Sir Edmund Hillary [1919-2008] -- Real New Zealander & Stalw

[D. Spencer Hines]

The Times does an excellent job on Sir Edmund's obituary.

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas
----------------------------------------------

From The Times
January 11, 2008

Sir Edmund Hillary: The Times obituary

Resolute climber who made mountaineering history with Sherpa Tenzing in
ascending the world’s highest peak in 1953.

Good Lead. -- DSH

Of all the achievements that seemed to make the year 1953 such an annus
mirabilis for the United Kingdom — the Coronation of a young Queen Elizabeth
II, the regaining of the Ashes after 20 years and the wresting of the world
airspeed record from the Americans — none, perhaps seized the imagination of
the public so vividly as the ascent of Mount Everest on May 29 of that year
by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

Bingo! Yet many folks have continued to think Edmund Hillary was a Brit,
rather than a New Zealander and The Times does not make that clear in the
paragraph above. -- DSH

In an era in which exploration, travel, tourism and the internet have so
thoroughly shrunk the world, making Everest, too, comparatively familiar
terrain, it is difficult to re-create the sense of unassailable mystery and
menace represented in those days by the world’s highest peak.

Even Surreyman Felt It. -- DSH

From the moment in 1892 that the mountaineer and surgeon Clinton Dent had
declared: “I do not suggest that it would be wise to ascend Mount Everest,
but I believe most firmly that it is humanly possible to do so,” the
challenge to human endeavour was inescapable, whatever the cost in life and
health might be. The first British expedition, in 1921, had also witnessed
the first British fatality, when Alexander Kellas died from heart failure
exacerbated by dysentery before even making it to the mountain.

The disappearance of Irvine and Mallory in 1934, last seen by their
colleagues, still striding bravely upwards on the mountain’s skyline before
cloud blotted them from view, was just one more poignant tale from the
catalogue of valiant failed attempts which added to the mythology of
attempted ascents as the years went by. Eric Shipton, later to be replaced
at the head of the 1953 expedition, had made several attempts on the
mountain, the first (and the fifth British expedition) as early as 1935.

The volatile politics of the Himalayan region only added to the
difficulties. In 1947 the Nepalese Government had finally relaxed its ban on
foreigners entering the country, thus allowing ascents from that country,
while in 1950 the Chinese had seized Tibet, interdicting any attempts on the
peak from there.

In the end, after one of the best prepared and, under John Hunt, most
resolutely led, expeditions to that date, it was for Hillary and Tenzing to
achieve the fame of being the first men in the world to stand on Everest’s
summit on May 29, 1953. From that moment of glory, Hillary’s career opened
out into a lifetime of adventure and of widening interest.

He remained seemingly untouched by any of the fame that accrued to him. His
own laconic summary of his active life as merely a “constant battle against
boredom” only gave part of the picture and was typical of his innate modesty
and of his dislike of cant.

Edmund Percival Hillary was born at Auckland, New Zealand, in 1919 into an
old-established farming family. His mother, who had been a teacher, insisted
on him remaining at Auckland Grammar School until he was 18, but after an
unproductive two years at university he was allowed to come home to the open
air life he loved, to work on the family bee farm. All his life Hillary
described himself as an “apiarist” and remained in partnership with his
brother in the business.

Physically he developed his great strength after a slow start as a small and
shy child, but by the time he was called up for war service, in 1943, he was
strong enough to upset the day’s work programme by moving a dump of
artillery shells in half the time allotted for the task. In the Second World
War he served with the Royal New Zealand Air Force from 1944 to the end of
hostilities, as a navigator of Catalina flying boats on reconnaissance
patrols over the Pacific.

Hillary was an experienced climber in both the New Zealand and European Alps
when, in 1951, he and his friend, George Lowe, with two others. embarked on
an expedition to the Garwhal Himalaya. The party returned to base to receive
an invitation for two of them to join Eric Shipton’s Everest reconnaissance,
then on its way out to the Himalayas from England. Hillary and Earle
Riddiford were the lucky ones, and from a point on Pumori, Shipton and
Hillary had a view of Everest rising out of the Western Cwm, from which they
were able to envisage a route up the mountain from Nepal. In the following
year Hillary and Lowe accompanied Shipton’s Cho Oyu expedition and were
picked as members of his team for the 1953 assault on Everest.

