Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  He was very strongly Labour oriented. I can remember him almost raving during the depression days.

  He worked like mad – harder than I ever worked and I work pretty hard.

  He was a great vege gardener …6

  Rex’s memories of the encounters in the woodshed were less harrowing:

  We had a strict father, no denying that, he’d cart us over to the woodshed and give us a damn good hiding. In those days benzene containers came in crates made of wooden slats and Percy would give us a whack with them but they were so wide it didn’t hurt. He wasn’t really angry with us. You know, Ed and I were reasonably clued up. We knew that if we started crying and really put on a performance we wouldn’t get that much, so once we were on the way to the shed we started bawling – it helped! Yeah, he was a strict man but he had blind spots that let us get away with things.7

  Of his mother Ed wrote: ‘[She] had a more gentle disposition, although strongly principled too, and we relied on her for the warmth and affection that all families need.’8 She kept up the social habits she had learnt at Whakahara with visiting cards printed for herself and Percy: ‘Mrs P. Augustus Hillary of St Hilaire, Tuakau, will be at home at 2pm on Tuesdays’. And she was ambitious for her three children. She wanted them to have a level of education that would take them into social strata higher than those available in Tuakau.

  At the age of five, Ed entered Tuakau Primary School, expecting to spend eight years there before passing the Certificate of Proficiency, the entrance qualification for high school. There were eight grades in three classrooms. Movement up the grades was erratic, depending on the motivation of pupil, parents and teacher. Gertrude, a teacher herself, was a powerfully motivated parent. June used to say, ‘Ed was brainy, Rex was the good-looking one, and I was the girl.’9 She was being too modest: she was ‘brainy’ as well, and at the age of 10 won a scholarship to the private Diocesan School for Girls in Auckland.

  But it was Ed more than the others who was coached at home. He was the eldest son and liked reading and writing, skills which Gertrude admired. The results of her hot-house treatment were spectacular. At age 10 he passed Standards 3 and 4 in the same year, coming second in class. In his last year he passed both Standards 5 and 6, and became the youngest pupil in the school to achieve the Certificate of Proficiency. In his school report for 1930, Ed was first in class with uniformly excellent results. His teacher was enthusiastic:

  This is to certify that while under my tuition at the Tuakau School, Edmund Hillary proved to be an intelligent pupil whose work was always of a high standard.

  His character was in all respects excellent, while his manner and general bearing clearly indicated a sound home training.

  Edmund thoroughly deserves his place in class. He has worked well all term.

  Well done, Edmund!10

  As Ed used to say ruefully in later years, ‘I was the child genius of Tuakau Primary School.’

  But Ed’s academic success came at a cost. He was not just the smallest and youngest in his class, he was socially more than two years behind his scholastically undemanding peers, some of them large and pubescent as they entered their teens. Ed remembers gratefully ‘a very big Maori girl who was like a mother to me and if anyone laid a hand on me she’d give them a backhander that would make them lay off’.11 Despite the occasional protector, Ed was lonely.

  I had almost no friends at school. My mother’s attitude didn’t help. She was so kind in many ways, but had the philosophy that you can judge people by the company they keep and she didn’t feel my classmates had too much to offer.12

  … As a consequence I was permitted to play no games after school but had to return immediately home to the safety of the family circle. This attitude by my mother, who was so generous and kind in other ways, greatly irked me and I never knew if it was related to the substantial proportion of Maori pupils we had in the school.13

  Rex, however, remembered playing with other children, including a Catholic family of seven next door: ‘We were fairly religious and went to the Anglican church in Tuakau. But Dad didn’t like us mixing too closely with Catholics.’14 Anti-Catholic feeling, imported from the old country, was alive and well in 1920s New Zealand.

