Museum curator: Britain roots for Mallory

George Mallory. Photo / Supplied

The experience of Sir Edmund Hillary biographer and museum curator Alexa Johnston underlines the British enthusiasm to see George Mallory as the first man to the top of the world.

Johnston says the 2003 Auckland Museum Exhibition, Hillary: Everest and Beyond, was the first major exhibition about the explorer and the people around him. It travelled to the United States, Australia and Japan.

"We offered that exhibition to a number of British museums and they all weren't interested. They all said, 'We would like a show about Everest; not about Hillary'. I think there is a lingering, slight disgruntlement that it was a New Zealander and not a British guy who got to the top."

If it turned out that Mallory, who was a great climber and a driven man, did make it, the British would be triumphant."

She reckons Sir Ed would not have been "desperately distressed", if a Mallory-Irvine first ascent was proven.

She says Wilfrid Noyce, a member of the successful 1953 team, recalled Hillary saying at the South Col, after Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had returned from the summit, "Wouldn't Mallory be pleased to know about this?"

Says Johnston, "Ed was very aware that he was able to climb the way he was because others had tried, because so many others had tried.

"It was a huge joint effort, but because we live in an age where we want winners and losers and we want people to be on pedestals and others clustered around the base of them, their achievement turned into very much a one-person or two-person thing, and of course it wasn't..."

But if Hillary holds less fascination for Britain than does Everest, Britons' interest in the 1924 expedition seems undimmed and was last year fuelled by Jeffrey Archer's fictionalised account of Mallory's life, which portrayed him as "the first man to stand on top of the Earth".

The British Mountaineering Council reports that between last September and January, museums have staged the "first major exhibition since 1999" devoted to the Mallory-Irvine story.

The Mountain Heritage Trust led the creation of an exhibition to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest and has overseen a £30,000 ($64,083) project involving four universities - financed in part by the Heritage Lottery Fund - to recreate the wool, silk and cotton clothes used by the Mallory team.

Many believe that mountaineering gear in 1924 just wasn't good enough to permit a climb to the summit of Everest. One of the key differences by 1953 was the use of down garments, which were lighter and warmer.

But the heritage trust says the Mallory replica clothing project aims to "challenge the conventional view that Mallory's clothing and equipment were inadequate" for the task. The replicas are based on scientific analysis of textile fragments taken when Mallory's body was found in 1999.

"They demonstrate how effective they would have been at providing protection at altitude, and have been rigorously laboratory tested for comparison with current mountaineering products. Martin Johnston