Mountaineer Andrew Irvine, who, with George Mallory may have reached the summit of Mount Everest in the 1924 British Everest Expedition attended Shrewsbury during the First World War. During the 1920s the Georgian villa houses at Severn Hill and Ridgemount were acquired by the school and adapted into boarding houses. Severn Hill, the linear decedent of the house of which Irvine was captain, holds his ice axe from the expedition, discovered in 1933 by Wyn Harris.