  Some of the better memories of Tuakau were of the movies that arrived during the 1920s. They were shown in the War Memorial Hall, a grand brick building, its entrance flanked by Grecian pillars and a bronze plaque with the names of the 32 young men whose lives little Tuakau had given to Gallipoli and Flanders. Romance movies were shown on Tuesdays and westerns on Saturdays; Gertie and June sat upstairs, Ed and Rex down. In front of the screen a pianist played a sound accompaniment and later a gramophone was added to play songs (repetitively) before the film began. Two songs, ‘There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall’ and ‘Red River Valley’, later became part of Ed’s repertoire on special occasions, preferably around a camp fire, and sung con spirito.

  At Auckland Grammar School

  In 1931, Ed had his entrance ticket to high school. There were two options: the first at Pukekohe just eight kilometres away but with a patchy scholastic record; the second at Auckland Grammar School, the city’s premier school, the Eton of colonial society. It had been founded by Governor Sir George Grey in 1869, and since then had been educating the sons of Auckland’s elite. Its 900 pupils were taught by the best teachers the city could find. For Gertrude, insistent that her clever eldest son have the best education available, there could be no hesitation, and 11-year-old Ed was duly enrolled at Grammar, an arduous daily train journey away.

  The school day began with a bike ride to the Tuakau Railway Station to catch the 7 a.m. train, an hour on the train and then a walk to reach school by 8.30 a.m. He was placed in Form 3D, lowest of the ‘academic’ forms which included Latin and French in their curriculum. In the first week he was humiliated by the gym instructor whose job it was to turn slouching, evasive boys into straight-backed, muscular young men. The school system had its sprinkling of sadistic masters and this gym instructor seems to have been one of them. Humiliation was the path to improvement. He fulminated at Ed that his shoulders were round, his back not straight, his ribs flared unnaturally. Ed wrote, ‘I developed a feeling of inferiority about my physique that has remained with me to this day … a solid conviction about how appalling I looked.’15

  Discipline at boys’ schools of the time depended on corporal punishment with the cane for the most minor infringements. Schools, like the military, believed that without stern discipline, mayhem would ensue. Ed, along with large numbers of his fellow pupils, was beaten frequently.

  He continued to be a reader, and when not distracted by horseplay on the daily train journey, read avidly at the rate of a book a day. Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars, Tarzan), Henry Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines), John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps) were favourites: ‘In my imagination I constantly re-enacted heroic episodes, and I was always the hero. I died dramatically on a score of battlefields and rescued a hundred lovely maidens.’16

  Here Allan Quartermain watches his companion Sir Henry Curtis overcome the giant African chief Twala in single-handed combat:

  Again Twala struck out with a savage yell, and again the sharp knife rebounded, and Sir Henry went staggering back. Once more Twala came on, and as he came our great Englishman gathered himself together, and swinging the big axe round his head with both hands, hit at him with all his force. There was a shriek of excitement from a thousand throats, and, behold! Twala’s head seemed to spring from his shoulders: then it fell and came rolling and bounding along the ground …17

  And here is Captain Carter’s first encounter with the Princess of Mars:

  … she turned and her eyes met mine. Her face was oval and beautiful in the extreme … her eyes large and lustrous and her head surmounted by a mass of coal black, waving hair … Her skin was of a light reddish copper colour, against which the crimson glow of her cheeks and the ruby of her beautifully molded lips shone … She was as d
estitute of clothes as the green Martians who accompanied her; indeed, save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked …18

  This is not Henry James, but such tales fired Ed’s imagination and fed later into his natural gift for storytelling – and his own unpublished novel. They were also an escape from the misery of feeling physically inadequate in comparison with his peers.

  A slight respite was his promotion from Form 3D to 3B at the end of the first term on the basis of a report which classed him as ‘satisfactory’ in all subjects, with a fourth place in history as his best.

  The next year in Form 4B passed without E.P. Hillary leaving any trace, though his term reports record that he was top of his class in mathematics.

