Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  Vertebrate Publishing, Sheffield

  www.v-publishing.co.uk

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 A pioneering heritage

  2 Percy goes to Gallipoli

  3 Growing up in Tuakau and Auckland

  4 ‘The most uncertain and miserable years of my life’

  5 Escape into the Air Force

  6 Harry Ayres teaches Ed the craft of mountaineering

  7 The New Zealand Garhwal expedition and the Shipton cable

  8 Everest Reconnaissance 1951

  9 Everest from Tibet, 1921 and 1922

  10 Mallory and Irvine, 1924

  11 The 1930s, a decade of disillusion

  12 Lessons on Cho Oyu, 1952

  13 The Swiss get close, 1952

  14 Organising Everest, 1953

  15 ‘We were on top of Everest!’

  16 ‘The most sensible action I’ve ever taken’

  17 ‘A somewhat disastrous journey’ into the Barun Valley

  18 Employment opportunity in the Antarctic

  19 Scott Base

  20 ‘Hellbent for the Pole’

  21 Beekeeper in search of a better-paying occupation

  22 The Silver Hut expedition

  23 Makalu unravels

  24 Three new careers

  25 Repaying a debt

  26 The best decade of Ed’s life

  27 A plane crash ends two lives and blights another

  28 Killing time making films

  29 Ocean to Sky, the last big expedition

  30 Reconciliation

  31 The last two decades

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Photographs and Maps

  Maps: New Zealand & Antarctica

  Introduction

  I was 15 years old when Edmund Hillary made the first ascent of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay on 29 May 1953. I had placed a bet that the attempt would fail. Nine previous efforts had come to nothing – why should a tenth fare any better? Even when I was proved wrong, I still had no understanding of why 1953 was different. I came closer seven years later when Ed invited me to spend nine months in the Himalayas on his Silver Hut expedition of 1960–61. This was an expedition that began with a yeti hunt but moved on to the more serious business of studying high-altitude physiology in a laboratory on a high snowfield in the heart of the Everest region. We went on to test ourselves – disastrously – with an oxygenless attempt on Mount Makalu, fifth-highest peak in the world. I learnt that oxygen was a key player in the high-altitude game.

  My qualifications for the expedition were that I had climbed widely in New Zealand, had a degree in physiology and was halfway through a medical degree. During the three months before the expedition, Ed and his wife Louise generously invited me to join them on a trip to the home of the sponsors in Chicago, and to London where I worked in Dr Griffith Pugh’s physiology laboratory. I met famous Everesters whose books I had read: Eric Shipton, John Hunt, George Lowe, Mike Ward, James Morris. Ed and Louise took me with them to Chamonix in the French Alps. They were great fun. During the years that followed Ed invited me on more than a dozen expeditions. It was a friendship that lasted until Louise’s death in 1975 and continued in an attenuated form through to Ed’s death in 2008. He shaped my life, as he did so many others.

  What makes me believe that I have something new to say about Edmund Hillary? He writes his own story in his autobiographies. He always preferred his own version of his life. As he said to journalist Pat Booth who published the unauthorised Life of a Legend in 1991, ‘I write my own books!’

  The idea that I might write a biography came in 2009, a year after Ed’s death. I was writing a book about his aid work in Nepal between 1961 and 2003. He had bequeathed his papers and photos to the Auckland Museum, and for my research I read this large archive. There were surprises. There was a thick diary written by Ed’s father Percy describing his excitement when he went to war in 1915 and his horror when he experienced the reality of Gallipoli. Percy is clearly the father of the son who becomes a conscientious objector in the war that starts in 1939. Ed teaches Radiant Living and for a year in 1940–41 he runs a Young Citizens’ session on national radio each Sunday. When finally he enters the Air Force, his life of adventure begins. In Box 24 of the archive, 1965, there is an unpublished novel, Call Not to the Gods, under the nom de plume Gary Sankar.

