After Everest Read online

  His overriding emotion, he always said, was a feeling of relief. He and Tenzing looked at each other. The reserved New Zealander took Tenzing’s hand to give it a hearty shake. The Sherpa, nearly 20 centimetres shorter than his lanky companion, threw his arms around the climber in a joyful embrace.

  There was work to be done. Ed photographed Tenzing triumphant, holding aloft his ice axe and the flags they had taken with them and which they would leave there—the ensigns of India, Great Britain, Nepal and the United Nations, but not that of New Zealand. Nor, in a move that would mystify many over the years, did he get Tenzing to take a photo of him. His explanation was always that he didn’t think Tenzing had ever used a camera before and now wasn’t the time to learn.

  He turned 360 degrees and took photos at every point, capturing every ridge below so that there could be no doubt that he was shooting from the very top.

  He looked around for any sign that Mallory might have been there but could find none. And he gazed across at forbidding Makalu—another apparently impregnable peak—and saw what he thought might be a route to its top. When a French party became the first to summit Makalu, it was this route they followed.

  Ed and Tenzing were both carrying a few talismans to be left on the mountain, and these they now placed in the snow. Lollies and a coloured pencil that Tenzing’s daughter had given him; and a cross that John Hunt had asked Ed to carry.

  It was time to descend to base camp—to a place in history and a state of celebrity Ed could not have begun to imagine. He took a few stones from the highest point in the world as souvenirs; and finally—his effort to keep his fluids up having been as successful as everything else on this day—he paused to relieve himself on Chomolungma.

  CHAPTER 3

  DOWN TO EARTH

  Others have climbed Everest more than once. Ed’s son Peter has been there twice; once on a day when 78 people reached the summit. Apa Sherpa has made a record 21 ascents. A Sherpa couple has been married on the summit. But Ed didn’t ever consider repeating that particular climb. For him, once something was done, it was done.

  ‘Neither Tenzing nor I ever had the feeling,’ he said. ‘We were first and as a consequence never had the motivation to go up again. Nowadays everyone wants to go up more than once—but they didn’t have the pleasure of going up first.’

  In fact, he never pulled off another mountaineering coup, despite several attempts. His other major achievements were in many different areas. He did, however, have other climbing ambitions involving Everest. According to Tom Scott, Ed had expressed the ambition to attempt a solo ascent; one from the north; and one without oxygen. All these feats were eventually achieved, though not by Ed. However, few people outside the mountaineering community remember who achieved these other firsts.

  It was 1 pm when George Lowe, from his position at Camp VIII, sighted Ed and Tenzing briefly on the south summit. At 2 pm he saw them again. Moving quickly he set out to meet them and hear the good news, in Ed’s masterpiece of insouciance: ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’

  The group camped for the night before making their final descent back to join the main group. The other team members were in various states of suspense, but none more so than John Hunt, who tried to decipher the party’s demeanour as they approached. When Lowe gestured with his ice axe towards Everest towering behind and gave a thumbs-up, Hunt knew his expedition had been victorious.

  As they grew closer an emotional Hunt ran forward and embraced his assault party in a scene that combined relief, triumph and exhaustion. For some of the others in the party, there would have been a niggling realisation that no one else would have the chance to be the first man on Everest: that honour had gone to a New Zealander. Although for posterity, the media and absolutely anyone who asked, everyone agreed it was a team effort, few people remember the name of the team or its members, apart from Ed and Tenzing.

  Not long before Hunt died, Tom Scott interviewed him in England.

  ‘You in your heart of hearts must have wanted two Englishmen there,’ Scott said.

  ‘How could I have wanted it any other way?’ admitted Hunt.

  ‘Would you say that on camera?’

  ‘Heavens, no.’

  ‘Well, we’ll roll the camera and see if you change your mind. Sir John, did you want two Englishmen on the top first?’

  ‘I was thrilled that it was Ed and Tenzing who were the first to stand on top,’ said Hunt.

  And then he winked at Scott.

