Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  Although Ed was kept busy throughout 1962 getting to know 17,000 World Bookers, his thoughts often turned to the school he’d built in Khumjung. There was no postal service out of Khumbu, but fragments of news found their way to civilised Kathmandu, and were passed on to Ed and Desmond. Khumjung was thriving and now other villages wanted schools. A request from the village of Thame read:

  Sir, Respected Burrah Sahib, Sir Edmund Hillary We the local people, the Sherpas of Thame, Khumbu, came to know that your honour, helping us in all respects, is going to open some more schools in Khumbu. So we Thame people are requesting your honour to open a school at Thame just like Khumjung.

  Though our children have eyes but still they are blind …1

  Ten years earlier there would have been no such eagerness for schools, but the times were changing. The Chinese over the Nangpa La in Tibet were building schools where previously there had been none, and a few enlightened and well-off Sherpas had been sending their children to schools in Darjeeling or Kathmandu. But the biggest change had been the arrival of expeditions in the previously isolated villages of Khumbu. A new generation of Sherpas could ponder why these foreigners who employed them were so wealthy they could waste vast sums of money on something as useless as climbing a mountain. An outstanding point of difference was these people’s ability to read and write. Europeans didn’t have to hold everything in their heads; they could write it down, send it to others, learn from books, keep written records of their business dealings.

  Requests for schools came from village headmen, expedition Sherpas and from children. Sardar Urkien was one of the most compelling advocates. He was exceptionally strong physically and of well above average intelligence. Yet he was illiterate, and when not on an expedition his frustrations surfaced as drinking and violence. He was not alone in this, and the effects were felt throughout their communities.

  An important contributor to the early success of Khumjung School was its first teacher, who Desmond Doig had found through his extensive Himalayan network, in this case the Macdonald sisters who ran a hotel in Kalimpong. They had placed an advertisement in the Himalayan Times in Darjeeling which drew a response from a 42-year-old Sherpa schoolteacher, Tem Dorji.

  I beg to apply myself as one of the candidates for the aforesaid post if I get suitable salary. I am Sherpa by caste. I passed Master training in 1959. My dependants are my wife, 3 sons and 2 daughters. All my children are in school. If I get good salary I will go alone. I am not going to take anyone with me.

  For your act of kindness I shall ever pray.

  Yours faithfully, Tem Dorji Sherpa.2

  He was a properly trained teacher, a rarity in the hill villages of Nepal. No one knew the personal circumstances that made him willing to leave his family behind, but it was common for Sherpas to leave home for months or even years when they found a good job.

  A photo that hung in Ed’s study for many years was of the first intake of pupils lined up on the verandah of the new aluminium school – another silver hut – with Tem Dorji standing behind. The children are dressed in yak-wool homespun garments, many ragged and patched. There is no surplus money here. One child is a hunchback from TB in his spine. Some look malnourished and hypothyroid; others are bright-eyed and alert. Ang Rita, son of the eminent religious painter Kapa Kalden, described the excitement of joining this school that had suddenly appeared in the little valley just beyond the big chorten at the entrance to the village:

  Classes began in the open grass field where the school was being installed. I have a vivid memory of how the teacher started. He introduced the Nepali alphabet to us by asking us to draw a Sherpa house pillar which is shaped like an English T. Then he asked us to draw around this pillar, thus completing the first letter of the Nepali alphabet, pronounced ka … Those who could draw that ka felt very proud and excited. Day after day became more exciting as we kept learning more.3

  By the end of the year the best pupils could read and write basic Nepali. The strokes and scrolls of the alphabet were a magic key that could open the door into a new world of opportunity.

  Two more schools and a smallpox epidemic

  Encouraged by petitions, Ed began planning a school-building expedition for 1963. World Book gave generously and by the end of the year had donated US$52,000, the easiest bit of expedition financing Ed had ever known. Schools would be built in the villages of Thame and Pangboche, and water pipelines laid for Khumjung and Khunde. These villages lie in the northernmost Khumbu region of the Solukhumbu district. Solu to the south is larger, lower (4000–8000ft) and more populated than Khumbu, and predominantly non-Sherpa. But Khumbu is better known because its six villages have traditionally been the home of the strongest Sherpa climbers. Their houses are built in the small hanging valleys that cling to steep mountainsides in view of the great peaks of the Everest region. Living at 12,000–13,000ft gives these Sherpas their altitude tolerance and familiarity with mountains. Ed’s aid programmes began in Khumbu, though later extended down into Solu.