  More than this I had access to private letters between Louise and Ed which were held by Peter and Sarah Hillary. Ed always acknowledged the central importance of Louise in their shared life but without much detail. In the archive she enters Ed’s life as a lively 21-year-old in a ski club hut on Mount Ruapehu. On his way to Everest in 1953 he is meeting her for a weekend in Sydney, and he writes to her throughout the expedition. Three months after the famous climb, they marry and enjoy an extended honeymoon as part of a lecture tour through the UK, Europe and USA. Through the rest of the decade Louise is at home raising three children, but in 1961 after a trek into Everest country she joins him as a full partner in bringing education and health to the Sherpas. The wrenching tragedy of the plane crash of 31 March 1975 is all there in the files.

  As I read through the archive I became immersed in the life of Ed Hillary. Like him I am a New Zealander, born in Auckland. New Zealand is small, and in the days before air travel it was a long way from the rest of the world. Though I am 18 years younger than Ed, the social and physical environment he grew up in is recognisably mine.

  There are many biographies of famous men. This is mine, and it reflects how I saw Edmund Hillary during the time I knew him. It is not the complete story. The years after 1980 are too recent for me to attempt to cover them satisfactorily – the years of Ed’s marriage to June Lady Hillary will have their own biographer. One of the fascinations of Ed’s life is the way he handled his fame and came to be recognised as the person who best represented the ‘essence and spirit’ of New Zealand. It has been a privilege to have entered his remarkable life through those old letters and photos, as well as my own memories and those of others who knew him.

  – Michael Gill

  Auckland, 2017

  – CHAPTER 1 –

  A pioneering heritage

  It is not absolutely certain that Sir William Hillary (born 1771) was a forebear of Sir Edmund Hillary (born 1919) but, had he been asked, Ed would almost certainly have approved of the baronet’s life of adventure. William married Frances Disney Fytche, said to be the richest heiress in Essex, against her father’s wishes. He spent the whole of her £20,000 inheritance raising a private army to fight against Napoleon, earning a hereditary baronetcy in 1805. Three years later, to put a few miles and a little water between himself and his creditors (and apparently his wife), and to bury quietly the murkier details surrounding his elopement and marriage, he fled to the Isle of Man. Here he married again and embarked on the work for which he became most famous. The principal port of the isle was poorly protected and its fishing fleet vulnerable to storms from the east. Dismayed by the sight of wrecks and dead sailors washing ashore, Sir William established a fleet of lifeboats manned by volunteers to rescue crew from distressed vessels. The organisation would later become the Royal National Lifeboat Institution.

  The Hillarys of Dargaville

  We are on surer ground genealogically when we come in 1884 to Edmund Raymond Hillary of Dargaville, grandfather of the Edmund who climbed Mt Everest. Edmund senior was born in Lancashire in 1836 and trained as a watchmaker. A need for adventure led him to India where he made a good living working for maharajahs on their collections of clockwork birds and animals. In 1881 he was in Wales, then on 3 December 1884, when h
e re-enters the record at age 48, he was in Dargaville, marrying a 28-year-old Irish woman by the name of Annie Clementina Fleming, always known as Ida.

  There is no record of where Edmund arrived in New Zealand, but it was probably Auckland, where inquiries in the early 1880s would have shown that the formerly rich southern goldfields were in decline, whereas Dargaville to the north was on the rise, lifted by its kauri timber and gum trade. From Auckland immigrants travelling north went by rail to the southern reaches of the Kaipara Harbour, described as the largest enclosed harbour in the southern hemisphere. Embarked on a steamer, they moved north down a tidal river through mangroves before emerging on to an expanse of storm-swept water, land-locked except where the powerful tidal stream poured through the narrow harbour entrance between bare sandhills. On the beaches were skeletons of ships that had missed the navigable channel winding between breakers pounding the shoals of the bar. Once past the intimidating entrance, the steamer entered the tidal waters of the broad Northern Wairoa River with its main town of Dargaville on the west bank. Kauri timber was in demand in New Zealand and beyond, and was in evidence everywhere as rafts of logs coming down the outgoing tide, and as huge stacks of sawn timber in riverside mills or being loaded on to ships crowding the wharves.

