When Ed Hillary descended from the summit of Mt Everest, the highest point on earth, on 29 May 1953, he was on his first day at a job no one had done before. Conqueror of Everest turned out to be a full-time career. Ed had to work out for himself what the job entailed and how to do it. In many ways, though he was a prodigious planner he spent much of the rest of his life making it up as he went along.
Many books have been written about the life of Sir Edmund Hillary, most of them by Ed himself. After each great adventure, he produced his own account; in all he wrote or co-wrote sixteen volumes. These include the autobiographies Nothing Venture, Nothing Win (1975) and View from the Summit (1999), as well as a memoir jointly authored with his son Peter in which they tell their own, sometimes overlapping, stories in half the book each; and Ed’s accounts of various expeditions and adventures from Everest on. Many of those who went along on one of Ed’s adventures penned their own account of it, sometimes in conjunction with Ed. These include not only Ed’s first wife, Louise (three books) and son Peter (ten books) but such friends and colleagues as Peter Mulgrew, Mike Gill and Desmond Doig, each of whose writing fills gaps in Ed’s own accounts.
So when we told people we were writing this book, most expressed some doubt that the world needed another book about Ed. Then they would invariably add, after a pause, ‘Though all that business with the family is interesting.’ Similarly, when we approached people close to Ed and asked them to speak to us for this book, we could almost hear them silently saying to themselves at the other end of the phone: ‘What—another one?’
We spoke to many people from Ed’s immediate circle, nearly all of them impressive and charismatic individuals in their own right. Many said from the start they didn’t want to talk about the ‘fuss at the Himalayan Trust’ or ‘that business with the watches’ and proceeded to talk at length about the Trust and that business with the watches.
We also encountered at least three people who were willing to speak to us but made it clear they were planning to write their own books on Ed and would be keeping some information to themselves.
Indeed, we wondered ourselves whether another book about Ed was necessary until, having read through his writing and the other biographies, we realised that, although they all did an excellent job of recording Ed’s achievements—and that is no small labour—their emphasis on what he did had not left much room for talking about what he was like. And that is the purpose of this book: to present a picture of Ed in the round.
Inevitably we will revisit his great adventures and expeditions—Everest, the South Pole, Makalu, the great Ganges journey, the time as New Zealand high commissioner to India, and the greatest of all his adventures, his aid work in Nepal through the Himalayan Trust—as the lens through which we view the man.
We will also be exploring the many paradoxes of that character: the individualist who always worked with a team; the lonely boy who ended up loved by millions; the man who could be distant from his own children but is regarded as a surrogate father by thousands of Nepali; the left-leaning thinker who accepted the highest order of chivalry from Queen Elizabeth II; the man behind the legend.
Note: We will refer to Sir Edmund Percival Hillary throughout as Ed because that is how most who knew him, including his surviving children, refer to him and because it reflects the character of the man better than Sir Ed or Sir Edmund or Hillary.