After Everest Page 9

  Ed’s decision to ensure that aid measures were Sherpa-led was reinforced by an abortive attempt to revolutionise local chicken-breeding practices. This incident is recounted by Mike Gill in his magnum opus about the Trust’s work, Himalayan Hospitals. Ed procured New Zealand guidelines on poultry farming, which left the locals thoroughly bemused. In the end, it was neither poor farming practice nor unsuitable methods that brought the project to a halt, but a local weasel that reduced the flock to an unworkable number.

  The projects undertaken by what became the Himalayan Trust were extraordinarily varied. A partial list appended to Alexa Johnston’s biography of Ed includes schools, hospitals, airstrips, workshops, lecture rooms, bridges, water supplies and health clinics.

  All Ed’s legendary team-building skills came into play on these ventures. It needed a diverse group of talents to carry out such a wide range of projects. ‘The great thing about Ed is that he recognised abilities in me that I didn’t know I had,’ says adventurer Murray Jones. ‘In Nepal, it’s not like you can run down to the hardware store and buy what you want when you want. Typically, we used No. 8 wire a hell of a lot for tying down buildings. That was the only thing we had available. So Rex [Hillary] and I were quite good at making do with what we had.’

  ‘He put this extraordinary group of people together,’ says Peter. ‘There was this incredible sense of loyalty to him. I think people really loved the opportunities he gave them.’

  ‘He would be very tolerant until the moment he needed them to do the job,’ says Hilary Carlisle. ‘He would expect them to do the job well, but he would get a bit impatient if they didn’t.’

  Such cases were rare, according to Tom Scott. ‘People would say time and again, “He picked me out of the blue,” and he would say, “You’ll do,” and they did. He had a very low failure rate.’

  However, if the people he picked looked like they might not do, Ed had a temper that made itself felt. ‘He was hard on himself and could be hard on other people in expeditions,’ says Scott. ‘Personalities have to work [on expeditions]. If you have one person causing problems, the whole thing is out of kilter.’

  Ed resisted suggestions that his work was in any sense repaying a debt—the implication being that the Sherpa people had helped him get where he was and he owed them for it. ‘It’s much more a sense of friendship and admiration for many of my friends up here,’ he told NZTV’s interviewer Paul Holmes on his eponymous show in 1996.

  Ed’s approach to aid reflected many of New Zealand’s most cherished national myths: it was practical yet imaginative; he found inventive solutions to many problems; and he achieved swiftly, where others might have intellectually over-engineered the thing to death before even starting.

  One example of such a solution is quoted by John Hillary. ‘There was a village where the women spent something like 80 to 85 per cent of their lives climbing up and down this hill to get water. So Ed put a quality pipe at the top and a tank at the bottom and ran the water down the pipe into the tank and completely and utterly, with two little tiny things, changed people’s lives.’

  John admired Ed for his hands-on approach to humanitarianism. ‘There are a lot of people who do wonderful things but quite often they gather money and give it to the people. Ed didn’t do that. He went to the people and said to them “What can I do for you?” ’

  Ed shared local control most conspicuously with one of his very best friends, Mingma Tsering, veteran of Makalu. ‘I think his partnership with Mingma Tsering was one of the great things,’ says Peter. ‘The Sherpa man couldn’t read or write, but he was a brilliant manager of people. I have seen so many examples where there would be industrial issues and he would sort them out just by going in and talking to people, cajoling them and saying “Let’s go.” ’

  Not everyone rushed to be part of Ed’s humanitarian efforts, though. The Nepalese royal family certainly didn’t. As Johnston describes, an invitation to a school opening in 1964 led to the first visit to the region by a member of the royal family. Ultimately, in 1972 an agreement was signed between the Himalayan Trust and the government of Nepal; but much of the painstaking work on that agreement was done by John Claydon—Ed’s South Pole pilot and petrol procurer, now employed by the Asian Development Bank.

