Edmund Hillary--A Biography

by Michael Gill

  Then my chance came! … My father and mother were invited to Australia … and would be away for a month. We had completed the extracting of honey from our apiaries but I knew of a small group of hives that still had honey in place. On the departure of my parents, I removed the boxes of honey, extracted it, and filled a number of four-gallon tins. I then put an advertisement in the paper and, as sugar was short in those days, I had a rush of replies. For the first time in my life I had £25 in my pocket, a vast sum of money to me. I spent it carefully, but did take my girlfriend on a weekend holiday to Lake Taupo – we stayed in separate rooms of course.

  I was naïve to think my actions would not be discovered by my father on his return from Australia. He made me give back all the money I had not spent and then paid me nothing for some months … My romance faded, largely due to lack of money I suspect …16

  By 1943, a hard-fought world war was turning in favour of the Allies. Radiant Living was all very well, but Ed had gnawing at him an awareness that his own generation were in the vanguard of the fight against fascism. And Rex was languishing in the Strathmore Detention Centre. What was fair about his contemporaries sacrificing their lives and his brother being in prison while he enjoyed the country pleasures of farming bees? When Ed was called up to serve in the Home Guard, he was disgusted to find himself part of an elderly group who would interrupt a war exercise between ‘enemies’ to have lunch together.17

  By the end of 1943 he could stand it no longer. He applied for the Air Force and in early 1944 was accepted for training at a camp on the eastern edge of the Kaikōura mountains in the north of the South Island.

  – CHAPTER 5 –

  Escape into the Air Force

  In the autumn of 1944, Ed began a six-month training course at the Royal New Zealand Air Force camp in the South Island’s Wairau Valley. To the east the river wound over plains to the sea but inland rose the rugged peaks of the Kaikōura mountains, clothed in dense forest on their lower slopes, rising to tussock and the steep broken rock of the ridges and peaks. In winter thick snow covered the tops. Ed launched himself into his new life with zest, studying flying, playing rugby – and climbing mountains, a pastime which interested very few of his 260 fellow trainees. Given a choice between the warmth of a dance hall or a bar on a Saturday night, not many could see the point in heading off into a dangerous world of snow, ice, avalanches and freezing winds.

  The highest summit in the Kaikōura Range is Tapuae-o-Uenuku, 9465 ft, known affectionately as Tappy and visible from Wellington in the north to Christchurch in the south. When James Cook sailed down the South Island’s east coast in 1770, he noted it in his log as ‘a prodigious high mountain’. And in November 1849, in the first written account of an attempt to climb the peak, a Māori guide, Wiremu Hoepa, slipped to his death on steep ice.1 When Ed mentioned his intention to climb Tappy, a couple of fellow trainees expressed vague interest, but the next three-day weekend saw Ed off on his own, trudging up a gravel road in the dark. It was winter, and he found an isolated farmhouse where the farmer’s wife fed him generously and provided a bed.

  Away early on the Saturday, Ed walked 25 kilometres to enter a sunless gorge winding into the bowels of the mountains, and by late evening he was lighting a fire in a mountain hut alive with mice and fleas. Sunday was summit day:

  By 4 a.m. I’d had only four hours sleep but prepared a quick breakfast and was away before five o’clock. It was dark and very cold as I groped my way across the river bed and up the side of the main ridge … At 7000 feet heavy cloud came over the peak and it snowed quite heavily. I wondered if I should turn back. I was startled to hear what sounded like a thin human voice calling for help … and then realized it was the eerie wail of the native parrot, the kea … A strong cold wind had sprung up … To the west above heavy clouds towered a range of snowcapped peaks. I didn’t know what mountains they were. To the east was the blueness of the sea stretching all the way to Wellington …

  The climbing became a lot harder. I had to make my way across the side of the Pinnacle, a tall rock tower … and felt isolated and a little frightened … I arrived at the last big bump as heavy cloud moved in and was half blinded by drifting snow … I fumbled my way upwards until there was nowhere else to go and then I realized I must be on top.

