RIP George Lowe

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Obituary: GEORGE LOWE

George Lowe, born January 15th 1924, died March 20th 2013.

The Telegraph | 8:38PM GMT - Thursday, 21 March 2013


GEORGE LOWE loading film into his camera. — Photo: GEORGE LOWE Collection/Polar World.

GEORGE LOWE, the mountaineer, who has died aged 89, was both a key member and the last survivor of the 1953 British expedition that conquered Everest.

Lowe played a crucial part in the party’s success, displaying phenomenal strength and stamina to ferry kit up to the South Col, just shy of the peak, from where his fellow New Zealander and friend Edmund Hillary, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, pushed on to the summit itself. Spending day after day at altitudes of more than 23,000ft, Lowe often had to wade through waist-high snow to ensure everything was where it needed to be.

According to John Hunt, the expedition’s leader, Lowe “put up a performance which will go down in the annals of mountaineering as an epic achievement of tenacity and skill”. It was nothing less, Hunt added in his memoir The Ascent of Everest (1953), than an “astonishing feat of endurance”. Such was the effort that at one point Lowe himself felt “hollow and weak”.

When Hillary and Norgay were descending from the summit of Everest, it was Lowe, coming up from the South Col camp, who was the first to meet them. He handed Hillary a mug of warm lemonade and heard Hillary’s famous exclamation: “Well we knocked the bastard off!” Hillary also passed Lowe a fragment of marine limestone. Millions of years previously the rock had formed part of the sea-floor; by 1953, however, it was a souvenir from the highest point on the planet.

Lowe had displayed superb ice-craft over 10 days in spearheading a route up the Lhotse face, immediately below the South Col. But he was not just a climber. He also carried with him a Kodak Retina II, capturing many images that effectively made him deputy to the official expedition cameraman, Tom Stobart. And when the party reached altitudes that Stobart, weakened by a dose of pneumonia, was unable to endure, Lowe provided the photographic record.

The film of the triumph, The Conquest of Everest, was itself a great success, and nominated for an Oscar. With his reputation on ice and with film assured, Lowe was recruited as official photographer in the Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1957-58, which made the first successful overland crossing of Antarctica via the South Pole.

Lowe joined the 12-man party of the expedition leader, the British explorer Vivian Fuchs, which set out from Shackleton Base on one side of the continent, while Hillary led the support party from the Scott Base on the other side dropping supplies and establishing depots.

Fuchs relied on Lowe’s expertise to spot crevasses that were, Lowe later noted, “wider, deeper and harder to detect” than any he had previously encountered, and which posed a mortal threat to the tractors, dog-teams and snowmobiles they used to get around.

In the event Hillary reached the Pole first, on January 3rd 1958. The teams met when Fuchs arrived on January 19th, but while Hillary flew out, Fuchs continued on overland and arrived at Scott Base on March 2nd after a journey of 2,158 miles.

Wallace George Lowe was born in Hastings, on New Zealand’s North Island, on January 15th 1924, the seventh of eight children. His father was a fruit grower. Aged nine he shattered the bone in his left arm just above the elbow after falling off the steps of the veranda at home. The bone would not set correctly, and had to be re-broken seven times. His subsequent skill as an ice-climber was all the more remarkable as the accident left the limb almost entirely without strength.

He was educated in Hastings and soon developed an interest in photography, playing truant to hang around the studio of the aviator Piet van Asch, who was taking large landscape photographs from the air. Lowe even joined van Asch on several flights.

After qualifying as a schoolteacher, Lowe spent the immediate post-war years teaching at a primary school. In school holidays, however, he trained as a mountain guide, frequently teaming up with Hillary, five years his senior, in the Southern Alps, where they perfected their technique on such peaks as Mount Cook and Mount Tasman.

In 1951 the two men joined a four-man, four-month, New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas. The team had hoped, before setting off, to conquer one 20,000ft-plus summit; in the event they scaled six.

On the strength of this experience, he and Hillary were invited in 1952 to join Eric Shipton’s assault on Everest’s neighbour, Cho Oyu (26,850ft), a journey which would also involve exploring the Barun Valley in the same region. Their talents ensured that both secured their places on what was to prove the historic Everest expedition of the following year. However, planning in 1952 was not always up to the meticulous standards that Hunt would set. Running short of supplies on the return journey to the Indian border, Hillary was forced to bargain with locals for one abundant foodstuff: bananas. According to Lowe, an ensuing competition saw Lowe consume 120 in a single day. Hillary won their battle by eating 134.

After his return from the Antarctic in 1958, Lowe settled in England and joined the Department of Education and Science as an Inspector of Schools, which he remained until his retirement in 1984. In 1989 he helped found the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust in Britain, established to improve conditions for Sherpas in the Himalayas; Lowe served as chairman until 2003.

With his ready wit, mobile face and gift for mimicry, George Lowe was an entertaining and amusing companion. Few of his companions will forget his imitation of Cheyne-Stokes breathing patterns, a condition suffered by some people at high altitude.

