The expedition's leader, Noel Odell, and he discovered that they had met before in 1919 on Foel Grach, a 3000-foot-high Welsh mountain, when Irvine had ridden his motorcycle to the top and surprised Odell and his wife Mona, who had climbed it on foot. In 1923, Irvine took part in the Merton College Arctic Expedition to Spitsbergen, where he excelled on every front. Main article: 1924 British Mount Everest expedition While Irvine was on Everest, Harry began divorce proceedings against Marjory.
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Summers was one of the founders of John Summers & Sons, a steel company. He had a relationship with a former chorus girl named Marjory Agnes Standish Summers (née Thompson), who at the age of 19 had married Harry Summers, then aged 52, in 1917. At Oxford, he joined the Oxford University Mountaineering Club, and was also a member of the Oxford crew for the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race in 1922 and a member of the winning crew in 1923, the only time Oxford won between 19.
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His prodigious ability as a rower made him a star of the 1919 'Peace Regatta' at Henley with the Royal Shrewsbury School Boat Club, and propelled him to Merton College, Oxford, to study engineering. He was also a keen sportsman and particularly excelled at rowing. During the First World War, he created a small stir at the War Office by sending them a design for a synchronisation gear to allow a machine gun to fire from a propeller-driven aeroplane through the propeller without damaging its blades, and also a design for a gyroscopic stabiliser for aircraft. He was educated at Birkenhead School and Shrewsbury School, where he demonstrated a natural engineering acumen, able to improvise fixes or improvements to almost anything mechanical. He was a cousin of journalist and writer Lyn Irvine, and also of pioneering female surgeon Eleanor Davies Colley and of political activist Harriet Shaw Weaver. His father's family had Scottish and Welsh roots, while his mother was from an old Cheshire family. Irvine was born in Birkenhead, Cheshire, one of six children of historian William Fergusson Irvine (1869–1962) and Lilian Davies-Colley (1870–1950).