  Edmund set up shop in a main street that had the makeshift look of a set for a western movie. His two-storey house on the Dargaville waterfront was substantial; he became secretary of the Dargaville Town Board and kept racehorses. His wife Ida, born in 1856, had come to New Zealand at the age of eight and had worked as a governess until her marriage. She had a warm personality and like her husband was a storyteller. Four children were born to the Hillarys: Percival Augustus, future father of Edmund Percival; John, Leila and Clarice. For 20 years the family prospered and the four children grew up strong, healthy, independent, and as well educated as the times allowed.

  But by 1905 Dargaville was past its peak. The great forests of kauri disappeared as all but the most inaccessible trees were felled and dragged and floated to the mills. Where once there had been stands of the most majestic trees on Earth, their trunks rising like the pillars of a cathedral, now there were only their burnt-over remnants. The timber trade had brought wealth to the north, as the goldfields had to the south, but it came at a price. The gum, too, that poor man’s gold, had almost run out.

  The Hillary family fortune declined along with that of the rest of the community. Edmund had owned and betted on horses, and lost heavily. His Leorina was an ‘also ran’ in the Auckland Cups of 1889 and 1890, and his Bravo was a non-paying third in the much humbler Matakohe Cup of 1892. The big house had to be sold. Family lore has it that in his late sixties Edmund took to his bed in a fit of depression that lasted through to his death in 1928 at the age of 92. The story is plausible. A streak of depression runs through the Hillary family and, besides, he had a younger wife to take over. To Ida fell the task of earning money and raising the children. She did what work she could – dressmaking, painting pictures for sale – but she must have been hard-pressed. The children completed eight years of their compulsory primary schooling, though not all the way through to the legally required age of 15. Somehow, as people did, they got by. Ida too was long-lived, dying in 1952 at age 95, a year short of seeing her grandson climb Mount Everest.

  Percival Augustus, the eldest of Edmund and Ida’s four offspring, grew into an energetic and resourceful youth. In 1898, at the age of 13, he began a lifelong connection with journalism when he became a copy boy for the Wairoa Bell, an entry-level job delivering telegraphs and as general factotum. He learned photography, and after proving his writing skills became a reporter. Three years later, inspired by tales and photographs of the heroic British fighting the Boers, he volunteered for war in South Africa but was too young. The glories of battle would have to wait until the Great War in 1915 at Gallipoli.

  By 1911 Percy was printing and publishing the Wairoa Bell on behalf of its locally based proprietor, and three years later, in April 1914 and at the age of 29, he left the Wairoa Bell to buy its rival, the North Auckland Times. All he needed was a wife, and he knew who she would be: Gertrude Clark, one of a perceptibly superior family of 11 siblings who lived 10 kilometres downstream at Whakahara on the other side of the Wairoa.

  The Clarks of Whakahara

  By North Auckland standards, the Clarks were landed gentry. Gertrude’s grandparents, Charles and Dinah Clark, had arrived in New Zealand from Yorkshire in 1843, 40 years before Edmund Raymond Hillary, and just three years after the beginning of systematic British colonisation and the signing of a treaty with Māori at Waitangi. The Clarks made their landfall in Nelson at the northern tip of the South Island, but found no opportunities for advancement there. Forming a friendship with a family by the name of Paton, they decided to move into the timber trade, first in Auckland, then in the northern Wairoa at a settlement called Paradise, upriver from Dargaville.

