by Michael Gill
Gertrude Hillary filled her traditional role as the mother who provided a warm and emotionally secure home. As a teacher she added her belief in salvation through education while softening her husband’s severity. There were books in the family and she encouraged her children to write stories. On trips to nearby Auckland, June, Ed and Rex mixed with their unmarried aunts and saw something of city life, small though it was. In Tuakau they had streams, fields, trees, animals and birds, and the great Waikato River nearby. These were the ingredients of a happy childhood and they had each other. June did well at school and went on to succeed at university. Rex, the youngest, was less interested in study but moved easily into the outdoor pleasures of tending 1600 beehives.
That left Ed, who was regarded as the cleverest of the family. He was tall, with strong features, a good voice – yet by the age of 20 he had found no occupation that caught his interest beyond the family business of beekeeping. The closest he came to standing out from the crowd was to be a fine speaker at meetings of the Radiant Living faithful, an involvement that did little to abate his restless insecurity. He lacked confidence and found girls so unapproachable that in his first 30 years he had only one brief and tentative relationship, and this with the help of Rex who had grown up with fewer inhibitions. Some of his insecurity stemmed from the fact that he never had enough money to assert his independence. Percy might have believed that one should help one’s less fortunate neighbours, but he also believed that sons should help their father by working for next to nothing. For a whole decade after leaving school Ed was controlled by his father’s strength of will and stubbornness.
The declaration of war in 1939 offered no escape to the wider world. Percy’s convictions meant conscientious objection was the only path for his sons, but it brought disapprobation from the outside world. Ed was granted exemption from military service but younger brother Rex was incarcerated for four years. Finally in 1944 Ed decided he had to join the armed forces. At the age of 25 he was at last starting to loosen the bonds that held him in the closed circle of his family. From his training camp in the South Island he spent weekends in the mountains and confirmed a passion for mountaineering that would become the lodestone of his life for the next 10 years.
Why did Ed Hillary want to climb? At the age of 16 he’d been excited by his first contact with snow on the broad dome of Mt Ruapehu. Four years later, he ‘felt so weighed down by mental turmoil’ that he decided to escape briefly from his father and the bees.2 The place he chose to escape to was the Hermitage–Mt Cook region, where he saw at first hand the adulation bestowed on two climbers who had just climbed New Zealand’s highest mountain. He had long dreamed of performing heroic exploits but found no outlet. Now he recognised an arena in which he might excel. His first Air Force camp gave him access to the South Island’s Kaikōura mountains. His climbs on Mt Taranaki from his second camp led to his acceptance into the New Zealand Alpine Club. He was a proper climber at last.
After the war he made annual trips to the Mt Cook area, developing his skills on the heavily glaciated peaks of the central alps. He had wanted a challenge and now he had peak after peak on which he could prove himself. The finesse of rock climbing had no appeal. It was the long days on the biggest ice routes that were the challenge, hewing steps on frozen snow and hard ice. He had boundless energy and loved the remote and sublimely beautiful mountain environment, a world away from the insecurities he felt in suburban Auckland.
The year when everything changed was 1951, and the Garhwal expedition which led to the Everest reconnaissance with Eric Shipton later in the same year. Ed would say of his first 32 years that they were unhappy, lost ones, but in many ways they were a perfect preparation for the expeditions of 1951, ’52 and ’53. Each was perfectly scripted for Ed’s unfolding abilities. Shipton took a liking to Ed who coped easily with altitude and was always eager for work. He was good company too. To the end of his life Ed could charm people with his yarns and enthusiasms, the twinkle in his eye and his readiness to laugh.
Neither Shipton nor Ed had a university degree. They did not hold to the Victorian belief that science was a necessary justification for an expedition. For both, travelling in the wild parts of the Earth was an end in itself, to be shared with others who liked to adventure by proxy. It was through Eric Shipton that Ed found a place on the Cho Oyu expedition of 1952; and when John Hunt took over the leadership of Everest ’53, Shipton gave Ed so strong a recommendation that Hunt made him a member of his planning group alongside deputy leader Charles Evans. Hunt was generous to a fault. His fellow Englishmen might have preferred that two of them be selected for the favoured second Everest assault team, but he put climbing strength first. Hillary and Tenzing were the chosen pair in position at the highest camp on 28 May. The following day the weather and snow conditions on the untrodden summit ridge were perfect. At 11.30 a.m. the ridge gave way to a rounded summit. Two men, a lanky, unknown beekeeper from New Zealand and a Tibetan Sherpa who had been born and raised in the shadow of the mountain, were realising their ambitions.
Thus began the 22 happy years of fame – and marriage to Louise Rose. Ed had till then led an austere life of work, leavened, up to a point, by mountaineering. Suddenly, within three months of climbing Everest, he was engaged and then married. Louise was vivacious, intelligent, confident, unflappable, ironic – the perfect foil for his energy, restlessness, ambition, depressions. She was the only person to whom he could easily turn for help with life’s problems and the only person who would give him no-nonsense advice.