  Ed’s emotions had been held at bay until he was back with the rest of the group. ‘We all got to our high camp and sort of celebrated and then we carried on down to base camp, and down at base camp we had a really good celebration. One of the other members of the party . . . had a bottle of rum and I wasn’t really a drinker at all in those days, but we all had a sip of rum. Now—this is at an altitude of oh, close on 20,000 feet—when you drink alcohol at that sort of altitude, it has quite a strong effect, so we all got a little bit tiddly.’

  Other reactions would follow swiftly, much to Ed’s surprise. He seems to have genuinely believed that very few people outside the mountaineering community would be much interested in what he had done. Mountain climbing, after all, was not an activity with a huge public following.

  The Times of London was an expedition sponsor, with rights to John Hunt’s own account of the expedition. But it did not even try to keep the initial announcement—which it received first and which came on the morning of Elizabeth II’s coronation day—to itself. Every newspaper in the world seemed captivated by the story of the ascent, with its added patina of royal glamour. Ed expected that, once any small fuss there might be had died down, he would be left to get on with his life. He might get the occasional speaking request and invitation to contribute to the NZAC Alpine Journal. And there were always the bees, although he had done a good job of finding reasons not to go back to them for some time now.

  Percy certainly expected him to go back to the bees—and the sooner the better. He soon realised that Ed’s achievement was seen as quite something, but he never indicated that he thought there was much point to the exercise, although he and Gertrude did send Hunt a congratulatory telegram. Gertrude’s response was more enthusiastic than Percy’s. John Hillary remembers being ‘on my grandmother’s lounge room floor with my mother and we were cutting up newspaper clippings from the Herald and putting them in a scrapbook’.

  As for Norm Hardie—and probably many other climbers who had harboured an ambition to be first atop Everest—he says his feelings when he heard the news were ‘mixed’. The conqueror of Kangchenjunga has a tart summary of why the Everest climb drew such acclaim: ‘It’s the highest in the world. Two, a pronounceable name. Three, James Morris and Hunt were very good PR men. Evans on Kangchenjunga was totally shy and self-restrained—a great leader, but not a public man. Four, as sponsor, The Times was a very reputable paper so all the sources paid for the story. Many previous attempts on Everest with Mallory and other thrillers had kept up British interest in Everest.’

  Back home the news was announced by acting Prime Minister Keith Holyoake who, overcome with coronation fever, placed the achievement firmly in an imperial context: ‘I am able to announce that a newsflash has just come through advising us that the New Zealander, Hillary, has succeeded in conquering Mount Everest . . . If the news is correct, and I’m assured absolutely that it is, then our New Zealander Hillary has climbed to the top of the world. He has put the British race and New Zealand on the top of the world. And what a magnificent coronation present for the Queen. How proud we all are that this is from our loyal little New Zealand.’

  Holyoake would be less enthusiastic about Ed in years to come.

  The new Queen responded instantly by knighting Ed—to his chagrin. Customarily those being offered that honour are asked if they are willing to accept. Ed being incommunicado, the New Zealand prime minister took the liberty of accepting on his behalf and Ed got the news in the mail, handed over
by a highly amused George Lowe.

  For a high achiever it would have been a disconcerting early sign that he might not always be in total control of where his life was going. ‘I wasn’t all that happy about the knighthood to be totally honest,’ Ed recalled in his HARDtalk interview. ‘I was just a rough old country boy. A beekeeper. I couldn’t see me wandering around the farm with a knighthood doing the same simple things I’d been doing for years.’

  His attitude to honours may have changed over the years, as he never expressed any reluctance when, in 1995, he was elevated to the highest order of chivalry and made a Knight of the Garter—an honour that John Hunt had received in 1979.

  Tenzing received the George Medal, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross. This too Ed cavilled about: ‘I felt it would have been more appropriate if he also had received a title. Everybody involved in these things in Britain said he can’t get a title because inhabitants of India or Nepal are not permitted to have a British title. I think that’s rubbish. I think if he had received a title everyone in India and Nepal would have been thrilled to bits.’