  A small but important sub-region is Pharak, gateway to Khumbu, whose narrow strips of arable land follow the banks of the deeply entrenched Dudh Kosi Valley at 8000ft before the trail climbs steeply to Namche. It was in Pharak in 1963 that Ed first realised a health programme had to be added to his schools. His school-building expedition had just arrived below the village of Lukla when a frightened mother requested help for her daughter who was sick with what the Sherpas called hlendum. This was smallpox, familiar throughout Nepal because of recurring epidemics.

  The disease had been brought in by a porter who five days earlier had become ill with a fever before breaking out in the pus-filled nodules and extreme prostration of smallpox. A day later he was dead. Now the disease was spreading to all those who had been in the house with him, including the girl whom Ed, Desmond and the expedition doctor Phil Houghton had been summoned to help. In the corner of an upstairs room they saw a bundle of rags beneath which lay a dying child whose face was covered in the confluent sores of smallpox. There was nothing they could do. There is no treatment for it, and it is highly contagious. Expedition members had all been vaccinated, but there was the frightening possibility that the vaccine might not have done its work – a vulnerability rarely felt by Westerners in modern times.

  Next day the party continued up-valley towards Namche, hearing news as they went of contacts who had fallen ill. At the Namche checkpost Ed was able to radio a request to Kathmandu for an urgent airdrop of smallpox vaccine. Within days, crowds of Sherpas and Tibetans gathered to have the magic fluid scratched into their arms. It was too late for those already infected, but in less than a week more than 3000 people were vaccinated, limiting the outbreak to a few dozen people and about 20 deaths.

  For Ed it was a compelling example of a life-saving procedure that was taken for granted in the West yet unavailable to the people of Khumbu despite its minimal cost: ‘Of all the programmes we carried out on the expedition – schools, waterworks, medical clinics, and the like – the one most widely appreciated was undoubtedly the vaccinations, and this hadn’t been part of my original plans.’4

  It planted the idea that a health programme be added to education. Why not, Ed thought, provide the Sherpas with a simple hospital to meet basic needs, including immunisations against preventable disease? As it turned out, smallpox vaccination became unnecessary. Within 12 years a WHO programme had eradicated the disease, the only infection in history to have been eliminated by human intervention. But there was still plenty of scope for simple preventive health measures.

  Getting to know each other

  Ed was known to the Sherpas as the Burra Sahib, the Big Man, the Important Man, the one from whose largesse all might benefit, and he was welcomed in villages with the sort of veneration usually reserved for the most highly regarded Buddhist lamas. As he moved around Khumbu, Ed came to know the people and characteristics of the various villages. Khumjung and adjacent Khunde had achieved most-favoured status because so many of his
expedition Sherpas had come from there, and it was the loan of their yeti scalp that had been conditional on building the school.

  Ed and Desmond were ambivalent about Namche. There were warring political factions who made co-operation difficult. It had a school, recently funded by the government, but the teacher had absconded with funds. Trade with Tibet was in decline because of the Chinese presence across the border. Later it would become by far the largest and most important Khumbu village, with an excellent school supported by the community – but in 1963 it was in transition. Ed later saw it as a personal failure that he had not developed a better relationship with Namche.

  Thame, with its fine monastery built into a cliff, was a more welcoming place. Desmond liked it too, and Ed’s increasing rapport with Sherpas was helped immeasurably by having Desmond as interpreter, entertainer, and artistic and religious consultant. It was on his advice that the windows and other woodwork of the new Thame school were painted bright crimson and decorated with Buddhist motifs. A feature of Thame was the way its houses huddled facing south against an old moraine wall, and had heavy roofs of flat stone rather than the more usual wooden slabs held down loosely with stones. These preferences were explained when it was found that the aluminium roof of the school – which had been built on an exposed up-valley site – blew off each winter despite the best efforts of carpenters to fix it to the stone walls. The culprit was a fierce wind blowing down from Tibet during the bad months of January and February. Eventually the school was shifted to join the other houses in their more sheltered site under the moraine wall. Several of the most successful pupils to start their education in Ed’s schools came from Thame.

