The 1953
commemorative supplement | Video:
The Times scoop | The
Times report | Sir
Edmund Hillary in his own words - 1953 | Graphic:
conquering Everest | Obituary
| Blog:
Everest in shade
“Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned May twentynine stop awaiting
improvement stop all well.”
The message may sound like the announcement of failure. In fact, it was an
elaborate journalistic code, worked out by The Times in 1953, to
convey exactly the opposite message. When decrypted, the message read:
“Everest Climbed Hillary Tenzing May 29”.
The message had been sent by a 27-year-old Times subeditor, James (now
Jan) Morris, the only journalist to accompany the 1953 expedition. From base
camp, it was taken by runner to a police post with a radio transmitter 30
miles (48km) down the mountain at Namche, from where it was transmitted to
Kathmandu. From there the British Embassy wired it to London. It reached The
Times at 4.14pm on June 1. The news of the first ascent of Everest duly
appeared in The Times on June 2, 1953, the day of the Queen’s
Coronation.
Conquering Everest was an astonishing human achievement, but on a lesser
scale, it also represented a remarkable journalistic coup, an unparalleled
scoop involving personal courage, ingenuity and some extremely canny
journalistic plotting. The 1953 expedition was, in part, sponsored by The
Times, which obtained exclusive rights of publication in return for a
fee. The newspaper had been associated in the same way with earlier attempts
to scale the peak, including George Mallory’s ill-fated attempt in 1924.
Morris, theTimesjournalist selected to accompany the expedition as
special correspondent, was a former soldier and intelligence officer who was
working as a subeditor on the foreign news desk. Morris, needless to say,
was thrilled to be offered the journalistic break of a lifetime. “I wish
that Morris didn’t look quite so pleased,” the foreign editor had remarked.
“I think I was selected because everyone else was about 80 years old,” Jan
Morris said yesterday from her home in Wales. “I was young and fit, and
really very ambitious.”
AlthoughThe Times had secured exclusive reporting rights, other
newspapers and reporters, inevitably, were on the scent, most notably Ralph
Izzard of the Daily Mail and Colin Reid of The Daily Telegraph.
Both had travelled to Kathmandu, with instructions to intercept the news, if
possible, and spoil The Times’s scoop. Competition for the story,
Morris predicted, would be “ruthless and unremitting”.
The nearest telephone to the summit was 180 miles away, so getting the news
back to London would require elaborate planning; carrier pigeons were
considered, as was lighting a fire beacon on the mountain, or floating a
message in a watertight container down a river into India. None was
considered reliable. “One enthusiast even wondered if use might not be made
of those strange powers of telepathy for which Tibetan sages are allegedly
noted,” Morris wrote. Sadly, news editors are notoriously sceptical about
the reliability of sending news copy by telepathy, so that plan was also
scotched.
On his arrival, Morris discovered that the Indian Government had set up a
small police post (to keep an eye on communist Tibet) at Namche with a radio
link to Kathmandu. This would clearly be the quickest way to relay the news.
Rival journalists, however, had come equipped with powerful wireless
receivers, and there was a danger that the messages might be intercepted, or
even that they might somehow bribe the local radio operators to get The
Times’s report.
It was decided to draw up a code, similar to those used during the war, in
which the message of success could be concealed within one of failure. If
Morris wired “South Col Untenable”, for example, that would mean George Band
had made the ascent; if the message said: “Awaiting improvement”, that
signified Tenzing had made the successful ascent, and so on. “Snow
conditions bad” indicated success.
Before the final assault, Morris sent regular reports by runner with rewards
on a sliding scale: £10 if the journey was completed in eight days, but £30
if the runner achieved it in six. In The Times house journal, Morris,
who would change sex in 1972 and achieve huge fame as the writer Jan Morris,
gave an account of the journey, describing the oversized insects and meals
of “snowman pie”: chopped yak meat embedded in mashed potato. “Excellent if
indigestible”.
On May 30, Morris was with the climbing party at Camp IV, at an altitude of
22,100ft, anxiously awaiting news of the two men, Hillary and Tenzing, who
made the final assault. Morris later described the wait as “a decidedly
predentist feeling”. When Hillary and Tenzing finally appeared at 2.30pm the
expedition leader John Hunt recorded: “When we realised by their
unmistakable gestures that they had been to the top, we temporarily went
mad.”
“It was moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that the hot tears sprang to the eyes
of most of us,” wrote Morris. But there was little time for celebration, for
Morris was on a strict deadline. “In a moment of wild optimism,” Morris
reflected, “The Times could conceivably print the news on the
very day of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation.”
