It should surprise no one that, even half a century after the achievement that carved his name indelibly into history, Ed Hillary remained the New Zealander most admired by New Zealanders.

A survey in 1996 named the conqueror of Everest as the top choice of men and women of all ages and across all ethnic groups - far ahead of any All Black, any political or artistic figure - as the person who best embodied "the spirit and essence" of our small nation.

It was not his achievement as a mountaineer that they honoured. Indeed, in the annals of mountain-climbing history, Hillary's list of achievements were modest, more distinctive for its firsts than its bests.

What lent him status was the fact that he parlayed the makings of an ordinary life into a truly extraordinary one - and showed us in the process that greatness is possible for anyone.

Certainly he was always at pains to underline this. "I discovered," he wrote in the foreword to his 1975 autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, "that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve." Elsewhere he told an interviewer that his life had been "a constant effort to illustrate how a very mediocre person with very mediocre talents which I have can create quite a lot if they really drive themselves."

Few of us would share Sir Ed's self-deprecating assessment of himself as mediocre - it was a word he often used. But, early on at least, his extraordinary life was most remarkable for its ordinariness.

He was born in Auckland on July 20, 1919, of tough Yorkshire stock.

His mother's family had farmed and run a general store in Northland and his father was the son of a watchmaker who as family legend had it, had done well in business in India - the country that would become Sir Ed's second home in later years - and set up a successful jewellery business in Dargaville.

"He bought a few racehorses," Sir Ed later recalled, "and over the next few years successfully disposed of his fortune on the racetrack [so that] by his middle sixties he was almost destitute."

His grandmother, as a result, was forced to fend for the family and Sir Ed says his father, Percy's character was "moulded by this uncertain environment into a mixture of moral conservatism and a fierce independence and pride."

Sir Ed's childhood was in Tuakau, south of Auckland, where Percy - a veteran of Gallipoli - established a weekly newspaper, the Tuakau District News and was well respected by local Maori - "he enjoyed the friendship of Princess Te Puea ... who was renowned for her lack of enthusiasm for most Pakeha."