In his book Because It Is There (1962) Lowe recounted his experiences on his two major expeditions. He contrasted Hunt’s open style of leadership with that of Fuchs, who appeared to him to reach all decisions in camera. Lowe left no doubt as to which style he preferred. With other members of the Trans-Antarctic Expedition, Lowe received in 1958 the Polar Medal (with Antarctic clasp). He was also commemorated in Mount Lowe, a 3,000ft peak in the Shackleton Range.

He was appointed OBE for services to mountaineering and exploration.

He counted himself Edmund Hillary’s oldest friend. Before his own death, Hillary wrote the foreword to The Conquest of Everest: Original Photographs from the Legendary First Ascent, which Lowe compiled with Huw Lewis-Jones and which is to be published imminently. According to Hillary, Lowe “saved my life a few times over the years. Down in Antarctica, I remember when we were trying to get our ship, Theron, clear of the ice and I was standing with George on an ice-floe, cutting a channel. A steel cable fouled the propeller just as a rope-end flicked and locked around my ankle. Quickly, yet calmly, George managed to knock it free before it came tight. A moment later and I would have been sucked under...”

Lowe’s home in Derbyshire was filled with boxes of souvenirs from his climbing adventures — slides, press clippings and the like. But above all he treasured the fragment of rock from the summit that Hillary had given him, and which he kept on his desk. “It was always fairly simple,” he noted recently, “The mountains were a deep source of real happiness. They dispense a lion’s share of sorrow too, but it’s the joy that always wins out.”

His first marriage, to Susan, a daughter of Lord Hunt, was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife, Mary, and by three sons of his first marriage.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9946849/George-Lowe.html

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Kiwi mountaineer George Lowe dies age 89

The New Zealand Herald | 9:50AM - Friday, March 22, 2013


GEORGE LOWE has died at the age of 89. — Photo: The Telegraph.

NEW ZEALANDER George Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, has died. He was 89.

Lowe's widow, Mary, said he died on Wednesday at a nursing home in Ripley, central England, after an illness.

One of two New Zealanders on the 1953 British expedition, Lowe helped establish the final camp 1000 feet below the mountain's summit on May 28th, 1953.

The next day, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the peak.

As Sir Ed descended the next day, he told Lowe: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."

Lowe directed a film of the expedition, The Conquest of Everest, and also made The Crossing of Antarctica, a movie about a trans-Antarctic expedition later in the 1950s.

He is survived by Mary and three sons.

Born and raised in Hastings, Lowe spent most of his life abroad following the 1953 ascent. A school teacher before Everest, Lowe returned to education after the expedition, spending a decade at a school in Chile, the last eight years as rector.

Lowe met his wife later in England when both were "Her Majesty's [school] Inspectors", and married in 1980.

It was the second marriage for both, Lowe's first wife being Lord Hunt's daughter, Sue.

Lowe was a life-long friend of Sir Ed, and was the best man at his first wedding.

In 2008, Lowe told the Herald he was happy it was Sir Ed who stood on the summit first, and was enormously proud of the team effort that put his friend up there.

"In 1953, it was the team that climbed it. That was the thing. It's not like today where all the climbers have to go up to the top. The team had succeeded."

"[Today] it's an ego trip for the individual climber."

He was also pleased Sir Ed who got the attention following the ascent.

"I'm absolutely delighted I didn't have the life that Ed's had. Ed was the right one. I would have been a bugger. I wouldn't have had the diplomacy that Ed's had."

Double amputee and former mountaineer Mark Inglis said climbers of Lowe's era were "inspirational".

"They were just so tough. We used to learn from those who have gone before and the amazing thing that those guys did was they went to places that no other human being had ever been, which was amazing."

Lowe played a major role in motivating future generations to look to take up mountaineering, he said.

"New Zealand has just such a phenomenal record of inspirational mountaineers and most of the public never hear of them."

Many of them had lost their lives in the "dangerous sandpit that we play in," Mr Inglis said.

• Read Lowe's account of Hillary's successful Everest climb HERE.


Sir Edmund Hillary, accompanied by fellow NZ climber
George Lowe, arrives in Auckland and alights from a
flying boat to a hero's welcome from a proud Kiwi public.

www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10872850

[Dave Homewood]

RIP.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

When my Mum finished at teacher training college at the end of 1949, she moved to Hastings and got a job teaching at the school where George Lowe was one of the teachers (she also got married to my Dad in 1950).

The education system used to appoint a mentor to look after the junior teachers just out of training college, and my Mum's mentor was George Lowe. They taught in adjacent classrooms.

My Mum told me that George was a real character and had lots of larger-than-life tales about his alpine adventures, including in 1951 when he headed off to the Himalayas with Ed Hillary and a few other Kiwis on a NZ Himalaya Expedition. It was during that expedition that they scouted out a route to the summit of Everest from the Nepal side of the mountain, and that was the route attempted by the Swiss in 1952, and successfully used by the British expedition in 1953. When he was selected for the 1953 Everest expedition, George Lowe applied for unpaid leave from his teaching job, but the Hawke's Bay Education Board turned him down and insisted that he keep teaching. So George told them where to stick their job and buggered off anyway. After the successful expedition, George returned to Hastings with his mate Ed and headed for Parkvale School to catch up with his old workmates and pupils, bringing Ed along with him. Mum said that all the members of the Hawke's Bay Education Board turned up at the school and tried to put themselves in the limelight, but George told them to bugger off, that he was at the school to introduce Ed to the school staff and pupils, and not to pander to the tossers who tried to stop him from being part of the expedition.