  He didn’t have to wait long to be asked a question he would be asked over and over again for the rest of his life: Who really got to the top first? This was by turns annoying, amusing, tedious, rude and ridiculous.

  We can be certain Ed made it to the top for two reasons. One is that he wanted to be first. In all his writing and speaking about Everest, he made no secret of his ambition to be part of the project and then, once on the mountain, to be part of the summiting team. It’s hard to imagine that, as he and Tenzing set out, he would suddenly have lost all interest in the question of precedence; that he wouldn’t have made sure that it would be his boot that first planted itself on the peak. All his friends and fellow team members describe Ed ploughing ahead in any situation, whether crawling across a crevasse on a ladder or bounding towards the next campsite. He did not do second.

  The other reason we know for sure Ed was first without his telling us is that his deeply ingrained honesty would not have allowed a lie—or even a misconception—to gain currency. If Tenzing really had been first, Ed would have been the first to say so.

  In the early days Ed and Tenzing had been happy to say that Ed was first, Tenzing next. However, as the days went by and the team made their way homewards through Nepal and the crowds grew ever bigger, so too did their enthusiasm for the notion that the local had summited first. Eventually, Ed and Tenzing went with the flow. It has been suggested that, as well as going with the flow, Tenzing may have actively muddied the waters.

  In later years the official line became that they got there together; and Hunt credited the whole team with the ascent. Of course it was a team effort—a solo ascent wouldn’t be made until 1980.

  The team could not have done it without Ed, but Ed couldn’t have done it without the team.

  Ed hummed and hah-ed somewhat over what to say on the issue over the years. Perhaps the best attempt at diplomacy was this account to the Listener ’s Maggie Barry: ‘That was the way it was. I mean, I had unquestionably set foot on the little cone of the summit and Tenzing had followed very effectively behind . . . in actual fact, to say that we reached the summit almost together was as good a description as you would really require.’

  That was the official line back home. His son Peter recalls: ‘It was always, always in our household: “We did it together. Tenzing and I were a team, we climbed the summit first,” and that’s just the way it was.

  ‘The reality was in Tenzing’s biography he did say that Ed had stepped on first and [Tenzing] came up behind him, and Dad continued to say, “We climbed it together, we climbed it together” and it was only in the most recent autobiography that he did say that he went up there first. The only reason he did that, he told me, was because Tenzing said it himself—so, he thought, I will too.’

  Ed told a slightly different version to the Listener : ‘When Tenzing died, I decided . . . well, I mean, if someone asked me who got to the top first, oh, Tenzing’s dead, he’s done a great job—I see no reason why I shouldn’t mention that I actually set foot on top first. But only if people asked. I felt a bit poorly about it first and of course Tenzing’s grandson resented this bitterly. But I felt that for ten or fifteen years I had held my peace and that it would be fair for me to actually tell what had happened. After all, he reached the top too.’

  But back in 1953, Ed had not been happy as the Tenzing mania along the route back from Everest grew ever more frenzied. He found himself the subject of a cartoon for the first time—there would be many more over the years. The image was on a placard that was hoisted over the crowd. It showed a triumphant Tenzing alone on top of Everest. Some metres below, attached to the Sherpa by a rope, lay Ed on his back, relaxing while Tenzing did all the work.

  Ed thought this was funny at first, but not for long. And when an enthusiastic member of the crowd leapt onto the car carrying him and bellowed, ‘Long live Tenzing’ in Ed’s ear, his temper got the better of him and he shoved the young man to the ground.

  By now Ed should have begun to realise that this was the start of something big. ‘I had no idea that the media and the public in general would be as interested as they turned out to be. I think I was a rather naive sort of person in those days.’

  In fact, this was Ed’s first day at his new job for life—Conqueror of Everest. It was not a position anyone had had before, and for the next 55 years he would effectively make it up day by day as he went along. And he would make the most of it.

