Knocking off that bastard...

Exploring another climbing quote

“Well, we knocked the bastard off!”

- Edmund Hillary, 1953

Believe it or not, according to Edmund Hillary’s first two published accounts of his (and Tenzing Norgay’s) summiting of Mount Everest, when he and Tenzing descended to a high camp and a small number of fellow climbers, Hillary’s first words about the long-awaited summit were … nothing.

Or nothing worth reporting, anyway.

That’s right. On the 10th serious expedition to Everest, and the first British-led expedition since 1938 – and yes, Hillary and George Lowe, another terrifically strong climber, both hailed from New Zealand – Hillary and Tenzing had finally summited.

But according to Hillary (in leader John Hunt’s official account, The Ascent of Everest), when he and Tenzing reached the awaiting Lowe, “We were too tired to make any response to Lowe’s enthusiastic acceptance of our news.”

So we don’t learn in the official account how Hillary reported his news; we don’t learn what Lowe said; and supposedly nobody said anything at all for a while after that.

Which seems … unlikely, on its face. Relatively speaking, Hillary and Tenzing were in good condition, having utilized bottled oxygen and (not coincidentally) not suffered even the beginnings of frostbite. But the section of Hunt’s book on the two-man summit push – again, supposedly written or related by Hillary – consists of only 14 pages. So there just wasn’t much room for color.

Or maybe there just wasn’t much time. Hunt and the British Everest Expedition had exclusive rights to book publication, at least in the short term, and indeed Hunt’s book was somehow written and published within six months of the expedition’s close. And it’s not at all a bad book! But it was necessarily a sort of second draft of history.

Two years later, though, Hillary wrote his first book, High Adventure. And oddly, Hillary still doesn’t seem quite ready to write what he had said…

George’s tall, strong figure was now much closer, and the thought struck me that there wasn’t anyone I’d rather tell the news to first. George and I had been through a lot together in the mountains. We’d had a lot of success together and we’d had our tough moments; no one had done more than George to make this final success possible. Already I could see his cheerful grin, and next moment his strong vigorous voice was shouting out a greeting. To my tired mind he looked an absolute tower of strength. In rough New Zealand slang I shouted out the good news, and next moment we were all talking at once and slapping each other on the back.

That’s quite a different, fuller account! But still no details on what Hillary and Lowe said to each other.

Twenty years later, Hillary penned his first real autobiography, Nothing Venture, Nothing Win. Less than a quarter of the book is about the Everest expedition – Hillary had by then lived many other adventures, with more to come – and some of the details from High Adventure are not repeated. But he does add one good one:

George met us with a mug of soup just above camp, and seeing his stalwart frame and cheerful face reminded me how fond of him I was. My comment was not specially prepared for public consumption but for George … “Well, we knocked the bastard off!” I told him and he noted with pleasure … “Thought you must have!”

So when did Hillary’s exclamation first appear in the public record?

In 1955, the same year as Hillary’s first book, Micheline Morin’s book Everest: From the First Attempt to the Final Victory was published in England, and Morin does have Hillary saying to Lowe, “Well, we’ve knocked the bastard off!”

Which is accompanied by a footnote: “Quoted in a B.B.C. interview, July 24, 1953.”

However, according to a 2019 RNZ story on the 65th anniversary of the first ascent, that was actually a quote of a quote:

There is no recording of Hillary saying this but in July, a BBC radio documentary about the expedition – which key members of the team took part in – George Lowe repeated the statement.

“Wilf [Wilfred] Noyce and I, were waiting for them on their return to the South Col, I remember how tired they looked coming down. They moved down the couloir, feeling for their steps, with legs stiff and walking like toy soldiers. Ed came up to me and I was sheltering against the wind, I was crouched over a thermos, he took off his mask and he said ‘well, we knocked the bastard off’. But his remark wasn’t cocky, he was more amazed and incredulous.”

It was momentous enough that the word could be used on air on the BBC at the time.

But apparently not so momentous that Hunt would allow the word in 1953, or Hillary in 1955 in their books. Anyway, you can hear Lowe’s quote at the 5:15 mark in this audio version of the story. And in fact this seems to be exactly how the world first learned what Hillary had actually said upon his descent (or shortly into his descent, anyway).

In his second full autobiography, published in 1997, Hillary recalled, “We were interviewed by the BBC and the announcer asked George what my first comments had been on coming off the mountain and meeting him on the South Col. Somewhat to my regret George mentioned with a certain relish I had said, ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’ This utterance was quickly blasted around the world airwaves and later my mother told me she was horrified by my comment.”

So maybe that’s why Hillary omitted his most famous words from his 1955 memoir.

He was afraid of his mom.