KEY POINTS:
Some are born great," says the mean-spirited Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, "some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." That Sir Edmund Hillary was known - indeed, preferred to be known - throughout his life as "Ed" underlines the fact that he never felt he
belonged to any of those three groups.
He liked to think of himself, he often said, as an ordinary bloke who liked a challenge and who happened to be in the right place at the right time - the moment when it was decided to make the final assault on the summit of the world's highest mountain.
To say so gives due credit to the fact that the British expedition was a 10-man team of which he was just another member - indeed Hillary always said that he and Tenzing were the "end links" of a chain; but it ignores the fact that he, though not as technically gifted a climber as others in the party, was by some margin the strongest, hardiest and fittest.
The photos of the day bear it out: we have grown used to the jowly, avuncular, always-smiling senior citizen of later years, but the mountain man was improbably sinewy, economically muscular, his frame as lanky as his visage was lean.
At best, then - if he had allowed the word to be applied to him at all - Ed might have been prepared to accept that he had greatness thrust upon him. But we know differently. We know that his greatness consisted not just in his achievements but in the ease with which he carried his celebrity. His was neither the awkward, self-abnegating modesty with which New Zealanders so often undersell themselves, nor the grotesque self-regarding pomposity of those modern celebrities who are famous for being famous.
At the summit of his triumph and in the 55 years that followed, he pitched it just right: he knew who he was and he wasn't going to waste time talking about it; he had much better things to do.
What is undeniable is that Hillary was not born great. Born in the small town of Tuakau south of Auckland where his father, a veteran of Gallipoli, was the owner and editor of the local newspaper, Ed had a childhood that was far from happy. He endured physical punishment from a martinet father with whom in his teenage years, he often clashed. His mother was "a woman of admirable character who gave me all the affection and encouragement I needed," he wrote, but he remembers that he cried easily and often. Matters didn't improve much when his mother, determined that Ed would get a good education, packed him off to Auckland Grammar School. The country boy, who endured long daily train journeys to get to school, found the city experience terrifying. He was, he said, "academically and emotionally lost".
He was gracious enough not to recall in print the name of the physical education teacher who, adjudging the new boy a puny loser, banished him to a misfit class. It is tempting to wonder what the teacher concerned must have thought when the lad he so derided grew into a man who stood where no other had been before.
Lost, then, and lonely and something of an outsider, Hillary found his future on a class trip to Mt Ruapehu in his last year at school. The "fairyland of glistening snow and stunted pines and frozen streams" quite entranced him, he wrote. "I was in a strange and exciting new world."
It was in that new world that Ed - much as he would hate us saying so - achieved greatness. Bitten by the mountain bug, he scaled every peak of significance in the Southern Alps on his way to the ascent that would make him a legend.
More than half a century after the achievement that made his name, it is hard to comprehend the impact of the news. When Ed's son Peter scaled Everest in 2002, he spoke to his father from the top by satellite phone. But in 1953, it was a more complicated affair getting the news out to the world.
James Morris, a journalist for the Times, sent a radio message from the town of Namche Bazaar, but encoded it to avoid being scooped by competitors: "Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement" conveyed the key facts - that the summit had been reached, when and by whom.
The news broke on the day of the Queen's coronation ("All this and Everest too", was the Times' memorable headline) and the impact was profound. It was a fillip for the notion of Empire and welcome news in a country still feeling the after-effects of war in 1953; food rationing had another three years to run.
But if it prompted imperial pride among many of Her Majesty's loyal subjects, Ed wasn't about to engage in much chest-thumping. He was more-than-mildly irritated that the knighthood announced before he'd made it back to Kathmandu for a decent shower was to be conferred immediately, and that he would have to fly home via London. Disarmingly, he told an interviewer that when he returned to his beekeeping trade in Tuakau he supposed he would have to buy a new pair of overalls for when he went to town.
If some of the details of Ed's achievement and the way news of it reached the world seem quaintly old-fashioned now, more old-fashioned still was what he did with the fame it brought him. In a manner virtually incomprehensible in this day and age, when spurious celebrity is milked for every last drop of personal gain, Hillary always sought to use the fame he had achieved for the benefit of others. He would not have seen that as remarkable because he saw his achievements, managed with the assistance of others, as being widely owned. Thus most of the proceeds from speaking engagements and the commercial endorsements that outdoor-equipment manufacturers sought were ploughed into improving the lives of the Himalayan Nepali people who, as he saw it, were the logical beneficiaries.
As his good mate Tom Scott said on Friday, the name Hillary will be remembered a thousand years from now - with names like Columbus, Magellan and Amundsen - for a singular achievement. But what made Ed a hero - and a very Kiwi hero - is that he never acted like one. He behaved the way he would like to be remembered: as one of us. And we will never forget him.
