CHAPTER 16
As a consequence of living so long, Ed gave more than the usual number of retrospective, valedictory interviews and was subjected to more than the usual number of tributes. Having achieved so much in his early thirties meant that 50-year anniversaries rolled around regularly when he was in his eighties.
If anything could trigger one of his despondent periods, it was a bout of bad health. His health was erratic at best, and dismal when he spent time at high altitudes—something he persisted in doing far past the stage where it was comfortable. But given the problems he had had over the years—the stroke, the altitude sickness, malaria, to name a few—he kept in remarkably good health until not long before his death. He got tired. He forgot things. He had the problems anyone in their eighties is likely to have; but, because he was Ed, people found these everyday things to be noteworthy.
‘Dad was in his seventies and although he was reasonably fit he actually went downhill pretty rapidly after that as a lot of people in their seventies do,’ says Peter. ‘He became isolated; he wasn’t doing all the big stuff anymore. There was still a lot of interest in him because he was this huge personality who had this huge life, and they travelled extensively. But it wasn’t doing the big expeditions and it wasn’t doing the actual buildings—it was like social engagements.’
Ed said he never stopped dreaming of adventures. ‘I’m past carrying out some of the wishes that I would have wanted to do before,’ he told the Listener, ‘but I still dream about what I would like to do if I was able to do so. You know, I’m nearly 88 and so obviously I’m a little bit on the limited side as far as carrying out exciting moments. But I still dream about them; I still spend quite a lot of time thinking about how I would like to do this or that.’
‘He had a punishing schedule,’ says Sarah. ‘Tom Scott went on one of his tours and he couldn’t believe the pace of the interviews, the lectures—it was pretty gruelling.’
Scott became friendly with Ed late in Ed’s life, and he joked that, if they had met any earlier, they wouldn’t have got to know each other at all because Scott wouldn’t have been able to keep up with Ed.
Even the social engagements were planned like mini missions. ‘He just had his systems,’ says Peter. ‘Even after the interviews and the dinners and he’d given the speech, he’d sign a few things, he’d say “hello” to a few people and then bang—he’d be gone. At 9.30 he’d be gone. Everyone would carry on, but he’d go to bed and the next day is another day. The systems enabled him to deal with quite a gruelling schedule.’
Nothing happened to improve relations between the various branches of the family. Hilary Carlisle says Ed was aware of the problem, but wouldn’t deal with it.
‘June is a different sort of person to what I would normally mix with,’ says Peter. ‘So, as so many families around this country would testify, you are there because of the relationship you have with him—not with them but with him. So you know everyone does their best, but sometimes there were good times and sometimes it was more stressful. I think it is not dissimilar to a lot of families. Unfortunately, if anything happened, it would be on the front page.’
It was never a chore for Ed to visit one of the Poles. In 1985 he was invited to the North Pole on a two-week visit in the company of Neil Armstrong, with whom he was often compared. As Peter tells the story, he and his father were having a cup of tea at the Remuera house when Ed said, ‘Would you like to go to the North Pole?’ Yes, he would.
The trip was an extraordinary gathering that also included the balloonist and adventurer Steve Fossett. Peter, who was in some awe at being in Armstrong’s presence, and all too aware of what his father had endured over the years, fought the temptation to ask, ‘What was it like on the moon?’
Peter told ABC Radio his father and the astronaut had amazing conversations, and eventually Armstrong began to talk about the lunar expedition, including the last-minute recalculations that had to be made to ensure a successful landing.
Armstrong, like Ed, had often said he was just in the right place at the right time—next on the list. Ruthless ambition had nothing to do with it. Having seen them up close, Peter concluded that both had made sure they were in the right place at the right time.
Both, of course, also uttered lines that went down in history. Ed himself practised a mild form of revisionism in later life when he supplemented the ‘bastard’ quip by saying to interviewers that he liked to think, not that he had conquered Everest, but that Everest had ‘relented’. It was a much more carefully crafted, statesman-like and sententious response than the words he uttered at the time.
