Sir Edmund Hillary 1919-2008

[SO19]

Sir Edmund Hillary

11/01/2008

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.

Edmund Percival Hillary was born in Auckland on July 20 1919. His sister June had arrived two years before; his brother Rex followed in 1920.

Hillary's parents lived in the small town of Tuakau, 40 miles south of Auckland. Edmund's paternal grandmother had been an Irishwoman who (he recalled) "had the misfortune to meet my grandfather", a man who made friends, and money, with a well-heeled maharajah in India, then travelled on to New Zealand, and lost it all on the horses.

Edmund's father reacted by adopting harsh and austere moral views. He believed, for instance, that the only cure for ill-health was having no food, which meant that his children learnt never to declare themselves ill. His wife, however, was concerned to mingle with the right people.

As a boy Edmund dreamed of exciting adventures, devouring a book a day, with especial concentration on the works of Rider Haggard, John Buchan and Rice Burroughs. His independent spirit led to frequent rows with this father; though frequently beaten, he never admitted he was wrong.

At Auckland Grammar School, he was at first a shy and scrawny figure who made few friends and provoked the despair of the gym instructor: "What will they send me next?" But he soon began to grow and showed himself more than capable of looking after himself in fights.

His enthusiasm for snow and mountains began in 1935 on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu in the middle of the North Island. At home his father gave up his job as a journalist to concentrate on bee-keeping; and the boys were expected to help shifting the 120lb crates of honey.

During two years at Auckland University, where he was supposed to be reading Mathematics and Science, Hillary failed to pass a single exam or make a single friend. So he returned to bee-keeping - though his father never thought of giving anything more than food and lodging for his back-breaking daily labour.

On the outbreak of the Second World War Hillary applied to join the Air Force, and was told he would have to wait a year to be called up for training. On a short trip to the South Island, he scaled Mount Oliver, a modest peak but sufficient to spark an enthusiasm for climbing. Unknown to Hillary, his father had applied to keep him at home for bee-keeping, which was deemed essential work. It was not until the beginning of 1944 that he joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force.

Training in the Wairu Valley in the South Island, he began to spend all his money and every spare moment on climbing. He set a tough pace. "It was great fun, Ed," said an exhausted companion after one ascent, "but I'm not going to do it again." Soon afterwards Hillary used a spare weekend to make a solo climb of the 9,465 foot Mount Tapuaenuku.

His confidence was growing, and having come 14th out 260 in his Air Force exams, he was sent to Navigation School at New Plymouth, and then posted to the Solomon Islands as a navigator of Catalina flying-boats.

After the end of the war against Japan he had a lucky escape when a petrol tank on the speedboat he was piloting fell off its mounting and set the craft on fire. Hillary suffered 40 per cent burns and much pain, but was lucky to have an excellent surgeon.

Back in New Zealand, he went back to his father's bee-keeping business (he was now paid a modest salary) and devoted his holidays to climbing.

His technique was much improved by climbing with New Zealand's leading mountain guide, Harry Ayres; in 1946 they scaled Mount Cook, at 12,349 feet New Zealand's highest peak; and two years later became the first men to conquer the difficult south range of the same mountain.

It was George Lowe who first interested Hillary in the possibility of climbing in the Himalayas. The team of four New Zealanders which went to Nepal in 1954 was advised by Noel Odell, who had been on the Everest expedition of 1924, and caught a last glimpse of Mallory and Irvine "going hard for the summit".

Odell's counsel, that it was not necessary to take expensive equipment, proved over-sanguine, particularly in the matter of boots. When in the Himalayas Hillary heard about Eric Shipton's expedition to the south side of Everest, and showed a ruthless determination to join him. The two men hit it off straight away, and Hillary was set on the path which led him to the peak of Everest.

The news of the mountain's conquest in 1953 appeared in the English papers on June 2, the morning of the Coronation, and unleashed a torrent of patriotic sentiment. Hillary was halfway back to Kathmandu when he received a letter addressed to "Sir Edmund Hillary KBE".

"With sinking heart," as he wrote in his autobiography, he discovered that this was no joke. "I did not consider myself knightly material. For one thing I was far too impoverished to play the role." He was also uneasy that Tenzing (who was awarded the George Medal) had not received a knighthood.

Yet for all his diffidence, his name had overnight become one of the best known in the world -- even if he himself was not always recognised.

Later that year he was climbing on Snowdon when he received a dressing down from a member of the Alpine Club for being improperly accoutred for mountaineering. Afterwards, when introduced to Hillary, this gentleman was appropriately covered in confusion.

