HILLARY’S WITNESS

I was getting ready for a road trip when my mate Mark Sainsbury phoned to inform me that Jan Morris, the last surviving foreign member of the 1953 British Expedition to Mt Everest, had died, aged 94, in a North Wales hospital.

As the only embedded journalist on the historic ascent of the world’s highest peak that brought glory to Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, Jan was James back then. He would undergo sexual-reassignment surgery in 1972, after decades of feeling “that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl”.

But back at Camp IV on published its correspondent’s dispatch.