Edmund Hillary

Edmund Hillary was born on 20 July 1919 in Auckland, the son of Percival (Percy) Hillary and Gertrude Clark. His father, a veteran of the First World War, worked as a journalist and beekeeper. In 1920 the family moved to Tuakau, south of Auckland, where his father was allocated land as a returned soldier. Hillary attended primary school in Tuakau and then Auckland Grammar School.

At sixteen he became interested in mountaineering after a school trip to Mount Ruapehu. He studied at Auckland University College and worked with bees. His first major climb was Mount Ollivier near Aoraki/Mount Cook in 1939. In the Second World War he served as a navigator in the Royal New Zealand Air Force and in 1945 was injured in an accident in the Solomon Islands.

After the war Hillary climbed in New Zealand's Southern Alps; in January 1948 he climbed the south ridge of Aoraki/Mount Cook with others. In 1951 he took part in a New Zealand expedition to the central Himalaya and in a British reconnaissance of the southern flank of Everest under Eric Shipton, and in 1952 in an attempt on Cho Oyu.

In 1953 he was part of the ninth British Everest expedition under John Hunt, an undertaking of over four hundred people, including 362 porters and twenty Sherpa guides. After Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans had reached the South Summit without gaining the main summit, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the top on 29 May at about 11:30. They stayed there for about a quarter of an hour.

From 1955 to 1958 he led the New Zealand party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition under Vivian Fuchs. His team built Scott Base; on 4 January 1958 he reached the South Pole overland by tractor. In later years came a jet-boat expedition up the Ganges (1977) and, in 1985, a landing at the North Pole.

After the Second World War expeditions carried strong symbolic value. British teams had tried to climb Everest since 1921. In 1949 Chinese-controlled Tibet closed the old northern route, and Nepal admitted only one or two expeditions a year, which made the southern route important.

The 1953 expedition coincided with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June 1953; the news reached Britain around that day and Hillary was knighted. Around the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958), Antarctica was also the focus of scientific and national expeditions.

The Himalayan Trust, which Hillary founded in 1960, built, together with Sherpa communities in the Khumbu region, more than twenty schools (the first, at Khumjung, opened in June 1961), hospitals and clinics, bridges and water pipelines. In 1964 an airstrip was built at Lukla, improving access to the Everest region. Since 2008 the airport has been named Tenzing–Hillary Airport.

Hillary was knighted in 1953 and received the Order of the Garter in 1995. From 1985 to 1988 he was New Zealand's High Commissioner to India (also to Bangladesh) and ambassador to Nepal. In 2003 he became an honorary citizen of Nepal. Since 1992 his portrait has appeared on the New Zealand five-dollar note.

There is a well-known question about the order at the summit. In 1953 Hillary and Tenzing presented the climb as a joint achievement of the whole expedition; the leader, John Hunt, stated that they had reached the top together, as a team. In his 1955 autobiography, recorded by James Ramsey Ullman, Tenzing wrote that Hillary was the first to set foot on the summit.

Hillary died on 11 January 2008 in Auckland of heart failure, aged 88, and was given a state funeral on 22 January 2008. His first wife Louise and daughter Belinda died in 1975 in a plane crash near Kathmandu, on their way to join him at Phaphlu, where he was helping to build a hospital. The Himalayan Trust still exists.