Edmund Hillary
A beekeeper who reached the top of Everest and spent the rest of his life building schools below it
Edmund Hillary grew up in a small town south of Auckland, the son of a beekeeper and newspaper editor. He was a gangly, self-conscious boy who did poorly at sport and only discovered he was strong on a school trip to the mountains at sixteen. After war service as a navigator on flying boats in the Pacific he went back to the family bees, which gave him summers of hard work and winters free to climb.
He was picked for the British Everest expedition of 1953 as one of two New Zealanders. On 29 May he and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit, the first people known to have done so. His first words to a teammate on the way down were blunt and unrepeatable. He was knighted within days and found the attention bewildering.
He led the New Zealand party of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition and in 1958 drove modified farm tractors to the South Pole, the first overland journey there since Scott. But it was Nepal that occupied him. In 1961 he built the first school in Khumjung with money he raised himself, and over the next four decades his Himalayan Trust built dozens of schools, hospitals, clinics, bridges and airstrips in the Sherpa valleys.
In 1975 his wife Louise and their daughter Belinda were killed in a plane crash on their way to join him at a hospital site in Nepal. He kept working. He died in Auckland in 2008 and was given a state funeral.