Sir Edmund Hillary

FROM THE NEWS:
Sir Edmund Hillary, who died late yesterday aged 88, made his name as the first conqueror (with Norgay Tenzing) of Everest; just as impressive, though, was the use he made of his renown over the remainder of his life.

On the one hand there were feats of exploration - to the Antarctic and South Pole from 1956 to 1958; in other parts of the Everest region in the early 1960s (including a search for the Abominable Snowman, or yeti). In 1968 he drove jetboats up the violent rapids of Nepalese rivers; in 1977 he took them up the Ganges.

Hillary developed a deep admiration for the Sherpa people, and through the Himalayan Trust which he established in the 1960s oversaw the building of 25 schools, two hospitals and a dozen medical clinics, as well as bridges and airfields. This work led to his appointment as New Zealand's High Commissioner in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, a position he held from 1985 to 1988.

The Himalayas were very much more remote than they now are when Hillary first visited them in 1951. Two years before the Chinese had closed the traditional approach to Everest through Tibet to the northern face. The expedition of 1951 which Hillary joined, led by Eric Shipton, was trying to discover a route from the southwest. By forcing their way up the difficult Khumbu icefall and into the Western Cwm, which runs up to the South Col, Shipton and Hillary showed that it would be possible to climb Everest by this route.

Hillary was bitterly disappointed the following year when the British Himalayan Committee decided that Shipton, whom he greatly admired, should be replaced as leader of the forthcoming British Everest expedition by John Hunt - "someone unknown to me personally, and a senior Army officer to boot". Rumours circulated that Hunt wanted to drop Hillary and George Lowe, another New Zealander, in favour of climbers known to him personally. But Hillary's and Lowe's reputations were already such that they could not easily be discarded.

In the event Hunt handled Hillary with great tact, and was amply rewarded. Hillary led George Lowe and George Band up the Khumbu icefall - perhaps the most dangerous part of the entire climb - and established Camp III, the advanced base camp, in the West Cwm.

But he had a narrow escape when the ice gave way as he was moving loads up to this camp, plunging him into a crevasse. Fortunately Tenzing, who was following, thrust his ice-axe in the snow, and whipped the rope round it in good belay. It tightened just in time to prevent Hillary being smashed to pieces at the bottom of the crevasse. Thereafter Hillary began to think of Tenzing as the ideal partner in a bid for the summit.

By his own admission, Hillary had been quite determined that he himself would be chosen for this honour. Together he and Tenzing climbed from Base Camp to Camp III and back again in a day - a pointless effort, as Hillary himself admitted, save that it showed that he and Tenzing were ultra-fit. "I was sufficiently calculating," he later confessed, "to regard it as important for Hunt to keep us in the front of his mind."

Hillary followed up by putting in mighty efforts as a load-carrier, first from Camp VII to the South Col, and then up to Camp IX at 27,900 feet. James (now Jan) Morris, who covered the expedition for The Times, wrote of Hillary working in the half-light, "huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous, bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America."

As the world knows, Hunt did select Hillary and Tenzing for the main attempt on the summit. They spent the night of May 28/29 at Camp IX; rose at four o'clock in the morning, with the temperature at -27 centigrade; proceeded to the South summit; and cut steps cautiously along the left-hand side of the summit ridge until they reached the 40-foot rock face now called the Hillary Step.

Hillary managed to wriggle his way up a narrow crack. Thirty-seven years later his son Peter would ring him from the summit of Everest to express his admiration: "People have talked about the south-east ridge and the Hillary Step as though it were relatively easy, and it certainly is not easy."

Hillary reached the summit first, as Tenzing admitted in an autobiography as early as 1955. But since Hillary insisted that the matter was of no importance, and that the achievement belonged equally to them both, he refused for years to claim any primacy - even when the King of Nepal announced that Tenzing had been on the summit before him.
They spent a quarter of an hour at the peak. Turning in typical Anglo-Saxon manner to shake Tenzing's hand, Hillary was enveloped in a bearhug: "with a feeling of mild surprise I realised that Tenzing was perhaps more excited at our success than I was".

Hillary remained determinedly low-key. "Having paid my respects to the highest mountain in the world," he recalled 46 years later in his autobiography View from the Summit (1999), "I had no choice but to urinate on it." Though he took Tenzing's photograph he did not bother to organise one of himself. And when he met Lowe at Camp VIII on the way down, he delivered the great news in a laconic fashion deemed too shocking for publication at that epoch: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."

Though Hillary claimed to feel British first and a New Zealander second, the Kiwi strain was always strong in him.

Hillary was much loved in India and Nepal, and he and June Mulgrew often found themselves the only foreigners at official functions. In 1986 he had the melancholy experience of attending Tenzing's funeral.

His own energy seemed inexhaustible, even if he confessed to finding the hills he ascended increasingly steep. This did not prevent him from celebrating the 40th anniversary of the conquest of Everest with a trek in the Himalayas.

In 1987 Hillary was appointed to the Order of New Zealand, and in 1995 invested as a Knight of the Garter - on the same day as Lady Thatcher.

Yet his style remained downbeat. He drew satisfaction from his work in Nepal - "not, I hope, of the do-gooder sort, which I rather deplore, but the satisfaction of working with people I like and admire, and being able to give them a bit of a hand, and also getting quite a lot back from them".

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I remember as a boy, the excitement of hearing about the conquest of Mount Everest. Sir Edmund Hillary was a tremendous role model, and truly deserves the title "hero"

Excellent obituary. I had no idea he was so active in the Nepalese community.

Anyone interested in reading about just how difficult it is to survive at that sort of altitude should check out Into Thin Air, a fascinating feature originally published in Outside Magazine in 1996, and later expanded into a book of the same title. It's a brilliantly-written account of an Everest climb which ended in tragedy.

I've read the book too, and highly recommend it.