There were other changes in his new life. Through lack of exercise he became less fit. The rangy 80 kilograms of sinew and muscle that had been the pre-Everest Hillary gave way to 100 kilograms of softer flesh thanks to banquets and cocktail parties. On the other hand, a range of more sophisticated skills developed: formal and informal speech-making, media interviews, writing, interacting socially with an endless array of people, learning to entertain with his stories. He fulfilled his own and his mother’s ambition to be a writer when High Adventure was published in 1955 and became a critical and financial success. His eight books between 1955 and 1999 generated not only a substantial income but also the stories of his life as he wanted them to be remembered.
The Antarctic expedition of 1957–58 sustained Ed’s reputation as an adventurer. He saw from the beginning that a trip to the Pole could be an option if timing allowed. Fuchs was late and Ed had discovered that three farm tractors supplied to drag loads around Scott Base could be upgraded to reach the Pole. It wasn’t in the contract but it happened. Ed’s English literary agent, George Greenfield, who knew both Ed and the London Committee of Management, wrote, ‘Some of the best brains in the City and the higher reaches of academe were part of the committee but it was collectively naïve of them to think that the first man on top of Everest would forgo the double of reaching the South Pole.’3
Ed’s journey raised questions about whether the challenge of an adventure is a valid reason for going to the Pole – or to a mountain, for that matter. In the long term, the controversy was largely forgotten, especially in New Zealand where ‘driving farm tractors to the South Pole’ became part of the Hillary legend. When asked in 1960 whether Everest was ‘his greatest thrill’, Ed said, ‘No. My greatest thrill came in Antarctica when we took three tractors to the Pole, when everybody said it couldn’t be done. You get a great deal of satisfaction out of doing something people say is impossible.’4
Another major change of direction came in 1961 when Ed responded to a request from the Sherpas of of Khumjung village to build a school. Nothing could have suited him better. Using the simplest of means he was bringing education and employment to people who were eager for what was on offer. There was never an element of sacrifice or duty. He loved living amid the spectacular mountains of the Khumbu, and he became more and more fond of the Sherpas as he worked with them. Raising funds could be a labour, but he knew it was worth it. He was now working for World Book and Sears, and inc
reasingly in demand on a lecture circuit where American generosity could be relied on.
With the building of Lukla airstrip, the trekking industry was born. Sherpas working as guides, porters or cooks improved their English – or Japanese, German or French. Some were invited back to their clients’ country; some married them. The people of Khumbu prospered. Health initiatives were the next step with the building of two hospitals and provision of simple interventions including immunisations, mother and child care, and family planning. Encouragement of environmental protection followed to prevent the cutting of slow-growing high-altitude trees and juniper scrub. Ed strongly promoted the development of the Sagarmatha/Everest National Park and in collaboration with Canadian funding developed forest nurseries growing fir, pine, juniper and rhododendron seedlings for re-afforestation.
Ed went out of his way to encourage young people. John and Di McKinnon were the first doctor couple at Khunde Hospital in 1966– 68. ‘He gave us an enormous amount of responsibility,’ Di said. ‘Just get on with it, he said, and that was incredible for us. He unleashed the potential inside so many different people.’5
Back in New Zealand Ed became the President of Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA), the New Zealand version of America’s Peace Corps. He was in constant demand as speaker at school prizegivings, and business or academic conferences, and he seldom refused what he saw as his obligations. For many young people growing up after 1953, Ed Hillary was a hero: ‘He made me attempt things I would not otherwise have tried,’ they said.
Here is the sort of story which must have been repeated many times. Marilyn Eales was a medical laboratory scientist passing through Canterbury University in 1967 when she saw a notice that Ed Hillary would be talking to a student gathering at 7 p.m. She slipped in at the back of the room and listened as he began with his usual understated account of climbing Everest.
But it was his work on behalf of the Sherpas that made a great impression on me. He had recently been elected president of VSA, and after the lecture I plucked up courage to approach the great man himself. I asked him about working for VSA and he took my name and address, promising to send further information. True to his word a sheaf of papers arrived a few days later. I applied, was accepted, and found myself working in a medical laboratory in Fiji. This was truly a turning point in my life. I was working with people from other cultures, Fijian and Indian, and came to realise that I was learning more from them than I was able to give. Later I took positions elsewhere in the Pacific. Thanks to Ed Hillary my life became more rewarding than I ever imagined it would be.6
The crash happened on 31 March 1975. It was Ed’s Gallipoli. The loss of 16-year-old Belinda was terrible enough, but it was the death of Louise that was so unmanageable and so destructive. A minute of uncontrolled flight in a small plane and his life had changed irrevocably. He felt a numb regret that he had not died with them. He seemed to retreat into some inner sanctum where there was no one but himself. Many who had known Ed since the early 1950s felt that he was never the same again. It was like some Faustian compact that he would enjoy unparalleled success starting with Eric Shipton on the Everest reconnaissance in 1951, continuing through the climb of 1953, the South Pole in 1958, the new life with the Sherpas in Nepal where Louise had shared what he was doing. Everything fell into place until 1975; and then everything fell apart. ‘He was always exciting in the old days,’ Sarah remembers. ‘But in those years after the crash you couldn’t get through to him. He no longer engaged with anything. So far as support was concerned he just wasn’t there.’7
Peter remembered during his childhood that his father was often away – but what a lift it was when he returned. ‘He was always active and he used to whistle cowboy songs. He had this strength and confidence that I felt could never be challenged. Then came the crash, and that was the end of the marvellous times. That was the end of Ed Hillary as we’d known him. I never heard him whistle cowboy songs again.’8
The Ocean to Sky expedition, originally conceived in collaboration with Louise in 1974, filled most of 1977 with activity, but the lifting of the main weight of grief came through Ed’s developing relationship with June Mulgrew in 1979. Their move to India where Ed had been appointed High Commissioner cemented their ties, and in November 1989, on their return to Auckland, they were married.