  Pangboche, two hours up-valley from Tengboche Monastery, was the last main village en route to Everest, but in 1963 was one of the poorest villages along with neighbouring Phortse. Ed had a soft spot for Phortse because it was home to some of the strongest Sherpas on Makalu, the ones who had been promoted from low-to high-altitude status by issuing them with socks. In 1963 Ed had no funds for a school at Phortse but a large house he rented in Pangboche became a hostel for pupils from that village.

  Ed’s focus in 1963 was on school-building, but climbing was not neglected. First ascents were achieved on Taweche and Kangtega, and a year later on the redoubtable Thamserku. These, along with Ama Dablam, are the dominant peaks that form an inner ring around the high villages of Khumbu. First ascents were made of all four by Ed’s expeditions, though Ed himself did not climb on them.

  Building an airstrip

  In 1964 more schools were built, but it was the construction of the airfield at Lukla that was truly transformative in the years that followed. This was unanticipated, the original purpose having been simply to provide a strip for flying in materials for the hospital Ed was by now determined to build in 1966. Long trains of hundreds of porters carrying loads for 17 days from Kathmandu were just too cumbersome, and the Antarctic had taught Ed the value of small planes. He had already constructed – and closed – his kamikaze landing strip at 15,500ft in Mingbo. It presented altitude problems for pilots, passengers and planes, quite apart from its dangerous dogleg approach and short length. Flat land anywhere below 12,000ft was in short supply and was used for growing potatoes where it existed. Nevertheless, Ed had noted a possible site at the village of Chaurikhakar, at 8600ft in Pharak. He asked his climbing friend Jim Wilson, at that time studying for a doctorate in Hindu philosophy at Varanasi in India, to trek in to Pharak pre-monsoon and write a report. Jim was joined by Ed’s Sherpa sardar Mingma Tsering, and by Bernie Gunn, the Antarctic geologist and surveyor who had spotted the Skelton Glacier as the route to the Polar Plateau. As a survey team for an airstrip that would become the second busiest in Nepal they were light on engineering skills, but Ed was comfortable with that.

  The Chaurikhakar option proved a disappointment. It was too broken, too short and too subject to cross-winds. But then a local survey team stepped forward with a new offer. They were local farmers from the village of Lukla, 800 feet higher than Chaurikhakar. ‘We have a good place for aeroplanes to come to,’ they said. ‘It is quite long and there is never much wind.’ None of this could be seen from below, and it was a mystery how these Sherpas could understand the technical requirements for landing a plane, but a quick climb showed they might be right. The village was a few houses and some terraced potato fields. Set at an angle of 12 degrees, it was far from flat, but when measured there was indeed room for a 400-metre airstrip. Bernie Gunn examined the approach for a plane coming from Kathmandu and declared there was room. The six land owners named their price, and for the equivalent of $835 the area became the property of the Government of Nepal.

  Ed’s expedition built the airstrip alongside 110 hard-working local Sherpas towards the end of 1964. The terrace walls were flattened, the rocks rolled aside or buried if too big to move, and the surface stamped down by dancing locals until it was hard enough for the first landing. Four weeks after work began, Swiss pilot Emil Wick circled low over the new airstrip in his Pilatus Porter before coming in for a perfect landing. ‘The tricky bit is getting the height right,’ he said. ‘Come in too low and you hit the end of the runway and you die. Come in too high with a heavy load of passengers and you find yourself with the options of trying to pull out or maybe hitting the wall at the top of the strip.’ There are videos of all three outcomes on Youtube, which is why it is always a contender for ‘The Most Dangerous Airport in the World’.

