THE RACE TO THE TOP OF THE WORLD

On the 7Oth anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, Robin Ashcroft charts the trials, tragedies and triumphs that led to that pioneering climb and its implications for Britain's place on the world stage

- Robin Ashcroft

Shortly before 11.30am on 29 May 1953, with “a few more whacks of the ice-axe”, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest. Their time at the top was brief – just 15 minutes – but well recorded. Hilary wrote that: “There was no disguising [Tenzing’s] infectious grin of pure delight.” The New Zealander did, though, omit one detail from his original account – that, having summited the world’s highest mountain, soaring to 8,849 metres, he’d had “no choice but to urinate on it”. It’s an odd detail to mention but, as the story of their triumph shows, an important one.

In the seven decades since 1953, more than 6,000 people from many nations have stood on Everest’s summit. At that time, though, it was seen as essentially a ‘British’ mountain, first surveyed from British-ruled India and thus targeted by British mountaineers. And climbing Everest was arguably the last major British imperial project.

The seeds of the story were sown in 1847, when the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India set its sights on the eastern Himalaya. On the distant horizon, 120 miles beyond the Indian-Nepalese border, rose an insignificant summit known to the British initially as Peak XV. It wasn’t until five years later that, following complex calculations, the survey’s ‘Chief Computer’, mathematician Radhanath Sikdar, established that this mountain was the world’s highest. It was named in honour of the previous surveyor general of India, Sir George Everest.

Golden age