Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who was catapulted into the history books when he became the first man to climb Everest, died last night at the age of 88.
Sir Edmund, who conquered the world’s highest mountain in 1953, had been suffering health problems since April after suffering a fall whilst in Nepal. While the New Zealander considered himself merely an average beekeeper, he was widely regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest adventurers.
His feats were not confined to Everest and in later years he led expeditions to the South Pole and to the source of the Yangtze River. He also committed himself to humanitarian work among the Sherpas through his Himalayan Trust and was made an honorary Nepalese citizen in 2003.
Knighted in 1953, shortly after the British-led Everest expedition arrived back in London, Sir Edmund was admired for his humility and his unaffected manner almost as much as his mountaineering.
After returning from the summit, which was announced inThe Times on the morning of the coronation of Elizabeth II, the climber famously greeted a fellow expedition member with the phrase: “Well, George, we’ve knocked the bastard off.”
The explorer, who preferred to be called just “Ed”, was humble to the point that he only admitted to being the first man atop Everest long after the death of his climbing Sherpa companion, Tenzing Norgay, in 1986.
Helen Clark, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, described his passing as a profound loss. She said: “Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off’ Everest but lived a life of determination, humility and generosity.”
Greg Gregory, the photographer who accompanied Sir Edmund on the Everest expedition, described him as a “top character”. Speaking from Australia, Mr Gregory, 90, said: “He was a member of the team like everybody else and nobody knew until quite late on, when John Hunt, who was the leader of the summit expedition, decided who was going up there, that he would be the first.”
His achievement thrilled the world, as Everest had previously defied every attempt at conquest for more than 30 years. Sir Edmund later recalled: “We didn’t know if it was humanly possible to reach the top. And even using oxygen as we were, if we did get to the top, we weren’t at all sure whether we wouldn’t drop dead or something of that nature.”
As he was a New Zealander and therefore a citizen of the Commonwealth, British subjects celebrated his achievement as their own. His ascent was announced on the morning of the Queen’s coronation, with The Times trumpeting that Everest had been conquered and “all is well”.
Remarkably though, the climb went unrecorded in picture form. While Sir Edmund took the famous photo of his sherpa companion posing with his ice axe, he refused Norgay’s offer to take one of him. Norgay had never used a camera before “and the summit of Everest was hardly the place to show him how”, Hillary later said.
Sir Edmund had joined a trip led by the British climber Sir John Hunt up the southwest ridge. By the latter stages, all but two climbers were defeated by exhaustion, and only Sir Edmund and Norgay were able to continue to the summit on May 29.
He described the last moments before that triumph. “I looked upwards to see a narrow snow ridge running up to a snowy summit. A few more whacks of the ice axe in the firm snow, and we stood on the top.”
His taste for mountaineering began at 16, when he went on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu on New Zealand’s North Island. It was there that he saw snow for the first time. By the Second World War, Sir Edmund, who served in the New Zealand Air Force for two years as a navigator, had become seriously involved in climbing. Sir Edmund had climbed 11 peaks of over 20,000 ft (6,100m) before tackling Everest. Until he successfully completed his ascent, Sir Edmund had lived as a beekeeper in Auckland but the unprecedented feat of scaling the world’s highest mountain brought him a fame he could hardly have imagined. Later, he led expeditions to remote corners of the Earth. In 1958 he participated in the first mechanised expedition to the Antarctic.
His autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, was published in 1975, and in 1979 he published From the Ocean to the Sky, an account of his 1977 expedition on the Ganges. Sir Edmund’s life was darkened by the loss of his wife and a daughter in a plane crash in 1975. There was a son and another daughter from this marriage. He married again in 1989.
When Peter Hillary reached the summit of Everest in 1990, he and Sir Edmund were the first father and son duo to achieve the feat.
Sir Edmund devoted his energy to environmental causes and to humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Nepalese people. He made many other trips to Everest during his lifetime but never attempted to scale the mountain again. Returning in 2003, the 50th anniversary of his climb, he was appalled at the way Everest had become a virtual tourist attraction. He called for Everest to be “closed” for a while, to give it a rest.
Pen Hadow, the British adventurer and environmentalist, said Sir Edmund’s death “closes one of the great chapters of planetary exploration”.
