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 Namche Bazaar, from where it went by wireless to the British Embassy in Kathmandu.

The news of the conquest was not merely information. It was an event wrapped in suspense, endurance, and human triumph. Morris wanted his newspaper to “break the news” exclusively. Hence the coded message. If he had sent the message in plain English, it would have been leaked to many newspapers.

In Andrew Marr’s Elizabethans: A History of How Modern Britain was Forged, I read about the hardships James Morris endured while reporting on this major event. It was a major event for Britian especially because the French and the Swiss were also trying to conquer Everest.

Marr begins his book with James Morris because Morris also had a personal peak to conquer. He was a woman caught in a man’s body. “After years of private unhappiness, and despite a successful marriage and five children, Morris would make the transition from man to woman, first with drugs and then through perilous surgery in Morocco. James Morris, successful journalist, travel writer and historian, became Jan Morris” in 1972.

It wasn’t easy for any Briton in those days to undergo a sex change surgery. “What would the crowds awaiting the Queen in the centre of London have made of it all?” Marr asks in the opening pages of his history of the Elizabethans? The “Britain of the 1950s was repressed and ignorant compared to today,” he writes.

James Morris was making a very bold and difficult decision when he became Jan Morrison. Jan Morrison went on to write many excellent books. “She never saw herself as a victim because she was always more interested in the great world than in herself.”

Marr says that he intends to dig deeper into his country’s history through individual stories like Morris’s. I hope that’s going to be a different kind of history and that I will enjoy reading this book which I started reading just this morning.

James Morris

PS. 'Mountains to Climb' is the title of the first chapter of Marr's book.