Edmund Hillary

Edmund Hillary was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 20 July 1919, to Percival Augustus Hillary, a former soldier and journalist, and Gertrude Hillary. The following year the family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, where Percy had been given land as a returned serviceman and started a weekly newspaper before turning to beekeeping. Edmund had an older sister, June, and a younger brother, Rex.

Hillary finished primary school two years early and attended Auckland Grammar School, commuting more than three hours a day by train and bicycle until the family relocated to Remuera in 1935. He was small and shy as a boy, excluded from after-school activities by the long commute, but grew to over six feet tall and gained confidence through boxing.

A school trip to Mount Ruapehu in 1935 sparked his interest in the outdoors, and he soon preferred tramping to schoolwork. He studied mathematics and science at Auckland University College but abandoned formal study after two unsuccessful years, joining his father and brother in the family beekeeping business, tending as many as 1,600 hives and working the honey harvest in summer while devoting winters to climbing.

In 1939 Hillary made his first significant ascent, reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier near Aoraki/Mount Cook in the Southern Alps. Climbing introduced him to lasting friendships, including Harry Ayres and George Lowe, whom he later described as his first real friends.

At the start of the Second World War, Hillary briefly applied to join the Royal New Zealand Air Force but withdrew the application. With conscription introduced and the Japanese threat growing in the Pacific, he joined the RNZAF in 1943 as a navigator, serving with No. 6 and No. 5 Squadrons on Catalina flying boats. In 1945 he was posted to Fiji and the Solomon Islands, where he was badly burned in an accident.

After the war Hillary returned to mountaineering in New Zealand, joining a team that climbed the south ridge of Aoraki/Mount Cook in January 1948. That same year he took part in a difficult rescue on La Perouse, during which he became friends with fellow climber Norman Hardie.

His growing reputation led to an invitation onto the 1951 British reconnaissance expedition to Everest, led by Eric Shipton. In 1952 he and George Lowe joined a British attempt on Cho Oyu; when the expedition failed to find a viable route from Nepal, the pair crossed into Tibet via the Nup La pass and reached a camp previously used on the mountain's northern side.

Nepal's restriction on Everest expeditions to one or two per year, combined with Chinese control over the Tibetan approach since 1949, made access difficult. A Swiss team including Tenzing Norgay had come close to the summit in 1952 but was turned back by weather and oxygen equipment failure. In 1952 Hillary and Lowe were invited to join the 1953 British expedition, ultimately led by John Hunt after Shipton was replaced; Hunt drew Hillary into a small planning group alongside Charles Evans.

The expedition involved more than 400 people, including hundreds of porters and Sherpa guides. Lowe prepared the steep Lhotse Face for climbing, while Hillary helped forge a route through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall. Hunt selected two summit pairs: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, and Hillary and Tenzing. On 26 May, Bourdillon and Evans came within about 300 feet of the top before an oxygen system failure forced their retreat.

Hillary and Tenzing set out from the South Col on 28 May with support from Lowe, Alfred Gregory, and Ang Nyima, pitching a high camp before their companions descended. The next morning, after thawing his frozen boots, Hillary led the final push, including up a steep rock face later named the Hillary Step. At 11:30 am on 29 May 1953, the two men reached the 29,028-foot summit, the first climbers confirmed to do so, spending about fifteen minutes there before descending.

News of the achievement reached Britain on the day of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and was celebrated as a coronation gift. Hillary had already been made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and Hunt a Knight Bachelor, while Tenzing, ineligible for a British knighthood as a Nepalese citizen, received the George Medal and Nepal's Star of Nepal.

Hillary continued climbing in the Himalayas through further expeditions in 1956, 1960 to 1961, and 1963 to 1965, ultimately reaching ten more peaks. He also led the New Zealand section of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, reaching the South Pole overland on 4 January 1958, the first overland party to do so since Amundsen and Scott decades earlier and the first to use motor vehicles.

In 1960 he organised the Silver Hut expedition with physiologist Griffith Pugh to study high-altitude acclimatisation, and the same period included an unsuccessful attempt on Makalu and an investigation into reported evidence of the Yeti, which turned up no supporting proof. In 1985 he flew with Neil Armstrong to the North Pole, making him the first person to have stood at both poles and on the summit of Everest.

From 1960 onward, Hillary focused increasingly on supporting the Sherpa communities of Nepal through the Himalayan Trust, which he founded and led until his death, overseeing the building of numerous schools and hospitals. He also served as honorary president of the American Himalayan Foundation and of Mountain Wilderness, organisations dedicated to Himalayan welfare and mountain conservation.

Hillary's public life extended into diplomacy and politics. He supported the Labour Party's 1975 campaign, and from 1985 to 1988 served as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, concurrently covering Bangladesh and Nepal. He married Louise Mary Rose in 1953, and the couple had three children, Peter, Sarah, and Belinda; Louise and Belinda died in a plane crash near Kathmandu in 1975. He later married June Mulgrew in 1989.

Hillary received extensive honours, including appointment as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1953, membership of the Order of New Zealand in 1987, and the Order of the Garter in 1995. Nepal granted him honorary citizenship in 2003, the first foreign national to receive it, and his portrait has appeared on New Zealand's five-dollar note since 1992.

Hillary died of heart failure in Auckland City Hospital on 11 January 2008 at the age of 88, having suffered a fall in Kathmandu the previous year. New Zealand flags were lowered to half-mast, and he was honoured with a state funeral at St Mary's church in Auckland following a lying-in-state at Holy Trinity Cathedral. Most of his ashes were later scattered in the Hauraki Gulf, with a portion taken to a Nepalese monastery near Everest.