  Ed wasn’t always in gung-ho mode; he could be patient if there was no choice, and he waited for the Nepalese Government to get on side. And it’s abundantly clear he couldn’t have done it without Rex, who used to regularly be described as the unsung hero of the Himalayan Trust—though his contribution has been better acknowledged in recent years. When the Holmes show produced a segment on the Trust’s work in 1991, Mark Sainsbury described Khumjung School as erected by ‘the Hillary brothers’. Pat Booth became so exercised by the lack of recognition for Rex that he had hoped to nominate him for an award under the New Zealand honours system; but Rex died (in 2004) before that could happen.

  Critics have accused Ed of keeping Rex out of the spotlight. The younger brother is depicted as the hands-on plodder, while Ed flew in and out collecting cash and finding things to do with it. John Hillary has a ready answer for that.

  ‘Dad was still building schools and hospitals for Ed in Nepal when he was 75, so what does that tell you? He loved it. He built a lot of the schools and hospitals. Ed didn’t really do the physical, actual hands-on building, but nobody would have worked there if it hadn’t been for Ed. Dad went over 25 times, and you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t like your brother.’

  ‘You take your family for granted, don’t you?’ asks Murray Jones. ‘They are always there. Rex was incredibly loyal.’ Peter Hillary says the only time Rex got annoyed was when the food was sub par.

  Alexa Johnston describes an aura of unity around the three Hillary siblings that no outsider would have been able to penetrate. The bond between the brothers and sister, who had clung to each other to counter what the outside world saw as the family’s eccentricity, was stronger than any worries about who got the credit.

  ‘He told me there was one photo of them on the roof line,’ says Hilary Carlisle, ‘and Uncle Ed’s got the hammer and [Uncle Rex] said “It was the only time he picked up the hammer, and then he got the nail crooked.” ’

  ‘Well that’s true,’ agrees Murray Jones. ‘Ed was the organiser, and it took quite a lot of organising to get the materials to where you wanted. Everything had to be carried in—like the corrugated iron; the whole works. That was Ed’s forte and Rex’s forte was the building.’

  We can only wonder how successful the Trust would have been if Rex had been in charge of the organising and Ed in charge of the building.

  Norm Hardie, though he was critical of Ed’s ventures on the Barun Valley and elsewhere, remained on the Himalayan Trust for 22 years. He says one of the reasons he eventually fell out with Ed was that the schools Rex was building weren’t insulated properly.

  ‘I bet you he never said it to my father’s face,’ responds John. ‘Well, Dad isn’t one for punching but I’d like him to show me one thing my father ever built that fell down. Did you ask [Hardie] if he could carry up the materials? The timber and tools, piping? Ask the Sherpas what they thought of their hospitals and schools. Don’t forget these are probably the toughest people in the world and they have been living in those cold conditions all their lives.’

  Ed expressed himself forcefully when he felt moved; but he also at times avoided confrontation and discussion, and it seems that any criticism of Rex—particularly by Norm Hardie—was ignored.

  Any limelight that was shone on the Trust was inevitably directed at its figurehead; and credit did not always go where it was due. ‘It was great with [Mike Gill’s] Himalayan Hospitals book,’ says Sarah, ‘because so many people were finally recognised for their good work. Often everything was focused on Ed and that was a good way to fundraise, but there were all these good people working so hard and they were so passionate.’

  These seem to have been Ed’s happiest times. As Gill points out,
the Trust work marked a time of inevitable change for Ed. ‘He just loved being up there with Mingma Tsering and talking about doing things and making them happen. He loved planning things and he was really good at it. It was a wonderful thing for him, this transition from being an adventurer to being middle-aged, and realising it is getting harder and he has to keep doing famous things, so suddenly he has got this big new project which is open-ended and lasted him the rest of his life.’

  At the end of the day there would be time for a beer and stories. Ed was a wonderful storyteller, but his ability as a raconteur has never quite been done justice in print or in any TV documentary. A Radio New Zealand Spectrum documentary (available online), recording a reunion of Trans-Antarctic Expedition members, reveals Ed in discursive mode among his peers, without the self-consciousness that often bedevilled his appearances on camera.