The substitution of Colonel John Hunt (later Lord Hunt, obituary November 9,
1998), who was then unknown, for Shipton as leader of the expedition caused
hard feelings which might have come more into the open had it not been for
Shipton’s dignified withdrawal and his continued friendship with Hillary and
other team members. In the event the decision to appoint Hunt instead of
Shipton was justified by the skill with which the former handled his large
team of the world’s most expert climbers, each with his own strong and
disparate individuality. Hunt from the first regarded Hillary as a “very
strong contender” for the summit.

He was, Hunt recorded, “quite exceptionally strong and abounding in a
restless energy, possessed of a thrusting mind which swept aside all
unproved obstacles”. After the return, only 500ft short of the summit, of
Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing went into
action and reached the summit at 11.30am on May 29, 1953. They spent just 15
minutes there, during which Hillary took Tenzing’s photograph, before
descending.

The news broke in England on the morning of the Queen’s Coronation, June 2,
broken by The Times, which had secured the copyright of Hunt’s dispatches.
It had broken earlier on the South Col of Everest, where George Lowe,
waiting to meet them with hot soup, was greeted with Hillary’s typically
irreverent and cheerful shout of “Well, George, we finally knocked the
bastard off.”

<G> A Useful Detail. -- DSH

The rejoicing of British and Nepalese alike was only temporarily marred by
the ill-natured and ill-informed clamour as to who had got to the top first.
It was a question still being asked long after Hillary and Tenzing, who
remained firm friends, had given their answer that “We got there together”.

Hillary’s achievement was crowned not only by appointment as a Knight
Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and by much public acclaim,
but also by an exceptionally happy marriage that year to Louise Mary Rose of
Auckland. They had a son and two daughters. Lady Hillary was an accomplished
violinist and a woman of great vitality and goodness. Her death in 1975 in
an aeroplane accident with their younger daughter, Belinda, hit her husband
very hard.

Sherpa Tenzing was awarded the George Medal for his contribution to the
expedition’s success. He died in 1986 (obituary May 10, 1986).

Hillary’s success on Everest established him overnight as an acknowledged
leader in the competitive field of high-altitude mountaineering. In 1954 he
led a New Zealand Alpine Club expedition to the Barun Valley east of
Everest. His gallant rescue of a comrade left him with broken ribs and an
acute attack of pneumonia, but he was soon fit enough again to take part in
the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1955-58) led by Dr (later Sir)
Vivian Fuchs.

This first overland traverse of Antarctica was combined with a strenuous
scientific programme. Starting from Shackleton Base on the Weddell Sea, the
main party under Fuchs was to cross the continent (about 2,500 miles) by way
of the American station at the South Pole, to Scott Base on the Ross Sea in
the New Zealand sector of the Antarctic. Hillary’s task was to enlist New
Zealand support for the project, to establish Scott Base, and to organise
supply depots inland for the use of the crossing party on the second, longer
lap of their journey. The entire success of the venture is part of polar
history but it was not achieved quite as planned.

Instead of the main party’s punctual arrival at the South Pole, while
Hillary waited at the first depot on the home run, the New Zealanders, the
first overlanders since Amundsen, drove their ramshackle Ferguson farm
tractors into the American base two weeks before Fuchs rolled up in his
stately purpose-built Sno-cats.

Hillary’s dash to the pole, driving the last 70 miles non-stop and with only
12 miles of petrol in hand, is one of the classics of polar adventure. But
the charge that he risked the success of the whole project by going ahead
with so little safety margin has never been entirely refuted.

Hillary received the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Gold Medal for
1958, and in 1960 was back in the Everest region with an ambitious programme
largely financed by the American publishers of encyclopedias, Field
Enterprises Educational, of which he was to become a director.

He was to search for the yeti or abominable snowman, carry out physiological
research and climb some mountains. The Himalayan Scientific and
Mountaineering Expedition of 1960-61 was perhaps too unwieldy to be a
thorough success, and Hillary suffered a stroke and had to return
temporarily to base. Out of it, however, developed the projects which were
to become the abiding interest of his later years.

Everest lies in the homeland of the Sherpas, the hardy mountain people of
the Sola Khumbu who had been porters, guides, hosts and friends to
generations of British climbers. It seemed they wanted a school, and it
instantly struck Hillary that “here was an ideal way to repay the Sherpas
for the help and pleasure they had given me”.

The first school was built forthwith, and afterwards Hillary came back to
the Sola Khumbu in 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1966, bringing his family and
friends to help, taking part not only in fund-raising but also in the actual
physical labour, aided by singing Sherpas, of constructing schools,
hospitals, an airfield and a bridge. It was a tragedy indeed that Louise and
Belinda Hillary were subsequently killed on one of their visits to the Sola
Khumba.

