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On 8 June 1924 George Mallory and Andrew 'Sandy' Irvine left their high camp on Everest's North East Ridge with oxygen. Noel Odell last saw them through a break in the cloud near one of the ridge's rock steps, 'going strongly for the top', before they disappeared. Mallory's body was found in 1999 below the ridge, and whether either man reached the summit remains unknown.
Most of the men on the 1920s expeditions had fought on the Western Front, where death was constant, random and close. Having outlived friends who were no braver than themselves, they judged mountain risk against the trenches rather than against ordinary peacetime life. What looks like recklessness at altitude was a changed baseline: death had not become welcome, but it had lost its power to deter.
Britain had lost both poles, to Peary or Cook in the north and to Amundsen in the south, and had won a war that felt like mass bereavement rather than triumph. Read this way, Everest was a nationally staged project to recover prestige and meaning: a clean, heroic, measurable goal, planned from London through imperial diplomacy with Tibet. The symbolic need explains the expeditions' persistence as much as any mountaineering motive does.
George Finch, an Australian-born chemist and gifted climber, was dropped from the 1921 expedition on doubtful medical grounds, a decision widely read as prejudice against his background and manners. In 1922 he and Geoffrey Bruce used bottled oxygen to reach about 27,300 feet, higher than the climbers who went without it. The establishment still treated oxygen as unsporting, so a social code about how gentlemen should compete slowed adoption of the tool that worked.