Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  For the building team, Ed called on an old mate from his beekeeping days. Nev Wooderson ran his own plumbing business but could turn his hand to building. He was the sort of person Ed liked – resourceful, competitive, conscientious, uncomplaining – and expert at his trade. In his youth, Nev had raced motorbikes, and of an evening, relaxed by a mug of Kukri rum, he would take up a crouching position behind the handlebars of an imaginary bike as he described the series of lethal corners that constitute the course on the Isle of Man. The main body of builders were Sherpas. The rock-men chipped and split boulders for the stone walls. The wood-men worked in the pine forests down-valley, felling selected trees and pit-sawing them into beams and planks. Carpenters, using adzes, made window frames, doors and furniture. Villagers, as their contribution, carried wood and rock to the building site.

  When Louise joined the expedition, she brought Peter (11), Sarah (10) and Belinda (6) on their first visit to the Himalayas. She admitted to her fear of small planes when she described flying into Lukla:

  For days I had been steeling my shaky nerves for the flight …The expressive words ‘operational’ and ‘un-operational’ as applied to aircraft were new to my experience and I found them unnerving. I gained the impression that ‘un-operational’ was constantly being used when referring to the Twin Pioneers we were using … I have never quite understood how any aircraft remains in the air and my confidence hadn’t been helped by the information that out of the original ‘Twin Pins’ only one was now ‘operational’…

  We had been flying nearly an hour when we crossed into the tremendous chasm of the Dudh Kosi river to be tossed around by violent turbulence … We were now hemmed in by great mountain walls and there seemed no possible place to make a landing …

  Lukla! Yes, there it was! A tiny brown scar clinging to the side of the mountain. How could we possibly land on it? All the passengers except me yelled excitedly at one another. The brown scar became bigger and bigger until it finally took on the shape of a rather long tennis court with a wobbly looking ‘Lukla’ written in front of it.

  ‘We’ll never get down on the strip before that mountain wall comes up and hits us,’ I said. So to be on the safe side I closed my eyes tightly.

  ‘We’ve made it! We’re down! There’s Dad!’ the children shrieked.

  ‘We’re alive!’ I thought privately to myself.8

  Arriving at Khunde three days later, Louise was able to look at the hospital for which she had worked so hard. It was a low building between the upper houses of the village and the steepening slopes of the holy mountain of Khumbila behind. To the south it looked up at the fine peak of Thamserku, while further east were Kangtega and Ama Dablam. At one end of the building were the doctors’ quarters; in the middle was the kitchen, the warm heart of the hospital; and in the west was the clinic room, a two-bed short-stay ward for emergencies and a small long-stay ward for conditions like TB. The stone houses of the village sat amid potato fields of sandy soil, while to the north forested slopes led to cliffs and grass across which, for three mornings in a row, a huge white cat appeared, a snow leopard loping effortlessly from one boulder to another. Alarmed yak-herders raced up through rhododendron and juniper to retrieve their precious animals.

  For five Hillarys a visit to Everest Base Camp was part of the plan. Ed led Louise and Peter up the 18,200ft peak of Kala Patar from which the Western Cwm and South Col route on Everest are visible. For Peter it was one of those remembered images that would inevitably lead him to climb the mountain himself.

  Khunde Hospital opens for business

  The first doctors were John and Diane McKinnon from Nelson, and they set the pattern for a total of 19 couples over 36 years to October 2002, when Dr Kami Temba Sherpa took charge.9 For the volunteers, two years in Khunde was long enough to become deeply immersed in Sherpa culture. They were isolated, and their only communication with the outside world was through letters carried by runners. There were no other Westerners living in Khumbu. It was unlike anything they had imagined. The culture was permeated by Buddhism, and every village had its own monastery with its lamas. For the blessing and conduct of more important occasions there was the grandeur of Tengboche and its scores of red-robed monks. Sherpas could seem casual, but for the larger events of life, illness, danger or death, the presence of gods was real.