In 1967 Hillary was back in the Antarctic, scaling Mount Herschel on the
western shore of the Ross Sea. In 1968 he explored in jet boats the rivers
of eastern Nepal, making the first ascent of 180 miles of the Sun Kosi from
the Indian border to Kathmandu.

Although one of New Zealand’s most famous sons, Hillary took little part in
public life. He was bored by the formality of government circles, and
critical of politicians who seemed to him to care too little for the needs
of the world outside their boundaries. Instead he worked effectively over
the years as director of Field Educational Enterprises of Australasia and as
consultant of sports equipment to the American firm Sears Roebuck.

He was president of the New Zealand Volunteer Service Abroad and interested
himself in such diverse causes as family planning and race relations.

Hillary had little grace of manner, being gruff and casual with strangers,
but he came into his own in the field. Here the “ebullient, restless
Hillary”, as George Lowe described him, retained basically the same spirit
of adventure and (there is no other word for it) fun, long after he became
famous.

<G> STALWART. -- DSH

Hillary was the obvious choice to light the New Zealand bonfire in honour of
the Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee 25 years after he had stood on the roof
of the world. He was appointed to the Order of New Zealand (ONZ), the summit
of New Zealand’s honours system, in 1987, the year in which the order was
instituted by the Queen. He was appointed a Knight of the Garter (KG) in
1995.

Hmmmmmmmm... KG -- Good show. -- DSH

A prolific author, Hillary published many books about his adventures. They
included High Adventure (1955), his account of the assault on Everest, and
its precursors; (with George Lowe); East of Everest (1956), which described
the 1954 New Zealand Alpine Club Himalayan Expedition to the Barun Valley;
(with Sir Vivian Fuchs) The Crossing of Antarctica (1958); No Latitude for
Error (1961); (with Desmond Doig) High in the Thin Cold Air (1963);
Schoolhouse in the Clouds (1965); the autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing
Win (1975); From the Ocean to the Sky: Jet Boating up the Ganges (1980);
(with Peter Hillary) Two Generations (1983); and the autobiographical
Sargamantha: View from the Summit (1999).

In 1989 Hillary married June Mulgrew, widow of Peter Mulgrew, an old friend
and fellow explorer who died in an air crash on Mount Erebus in Antarctica.
Hillary’s son Peter has become a notable mountaineer (climbing Everest
twice) and explorer in his own right.

Edmund Hillary is survived by his wife, and by his son and elder daughter,
Sarah, of his first marriage.

Sir Edmund Hillary, KG, ONZ, KBE, mountaineer and author, was born on July
20, 1919. He died on January 11, 2008, aged 88.

[Eugene Griessel]

"D. Spencer Hines" <[email protected]> wrote:

The Times does an excellent job on Sir Edmund's obituary.

Th only obituary I'd like to see is of D Spencer Hines. As soon as
possible.


Eugene L Griessel

Morality is unique and universal. Nothing is added to it and nothing
changes during the course of time. It is not dependent on economics,
history, sociology or culture; it is not dependent on anything. Not
determined - it determines. Not conditioned, it conditions. It is,
in other words, absolute.

- I usually post only from Sci.Military.Naval -

[Michael O'Neill]

Eugene Griessel wrote:

"D. Spencer Hines" <[email protected]> wrote:

The Times does an excellent job on Sir Edmund's obituary.

Th only obituary I'd like to see is of D Spencer Hines. As soon as
possible.

<snip>

Nope, thanks all the same.

He'd probably have pre-written it, and with his usual little comments
interspersed all through it.

Come to think of it, what makes you think he still exists?

I think its a bot quoting pig latin.

M.

[Eugene Griessel]

Michael O'Neill <[email protected]> wrote:

Eugene Griessel wrote:

"D. Spencer Hines" <[email protected]> wrote:

The Times does an excellent job on Sir Edmund's obituary.

Th only obituary I'd like to see is of D Spencer Hines. As soon as
possible.

snip

Nope, thanks all the same.

He'd probably have pre-written it, and with his usual little comments
interspersed all through it.

You have a point.

Come to think of it, what makes you think he still exists?

You have a point there too.

I think its a bot quoting pig latin.

Mmm. Yes, you are probably right on all counts. It's better even
than Virginia.

Eugene L Griessel

If you can distinguish between good advice and bad advice
you don't need advice.

- I usually post only from Sci.Military.Naval -