Morris sat with Edmund Hillary in his tent (the great climber would later
become godfather to one of Morris’s sons) while the conqueror of Everest ate
an omelette and described the experience.
“Edmund Hillary was a really good man,” Jan Morris said yesterday. “His life
had such a wonderful shape. It was a colossal life, and a moral life, that
had at its core a lifelong obligation to the Sherpa people. He was the very
opposite of a celebrity.”
The young reporter then set off down the mountain, accompanied by the
mountaineer Michael Westmacott. “We stumbled and slithered our way through
the ice blocks,” he wrote. “The dark was coming on and I was fairly
exhausted, often losing my footing on the crumbly ice, getting entangled
with the rope, or tottering on the brinks of crevasses.”
History does not record whether any of The Times’s rivals managed to
intercept the message and believed it to be as nonnewsworthy as it seemed.
In London it was decided that the Queen-to-be could be informed ahead of
publication, on the eve of her coronation. The next day, The Times
described the feat as “a tribute of glory” to the new Queen.
Under normal circumstances such a scoop would have been kept back until later
editions, to prevent other newspapers from copying it, but the fact that
Everest had been finally conquered was so momentous it was decided all Times
readers should know about it. Morris’s dispatch ran through all editions.
Back on the slopes of Everest, Morris first discovered that the ruse had
worked and his message had got through safely, and exclusively, when he
heard the news on the BBC World Service. Hillary remarked of his
achievement: “Well, we knocked the bastard off.”
Morris was more lyrical. His triumphant article in The Times on June 2
concluded with a celebratory paean to more than 16 men who had previously
died attempting to climb Everest.
“Today, high above the rugged Nuptse ridge, Everest looks as surly, as
muscular, as scornfully unattainable as ever: but after 30 years of
endeavour the greatest of mountains is defeated, and many are the ghosts and
men far off who share the triumph.”
Everest: man and the mountain
High history
1848 Andrew Waugh, Surveyor General of India, identifies “peak b” as
possibly the highest mountain in the world. In Tibet, the mountain is called
Chomolungma and in Nepal Sagarmatha
1854 “Peak b” is renamed ?Peak XV
1856 Despite huge problems, Waugh measures Peak XV at 29,002ft
1865 The Royal Geographical Society officially adopts Mount Everest as
the mountain’s name, after Sir George Everest, first Surveyor-General of
India. Everest himself is reported as favouring a local name
1904 The first photograph of Everest is taken from a Tibetan village 94
miles away
1913 A British Army captain, travelling in disguise, comes within 40
miles of Everest
1920 The Dalai Lama opens Tibet to foreigners. A British party explores
a route to Everest from the north
1921 The first attempt by the British to climb the mountain ends in
failure
1922 Everest claims its first lives as seven Sherpas die in an
avalanche
1950s An Indian survey measures Everest at 29,029ft
The 1953 expedition
1952
July Eric Shipton, the man originally chosen to lead the expedition, is
forced out
September John Hunt, a relatively unknown military man, gets the job
and sets about stemming incipient mutiny by Shipton supporters and preparing
for the climb
November 5 Selection of party completed
1953
Second half of January Packing starts at Andrew Lusk, Wapping Wall,
London
January 20 Final equipment coordination meeting with trying-on of
clothing etc
February 5 Final party conference
February 12 Main party and baggage sail to India
February 20 Advance party flies to Kathmandu
March 8 Expedition and baggage assemble at Kathmandu
March 27 Both parties at Thyangboche
April 12 Icefall party reaches Base Camp (17,900ft)
The climbers
Leader John Hunt 42, Charles Evans 33, Tom Bourdillion 28, Alfred Gregory 39,
Edmund Hillary 33, George Lowe 28, Michael Westmacott 27, Charles Wylie 32,
George Band 23, Wilfred Noyce 34, Michael Ward 27 (doctor). Griffith Pugh
and Tom Stobart were sponsored to join the expedition by the Medical
Research Council and Countryman Films Ltd Twenty Sherpas, including Tenzing,
joined the party in Kathmandu
Ups and downs of the climb
During the campaign the mountain was climbed many times over, as supplies were
ferried up to support the final assault parties. Hillary had climbed three
and a half times the height of Everest by the time he reached its summit
The size of the problem
Everest’s five and a half mile-high bulk would completely dwarf Central
London. The vertical distance from Base Camp to the summit is over two miles
– the distance from St Paul’s Cathedral to Buckingham Palace