Ed continued his regular trips to Nepal, including the 1991 visit when he developed a severe case of altitude sickness. As Mark Sainsbury observed, Ed knew the score. Travelling at high altitudes was a calculated risk—or, more accurately, a miscalculated risk; but in 1991 he made a rapid recovery and gave the only explanation an adventurer could be expected to give: ‘I have the alternative of lolling on a sun-drenched beach—something I find exceptionally boring—or going off to the Himalayas and meeting friends I’ve known for years and doing something which may have a slight risk, but which for me is very exciting.’
The older you get, the more funerals you go to. Ed attended the obsequies for his old opponent Rob Muldoon when he died in 1992, and even shed a few tears. ‘I cry easily,’ he told an interviewer. ‘I wasn’t one of Sir Robert’s greatest supporters by any means, but there was something about him I had to admire all the same.’
Ed’s admiration for David Lange was never in doubt, and when Lange died, Naomi Lange remembers Ed as a conspicuous figure among many notable New Zealanders at the memorial service: ‘I was talking to Sir Ed while we waited for the service to start. [. . .] I think he was always the same with people—although of immense stature, he was able to put people at their ease by the way he spoke.’
In 1993 Ed travelled to Everest to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the expedition with the surviving team members. Tom Scott was there too. ‘They were all up on stage,’ says Scott. ‘It was a bit like a Last Supper. All these old wizened men and one fairly erect and silver-haired—this Colin Meads figure towering over them all. He looked indefatigable and like, with a bit of training, he could do it again. They had their reunion photos and the Poms all had their Everest-issue jackets, which they had kept because they were historic. But Ed—and this is proof of his lack of historical vanity—had long since lost his. He had worn it beekeeping and it had disintegrated years ago.’ The other team members’ jackets looked as though they had been stored in archival conditions. Ed had to borrow one to wear for a staged photo with John Hunt.
The old imperial/colonial divisions could still be seen. ‘The Poms had regulation army camps, with tents perfectly aligned and structured with their hierarchy,’ says Sainsbury. ‘The Kiwis were off to one side, a bit more ramshackle. The Poms had a mess tent and would dress up. Each side was totally different.’
Old political faux pas dogged Ed into his eighth decade. Tom Scott suggested to National Party Prime Minister Jim Bolger that a 40th anniversary dinner should be held in New Zealand as well. Bolger, citing Ed’s Citizens for Rowling involvement, turned him down. However, Deputy Prime Minister Don McKinnon was more amenable to the suggestion and a dinner adequate to the occasion was held. Ken Richardson, who had shepherded Ed into his appearance on This is Your Life, was a frequent visitor to the house. Sometimes he would visit with Cath Tizard; other times on his own.
‘People knew I had befriended Ed,’ says Richardson, ‘so they asked me to take books to be signed and I took one myself, which he would happily sign. On another occasion I had another book and I told June I would leave it in the letterbox. She phoned me and said “We are going to London for the Garter ceremony.” I said “Okay.” She said “I will leave it in the letterbox and if you are coming past you can collect it.” So I did. There was another inscription and two of the five-dollar notes that have his face on, which he’d signed for me. That was quite moving for me.’
A tsunami of accolades came his way, none more prestigious than the Order of the Garter, the highest order of knighthood that the Queen can bestow. At the ceremony Ed marched in procession with his political polar opposite, Margaret Thatcher, with whom he had nothing in common except an interest in making their mark in remote locations.
The man who bridled at being knighted without his consent 42 years before was happy enough to accept this nod, though again there were difficulties. The honour, it seems, though gratis, would involve substantial disbursements. Ed rang Tom Scott and told him he was worried about how he was going to pay for it. ‘I have to fly to London, get a coat of arms, find accommodation . . . Can you help me?’
‘Yes, Ed, I’ll fix it.’
