Lowe George

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Biografie:
Quelle: Alpinismus 1986, Heft 11, Seite 76 ff

George Lowe (1924–2013)
If George Mallory's off-the-cuff justification for climbing Everest, "because it's there", are the best known words in mountaineering, Edmund Hillary's somewhat less enigmatic summary of the first ascent, "we knocked the bastard off", must rank a close second.
Hillary never intended the remark for public consumption. He delivered the words to his fellow New Zealander and close friend George Lowe some 150 m above the South Col on 29 May 1953. Lowe had climbed from the Col to meet Hillary and Tenzing Norgay as they descended the mountain, but neither he, nor the rest of John Hunt's team waiting anxiously below, knew whether the pair had reached the summit.
"They were moving fairly rapidly - the only tiredness showed in their slightly stiff-legged walking as they cramponed the last part of the couloir," Lowe recalled. "I crouched, back against the wind, and poured out the thermos contents as they came. Ed unclipped his mask and grinned a tired greeting, sat on the ice and said in his matter-of-fact way, 'Well, George, we knocked the bastard off!' It was not quite matter-of-fact; he was incredulous of what they had done."
Lowe later felt the need to put the record straight about this apparent profanity. Writing in the 1993 Alpine Journal, he said this remark meant no disparagement to Everest and was intended for his ears alone. In New Zealand slang, big mountains were referred to with admiration as "big bastards", said Lowe. "Ed had to live with the fact that I told the BBC what he said on meeting me, and he has never forgiven me for it!"
Lowe's sense of fun is in play here. And even were it not, Hillary had little to forgive. Grateful thanks were more in order, for Lowe had played a major part in making a summit bid possible. An accomplished ice climber, he had spent 11 days at around 7000 m, often battered by high winds, pushing the route up the Lhotse Face towards the South Col. Hunt described it as "an epic achievement of tenacity and skill".
Then, on 28 May, Lowe had led the way up from the South Col. With Lowe, as well as Hillary and Tenzing, were Alf Gregory and Ang Nyima. At 8340 m they picked up a cache of gear left, after a gruelling carry, by Hunt and Da Namgyal. "Ed took the tent, Greg the RAF oxygen cylinder and I took fuel and some of Greg's load," he recollected. By now Hillary was carrying an estimated 63 lbs, Lowe and Gregory 50 lbs each and the two Sherpas 45 lbs each - all way over the 15 lbs reckoned to be a good load at such an altitude. This Herculean effort succeeded in placing a camp at about 8500 m from where Hillary and Tenzing would go for the top.
Wallace George Lowe was born on 15 January 1924 in the farming community of Hastings, North Island, the seventh of eight children, and the seventh child of a seventh child. His father was a fruit grower (an 'orchardist' in New Zealand parlance) and kept bees as a sideline. He got his queen bees from the Hillary family in Auckland - George delighting in the coincidence when he first met Ed Hillary, on a bus heading for the Mount Cook area on South Island where he (Lowe) had got a holiday job escorting tourists to a glacier.
Young George hardly seemed destined to be a climber. Aged nine, he had broken his left arm; it would not mend and had to be realigned seven times. It remained bent and virtually without muscle for the rest of his life. Added to this, he had an early fear of heights. He attributed his embrace of mountaineering to his determination to face up to his weaknesses.
Climbs with Hillary and others in the Southern Alps - notably a first ascent of the long, jagged Maximilian ridge on Mount Elie de Beaumont - led to the Himalaya in 1951 where he and three companions made the first ascent of Mukut Parvat (7242 m) in Garhwal. On the walk out, at the village of Ranikhet, the group picked up their mail, including a surprise telegram from the English mountaineer Eric Shipton inviting two of them to join an expedition about to leave Kathmandu for an exploration of the south side of Everest.
The telegram "turned four amiable New Zealanders, relaxing in the hill station lounge, into four tense tigers, caged, self-seeking, eying each other with jealousy," Lowe wrote in his very readable memoir Because it is There (London 1959). But he and Ed Cotter were broke and had to watch, "riddled with envy", as Hillary and Earle Riddiford departed for Nepal.
A year later, however, thanks to Hillary's recommendation, Lowe was invited by Shipton to join the British expedition to Cho Oyu (8201 m), a tough rehearsal for the 1953 attempt on its neighbour, Everest. Cho Oyu remained unclimbed but Lowe and Hillary took consolation in an outstanding first crossing of the torturously crevassed Nup la from which they descended secretly into Tibet. The two colonial boys had certainly earned their ticket to join the chaps next year.
Lowe had trained as a teacher and was working in the same primary school where he had been a pupil. He had been given special leave for his Himalayan trips in 1951 and '52, but a third time was pushing his luck. Leave was refused so he resigned.
Though Lowe would later return to teaching, Everest, almost by accident, opened a second profession, that of photographer and film-maker. Lowe had been a keen 'stills' amateur since his teens and when a bout of pneumonia rendered Tom Stobart, the expedition cameraman, unable to work at altitude, his movie moment arrived. Entering the Khumbu Icefall, it was the first time Lowe had held a ciné camera in his life; action sequences he shot high on the mountain contributed greatly to the success of the expedition film, The Conquest of Everest, which was nominated for an Oscar.
These new credentials, together with a familiarity with crevasses, led to his being invited by the geologist/explorer Vivian Fuchs to join the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition - an enterprise that occupied Lowe for three years. In a tracked Weasel vehicle called Wrack and Ruin he made the 2158-mile crossing in 99 arduous days, uniting with Hillary at the South Pole on 19 January 1958, his fellow Kiwi having approached from Scott Base in the opposite direction. Between Everest and Antarctica, he joined Hillary for an attempt on Makalu (8481 m) that came close to disaster when Hillary cracked three ribs in a crevasse rescue and became ill, and later in a hunt for the yeti (not found).
In 1959 Lowe returned to education, first at Repton School, Derbyshire, and then, from 1963, at the Grange School in Santiago, Chile, where he became headmaster. In 1962 he had married Hunt's daughter Susan and their three sons were born in Santiago. The family returned to the UK in 1973 - the year of the military coup in Chile and the death of Salvador Allende - after which Lowe worked as one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools until retirement in 1984.
Lowe, like Hillary, felt a deep commitment to the Sherpas of Nepal and in 1989 he helped found the UK arm of Hillary's Himalayan Trust, funding schools, health services, and other projects. The work was shared by his second wife, Mary, who continues as the Trust's secretary from their Derbyshire home.
Lowe has been described as the 'forgotten hero' of Everest. It is unlikely he minded. Though witty and amusing company, Lowe shunned the limelight and expressed relief that he was not in the summit party. "Ed Hillary was the right one. I wouldn't have had the diplomacy that he had," he said. Lowe's part though is likely to get a reassessment in the coming weeks with the publication of two books: Letters from Everest (Silverbear) and The Conquest of Everest (Thames and Hudson), both being a collaboration between Lowe and the historian Huw Lewis-Jones.
Lowe died in Derberyshire on 20 March 2013. He was the last surviving member of the 1953 Everest climbers. When the 60th anniversary of the first ascent is celebrated in May, only the author Jan Morris, who was The Times reporter attached to the expedition, will be able to recall the moment when Hillary and Tenzing descended to Hunt's advance base camp in the Western Cwm and George Lowe, leading the group down, gave an exuberant thumbs-up. Soon the world knew that Everest had been climbed.

STEPHEN GOODWIN

(This obituary was first published in The Independent on 26 March 2013).



Geboren am:
15.01.1924
Gestorben am:
20.03.2013