Back‘Snow conditions bad’
The incredible story of how news of the Everest's first ascent was broken, and the woman who made it happen
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Plenty of newspapers have reported that there remains only one survivor from the 1953 British expedition to the Everest—the Welsh author and historian Jan Morris, the embedded reporter from The Times who broke the news of Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary’s pioneering successful summit of the world’s highest mountain. They are wrong. There is at least one other survivor from that expedition, Kancha Sherpa, who is now a monk in a monastery close to Nepal’s Namche Bazaar, the sherpa village which is the gateway to the Everest.
But this story is about Jan Morris, who was known as James Morris in 1953, and had never climbed a mountain before he was dispatched by The Times to the slopes of Everest.
The 1953 expedition took place at a time of great upheavals for the British empire—the coronation of a new queen, the empire had been bled white by World War II, had lost the very country that had defined the empire, India, after a violent and protracted upheaval, and the British had lost the race to the North and South Poles. All these gave the 1953 British Everest Expedition a special significance and urgency beyond that of the obvious—being the first to set foot on the highest point on Earth, a place then commonly known as “the final frontier".
Morris was accutely aware of the burden of his job, and that of Colonel John Hunt, the leader of the expedition, when he arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal, in the wake of the climbing party. The immediate concern was to find a way to send news back to London that would not be intercepted by other journalists.
“The technical problems of getting news away from the mountain were exacting," Morris wrote later in the article “The Press on Everest". “The sinews of any foreign news service are the international cables, telephones and radio links, for without them the hottest news is liable to cool; but between Everest and the nearest cable office or telephone there lie about 180 miles of difficult and roadless country."
All manner of communication systems were discussed—carrier pigeons, beacon fires, floating dispatches down the Dudh Kosi in watertight containers, and telepathic lamas—before Morris and the expedition members zeroed in on the most practical: sherpa runners who would make the 7-10 day trek back to Kathmandu, from where the news would be radioed to the British embassy in India, and from there to the foreign office in London. An alternative route was also established—“through the jungle of Terai to the railhead at Jogbani, and thence to Patna, where a father at the Jesuit college transmitted them to Europe".
Arrangements in place, Morris made his way up to Namche Bazaar, where he could not believe his luck—an Indian Army outpost had a radio link to the Indian embassy in Kathmandu. This, Morris decided immediately, was how he was going to break the news—a short coded dispatch over the radio, with the runners as back-up and carrying the longer story.
Soon, Morris was at base camp, befriending the climbers and getting his first taste of mountaineering, making trips across the treacherous Khumbu Icefall up to camp III and spending the night at camp II—“they were kindly souls on the rope, and somehow they pulled me over the crevasses, heaved me up the ice-blocks, pushed me over the dizzy makeshift bridges, and dragged me through the wilderness of crumbled ice".
Down below, the fight for the news had intensified. Several British newspapers had set up radio receivers in Kathmandu with the hope of intercepting wireless messages from Namche, or messages going out from Kathmandu to India. Reporters had gathered at Namche, and a Reuters correspondent had set up base at the Thyangboche monastery, at 12,687ft, the closest village to the base camp (18,000ft).
Up above, the climbers were making their lonely way up the slopes of Everest, while Morris waited at camp III. It was 26 May, and the first summit assault party, comprising Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, had failed in its bid. On 28 May, the second party, Hillary and Norgay, set off for the summit. They established a final camp at 27,900ft and spent a sleepless night in the bitter cold. On 29 May, at 11.30am, Hillary and Norgay stood atop the Everest.
The next day, the other expedition members and Morris gathered at camp IV, at 21,200ft, still awaiting news from the advanced assault party.
“I shall never, as long as I live, forget the transformation that overcame the camp when the summit party appeared and gave us the news of their victory," Morris wrote in “The Press on Everest". “It was a moment so thrilling, so vibrant, that hot tears sprang to the eyes of most of us. The day was so dazzlingly bright—the snow so white, the sky so blue; the air was so heavily charged with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise; and it felt to all of us that we were very close to the making of history; and away in England, as we knew, an entire nation, in celebration for the Coronation, was waiting eager-hearted for the word of triumph. It was a moment of great beauty."
Morris immediately began the long trek down to the base camp with the help of an expedition climber, stumbling and slipping dangerously through the icy slopes as night approached. They reached the base camp well after dark.
“Next morning I sent off two runners. The first carried a short code message for the radio station at Namche, for transmission (with luck) to Katmandu. The message ran: ‘Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned may twentynine stop awaiting improvement stop all well.’"
This was the coded message designed to throw off the competition: “Snow conditions bad" meant “Everest climbed", “Advanced base abandoned" signified Hillary, and “Awaiting improvement" stood for Norgay.
It was 1 June, and the runners and the Namche radio did their job—the news reached London the very same day.
The news had, unknown to Morris, also leaked out to an Indian climber and schoolteacher. Gurdial Singh, now 88, had led India’s first mountaineering expedition, to the 23,360ft Trisul at the edge of the Nanda Devi National Park in 1951. Singh had joined Doon School in 1945, and had found his love for mountaineering through alpinist teachers and Tenzing Norgay, who often climbed with him.
“On 1 June 1951, as the coded message was being passed from Kathmandu to Delhi to London, it went through a British major general in the Indian Army called Harold Williams in Delhi," Singh says. “Williams was very close to the headmaster at Doon, John Martyn, who had introduced me to climbing. So the moment he got the news, Williams called up Martyn and told him. I was in Martyn’s room then, so Martyn told me, and then told me to keep shut. I couldn’t sleep that night."
Morris, though, “slept like a log". When he woke up the next day, he got a radio message telling him that The Times had broken the news on the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
“I leapt out of bed in my tattered old shirt and holed socks, bearded and filthy, and shouted to my Sherpas peering owlishly from the upper windows of a neighbouring house," Morris wrote in “The Press on Everest". “Chomolungma finished!’ I shouted. ‘Everest done with! All O.K.!’
‘O.K., Sahib’, the Sherpas shouted back. ‘Breakfast now?’"
But Morris’ extraordinary story does not end here. Morris continued to strengthen his reputation as a fantastic journalist, covering wars and breaking stories of great importance, and then began a flourishing career as an author and historian. In 1964, 15 years after being married to Elizabeth Tuckniss, the daughter of a tea planter in Sri Lanka, and having five children, Morris began medical procedures to become a woman. Tuckniss had known from the time they were married that Morris had felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body. In 1972, Morris went to Morocco for a sex-change operation. When Morris returned to the UK as a woman, she had to divorce Tuckniss under British law. But the couple never separated. They continued to live together in the Welsh village of Llanystumdwy, with Morris referring to Tuckniss as her “sister-in-law".
In 2008, as the laws progressed, Morris and Tuckniss reaffirmed their bond in a civil partnership ceremony in their village.
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