When Scott hung up, he realised he had no idea how he was going to fix it. So he rang Richard Griffin, who was media adviser to Bolger at the time. ‘Dick, Ed’s got this great honour but it’s really expensive. He’s got to pay for a gown, get a shield designed. It’s a lot of dough.’
‘Leave it with me,’ said Griffin.
About a week later, Griffin rang Scott, ‘and it had all been taken care of. He’d spoken to a merchant bank . . . Air New Zealand. Ed was very grateful. He gave me the credit, but it was really Dick [Griffin].’
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand helped out by donating the fee for his coat of arms, which included an ice axe, a penguin and prayer wheels, plus the motto: ‘Nothing Venture, Nothing Win’.
Ed was also a foundation member of the Order of New Zealand. Other honours that were bestowed on him in his lifetime included the Order of the Gurkha Right Arm, the Everest Medal in gold, the David Livingstone Medal of the Scottish Geographical Society, the American Geographical Society of New York Medal, the Belgium Le Soir Medal, the Geographical Society of Chicago Medal, the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographical Society, Washington, DC, the Cullum Geographical Medal of the American Geographical Society, the John Lewis Gold Medal of the South Australian Branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, the French Geographical Society Medal, and the Distinguished Services to Geography Medal of the Geographical Society of Philadelphia, the Polar Medal and the Fuchs Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, London, the Patron’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, London, the French Order of Sports Merit, the Order of the Golden Ark of the Netherlands, and the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Even his death didn’t put an end to the recognition, with a posthumous Padma Vibhushan (Decoration of the Lotus), awarded by the Indian Government.
There was a fuss about the ownership of some relics being auctioned in 1998. It turned out that on Ed’s Trans-Antarctic run in 1957, some items from Scott’s and Shackleton’s huts had been ‘souvenired’ by John Claydon and were to be auctioned at Christie’s in London. The news offended Ed on many fronts. Most of all, when it came to respecting predecessors and their property, he was fiercely protective, although a ban on such souveniring did not come into effect until the adoption of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, signed by the twelve nations then active in the area.
‘Various members [of the expedition] visited the huts, as I did,’ Ed told the New Zealand Press Association (NZPA), ‘but I certainly never, ever took anything from them. We regarded them as a place of enormous respect really and I didn’t believe there was any effort made to take anything from them.’ Had he known, ‘I think I could have completely stopped it. I was the expedition leader.’ Ed thought the items should have been returned to the huts, but they were donated to the Scott Polar Research Institute in England.
Ed continued to exercise his accustomed candour well beyond middle age. Criticisms that had been muted in Nothing Venture, Nothing Win were louder in View from the Summit, published in 1999. ‘There are some things which I feel now I’m almost approaching 80 I can speak out a little bit more firmly on,’ he told the BBC. ‘I’ve always been careful not to say anything which might offend other members of my expedition. But now I’m not worrying too much about that, telling it like it was.’
He was asked less frequently who got to the top first, but the mystery surrounding George Mallory popped up from time to time, and was given new life when Mallory’s remains were discovered high on Everest’s North Face in 1999. But in the same BBC interview, Ed allowed himself a grunt of annoyance when the question of Mallory being the first man to reach the summit was put to him: ‘Climbing friends . . . in the 1930s, especially Shipton . . . did not feel he got to the top,’ Ed said. ‘Who knows? The big thing is that this discovery of the body hasn’t resolved the problem of whether Mallory got to the top or not. The only thing that will do that is if a camera is found and film is produced showing shots from the summit. One other thing I think all mountaineers will agree—Mallory was a heroic performer. You can’t take that away from him. However, it’s quite important on a big mountaineering expedition not only to get to the top but also to get safely to the bottom.’
The English mountaineering fraternity, in particular, has never quite been able to let go of all hope that Mallory was first to the top. Fortunately, Ed was not alive to hear about Jeffrey Archer’s fictional account of Mallory making it to the top, published as Paths of Glory in 2009.