  Back at camp next day, ‘I listened to the young airmen discussing their social conquests of the evening. But I didn’t care! I’d climbed a decent mountain at last.’2

  Ed, always the dutiful son, regularly wrote letters home. To Percy he wrote about rugby and the bees:

  Dear Dad, I suppose you’ll be very busy from now on keeping all the hives fed. We get plenty of exercise and I rather enjoy it. A week ago we had a special football match, our squadron playing against our sister squadron. I played in the forwards and we managed to beat the other team by 11 points to 6. I obtained a score which rather tickled me. It was a very hard game and towards the end became rather rough. Tempers got a bit frayed amongst the forwards and one of the opposition was especially irate as I had accidentally bashed him in the lineout and made his nose bleed and just about knocked a couple of teeth out. However all was well after the game and all animosity was forgotten. I do rather well in the lineouts due to my height and find small difficulty dominating them.3

  In letters to Gertrude he was more open, and his affection is always apparent:

  Dear Mother … Do you know what I miss most about home? Firstly our good old discussions… you know how I love to talk. And secondly my Sunday mornings in bed when you brought up my breakfast. How I used to revel in the luxury. I can still taste those delicious omelettes and feel the peace of our back garden floating through the window …

  … I think the varied experiences the five of us have had in the last five years will enable us to come together and form a mighty cohesive family team capable of overcoming any problem – this is Dad’s old dream isn’t it and I think it will come to pass. I intend seeing that you and dad get some return for all the love and effort you have put into us …

  … I suppose you’ll be rather short of cash so I’m enclosing £5. Use it for yourself and keep the house going …

  Love, Edmund.4

  In September, the trainees sat their exams. With a motivation he had not known at school or university, Ed had applied himself to flying and navigation with such diligence that he came fourteenth in a class of 260. Where to next? At 25 he was a bit old to be a pilot, so was placed in a special group of 12 going to Bell Block in New Plymouth to train as a navigator.

  In camp Ed shared a bunkroom with 19-year-old co-trainee, Julian Godwin. Julian remembered Ed as ‘affable’, someone who mixed easily with other men, though with women he became suddenly quiet. He had a distinctive ‘drawly’ voice.5 Neither of them drank, smoked or went out with girls. They worked hard at their navigation, read books and listened to the radio which mainly aired popular music. Julian, of English parentage, described Ed as an ‘anglophobe’, an attitude which probably came partly from Percy’s experience in Gallipoli under English leadership, partly from the determinedly egalitarian New Zealand ethic where Jack was as good as his master, if not better. Another Bell Block trainee was Ken Durrant who recalled how on most weekends Ed would set off for Mt Taranaki (then known as Mt Egmont), usually on his own. He also remembered Ed as a table-tennis player whose strategy was always to go aggressively for the winning smash.

  The trainees worked hard on navigation during the week, but between midday Saturday and Sunday evening they were free, and Ed, who was always trying to persuade others to join his expeditions, was soon working on Julian, who in 2014 wrote:

  We’d been at Bell Block for a fortnight when Ed broached the idea of climbing Mount Taranaki. Although I’d done no serious climbing, or even tramping, I didn’t take much persuading. By repute I knew Ed had spent his spare time at the Wairau camp climbing nearby peaks.

  The approach march began on bikes, hot pedaling on dusty roads, and then on foot. Ed set a cracking pa
ce. We must have just passed the halfway mark when a cold wind came up with cloud obscuring everything. The track was never-ending and the wind got stronger and more icy by the minute. After two hours the hut was not in sight and visibility was down to just a few yards. The wind, fresh from its journey across the Tasman Sea, blew and flapped our wet clothes around our cold bodies as we discussed whether to turn back. Then we heard a clang, the sound of a loose sheet of corrugated iron. The wind was giving us a signal where to find the hut.