Ed had just turned 70, and the last two decades of his life were settled years. Honours, including honorary doctorates, flowed in from around the world. Most prestigious of all was his appointment Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1975, but there were many others including, in 2003, honorary citizenship of Nepal on the fiftieth anniversary of the climbing of Everest.
He remained in demand as a speaker around the world. His notes were a small sheaf of A5 slips of paper.9 He would begin with an anecdote: a favourite was about the attractive hotel receptionist who sees his name, looks up in apparent admiration but adds in surprise, ‘I thought you died years ago.’ He established a link to his audience by noting shared interests, and then told stories to illustrate a theme. Growing up in Tuakau in the Depression with few educational achievements, for example, did not preclude later success. ‘Life must remain a challenge and it must force you to your limit. Fear is a stimulus to be welcomed.’ He was never short of ideas and an address to an important audience was an opportunity to explore them.
In the years before 1975 he made more of an effort to develop ideas for each audience. During the latter years, his speeches were selections from earlier material, but people still loved them, even at such distinguished venues as the Smithsonian Institute or major universities. Retelling the story of the climbing of Everest never failed to hold his audience. He was living history and a memorable presence with his big frame, familiar long face and strong jaw with a ready smile, and a full head of hair even in his eighties. His voice was strong with an accent which was not English but not entirely New Zealand either.
In New Zealand he remained in the public eye for 55 years. He became the nearest we had to royalty. He had won fame through a sporting achievement but of such an unusual and unrepeatable sort that it seemed more like a coronation, even beatification. Yet his beginnings were simple and he had retained those characteristics we like to admire in ourselves. He was egalitarian, without conceit or showiness, and transparently honest. He was neither rich nor wanting to be, but not poor either. His humility about his fame was genuine, though overlaid, ironically, by the realisation that modesty was a useful part of the Hillary persona created jointly by himself and his public. He never wanted to live anywhere except New Zealand whose inland mountains and long coastline he loved equally.
He was not of course without fault. He could be overly stubborn and sensitive to criticism. He was not always magnanimous in recognising people who had helped him. In his 1999 autobiography he is a less tolerant and generous person than he was in 1955 and 1975. He was prone to depression and what he called ‘our civilized curse of self-pity’.10 He was not as supportive a father as he might have been in his later years. He shared the insecurities of the people of a small country with a short history, but he had their strengths too, their independence.
John Mulgan was a New Zealand writer who had been at Oxford in the 1930s and then joined the war and fought in North Africa with an English battalion. In 1942 he encountered a New Zealand division who had been fighting in the desert for over a year and ‘it was like coming home’:
They were mature men, these New Zealanders of the desert, quiet and shrewd and skeptical … Moving in a body, detached from their homeland, they remained quiet and aloof and self-contained. They had confidence in themselves, such as New Zealanders rarely have, knowing themselves as good as the best the world could bring against them, like a football team in a more deadly game … they marched into history.11
These were men of Ed’s generation. His own march into history was in a different place, and around it grew a different sort of myth. He was the man from humble beginnings who with Tenzing was the first person
to look down on Earth from the highest point on its surface. Because they were not important figures from the great nations of our planet, anyone might identify with them. They had gone where no one had gone before. Peasants on the plains of the Ganges crowded to the banks of the river to glimpse someone they saw as a reincarnation of the great Hindu warrior Arjuna. In the West, too, there was the legend of the person who devoted half a lifetime to working in the heart of the world’s highest mountains, helping the people who had made him famous. He was an ordinary person, he always said. ‘I should be content,’ he wrote in 1975, ‘yet I look at myself and feel a vast dissatisfaction – there was so much more I could have done.’12 He was always striving. What is apparent is that out of what he claimed was his ordinariness, he created, during eighty-eight years, an extraordinary life.
Acknowledgements
My first thanks go to Ed Hillary for bequeathing such an archive of papers and photos to the Auckland Museum; and to Peter and Sarah Hillary who gave me permission to use these papers and their own files of personal letters; they have also made valuable comments on the manuscript. Amongst other members of the extended Hillary family I particularly thank Hilary Carlile, John Hillary, and Yvonne Oomen. After the Hillary Collection, the Royal Geographic Society has been my most important source of photos and I extend my grateful thanks for their efficient and expert help. Sue Gregory has kindly supplied the important cover photo, which was taken by her husband Alf at the Everest Base Camp in 1953.