George Mallory: Man who died climbing Everest sent secret love letters to woman he never met

Mallory began writing to Eleanor Holmes in 1923 after she sent a fan letter to him

Mallory disappeared while close to the summit of Mount Everest in 1924 (Getty Images)

George Mallory, the British mountaineer who disappeared while close to the summit of Mount Everest in 1924, exchanged love letters with a 19-year-old woman he had never met in the months before his death.

Mallory, who had married his wife Ruth Turner in 1914, began writing to Eleanor Holmes in 1923 after she sent a fan letter to him, The Daily Telegraph reported.

Their correspondence, which is being put up for sale by Ms Holmes’ son, gradually became more and more affectionate.

In one letter, the climber asked her: “Can you love a shadow – a mere hand that spins lame halting words & belongs in some way to a mere name in the newspapers?

“But words are thoughts, and thoughts are men and women. Can thoughts love each other? Clearly they must.”

In another message, Mallory told Ms Holmes that it was lucky they had started getting to know one another without actually meeting.

He then wrote: “By the way, are you beautiful? I hope not. If you are quite ugly I will guarantee that when we meet we have the time of our lives; if you are plain, of a moderate plainness, I will promise you not to be too damnably polite or stiff; but if you are beautiful Heaven help me; I shall shut up like a sea anemone.”

A letter from Ms Holmes, he told her, had had a “strange effect” on him.

“Strange effect? Well, only this, that after reading it I wanted to kiss you. He wanted to kiss a girl he’d never seen – curiouser & curiouser,” Mallory wrote.

Another letter, which he wrote by a fire in a Cambridge pub, said: “Guess what might happen if another spark glowed there in the chair opposite. Would two sparks make a fire? Suppose the other spark were you Marjorie?

“What is it all about this fire always waiting to blaze up? Shall we see it blaze or shall we hold the snuffer on it?”

Ms Holmes, who married a doctor, Maurice Newfield, five years after Mallory’s death, kept the letters but only told her son Gabriel about them towards the end of her life. He did not actually read them until after her death in 1978.

Mallory was last seen alive just 245m from the summit of Everest. His body was not discovered until May 1999.

It is not known for certain whether he and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine managed to reach the summit of the world’s highest mountain 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top.

He was known to be carrying a photograph of his wife with the intention of leaving it at the summit. But despite his body, clothes and equipment being preserved by the freezing conditions at that altitude, the photograph was not found.

Some have speculated this meant he had reached the top, but others have suggested that as he lay injured and dying after a fall, he may have taken out the picture to look at his wife and it had blown away after he died.

The letters will be sold by auctioneers Bonhams in London in November.