  Even back home the work and its legacy were a point of pride for Ed. As Maggie Barry described it, ‘he lit up when pointing out the framed picture on the living-room wall of a group of Nepalese children, now grandparents, who attended one of the schools he built there’.

  If you were a family member or friend of Ed’s, he would at least try and inveigle you into some involvement in the Trust’s work. Many people ended up donating months, sometimes years of their own time, bringing their skills to bear in this environment.

  Louise was also active on the Trust’s behalf in Auckland. She brought rugs, crafts and other items back from Nepal and sold them to raise funds. She also gave talks to raise awareness.

  Like their father, the Hillary children developed a social conscience early on in life, sparked by direct encounters with poverty. In Keep Calm If You Can, Louise described their concern about the plight of Tibetan refugees in Nepal. Ed was thrilled when the children set up a stall to raise funds by selling their toys. And in a peculiar foreshadowing of later events with the Trust, there was even a family feud over the use of the money they made; the girls gave it away without consultation, in Peter’s absence.

  ‘At first we found [Nepal] strange,’ says Sarah, ‘but we rapidly started liking it because of course our parents had made friendships, so the people were really kind to us. We were treated like family. We loved it because we went wild, we went feral really. We could run around the hills, we didn’t have to wash very much. The Sherpa people are very warm, they like laughing a lot and they are very strong and active.’

  ‘They were wonderful trips and wonderful family trips,’ says Peter. ‘It has been an incentive for me to try and do similar things with my own kids.’

  Kevin Biggar is a good example of a young person who fell under Ed’s spell and rose to the challenge. His high school raised funds for the Trust and sent students to Nepal to help on the projects there. ‘In my year they sent four students,’ says Biggar, who was one of the four. ‘It was a big commitment—you had to take a whole year off school because the trip was three months of the academic year.’

  As a teenager, Biggar had not hero-worshipped Ed. He hadn’t played climbing Everest when he was little. When Ed spoke at his school, he was more interested in the afternoon tea than in the Famous Mountaineer.

  By the time he got to the Himalayas, though, Biggar was in awe of the great man. This was the period when Ed was New Zealand’s high commissioner in India; but in Nepal he was relaxed and entertaining, singing his trademark maudlin version of There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall, and telling stories of Everest and the Pole.

  Ed’s standing with the local population only increased over the years. According to Louise, even in the early days she had trouble finding competent Sherpa babysitters because they were so in awe of her husband that they could only sit and stare at his children. Many—especially the early pupils at the schools the Trust established—described Ed as a second father. In the words of George Lowe, it was ‘not too much to say many of the locals give him a godlike status’.

  Miracles certainly seemed to follow the opening of the hospital in Kunde in 1966. Many in the region were afflicted with a disfiguring goitre, the result of iodine deficiency, and women with this condition risked giving birth to children with cretinism—severely stunted physical and mental growth. But regular injections of lipiodol remedied both the hypothyroidism and the resulting cretinism.

  In later years Ed did the rounds of the region with a bag of Trust money in the form of US dollars—the universal currency—which he dispensed according to need. He held meetings where locals put their case for donations, and he judged them on their merits.

  ‘I travelled with him and his bag of money,’ says Tom Scott. ‘People came and made petitions and bowed and scraped.’ It was heady stuff. It occurred to Scott that if he were in Ed’s position, it would take only fifteen minutes for him to turn into a not very nice person. ‘He became a living god. He would give this largesse, that largesse, handing out money. He had all this power. Whether that is the best model for aid . . . At least not a penny was creamed off by the officials in Kathmandu.’

  But there were some unforeseen consequences to Ed’s approach. His wish that educated young people would stay in their communities did not come to pass. ‘He knew he was altering something he loved,’ says Scott, ‘but it would be altered anyway, so he tried to alter it the way they wanted to.’

