Sir Edmund Hillary: Beekeeper, Mountaineer, Humanitarian, and the First Person to Stand on the Summit of Mount Everest

Introduction

Few lives in the modern era have combined physical daring, intellectual rigor, and genuine human compassion as completely and as humbly as that of Sir Edmund Percival Hillary. The man who on the morning of May 29, 1953, stood on the highest point on the surface of the earth was not a professional adventurer, not a soldier of empire, not a scion of privilege. He was a beekeeper's son from a small New Zealand township south of Auckland, a quiet and somewhat bookish young man who had discovered the mountains late and loved them completely, and who would spend the better half of a long life ensuring that the Sherpa communities who had made his greatest triumph possible would share meaningfully in whatever prosperity his fame could generate.

The story of Sir Edmund Hillary is, on one level, the story of the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition, one of the most meticulously planned and brilliantly executed mountaineering enterprises in history, culminating in a moment that electrified the world and coincided, with a precision that seemed almost supernatural, with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. On another and deeper level, it is the story of what a person of genuine character does with enormous fame: not hoard it, not perform it, but spend it quietly and persistently on behalf of others. Hillary himself often said, and meant it without false modesty, that the most important thing he had ever done was not climbing Everest at all, but the decades of humanitarian work he carried out in Nepal through the Himalayan Trust. That statement, made by a man who had genuinely reflected on what mattered in a life, reveals the essential character of one of the twentieth century's most remarkable figures.

The coded telegram that carried news of the summit from the Himalayan foothills to London on June 1, 1953 -- designed to appear to the uninitiated as a routine weather report while conveying, to those who knew the agreed cipher, the greatest mountaineering news in history -- was timed to ensure that the information broke on June 2, 1953, the very morning of the Queen's coronation. The effect, across Britain and the Commonwealth, was electric. A war-weary world still adjusting to peacetime received the news that the summit of Everest had been reached as a kind of gift, a sign that human beings, working together with discipline and courage and selflessness, could still accomplish the extraordinary. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa mountaineer who climbed alongside him, became in that instant two of the most famous people on earth. They have remained so, for different reasons and with different trajectories, for every decade since.

This is the exhaustive account of the life and legacy of Sir Edmund Hillary: his origins in rural New Zealand, his discovery of mountaineering, his wartime service, his early Himalayan campaigns, the great expedition of 1953 in all its logistical detail, the summit day itself, and then the long, equally extraordinary second act of a life devoted to the people of Nepal.

Early Life and Family Background

Edmund Percival Hillary was born on July 20, 1919, in Papakura, a small farming community situated in the southern reaches of the Auckland region of New Zealand. His parents were Percival Augustus Hillary, known as Percy, and Gertrude Hillary, born Gertrude Clark. The family was not wealthy, but it was not impoverished; Percy Hillary made his living as both a beekeeper and the editor and publisher of a local newspaper, the Tuakau District News, a combination of occupations that gave the household a flavor of both practical agricultural labor and intellectual engagement.