  Illness was mediated by spirits, not bacteria, and the spirits were everywhere – in trees and springs, on the heights of the mountain Khumbila behind the village, and hovering over houses, hospital, and, thickest of all, over the area of rocks and forest where the dead were cremated. Convincing Sherpas that the hospital might be useful was not easy. It was dangerous to leave the protection of the deities in one’s own house. The spirits outside were often less than benign. The first healer to be called in was usually the local shaman or a lama, but slowly the villagers discovered that the doctors had medicines that miraculously cured a high fever in a child or the cough and wasting that was tuberculosis. Nearly every resident doctor had a terrifying encounter with a woman suffering an obstructed labour that required some sort of intervention. They might have had rudimentary instruction in how to do a Caesarian section back home, but it was different in the middle of the night in a grubby Sherpa house with snow on the ground outside. Over time, family planning in the form of depot hormones became accepted. The government-supported immunisation policy was implemented by the hospital and its Sherpa staff. Slowly the burden of disease in the community decreased.

  A special situation was the high incidence of goitres and cretinism, a common problem in mountain peoples worldwide due to the lack of iodine in water. Goitres, sometimes growing to a grotesque size by middle age, were to be seen in the necks of nearly all Sherpas. Cretinism from lack of iodine in the pregnant mother affected up to 10 per cent of those born in Khumbu, causing mental retardation and stunting throughout their shortened lives. For expert advice, Max turned to endocrinologist Professor Kaye Ibbertson who had graduated with him from Otago Medical School. Kaye described how iodine deficiency in the New Guinea Highlands had been corrected by injecting iodised oil into a population as an intra-muscular depot of iodine which would be slowly released into the blood stream over a period of up to five years. A programme was started in which injections were given to everyone in Khumbu, starting with women of child-bearing age. The results were astonishing: after 1966 no more cretins were born, and huge disfiguring goitres became a thing of the past.

  A philosophy of development aid

  In Schoolhouse in the Clouds, published in 1964, Ed put down his thoughts on aid. He believed that ‘wealthy nations have a responsibility to help undeveloped nations’,10 and he promoted this philosophy throughout his life. How does one approach delivering this ‘help’? A first principle was that the local people must be partners in a project. Ideally they will have requested it themselves, as had the Sherpas of Khumjung with their school.

  Another principle was that wherever possible work should be done by local people, not by visiting foreigners. Ed wrote, ‘I am firmly convinced that one of the finest ways of helping an undeveloped community is to give the opportunity for worth-while and profitable employment.’11 It followed from this that where non-traditional skills were required, locals should be trained either on the job, or through apprenticeships, or by way of training in Kathmandu.

  Although Ed was proud of his hospital, he recognised that of all the assistance he gave, providing access to education was the most important. But when thinking about the question, ‘What is the purpose of education?’ Ed’s answer was simple. Literacy: the three Rs, reading, writing, arithmetic.

  We had put much thought into the problem of how far we should take children along the path of education. Too much education could make them misfits in the simple life of their community. They’d drift to the towns, joining the growing band of the partly educated – those not well enough trained to get a good job but too proud to dirty their hands with physical labour. In reviewing where Wester
n knowledge could most profitably be used, I inevitably came back to the needs of public health and agriculture …

  It is not easy to teach people to adopt new methods and ways of living if they are unable to read and write so this seemed to us to be a first priority. Initially we didn’t plan to take the children beyond sixth grade. Only those few pupils who made outstanding progress would be given more education with a view to filling the need for more teachers.12

  An outcome that Ed did not foresee when he wrote this was that education would lead above all else to Sherpas entering the nascent trekking and guiding industries, bringing relative prosperity to many and wealth to a few. As it turned out, Sherpas weren’t keen on the poorly paid teaching profession. One has to look no further than Kalden Sherpa, Ed’s first young graduate teacher, who soon realised that teaching does not make use of the commercial instincts that are part of being a Sherpa. He settled in Kathmandu, worked in the tourist industry, started his own business and eventually became very wealthy indeed. There were many like him. Others took degrees in national park management – at Lincoln University in New Zealand – or environmental studies, and found jobs in international NGOs. One of them, from the first Khumjung School intake, was Mingma Norbu Sherpa who became a director in the World Wildlife Fund. Sherpas became pilots both in Nepal and for international airlines. And finally there were health workers, not least of them Dr Kami Temba who became Khunde Hospital’s first Sherpa doctor and director.