Ed was also publicly critical of the large number of people who climbed Everest annually, mainly because of the ecological impact they had. By the end of the 2010 season, 3142 people had summited. On the day Peter reached the top for the second time, in 2002, so did 78 other people. In a glaring contrast to the rigours of organising and preparing for the early reconnaissance expeditions and the Hunt expedition itself, an Everest expedition can now be booked by anyone with a personal computer.
‘I don’t think it’s a very satisfactory arrangement,’ Ed told the Listener, ‘because the mountain has been covered with people. Some of them are climbers, some of them aren’t, and so there have been quite a few deaths of people who aren’t very knowledgeable. I tried to persuade the Nepalese Government to restrict the number of teams they had on the mountain, but they get a lot of money out of it—I’m afraid money came before sound advice.’
‘There was an interview with Rob Hall and Gary Ball,’ says Tom Scott, ‘where they criticised Ed and said he didn’t understand modern climbing. They were quite patronising and condescending. His era was over. Ed said people are going to die on these climbing trips. Everest should not be turned into a business.’
A friend told Scott that Ed came across as a fuddy-duddy in his response to Hall and Ball: ‘I was defensive. I said, “I’ll put my money on Ed. He’ll outlive those two. Ed’s knowledge is hard won.” I had no basis for saying that. I was a bit knee-jerk. But within two or three years both had died on the mountain.’
‘He was very hot on people paying 60,000 to go up,’ says Mark Sainsbury. ‘Ed thought this was wrong. One of the reasons was that you’d never be able to leave the climb.’ In Ed’s view, if two climbers are on a mountain and one is injured and likely to die, the other can leave. But if the injured climber has paid the other climber to be their guide, the guide has to stay. ‘Once you start accepting money, you can no longer make the rational decision,’ says Sainsbury. ‘And that is exactly what happened to Rob Hall [who died on the mountain in 1996]. He could have got down—he stayed with his client.’
Kevin Biggar, who had had the good fortune to work in Nepal for the Himalayan Trust while a schoolboy, reappeared in Ed’s life when Biggar and Jamie Fitzgerald were planning their first big adventure—competing in the Woodvale Atlantic Rowing Race. Ed always had time for a young person with an ambitious project in hand.
‘Sir Ed came to the launch of our boat when it had just been completed, and spoke,’ says Biggar. He lent his name as patron to the effort. Ed’s support meant more than money: ‘Having him there meant we got on TV. Having him as a drawcard to come to our launch was fantastic—it meant our sponsors came too. He spoke so well.’
When the pair decided they would walk unsupported to the South Pole, without supplies dropped along the way and taking everything they needed with them, they naturally thought of the world expert on madcap polar exploits and went to see him.
‘He’d always open the front door,’ says Biggar, echoing the surprise of many people that Ed treated his home just like a home. As June brought tea and scones, they told him about their plans for the crossing. ‘He was dismayed that there were no drop-offs. He thought of his own trip, and his mission was the supplies—it was going to be 50 years since his. He thought it would be good to do it first. He had strong feelings about being first.’
Ed again agreed to support the mission. ‘It was generous of him to associate his name with us. If someone asked me the same, I would do a lot more due diligence than he did.’
Ed had acquired a sort of secular semi-divine status at home by now, as Murray Jones couldn’t help noticing. ‘When they had the Hillary exhibition [the Alexa Johnston-curated Everest and Beyond] in Auckland Museum,’ says Jones, ‘when we came out, June was driving him and people would see Ed in the car. They would stop and start clapping at him. That was amazing. I’d never seen that before—genuine New Zealanders in Auckland.’
In public, his harshest words were reserved for those who failed to show the sort of old-fashioned chivalry and grace that was at the core of his character, especially up a mountain or down a crevasse. He had had this attitude from the start—in his description of the Ruth Adams rescue in 1948 there was never a hint of resentment at the situation in which he found himself. He summed up that affair by expressing his pleasure at having the opportunity to see some of the country’s best climbers in action.
