a hundred haystacks.

"If anyone finds it, I hope that it is him," she told me. "The Irvine family have a great deal of respect for him. He is an amazing man."

But how could they fail to be impressed by a man prepared to climb Everest dressed in 1920s clothing simply to prove it could be done.

Hillary himself would doubtless have approved of Mr Hoyland's efforts. The New Zealander always observed that Everest had already brought him enough fame.

And whether or not Sandy Irvine and the camera are found, he will forever be the first man to have conquered Everest and returned alive.