Mountains to Climb
Jan Morris [1926-2020] On 2 June 1953, The Times newspaper carried two news items with almost equal prominence. Twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth was crowned Queen of England that day. The other news item was the conquest of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. What is remarkable is that The Times was the only newspaper in the world to carry the story of the Everest conquest on that day. When James Morris, the correspondent of The Times of London, reported it, journalism achieved one of its great dramatic moments. What Morris sent to his newspaper in London from the base camp, 18,000 feet up in the Himalayas, was this message: Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement. What that meant was that the adventurers had reached the summit. It was a code that only The Times office in London would decipher. Morris wrote out that coded message and gave it to a runner, who in turn passed it down to the Silk Road village of...