  One of his first duties was to take part in a lecture tour of Europe and North America. But, between the descent and this tour, he found time back in New Zealand to marry Louise Rose; the circumstances of this will be told in the next chapter. The tour would also serve as their honeymoon.

  If Ed needed a reminder that he was part of a team, it came in the form of the £25 per lecture he received on tour with others in the group. At least, it was supposed to be a group affair; by all accounts, Ed’s competitiveness came into play here too, and the tour soon evolved into the Ed and George Lowe Show. Ed was the funny man and Lowe the straight man. They may not have been paired to make the assault on the mountain, but they certainly knocked the other bastards off the lecture stage.

  ‘It was all sort of mocking,’ says Tom Scott. ‘George said he watched Ed change from a moth to a butterfly. He got all this attention and he didn’t realise he was funny, but he would say, “I was on a slope. It was a bit dicey, ice was rushing forward and dropping 10,000 feet into Nepal, and I said to myself, ‘What do I do here, Ed?’ And I said, ‘Ed my boy, it’s Everest, we better push on.” ’

  It wasn’t always like that. Norm Hardie recalls being present with him ‘when he gave his first post Everest speech, at a girl’s school in Beckenham Kent. He was hesitant, unclear and embarrassed by the adulation’. For someone who grew up shy and insecure, finding you can make a large group of people laugh is the best boost your self-confidence can have. If it comes hard on the heels of an ascent of Everest, you’re set.

  The tour was not a great money-maker, but it was an excellent reputation-maker. It helped Ed develop the on-stage persona that would serve him so well over the years. He would be self-deprecating, but at the same time never let anyone forget what he had achieved. He would pay courteous credit to those around him—but it was his version of the story that prevailed.

  Ed had to wait to tell his own version of the ascent in print until John Hunt’s official account had been published. But Ed’s book, High Adventure, allowed him to pay off his overdraft and start building the house that would be a family home for the rest of his life. It was also the start of a highly successful career as author.

  Instant fame, such as Ed experienced, is rare today—and very rare indeed with planned expeditions. The team that went up the mountain, though it certainly made no secret of its existence, did not receive the wall–to-wall media coverage that such an enterprise would attract today, for months befo
re even setting off. A modern equivalent’s progress would be documented from inspiration to conclusion with at least a fly-on-the-wall TV series and regular social media updates. Everyone on the team would have been a familiar figure before the final attempt even began. Women’s magazines would have asked readers to choose between Team Evans/ Bourdillon and Team Hillary/Norgay.

  As it was, Ed and Lowe, the larrikins, carried their act over into day-to-day activities—easily, because it wasn’t an act. If Ed had to suffer the indignity of an unasked-for knighthood, to be followed by dinner with the Duke of Edinburgh, he was going to have some fun along the way.

  In the interests of normalising the whole thing, Ed played up the Kiwi side of his character, specifically contrasting it with the stuffed-shirt Poms on the team: ‘When we all went back to the UK, George Lowe and I were the New Zealand members of the party,’ he told New Zealand television journalist Mark Sainsbury. ‘Every day we were having cocktail parties and champagne and smoked Scotch salmon and we were meeting lords and ladies. George and I thought it was the funniest thing we had ever experienced in our lives, whereas our fellow members, all very good fellows, took it extremely seriously.’

  This down-to-earth quality became a key part of his image, making him beloved of his countrymen who, at that time, still regarded themselves as possessed of an egalitarian spirit. At the same time as he emphasised this, Ed downplayed the un-Kiwi attributes of ambition, ruthlessness and single-mindedness that had got him to this point and that would take him much further.

  Ed had to borrow a dinner suit to go to Buckingham Palace. The shirt that came with it had a slit up the back, which nonplussed Ed somewhat; but he was told all would be well as long as he kept his jacket on.

  He and George Lowe got ready at a gentlemen’s club. Their preparations were handicapped by not knowing where exactly all their new decorations were supposed to go. As Ed typically told the story, he and George spent much time sticking holes in each other in the process of appending their regalia.