  Morning came with no sign of any let-up, the wind still strong from the west, so we admitted defeat and stumbled back down the track.6

  About a month later, Ed managed to talk the transport section into supplying a driver and a canvas-top personnel truck for another assault. This time eight aspirants would be involved in a Sunday attempt to reach the summit. Ed’s team of beginner mountaineers were wearing Air Force-issue boots with smooth leather soles of the sort that can send the wearer slithering to his death when a change in the weather turns wet snow to ice, but on this occasion all survived. Ed climbed the mountain in total seven times, enough to inspire Flying Officer Auld, a member of the New Zealand Alpine Club, to propose him for Associate Membership, the preliminary to the sought-after Full Membership.

  When the exam results came through, Ed learnt that he had come second in his group of 12 trainee navigators, and that at the end of February he would be flying to Lauthala Bay in Fiji to navigate Catalina float planes. His pay would rise to £5 10s a week, of which he promised £3 to Gertrude.

  A second encounter with the Hermitage–Mt Cook area

  Before the move to Fiji, the trainees had their Christmas break from 18 to 31 December 1944. Feeling the need to test himself on more difficult peaks than Tappy or Taranaki, Ed set off for the Mt Cook region accompanied by two coerced companions who dropped out in Christchurch before they had even caught sight of a mountain.

  The high peaks of the central Southern Alps that cluster around Aoraki-Mt Cook, 12,218ft, can be intimidating. On the scale of other ranges in the world they are not high, but their abiding feature is the fierce weather that sweeps in from the north-west driven by stormforce winds, dumping huge amounts of rain in the forests and snow on the mountains. The snow compacts into ice which flows down the higher slopes, seamed with crevasses, until steepening into the chaos of an icefall. The incessant, reverberant thunder of avalanches from these breaking walls of ice is a constant reminder of the mountains’ dangers.

  Ed’s intention was to ascend the Hooker Glacier on the western flanks of Mt Cook and to examine its routes on that side, all of them steep, icy and exposed. He had some ‘very ambitious plans’ that now had to be realised on his own. Although he never said as much, one suspects that among those very ambitious plans might have been an attempt on Cook itself. His experience was of the benign peaks of the Sealy Range five years earlier; now, as he stepped out of the bus in view of the ice-clad walls of Mts Cook and Sefton, he sensed a challenge infinitely more daunting than his climb of Ollivier.

  Ed’s diary describes how he made his way to Hooker Hut en route to Mt Cook on the first day:

  Packed my rucksack with food and clothes for a week. And what a load it made, at least 80lbs … The view is stupendous with great peaks soaring up on all sides. The only noise to break the stillness was the rumble of avalanches from the hanging glaciers on Cook and Sefton, the crash of rocks tumbling down the precipices, or the swish of some rubble on the glacier sliding down into a subterranean depth.

  I set off up the glacier. It looked very treacherous and I was too nervous to venture any distance out on it by myself. At 4.30 p.m. I was right up at the foot of Mt Cook … Very tired back at hut but a sumptuous repast of sausages, chips and onions made me feel better …7

  By the morning he had decided to leave Mt Cook for another day. Looking around for an easier peak, he saw to the west on the Main Divide Mt Footstool, 9078ft, reached by a steep ridge flanked by icefalls, and with a tiny hut halfway up known as Sefton Bivvy. Ed was uncomfortably aware that though Footstool might be easier than Cook, it still had a threateningly big-mountain feel to it, and he was tired and lacking in energy. Having finally reached the bivvy which was half full of snow, he debated whether to go on. The slopes above were avalanching. The route looked impossible. Descent was the only option, and even then he had a short fall. ‘Very lucky,’ he wrote in his diary.

  Chastened by his second tactical retreat, Ed realised that the only options open to an untrained solo climber lay to the east, on the gentler peaks of the Sealy Range which included his old friend Mt Ollivier. Next day he climbed to the Mueller Hut: ‘Very hot day and heavy pack. Needed frequent rests … toiled through steep soft snow … It’s a bit lonely by yourself.’