  Ed had always thought that Lukla would remain an infrequently used dirt strip for mountaineering expeditions and for aid projects such as his own. In the early 1960s trekker numbers were negligible, and even by the end of the decade there were fewer than a hundred a year, most of them starting from the end of the road out of Kathmandu. But then the number of trekking companies took off. Many were owned by Sherpas and they provided employment throughout the region. In 2016 more than 40,000 trekkers entered the Sagarmatha (Everest) National Park, most of them flying into Lukla with its smooth tarmac. As early as 1975 Ed was writing that at times he was ‘racked by a sense of guilt’,5 but the Sherpas made no complaints about how their lives and environment were changed by so many visitors.

  Khunde Hospital

  Ed needed medical expertise to guide the building of his hospital. The doctor on the 1964 expedition was Max Pearl, a 40-year-old Auckland general practitioner who with his parents had fled Germany as a refugee in 1936. He was an excellent doctor – intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced, committed to his patients day and night – but his restless energy was not satisfied by general practice. A dream from his childhood days was to go to Tibet. When he read an article about the new Hillary hospital, he saw this might be his chance to find his own Tibet. He wrote to Ed who forthwith invited him to join the expedition. As Ed got to know him, he knew he had found in Max the ideal director for the medical aid work he saw ahead.

  World Book and Sears again backed the project but this time Ed, assisted by Louise and Max, launched a public appeal in New Zealand. Louise became an expedition member and wrote about it in A Yak for Christmas.

  The raising of money for the Sherpa hospital dominated our lives for a year … It was a worrying time for all of us. What if we received no money? Or not enough? … Money started to trickle in – a few pounds from our local Member of Parliament, a few precious shillings from an old age pensioner. We organized a business appeal with me making the appointments and Ed doing the calls …6

  Throughout 1965, they worked long hours to raise money. They approached individuals and companies, wrote articles, gave as many as five talks a day to service clubs and schools, and travelled thousands of kilometres up and down New Zealand. A breakthrough came at the end of the year, when the 40 Lions Clubs of the Auckland District agreed to raise £30,000 – over NZ$1 million in today’s currency.

  Ed, Louise and Max had their money for the post-monsoon season of 1966, but in which village would the hospital be built? Namche, crowded into its little amphitheatre
on the flanks of the Bhote Kosi, didn’t have room for a hospital. Thame, on the trail to Tibet, was not on the main track to Everest. Khumjung, adjacent to Khunde, already had the school. The deciding factor was that sardar Mingma Tsering came from Khunde, and the hospital would be the jewel in the crown of the village of which he was a headman.

  Mingma had first come to Ed’s notice in 1960–61 as ‘the Sherpa who could be relied on to find the answer to any problem’.7 From 1963 until his death in 1993, he was not only Ed’s trusted sardar but also one of his closest friends. Mingma’s parents were Tibetans who had crossed the Nangpa La to settle in Khumbu when they were young. Through hard work and application they raised themselves out of the poverty that was the lot of most immigrant Tibetans, but it was their sons, benefiting from the opportunities provided by expeditions and trekkers, who achieved status and became wealthy. Mingma was intelligent, hard-working, shrewd, loyal and tough. Like nearly all his contemporaries, he was illiterate, but he compensated for this with a memory that in some extraordinary way kept track of his responsibilities as a sardar: how many days each porter had worked, how much they had been paid, how many rafters or how many lengths of timber he had ordered from these wood-men, how much cut stone from those rock-men. He could be generous at times, but tough and unflinching at others.

  As Ed’s sardar he held a position of power in the local community. He could bestow jobs through his patronage, and was feared as well as respected – necessary attributes in a job that was complex and demanding. He was also Ed’s interpreter, always a position of influence. Like many expedition Sherpas, he was a linguist, fluent in Sherpa, Tibetan and Nepali, and his understanding of English was excellent, though when speaking he kept to the Sherpa pattern of using the present participle as an all-purpose verb form. Praise would come out as an approving nod and the words, ‘This man I much liking. He very good work doing, plenty rock breaking.’ The dreaded condemnation came with a scowl: ‘This man I no liking. He no hard working. He too much money asking. I no job giving.’