Sir Edmund Hillary
Cover
‘I do like to sort of succeed’
by Maggie Barry
Continued from page 7...
I said, “That’s very kind of you”, so he got his morning dress out and I tried it on and I discovered that the shirt had a tear right down the back. I said, “This one wouldn’t be any good, would it, going through the palace with this tear?” but he said, “Nobody’s going to look at the back of your shirt.”
He was a good bloke and so I wore it and nobody did look at the back of it, but following that, when George [Lowe] and I entered the back gate of Buckingham Palace I started walking ahead of George and in front of me was a very smartly dressed gentleman and this gentleman had a very nice walking stick. I was following along behind him and he was swinging his stick. He’d go one, two, three and over, and I was rather taken with this, so I started doing the same with the umbrella I had.
So I walked along behind him – one, two, three and over it went, you see – and he unfortunately turned around and saw me doing this; and he wasn’t particularly pleased with that, because I was just a rough little farmer from New Zealand. But I was not going to be put off by that so I did a particularly energetic one, two, three and the umbrella came apart and flew past this chap and I was just left holding the handle of the umbrella.
I will always remember that. I thought it was incredibly funny, and so did George, I might say, too. But this very distinguished gentlemen didn’t think it was funny at all. You know George and I were constantly meeting the upper crust of society but it didn’t mean anything to us. I mean, it was Lord This and so-and-so this but it was just people.
Was there anyone that you were in particular awe of when you met, or did you just treat them all the same, as it were?
No, I regarded everybody much the same, to be honest with you.
JUNE: The Queen? You admired the Queen.
ED: Oh yes, the Queen was charming. I’m definitely a Queen supporter. She was great. And I’ve met her many times since, and I think she’s a very fine lady.
JUNE: Let me tell the story of when we went to the Albert Hall. Just recently we went to the ballet and we were upstairs – they had an eating place upstairs. It was quite modern for there, with glass between you and looking down, and Ed put his stick down – the stick that he uses – and we were eating, then he leant over and said, “My stick has fallen through”, and I thought, “Oh my God” – so I went racing downstairs and here was this man with this bloody wound on his head, mopping it, and all his cuff links and his cuffs and everything, and he said something had fallen on his head.
He was very calm, nice about it, and they’d sent for somebody in. They didn’t sort of look to see why, and so I said, “My husband’s coming down” (somewhat reluctantly, I think, he was coming down). And the chap’s wife came up and said, “It’s absolutely outrageous, it’s disgusting” and this sort of thing. She went berserk. And Ed came along and the guy looked up and he said, “Well, if it’s Sir Edmund Hillary, I don’t mind.”
There’s been a record number of people climbing Everest this year. What are your views on what that might do to the environment?
I don’t think it’s a very satisfactory arrangement, 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 from 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.
Do you think that you and Tenzing had the best of it?
Undoubtedly. For one thing we were the first, and it’s always nice to be first – that gave us a great sense of satisfaction. We didn’t even think about all the problems on the mountain particularly. We weren’t confident that we could go to the top but we knew that we were going to give it a jolly good go, and so it turned out to be.
For many years you let the world believe that perhaps Tenzing got to the top before you did. Can you explain why you didn’t want to talk about that level of detail until after Tenzing passed away?
Well, we were good friends. We worked together. I knew we had both contributed to the getting to the top and I respected Tenzing for that. But I guess it was the fact that he had this wish for success. He really had a greater desire for success than I did. When we actually got to the top, he was overwhelmed.