‘He thought there was a lack of chivalry on the mountain,’ says Scott. ‘He was from an age where, if you came across someone dying, you would abandon your attempt and get this person down. [His contemporaries] were honourable men. They had a courtliness about them. Hunt was the most gracious man. None of those guys would step over a body.’
So when Mark Inglis, who in 2006 became the first double amputee to summit Everest, reported seeing the dying English mountaineer David Sharp on the climb but not stopping, Ed was incensed. There were some 40 climbers on Everest that day. Accounts of exactly what happened and what, if any, chance Sharp had of surviving differ widely. But everyone agrees Sharp was left to it.
‘In our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever, if one member of the party was incapacitated, that we would just leave him to die,’ said Ed. ‘It simply would not have happened . . . If you have someone who is in great need and you are still strong and energetic, then you have a duty, really, to give all you can to get the man down and getting to the summit becomes very secondary. You can try, can’t you?’
‘The last person in the world who could have rescued anyone was Inglis on his two artificial legs,’ says Tom Scott. ‘He could barely get up there himself. To expect him to do it . . . When I heard Ed, I thought, you don’t need to say that.’
Ed’s last great journey was in the year before he died—an odyssey to Antarctica to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the New Zealand presence that he had helped establish on that continent. Ed was very frail and very determined to make the most of what he certainly knew would be his last visit to one of the places he loved best of all. Attendant media were in awe; in each of them, their desperate desire to make the most of Ed’s presence was waging a fierce war with their respectful acknowledgement that he might deserve to be left in peace.
But Ed didn’t want to be left in peace. He appeared energised once he hit the ice. A promised 20-minute interview with accompanying media turned into 40 spellbinding minutes of anecdotes about his adventures there over the years. It got a standing ovation from the assembled journalists and others who had drifted in during the performance.
Finally, before returning to New Zealand, according to John Henzell in the Christchurch Press, he was granted his wish to spend a night in ‘an old A-frame hut discarded by the Americans and instantly appropriated by the Kiwis to serve as the equivalent of a bach on the ice shelf. He wanted to spend his final night in Antarctica cooking dinner on the same type of Primus stove Scott used and just telling some yarns over a few tumblers of whisky.’ Which he did.
Back home visitors were still welcome. Ken Richardson’s last visit was just a few months before Ed died. He arrived late in the morning to find Ed still in bed. He was received by June, who explained that Ed wasn’t feeling the best. Richardson expected to leave without paying his respects, but Ed made the effort to get up and greet him.
‘He was in shorts and his dressing gown fell off because he was sitting down and I noticed he had these enormous legs. I had never seen legs like that. I am sure Colin Meads has legs like that but Ed’s legs . . . I thought, “God they took him to the top of Everest” and I am not surprised he was picked, because those legs would have carried you anywhere. These were the legs of an 80-year-old-plus man, but they were noticeable.’
When Richardson’s visit came to an end, Ed got up to farewell him. ‘From their lounge you had to go up about three steps to reach the front door. It was very steep and Ed couldn’t make it up those steps. He faltered at the bottom, so June came and said goodbye to me and that was it.’
Invitations to events around the world regularly turned up in the mail. June was always relieved when Ed showed no desire to accept them. He said he didn’t spend much time thinking about the past. The contrast between the gangly powerhouse on Everest and the tired and frail man he had become when he was nearly 90 was depressing. Boredom lurked always in the background. June and Ed filled their days with the routine activities with which most old couples occupy themselves—he had a huge appetite for TV sport, and they went for walks together.
Weighed down with honours, with illness and with years, Ed’s thoughts naturally turned to his inevitable end. ‘I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about dying,’ he told the Listener, ‘but I like to think that, if it did occur, I would die peacefully and not make too much of a fuss about it.’