When I was a kid, my Mum seemed to have an amazing knowledge of the 1953 Everest Expedition. When you are a kid, you never question your parents' knowedge, but as I got older I often wondered how come my Mum seemed to have so much intimate knowledge of the conquest of Everest. It was only many years later into adulthood that she told me about her association with George Lowe and how she had got all her information straight out of the horse's mouth from George Lowe and Ed Hillary when the two of them had dinner at my parents' place during that visit to Hastings (Mum would have been pregnant with me at the time). Which explained why she always knew so much about it.


As a matter of interest, the members of the expedition and in particular Ed Hillary, made no secret of the fact that the success of the expedition was largely due to George Lowe. George was regarded as the foremost ice climbing expert in the world in the early 1950s and that was the reason why he was on the expedition. When they got bogged down on the Lotse Face, it was George who literally dug them out of the hole and cut a route up the face over an epic period of about ten days of working hard at high altitude and without oxygen while he was toiling up there. George also broke the trail high up the summit ridge above the South Col for Hillary and Tenzing to the final camp from where they made the successful bid for the summit. George then descended to the South Col to await their return the following day.

[kiwithrottlejockey]

Last climber from Hillary's Everest team dies

Associated Press | 8:01AM - Friday, 22 March 2013


GEORGE LOWE. — Photo: Hawke's Bay Today.

NEW ZEALANDER George Lowe, the last surviving climber from the team that made the first successful ascent of Mount Everest, has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 89.

Mary Lowe said her husband died on Wednesday (Thursday NZT) at a nursing home in Ripley, central England, after an illness.

Lowe and his friend Sir Edmund Hillary were the only two New Zealanders on the 1953 British-led attempt to climb the world's highest peak.

Lowe was part of a small group that established the final camp 300 metres below the mountain's summit on May 28th, 1953. The next day, Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal reached the 29,035 foot (8,850 metre) peak.

As Hillary descended the next day, he greeted Lowe with: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."

"He and Hillary climbed together through life, really," said travel writer Jan Morris, who was part of the Everest expedition as a journalist for The Times newspaper.

"And when it came to the point near the summit, George had to play a subsidiary role. He climbed very high, he climbed to top camp and said goodbye to Hillary then helped him come down. He played a very important role."

Morris said she was now the expedition's only survivor.

She said Lowe was "a gentleman in the old sense — very kind, very forceful, thoughtful and also a true adventurer, an unusual combination."


VICTORIOUS: One of two New Zealanders on the 1953 British expedition, Lowe (right) helped
establish the final camp 1000 feet below the mountain's summit on May 28th, 1953.

Hillary, who died in 2008, inevitably got much of the media attention — and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. Mary Lowe said her husband "didn't mind a bit."

"He had a wonderful life," she said. "He did a lot of things, but he was a very modest man and he kept quiet about it."

"He never sought the limelight. Ed Hillary didn't seek the limelight either — but he had it thrust upon him."

Born in Hastings, New Zealand, in 1924, Lowe began climbing in the Southern Alps and met Hillary, another ambitious young climber with whom he forged a lifelong bond.

In 1951, he was part of a New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas, and in 1953 he and Hillary joined the British Everest expedition led by John Hunt.

Kari Herbert of Polarworld, which is due to publish Lowe's book "Letters From Everest" later this year, said Lowe's efforts had been crucial to the expedition's success.

"He was one of the lead climbers, forging the route up Everest's Lhotse Face without oxygen and later cutting steps for his partners up the summit ridge," she said.

Lowe directed a film of the expedition, "The Conquest of Everest". He also made "Antarctic Crossing" after participating in the 1955-58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the first successful overland crossing of the continent.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the documentary category.

Lowe later made expeditions to Greenland, Greece and Ethiopia, taught school in Britain and Chile, lectured on his expeditions and became Her Majesty's Inspector of Schools for England.

He was a founder of the Sir Edmund Hillary Himalayan Trust UK, a charity set up to support the mountain residents of Nepal.

Lowe is survived by Mary and by three sons from his first marriage to John Hunt's daughter Susan: Gavin, Bruce and Matthew.

Mary Lowe said a memorial service would be held next month.

www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/8459131/Last-climber-from-Hillarys-Everest-team-dies

[No longer identifiable]

In the latest Listener (April 6 - 12) Phillip Temple reviews a book about the 1953 Everest expedition, written by an Englishman. Looks like a good read from a different perspective, but Temple makes that point that it was a pity the author had not interviewed Lowe, who was the last surviving member. I suspect that George Lowe was still alive when Temple wrote the article, but only by days.