Born on this date in was 1919 Sir Edmund Hillary, famous for climbing Mount Everest. 10 things you might not know about him:
He was a New Zealander, born in Auckland, where he called home for most of his life. He became the first living New Zealander to appear on the country’s banknotes in 1992.
His mother was a teacher and his father a beekeeper. His mother Gertrude was famous for breeding and selling queen bees. He followed his father into the beekeeping business, which he could work at during the summer to finance his climbing expeditions in the winter.
He was over 6ft tall, although as a child, he was smaller than most of his schoolmates. That, and the fact he lived too far away from his school to take part in after school activities, and was rather shy, meant he didn’t enjoy school much. He took up boxing, which helped him gain confidence as well as getting fit.
He discovered his love for climbing on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu when he was 16. He made his first major climb in 1939 reaching the summit of Mount Ollivier in New Zealand.
He was 33 years old when he climbed Everest. It has been reported that on his way back down he met another mountaineer called George Lowe, and said to him, “Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.”
He seems to have lived a bit of a charmed life, narrowly escaping death several times. During World War II, Hillary served in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, posted to Fiji and the Solomon Islands, where a boating accident left him with severe burns. In 1960, he missed a flight which was involved in the New York Air Disaster, a mid-air collision between two planes that killed all 128 passengers as well as six people on the ground. In 1979, he pulled out of an Antarctic Sightseeing Flight due to work commitments. The flight crashed into Mount Erebus, killing all 257 people on board.
Sadly, his first wife, Louise, wasn’t so lucky. He’d married her soon after he climbed Everest in 1953, although even after that achievement he was too shy to propose himself and got his mother to do it for him. Louise was on her way to join him in Nepal with their youngest child, Belinda, in 1975. Both died in a plane crash just after take off from Kathmandu airport. In 1989, he married June Mulgrew, the widow of his close friend Peter Mulgrew, who'd taken his place on the ill-fated flight in 1979.
Hillary was the first person ever to reach both the North and South Poles as well as the peak of Everest. This has since become known as the ‘Three Poles’ challenge. He also spent five months in the Himalayas on an expedition looking for the abominable snowman/Yeti. Although he found “yeti scalps” in ancient temples, they were found to be from bears and antelopes, and no concrete evidence of the existence of the yeti was found.
He founded the Himalayan Trust in 1960, with the aim of supporting the Sherpa people and building hospitals and schools in remote parts of Nepal. He served as ambassador to Nepal (at the same time as he was New Zealand's High Commissioner to India and Bangladesh) and in 2003 he became the first foreigner to be granted honorary citizenship of Nepal.
Things named after him include The Hillary Coast, south of Ross Island, the Hillary Canyon, an undersea feature in the Ross Sea, the ‘Hillary Trail’, a hiking trail near Auckland, and the ‘Hillary Step’, a near vertical 12-metre high rock face near the summit of Everest. In 2003, a 2.3-metre bronze statue of Hillary was unveiled, by Hillary himself, in Mount Cook Village. A New Zealand duet called The Kiwis recorded a tribute song about him called Hillary 88 which became his official memorial song.
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