  Ed’s third year at Grammar saw the beginning of a more physically assertive Hillary. He grew like the proverbial weed, 10cm in 1933 and a further 12cm in 1934. From being one of the smallest in the class he had become the tallest, with a rangy build toughened by the work he did for Percy in the weekends. The train too had become a second home, full of rough adventure with the other schoolboy commuters joining at stations along the way:

  The train became the most important part of my life … and I learned to excel. Leaping off while it was gaining speed, holding onto the handrails, running furiously alongside and then leaping tigerishly aboard at the last desperate moment … The horseplay and battles, the broken windows and smashed seats … I learned how to fight in the train, how to hurl my opponent into the corner of the seat and lie on him so he couldn’t use any superior skill at boxing or wrestling. I learned how to push all the glass out of the broken window so the guard wouldn’t see it. I learned how to collect ‘Schoolboys Only’ stickers and place them on a choice carriage on the 4.20 express and then travel home in uncrowded comfort …

  I started getting boxing lessons and rather favoured my skill with a long straight left. I persuaded one of the younger boys to spar with me and duly pranced around him and showed off my primitive skill. A couple of days later I was approached by the guard on the train – the boy’s parents had complained that their son was being bullied – he was coming home with his arms black and blue. A bully? Me? There was nothing I despised more … yet I realized the accusation was justified …19

  Ed added a couple of modest disclaimers. Of the horseplay in the carriages he said, ‘nothing vicious about it – merely violent, youthful energy a little misdirected’. And of his boxing: ‘I wasn’t really a good fighter as I lacked the necessary “killer instinct”.’20 This may have been true, in part, but he wasn’t shy about defending himself, and it is clear that the newly grown Ed Hillary was not a person to be messed with. He was strong, tall, had a long reach and didn’t like being pushed around. He went on to learn wrestling and ju-jitsu. Several years later, he was still boxing at a local Auckland gym in his spare time. He tells how Vic Calteaux, New Zealand welterweight champion, came to the gym and asked for sparring partners. Ed, taller and heavier, volunteered but forgot that sparring is about getting fit, not punching your partner in the head.

  We pranced around the ring for a while, largely shadow boxing, when I noticed his guard was rather slack so reached out and thumped him rather firmly on the nose. Calteaux’s temper was never particularly well controlled and he set about me in furious fashion and duly lowered me to the canvas with a terrific hook to the solar plexus. I was helped from the ring by my concerned instructor who muttered, ‘Why didn’t you stick to sparring?’21

  But Ed was still not making much headway academically, partly because of the wasted hours travelling to school. Gertrude, who was in regular contact with her schoolteacher sisters at Herbert Road, knew that the time had come for all three children to move closer to good schools in Auckland. In mid-1934, the Hillarys moved to a rented house at number 298 on Remuera Road, a long ridge whose sunny northern slopes, with views of Auckland Harbour and the Hauraki Gulf, accommodate some of the city’s best real estate. It was the road on which Ed would live for the rest of his life.

  Two years later in 1936, at a cost of £2025, Percy and Gertrude bought their final home at 730 Remuera Road, a kilometre beyond the terminus of the electric tram which linked them to Auckland Grammar, Auckland University and the city centre. The house at number 298 has long gone, but number 730 still stands, a handsome, two-storey house with tall tiled gables. Not long after this move, Percy and Gertrude bought a beach property with two desirable adjoining sections at Ōrewa, 40 kilometres north of Auckland. These were the accoutrements of success. Ed remembered the family being endlessly short of money at this time, but New Zealand, along with the rest of the world, had been sunk for most of the decade in a disastrous depression, and Percy was thriving, mainly on the bees. He could recognise an opportunity when he saw it; he was intelligent and worked hard – and he skilfully disguised the extent of his success from his equally hard-working sons who were contributing their unpaid labour to the bee business.