  The Clarks became well known on the Wairoa River, and Dinah was described as a clever businesswoman. Those early days in timber set them up financially, and in 1860 they were able to purchase a small farm downriver on a low hill known to Māori as Whakahara. Charles built a raft – standard technology for timber workers – on to which he loaded all their possessions, including livestock, before setting off on the outgoing tide. On sloping ground overlooking the broad expanse of the river they built their homestead of pitsawn local timber, and filled it with mahogany and Venetian glass imported from England, as well as local kauri furniture. In time they established a fine garden. In front of the house Charles added a one-roomed store selling basic items such as flour, tea, sugar, oatmeal, tinned meats and hardware to passing timber workers and gumdiggers. To these amenities they added a post office and a butchery, and the service of a cutter as transport across and around the Kaipara Harbour. Church services were held in the big dining room, and the home became a centre of hospitality for early settlers and travellers on the river.

  Despite their isolation, Dinah kept in touch with political developments. Among the 31,872 signatures to the suffragettes’ 1893 petition to Parliament – from a quarter of New Zealand’s women of voting age – were 211 from rural Northland, one of them that of Dinah Clark of Whakahara, then in her seventies. The petition became law that same year, making New Zealand the first country in the world to give women the vote.

  Charles and Dinah had four children. The youngest, George, married a local seamstress, Harriet Wooderson, and took over the working of the Whakahara farm and store. Between 1882 and 1900, Harriet gave birth to 11 healthy children, spaced on average 18 months apart. She might well have delivered many more had not George been killed in 1901 by a kick from a horse. The family held together despite the tragedy, kept their store in business, and maintained their position as the sort of pioneers others might try to emulate.

  Gertrude, born in 1892, was the eighth of George and Harriet’s children. She and her siblings were at first educated by a succession of governesses, young women who quickly gave up the isolation of Whakahara in favour of the bright lights of Auckland. By building a schoolhouse on their property, the Clarks were able to persuade the government to pay the salary of a primary school teacher. But secondary schools were in short supply, the nearest being at Te Kopuru, south of Dargaville, on the other side of the river. Gertrude later described what getting to school entailed:

  When I was twelve years old I was determined to go to High School but this meant crossing the wide and oft-times treacherous tidal river, a distance of half a mile. My mother conferred with her older children, my father having died earlier, and it was decided that the daily journey would be too much for a girl. This I would not agree to.

  For two years my brother and I set off in a small rowing boat. Sometimes it was very rough, and the mill hands on the opposite side of the river would come out, and stand along the river bank watching our progress, especially when we reached the sand bank in the centre of the river where the waves broke in all directions
and our frail barque was greatly in danger of being capsized.

  On some nights when there was a storm and the waves were racing down the river with the out-going tide, we would have to row across very strongly to land at our house. Sometimes we would be swept down-river before we could get the boat ashore. We would grab hold of a mangrove as we swept past and sopping wet would wade ashore, tie up the boat for the night and wearily trudge home.

  However, even with these vicissitudes, I passed my Candidates Examination as a teacher. It was a great life indeed.1

  It might have been a great life but the future lay in Auckland, not Whakahara. George Clark had understood this, and before his death had set up a business in the Auckland suburb of Mt Eden, selling china from a shop with a small attached house. When the shop failed, the house came into use as accommodation for various members of the family. Later Harriet, as matriarch, bought a section nearby at 20 Herbert Road, and despatched Mabel, her eldest and most able daughter, to supervise the building of a substantial house and manage it as the family centre for a growing tribe of siblings, cousins and other more distant family members – including, eventually, Gertrude’s son Edmund. Artistic Helen made a sign in beaten copper for the veranda announcing that this was ‘The New Whakahara’.

  In 1907, 15-year-old Gertrude was still at Te Kopuru but now as a trainee teacher rather than a pupil. Soon she was moving south to Herbert Road to complete her teacher training, and from there went to Te Awamutu Primary School in the Waikato. Photographs of the time show Gertrude as a slim, elegantly dressed, rather dreamy-looking young woman. She had acquired her values from her grandparents and parents. She had a powerful belief in the importance of education and aspired to the social values of the English middle class that existed in New Zealand in rudimentary form. She believed it was important to mix with the right people, difficult though that might be in such an unformed society. She kept a journal in which she copied poetry, and she believed strongly in books and the people who wrote them. Traditional Christianity was an integral part of her upbringing.