John Hunt(1910–1998)

Henry Cecil John Hunt was born at Simla in India on 22 June 1910, into a military family of the Hunt name, and was himself a professional soldier, trained at Sandhurst and commissioned into a British Indian regiment. He served on the North-West Frontier and in the Italian campaign of the Second World War, where he was decorated for distinguished service, and he combined his soldiering throughout with a serious mountaineer's life in the Alps and the Himalaya, climbing hard routes and learning the high mountains at first hand over many years.

By the early 1950s the summit of Mount Everest, the highest point on earth, had defeated every expedition that had attempted it over thirty years and had cost a number of lives. In 1953 Hunt was appointed to lead the British expedition that would try again, and the task he faced was as much one of organisation as of climbing: the moving of tons of supplies and oxygen up the mountain, the careful staging of camps ever higher, and above all the choosing and supporting of the two men who would make the final attempt from the last camp.

Hunt planned the assault with the thoroughness of a soldier laying on an operation. He drove the expedition up the mountain in a series of measured stages, established a camp higher than any before it, and selected for the summit pair the New Zealander Edmund Hillary and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. On 29 May 1953, supported by the whole effort Hunt had organised beneath them, the two men reached the summit of Everest and came safely down, the first human beings to stand on the top of the world.

The news was carried home and reached London on the morning of 2 June 1953, the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, so that the conquest of Everest and the crowning of the new queen ran together as a single moment of national rejoicing. Hunt, who had insisted from the first that the achievement belonged to the whole team and not to any individual, became a national figure and was knighted, as were Hillary and Tenzing honoured.

He gave much of the rest of his long life to young people, leading the organisation of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme that has sent generations of the young into the outdoors and into service, and he was raised to the peerage for his work. He died on 7 November 1998. The Hunt name carries his memory as the soldier-mountaineer who, by planning and leadership rather than personal glory, brought off the first ascent of Everest and gave his country a triumph to set beside the crowning of its queen.