  In 1934 Ed sat the matriculation exam that would qualify him for entry into Auckland University. He passed in seven subjects: English, history, French, arithmetic, algebra and geometry, chemistry and drawing. ‘It was one of the great moments of my life when I read in the New Zealand Herald that I had passed matriculation,’ he told the school assembly on a visit in 2003.22 Staying on for the Sixth Form, he earned his only mention in the school magazine in five years. In the account of his rugby team’s successes, it was noted that ‘E P Hillary dominated the lineouts.’ A good lineout forward had to be tall, with a long reach, but also light enough to jump higher than the opposition. An added skill was using an elbow skilfully enough to wrong-hand the opposition yet unobtrusively enough not to be penalised for rough play. Ten years later, when playing rugby in the Air Force, Ed was still dominating lineouts.

  A seminal event in Ed’s life took place in the early spring of 1935, when he saw his first mountain and touched snow for the first time. Ski runs had been established on the northern slopes of Ruapehu, a 9180ft occasionally eruptive volcano in the central North Island, and each year a group of Auckland Grammar senior pupils spent 10 days on the mountain.

  The trip needed money, so Ed approached the thrifty Percy. The honey crop from the summer of 1935 had been a good one. Ed and Rex had worked hard with the hives in weekends and holidays for nothing, not even pocket money. Percy thought hard and finally agreed to pay. August was the time of year when bees needed almost no attention.

  The train from Auckland arrived at National Park station at midnight. The boys stepped out into a brilliant night with snow on the ground. ‘As our bus carried us steadily upwards … its headlights sparked into life a fairyland of glistening snow and stunted pines and frozen streams … I was in a strange and exciting new world … For ten glorious days we skied and played …’23 There was no suggestion that anyone should climb to the summit, where there was the risk of avalanche or falls on ice or rock, but the experience of a mountain world found a place in Ed’s imagination that would remain for the rest of his life.

  – CHAPTER 4 –

  ‘The most uncertain and miserable years of my life’

  With his schooldays at an end, Ed had to think about his future. Regrettably, Rider Haggard provided no answers. Prompted no doubt by Gertrude and perhaps also by his elder sister June, who was already passing units for her Bachelor of Science degree at Auckland University, he followed in her footsteps, studying the subjects he was best at: maths and science. For Ed it was like being back in his first year at Grammar. He was 16, with few social skills and no academic ambitions. Why was he at university? To become a teacher, perhaps? If he had thought of joining the profession, he never mentioned it.

  His one escape was the University Tramping Club, a haven for eccentrics and intelligent misfits1 who enjoyed the outdoors and burning up energy on the network of tracks in the forests that covered the Waitakere Ranges between Auckland and its west coast. On a Friday evening they took the train north, got off at Swanson station and climbed in the dark a steep
track to the club hut called Onuku. There were gorges and waterfalls to be clambered down, their wet walls covered in ferns and moss. There were wild black-sand beaches pounded by a hazardous surf whose rips and holes could drown the unwary. It was a coast Ed grew to love.

  Racing around the Waitakeres, however, was getting him no closer to a vocation. At the end of 1936 he failed all his papers, and in 1937 he failed again. His heart wasn’t in it. Quite simply, he was lost.

  In 1938 he left university and took a job as a law clerk in the office of Wiseman Brothers, Barristers and Solicitors, Queen Street, Auckland. Aunt Clarice, sister of Percy and now living in California, wrote approvingly:

  Dear Edmund, I hear you are in an office going for the law. I am glad, always thought your dad had the makings of a lawyer. More than likely you have it too. The profession may be crowded but there is always room for an exceptional man in any profession. Do you like the work? That I think is particularly important …2

  But there is no further mention of the law, except for a letter of reference:

  This is to certify that E.P. Hillary was employed by us as a Law Clerk from 14th February to 26th August 1938, and that he proved to be a most willing and intelligent worker besides being absolutely trustworthy and reliable. Mr. Hillary resigned from his position in this Office to go into his Father’s business and we were very sorry to lose his services. J.S. Wiseman.3

  For someone who loved the outdoors and dreamed of adventure, such an outcome was unsurprising. There was not much adventure in the office of the Wiseman brothers – but nor was there anything on the horizon to take its place.