He and his climbing partner George Mallory disappeared somewhere high on the mountain's northeast ridge, last seen alive at an indeterminate distance from the summit.

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 prodigious ability as a rower made him a star of the 1919 'Peace Regatta' at Henley with the Royal Shrewsbury School Boat Club,[5] and propelled him to Merton College, Oxford, to study engineering.

Irvine set sail for the Himalaya from Liverpool on board SS California on 29 February 1924,[10] along with three other members of the expedition, including George Mallory.

The expedition made two unsuccessful attempts on the summit in early June, and time remained for one more before the heavy snowfall that came with the summer monsoon would make climbing too dangerous.

Irvine's proficiency with the oxygen equipment was obviously a major factor in Mallory's decision, but some debate has occurred ever since about the precise reasons for his choice.

[13] The Swiss manufacturer's name matched those of a number supplied to the 1924 expedition, and since only Mallory and Irvine had climbed that high along the ridge route, it must have belonged to one of them.

Hugh Ruttledge, leader of the 1933 expedition, speculated that the ice axe marked the scene of a fall, during which it was either accidentally dropped or that its owner put it down, possibly to have both hands free to hold the rope.

Experts from Kodak have said that there is a good chance that the cameras' black-and-white film could be developed to produce "printable images", due to its chemical nature and its likely preservation in subzero temperatures.

In 1979, Ryoten Hasegawa, the leader of the Japanese contingent of a Sino-Japanese reconnaissance expedition to the north side of Everest, had a brief conversation with a Chinese climber named Wang Hong-bao, in which Wang recounted that while on the 1975 Chinese Everest Expedition, he had seen the body of an "English dead" at 8,100 metres (26,600 ft), lying on his side as if asleep at the foot of a rock.

Wang knew the man was British, he said, by the old-fashioned clothing, rotted and disintegrating at the touch, and poked his finger into his cheek to indicate an injury.

Further confirmation of this sighting was provided by a 1986 conversation that American Everest historian Tom Holzel had with Zhang Junyan, Wang's tent-mate from the 1975 expedition.

During their meeting, the deputy leader of the expedition, Xu Jing, said that on his descent from the First Step, he spotted a dead climber lying on his back, feet facing uphill, in a hollow or slot in the rock.

[32] A new expedition organised by Holzel was due to explore the upper slopes of Everest in December 2011, presumably with a view to determining the nature of this possible object.

[33] In 2019, Mark Synnott led a party that investigated the 'crevice' identified by Holzel as the potential resting place of Irvine, but discovered that it was merely an optical illusion.

The remains were found at an undisclosed location on the Central Rongbuk Glacier at an altitude at least 7,000 feet lower than where Mallory’s body was discovered.