Not that there was ever any side to Hillary. "I did a good job on Everest," he considered, "but have always known my limitations and I found being classified as a hero slightly embarrassing." This attitude, of course, only added to his stature.

Back in New Zealand, in September 1953 Hillary married Louise Rose, daughter of the President of the New Zealand Alpine Club. But there was no question of a quiet domestic life.

In 1954 he returned to the Himalayas as leader of the New Zealand Alpine Club expedition. In helping to extricate a colleague from a glacier, he broke three ribs. Typically, he tried to carry on as though nothing had happened, only to collapse completely high up on Makalu (27,790 feet).

It took three days to carry him down to Camp I, and without the skill of Dr Charles Evans (another veteran of Everest) he might not have survived.

On Everest Hillary had been particularly remarkable for his ability to acclimatise quickly to high altitude, but after his near-escape on Makalu he found himself increasingly vulnerable as the air thinned.

His spirit, however, was undimmed. In 1955 he was appointed leader of the New Zealand Antarctic team, in support of Sir Vivian Fuch's Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition. His first task was to establish Scott base in McMurdo Sound, but by the time this was achieved in 1957 it was clear that there was scant sympathy between Hillary and Fuchs.

At Cape Crozier Hillary discovered the stone shelter where members of Scott's expedition had spent the winter in 1911 - as described by Apsley Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World. Under the snow the New Zealanders found a film labelled "To be developed before May 1 1911."

Hillary's next task was to reconnoitre crevassed areas, and lay out depots for Fuch's trans-Antarctic journey from Shackleton Base on the other side of Antarctica. Hillary, though, was also determined to reach the South Pole, and saw no hindrance in the lack of instructions to that end. On January 4 1958, after some hair-raising adventures driving tractors over crevasses, his team became the first to arrive at the South Pole by vehicle.

In his book No Latitude for Error (1961), Hillary was unsparing in his criticism of Fuchs, and, some felt, less than generous in his failure to appreciate the difficulties which the Englishman had faced.

In 1960 Hillary's search for the Abominable Snowman, financed by an American publisher, reached the conclusion that the animal was a myth derived from rare sightings of the Tibetan blue bear. Strange footprints were attributed to deformed Sherpa feet.

In 1961 Hillary returned to Makalu again, without oxygen equipment. At 19,000 feet he suffered a minor stroke which for two days partially paralysed his facial muscles and affected his speech. His friend Peter Mulgrew suffered a pulmonary oedema in his lung at 27,000 feet, and as a result of the resulting frostbite had to have both legs amputated.

"Now I realise," Hillary wrote in High in the Thin Cold Air (1963), "that my theories were a little too optimistic, and these long periods at high altitude without oxygen were possibly our undoing."

But caution was never in his nature. In 1967 he led a team that climbed Mount Herschel, "the Matterhorn of the Antarctic". In 1969 he celebrated his 50th birthday by doing a Grand Traverse of Mount Cook, though one of the young men accompanying him fell 1,000 feet to his death.

In 1977, aged 58, he suffered a cerebral oedema at 18,000 feet when he attempted Akash Parbat, on the upper Ganges. And in 1981 as chairman emeritus of an American attempt on the east face of Everest, he had to be escorted down after suffering hallucinations at 17,000 feet.

All this time Hillary had been deeply involved with his work for Sherpas. In this he enjoyed the full-hearted support of his first wife Louise, who wrote two books about the family's adventures in the Himalayas, conveying the life-enhancing impact Hillary had on all who met him.

But in 1975 Louise Hillary and their daughter Belinda were killed when their aircraft crashed on takeoff at Kathmandu. For months thereafter Hillary was in a bad state, depending heavily on drink and sleeping pills - though he denied ever being an alcoholic. He buried himself in his work for the Himalayan Trust; all the same, he observed in 1977, "I am now operating more from a sense of duty, whereas before it was just all jolly good fun."

In the 1980s, however, Hillary was supported by his friendship with the widow of Peter Mulgrew (who had been killed in an air crash in 1979).

She went with him to New Delhi as official companion when he became New Zealand's High Commissioner there in 1985; and they married in 1989.

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".

He felt slightly guilty that his work - and especially the airstrip at Lukla - had opened up Everest to the tourists, and was appalled when, in 1992, 32 people reached the summit of Everest in a single day. "Visiting Everest now is like taking a bus tour of South Wales," he complained.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... db1104.xml

[harry hackedoff]

He had a great life. One of the old school.
Rest in peace, Sir Edmund.

[Holger Danske]

Rest in peace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Edmund_Hillary

[tom163]

Wow this was a bit of a shock, I followed his life alot over the last few years of what he had done and having gone to a school named after him ive done alot of research on him and what a bloke. RIP Sir.