  Ed often said he had more pride in his aid work than in climbing Everest, but the one grew out of the other. Without his fame he could not have raised funds for development. Looking back, it is surprising that no one else had thought of such a simple project as building a school. An important reason why Ed was the first do to so was that he, greatly assisted by Desmond Doig in 1963, spent time listening to Sherpas and talking to them. It was an illustration of a piece of advice that Ed often gave to young people: ‘Cultivate an energetic and roving eye for opportunity and grasp it when it comes.’

  – CHAPTER 26 –

  The best decade of Ed’s life

  The years between 1964 and 1974 were as happy as Ed had ever known. The insecurities of his life before Everest were in the distant past. He had adapted comfortably to his fame and no longer had the old compulsion to prove himself against others. People loved to feel that he was the greatest climber on Earth, and nothing he could say would shake their belief. Standing in front of the North Face of the Eiger one day, someone he’d just met said with a chuckle, ‘I suppose you could walk up that with your hands in your pockets,’ to which Ed replied, ‘I couldn’t climb that if my life depended on it.’ This was greeted with the usual indulgent smile and a companionable punch on the shoulder: ‘This guy is just so modest.’1 Ed was stating a fact, but it was interpreted as the sort of humility that added to his stature. He was not, of course, universally admired – some in England never forgave him for driving his tractors to the Pole – but in the wider world he bathed in admiration.

  It was to Louise more than anyone that he owed this sense of fulfilment. She was the first woman he had loved, and when they were apart he missed her dreadfully. He might enthusiastically admire attractive women from afar, but Louise knew that he would never look elsewhere. This is not to say that there was no conflict. Ed said that ‘Louise could be pretty fiery when she was provoked’.2 When she felt she was right about something, she didn’t give in easily, and nor did he. From time to time there were fierce rows, but underlying their relationship was the simple fact that he couldn’t get by without her. She always appeared grounded and confident, and Ed drew from her strength when his own reserves ran low.

  Working for Sears and World Book

  At a more prosaic level, Ed now had financial security through his arrangements with World Book and Sears. Each year as a paid director he would fly to Sydney for World Book board meetings. And each year he would attend gatherings of the Ted Williams Sears Sports Advisory Committee in Chicago. A non-American has to ask who Ted Williams is, but rudimentary baseball literacy reveals that he is one of the all-time greats, ‘The Kid’, ‘The Thumper’, ‘The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived’. Around him Sears had gathered a group of luminaries who appear in publicity photos. Ted Williams is always in front, with Ed Hillary (camping) and Murray Crowder (guns) in the second row. The rest are further back: archery, basketball, boating, football, skiing and weightlifting, with golf, which one would have thought deserved better, bringing up the rear.

  Before Ed’s appointment, camping equipment was evaluated by examining tents pitched on the lawn of a comfortable hotel. Ted never went inside a tent, let alone slept in one. Ed had other ideas. ‘We can do better than a lawn,’ he said. ‘What about a few days floating down a river with a bit of fishing, and camping?’ Thus were born 27 years of Sears tent-testing expeditions. Bill Kelly, who wrote a book about them, recalled that ‘Ed was always the focal point of these field test trips. He was what bound us, making hardships or mishaps seem like heroic adventures.’ At least in the retelling, the events used to assume Olympian proportions. Not everyone loved them. Ted never went on even one. The gun-buyer in the midst of one ordeal named it ‘The Bataan Death March’, and the name stuck.3