  Lodges were built to cater for the growing number of Westerners wanting to attempt a climb or just visit Everest. As Scott notes: ‘Sherpas, especially the ones who own the lodges, are some of the wealthiest people in Nepal. A lot are moving into Kathmandu, and why wouldn’t you? It’s a big city; the climate’s more benign.’ Other Sherpas were prospering too—such as those who were providing other tourist services and expedition support. Ed himself described the centre of his benevolence as having become the ‘Remuera of Nepal’, referring to the affluent Auckland suburb where he lived.

  The area was becoming depleted, not just of people but also of trees. Deforestation was a problem, caused partly by the boom in tourism: timber was needed to heat water for travellers to bathe with. ‘It almost takes a tree to give an American a shower,’ says Scott. ‘In a very short period of time they stripped the trail on either side of the walk into Tengboche.’

  It may even be that the Trust played a part in the deforestation. Norm Hardie maintains that more timber was used than was necessary in the building projects—timber floors where concrete could have been used, for instance. Hardie berated Ed for accepting a Canadian forestry award under the circumstances. ‘He said the award came with $10,000,’ recalled Hardie.

  Ed realised something needed to be done. ‘He went to see forestry people in New Zealand,’ says Tom Scott, ‘and he asked: What do we do? How do we go about it? The reforestation is such a long-term commitment. A tree there at four years old is only so high and would be much higher in New Zealand. It takes great patience. But they have done it.’

  Three nurseries were established through the Himalayan Trust, and seedlings have been planted since 1984 with positive results.

  The long-term commitment of the Himalayan Trust is one of its key characteristics. Not many benefactors stay involved—as Ed did—with one project for more than 50 years. However, not everyone involved in the Trust would share Ed’s single-minded focus. The downside of such consistent commitment—and an unexpected one for the man once credited with being able to change his plan when it needed to change—was that he could not see alternative opportunities for aid. This would become a major dividing point in later years.

  That was far in the future, though. In 1975, Ed, Louise and sixteen-year-old Belinda were planning to spend a year in Nepal: they would be based in Kathmandu and would build a hospital in Phaplu. Belinda would do her lessons with the New Zealand Correspondence School, and she and her mother intended to learn Nepali—something Ed was never able to do.

  The Trust and its work had brought health, safety and education to the people of Solukhumbu. But to Ed’s family and friends it brought discord and controversy—and the greatest pers
onal tragedy of his life.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CATASTROPHE

  Even sitting here now as a 56-year-old man, in a way I still struggle to come to terms with that. Experiences like that are so shattering that I think you just have to learn to live with it. I don’t think it’s a case of ever really shedding the pain.

  —Peter Hillary, on Foreign Correspondent

  It was to be the beginning of a great adventure. Ed, along with Rex and others on the Himalayan Trust, was building the hospital in Phaplu. On 31 March 1975, Louise and Belinda were due to fly in from Kathmandu to visit Ed on site.

  Louise was a notoriously nervous flyer, especially in small planes. Her description of one nerve-wracking take-off, in Keep Calm If You Can, has a haunting poignancy in retrospect: ‘We taxied up the harbour and just as we were about a quarter of a mile from a bridge stretching across the water we started to take off towards it. I died a hundred deaths immediately and hated all pilots in general for not treating every passenger as a shaking nervous wreck. Of course we lifted smoothly and unhurriedly into the air.’

  On this occasion, Ed stood waiting for his wife and daughter on the airstrip at Phaplu. He grew increasingly worried as time went by with no sign of the plane. When a helicopter hove into view in place of the single engine Pilatus he was expecting, he feared the worst.

  The helicopter brought Elizabeth Hawley. A former Time reporter who had been based in Nepal since 1960, and who would go on to become a mainstay of Ed’s Himalayan Trust, Hawley had been the first of the inner circle to receive the news that the plane carrying Louise and Belinda had crashed.