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British officer, leader of the 1953 Everest expedition.
Personal details
name: Henry Cecil John Hunt
date of birth: 22 June 1910 – Shimla, British India
Died: 7 November 1998 – Henley-on-Thames, United Kingdom
Nationality: British
Occupation: officer in theBritish Army and mountaineer
Affiliation: Alpine Club
John Hunt was a British Army officer and mountaineer, best known for leading the British expedition to1953 Everest expedition, during which the summit was reached by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. He was born in Shimla to Cecil Edwin Hunt, a captain in the Indian Army who was killed in the First World War. He spent his holidays in the Alps from a young age: at the age of 12 he tied into a rope for the first time and at 14 he climbed Piz Palü with a guide.
After attending Marlborough College and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in 1930. With the regiment in India from 1931, he also served in themilitary intelligence and the Indian police, and in the final years before the war he was stationed in Bengal, where Darjeeling was just a night’s train journey away: Hunt would return there whenever possible, even on long weekends, to continue on to Sikkim. In 1935, following an attempt on Saltoro Kangri, he was elected a member of the Alpine Club. The following year he was among the candidates for the Everest expedition, but was excluded after a heart murmur was detected during his medical examination. In 1936, he married Joy Mowbray-Green, who accompanied him on expeditions to the Himalayas and climbs in the Alps.
On his return to Britain in 1940, he became chief instructor at the Commando Mountain and Snow Warfare School in Braemar, where he developed an interest in mountain training and its educational value. In 1943, he took command of the 11th Battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and took part in the Italian campaign; in 1944, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for the fighting on the River Sangro. In October, the battalion moved to Greece, where Hunt commanded the 11th Indian Infantry Brigade in Patras.
In 1952, he was serving with Allied Command Europe when the Joint Himalayan Committee of theAlpine Club and the Royal Geographical Society called upon him to lead the 1953 expedition in place of Eric Shipton, who had led the attempt on Cho Oyu the previous year and from whose group most of the mountaineers came. Hunt had had no part in the decision and tried to involve Shipton himself; the discontent felt by some members of the team, including Hillary, soon subsided. On 26 May, whilst the first assault rope team was climbing towards the south summit, Hunt and the Sherpa Da Namgyal – each carrying over 20 kg and with Hunt struggling to breathe – left a tent, provisions, paraffin and oxygen cylinders on the south-east ridge. The supplies were retrieved on 28 May by the second support team and carried higher up, where the final camp before the summit was set up. For this expedition, Hunt was knighted in 1953.
In 1954, at the end of a conference onEverest, he met a group of Soviet mountaineers for the first time: these contacts led to the British expedition to the Caucasus in 1958 and the Anglo-Soviet expedition to the Pamirs in 1962. After leaving the army in 1956, he became the first director of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a post he held for ten years, and from 1955 to 1965 he chaired the Plas y Brenin committee. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen from 1963 to 1966 and, in 1966, was created a life peer with the title of Baron Hunt of Llanfair Waterdine. He served as president of the Alpine Club, the Climbers’ Club (1963–66), the British Mountaineering Council (1965–68) and the Royal Geographical Society. He was the first chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales; the 1969 report on the Northern Ireland police bears his name; and in 1979 he was appointed a Knight of the Order of the Garter. He had four daughters with Joy.
Mountaineering achievements
Kolahoi, south spur – 1935 – first ascent with Rowland Brotherhood, Kashmir, India, Himalayas
Saltoro Kangri - 1935 – attempt with James Waller’s party, Karakorum, then British India, now Pakistan
Nepal Peak, south-western summit (7,145 m) - 1937 – solo ascent on 7 November, as part of C. R. Cooke’s expedition with Joy Hunt, Sikkim, India, Himalayas; the summit had already been climbed in 1936 by Güttner and Wien
Zemu Gap (5,875 m) - 1937 – reached from the north with a Sherpa porter, as part of the same expedition, Sikkim, India, Himalayas
Everest - 1953 – leader of the British expedition from the Nepalese side, Himalayas; on 26 May, he climbed with Da Namgyal to around 8,336 m to deposit the equipment used by the second support team; the summit was reached on 29 May by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay
Caucasus - 1958 - leader of the British expedition, Soviet Union
Pamir - 1962 – leader of the British contingent of the Anglo-Soviet expedition, Soviet Union (now Tajikistan); Hunt left the expedition following the deaths of Wilfrid Noyce and Robin Smith on Mount Garmo
Works
The Ascent of Everest, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1953
Our Everest Adventure. The Pictorial History from Kathmandu to the Summit, with Christopher Brasher, Leicester, Brockhampton Press, 1954
*The Red Snows. An Account of the British Caucasus Expedition*, 1958, with Christopher Brasher, London, Hutchinson, 1960
*Life Is Meeting*, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1978
Bibliography
As a writer
no critical study has been found on his written work
As a significant reference
Michael Westmacott and Stephen Venables, Henry Cecil John Hunt, Lord Hunt of Llanfair Waterdine, Himalayan Journal 55, 1999
George Band, Hunt, (Henry Cecil) John, Baron Hunt (1910–1998), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
Mick Conefrey, Everest 1953: The Epic Story of the First Ascent, Oneworld, 2012