  But of all the stories, none was retold more often than ‘The Middle Fork of the Salmon’ in Idaho in 1970. As one member of the group said, ‘We signed on for great adventure and I believe we achieved it.’4 Ed had always been alarmingly intrepid in his dealings with the flooded rivers of New Zealand or the brown, monsoon-swollen rivers of Nepal, but even he found himself expressing doubts to the two young boatmen who were to take charge of their rafts in the Salmon in high flood. There was a warning of sorts in a local newspaper report that in two boating parties the previous week, ‘several persons were drowned in the same turbulent river’. The local expedition leader reassured the Sears executives by saying that he ‘had seen the river this high six years ago’.

  In the largest and least manageable raft were Ed and six others. The bottom was ripped out in the first of the bad rapids, but they completed the day to reach a camp at Elk Horn Creek. Thoughts were concentrated on the following day’s rapids rather than tent design.

  Sure enough, the next day, just above Sheepeater Hot Springs, a large rock in one of the rougher rapids tore off most of the raft’s superstructure. Urgent repairs were needed, so when they passed close to shore, the two boatmen leapt over with a rope to secure the raft to a tree. Instead, the rope was torn from their hands and a reduced Sears team was swept once more into the main current. Another wild mile went by before they again came close to a bank. Ed and his companion Carl leapt overboard with a rope which Ed wrapped around a small tree before it snapped. The pontoon with the three most senior Sears executives aboard was once again swept out into the violence of the main current. Ed saw his happy relationship with Sears departing down the river with them.

  Ed and Carl chased down the river bank, and eventually found their disabled raft and its bedraggled passengers caught in a backwater on the opposite bank. They swam across for a thankful reunion, then limped on to Black Hole where they could haul out to attempt repairs. There they made the decision ‘to forego the rougher lower end of the river in the interests of safety’. From a small airstrip in the forest they were evacuated to civilisation.5

  Mt Herschel and Cape Adare

  In 1967 Ed made a special request to Sears for two snowmobiles (skidoos) and six Antarctic-style pyramid tents – a design that would not enter the general catalogue. He always had in mind potential expeditions, particularly those where a first ascent was a possibility. This one was the Antarctic continent’s Mt Herschel, 10,942ft, an unclimbed peak which formed a mountain backdrop to the American base at Cape Hallett, some 650 kilometres north of Scott Base. A decade after the IGY, it was still an important point on the flight path between New Zealand and McMurdo, offering useful weather information and an emergency landing strip.

  The one-month expedition
’s tiny budget of £2020 reflected the generosity of the American Navy, which provided flights, and New Zealand’s Antarctic Division at Scott Base which helped with equipment and food. Ed had invited three of his regulars to join the expedition: Norm Hardie as deputy leader and surveyor, Murray Ellis as snowmobile handler, and me as climber and photographer. Ed’s brother-in-law Larry Harrington, who had worked as a geologist in the area the previous year, added science, and Bruce Jenkinson was a professional guide. Climbers Peter Strang and Mike White completed the team.

  We left Christchurch on 18 October in a Super Constellation ominously christened Phoenix because of an engine which had recently caught fire. After nine hours in the air we landed on the ice at McMurdo. It was Ed’s first time in the Antarctic since 1958:

  We pulled on our warm clothes before stepping out of the aircraft and the cold was solid and tangible. We scrambled inside heated tracked vehicles and were driven over bulldozed snow roads towards the familiar buildings of Scott Base on Pram Point. It was nine years since I had left the Base and I had a strange reluctance to return – even the warmth of our welcome failed to eradicate this feeling. Late in the evening I went for a stroll outside. The snow was hard frozen and the light fading. To the west the mountains glowed pink and blue in the midnight sun. I felt a deep sense of nostalgia and sadness – a conglomeration of all the fears, hopes and loneliness I’d experienced in my long stay many years before. I was glad to go inside and lose my thoughts in the warm activity of a well-run base.6