  Late on the following day he was glissading down steep shingle slopes to arrive at The Hermitage Hotel on Christmas Eve. ‘There’s a big crowd here and I feel very neglected all by myself. This solitary trip is no good. I enjoyed the five days I’ve had but that’s about all I can stand of my own company in one stretch.’8 Christmas Eve is not the best night of the year to be overwhelmed by loneliness. Despite his ‘very ambitious’ hopes, there had been no advance on the trip in 1940 when he’d seen those two fit and tanned climbers just returned from Mt Cook. He had been overwhelmed by these mountains with their fearsome slopes of steep ice. He needed companions, skills, experience. He finished his diary entry for the 24th with the words, ‘I’m coming here again though …’

  Meanwhile, he was returning to the disparate worlds of the Royal New Zealand Air Force in the Pacific, Radiant Living with Gertrude, and beekeeping with Percy.

  He wrote to Gertrude:

  In Christchurch I spent two very pleasant days at the Theosophical Conference … They wanted me to lecture to the conference but unfortunately I had to leave too soon … I hope it won’t be too long before I’m back with you all again and moving once more in the old spiritual atmosphere.

  I prepared a lecture using experiences I had on my holiday as illustrations. I’ve entitled it, Footsteps on the Path.

  The footsteps he wrote about were in the steep snow on Footstool, and he gave his lecture the title ‘Great was my indecision’. He finished with a short paragraph entitled ‘Children of Eternity’:

  We are one with eternity and as such have no beginning and will know no ending. Humanity’s great strength of life flows on slowly improving, slowly developing characteristics of beauty, godliness, learning to express outwardly the external truth of which they are spiritually a part. A great inevitable, unquenchable wall of flame that will in time devour all the dross of life and leave him spiritually purged and cleansed – the true child of Eternity.9

  Serving in the Pacific

  Like Percy going to Cairo in 1914, Ed was filled with excitement as he contemplated new adventures in exotic places. Halfway to Fiji in February 1945, the lumbering Sunderland passenger flying boat emerged from cloud into bright sun over an azure sea. Fiji itself was white-sand beaches, surf breaking on reefs, and inland forests. The war seemed distant, with both the Japanese and the Germans on their way back to where they came from.

  The Air Force Catalina flying boats were central to the adventure. Designed initially in 1935 as patrol bombers for the American Air Force in the Pacific, they became one of the most widely used seaplanes of the Second World War. With their snub nose, boat-shaped hull, panoramic windscreens and slow flight, they looked too ungainly to be of use, but they were extraordinarily versatile. Their landing field was the whole of the Pacific. They could detect and destroy submarines, land beside and rescue aircrew shot down at sea, go on 15-hour reconnaissance flights, escort convoys. Painted black, they successfully attacked Japanese ships at night – though by 1945 the Japanese had been driven a long way north of Fiji, and Victory in Europe was only three months away.

  For four months Ed worked as a navigator on flights out of the Catalina base at Lauthala Bay close to Suva on the main island of Fiji. The navigator wa
s of crucial importance on long, slow flights, particularly when out of range of the radio beacons close to base. Between flights he had time to read, think and write long letters home:

  We’ve been doing a lot of night flying lately and I rather like it even though it entails a lot of hard work for me. On our last trip we crossed 600 miles of empty ocean to three small islands near New Caledonia and then returned making a round trip of 1200 miles. We flew at 9000ft and it was pretty cool but very calm. Below us stretched in every direction tumbled layers of cumulus cloud sharply outlined in the bright moonlight. I spent most of my time bashing away at the stars with my sextant and getting fix after fix. We had to cross 600 miles of ocean and then hit a small peninsular only 1½ miles wide but I managed to hit right in the middle of it.

  One of the islands is an active volcano and we zoomed over it at 9000ft. The crater was just like a great glowing cigarette end with every now and then sparks flying up as red hot boulders were thrown in the air. It seemed strange to me as we flew along in the cool, still air that on those little islands lying dark and quiet beneath us people were sleeping and dreaming. Here were we, unlimited by time or terrain, covering huge distances while these people build their whole lives out on these tiny specks of dust surrounded by nothing but hundreds of miles of ocean … High altitudes seem conducive to philosophical thought and I often turn thoughtful as we roar along a couple of miles above the sea.10