The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

whether one Prime Minister deserved preference over another, whether just the one footballer deserved the sporting palm, about why there are particular novelists or comedians or musicians who don’t appear in these pages. Good. If our New Elizabethans had been a bore, they would have been a pointless bunch.

      I record my deep gratitude to my BBC colleagues in the Acknowledgements, because this was a collective and energetic expedition that proved exhilarating at every turn. I found myself taken back to my youth – listening to Tony Hancock, missing a Beatles concert, learning of the ‘rivers of blood’ speech – and then to the politics that I covered as a young journalist – the first devolution arguments, the rise of Margaret Thatcher – and also discovering characters of whom I knew little, like Vladimir Raitz and his package holidays, or Talaiasi Labalaba, the SAS soldier of whom I hadn’t heard but whose statue is one of his regiment’s proudest memorials. I lived through the Northern Ireland Troubles again, and tried to explain what it was that made Billy Connolly a star.

      When it was over, and I was writing about the Queen for the last portrait, I was reinforced in my view that continuity has been as important as change in an era which can be too conveniently defined by decline, crisis and alarm. It is easier to think of the unsolved problems and coming threats than to remember the scientists or artists who startled the world, or the community heroes who fought for human values against a hostile tide. The useful excuse of a Diamond Jubilee, placing our age in a frame, is a chance to try to give the picture its proper proportions, and to see the light and the dark at the same time. It is neither escapist nor nostalgic, just the natural recollection of a journey through the years.

      The picture has many layers, and beguiling perspectives. It is both mirror and lamp, reflecting and illuminating, and these are the characters who have drawn it. They tell our story for us.

       JN, September 2012

Edmund Hillary

      Edmund Hillary was the first hero of the second Elizabethan age. His adventure was organized to make it turn out that way, and to this end the Coronation in 1953 had a piece of news attached that would both announce a new frontier and confirm that the days of unimaginable exploits in far-off places had not gone.

      The timing required luck as well as skill and brawn, but it was Hillary’s good fortune to carry with him for the rest of his life the impression that maybe it was because of his dignified bearing and natural modesty that everything had happened just as the expedition, and Fate, had jointly planned: so that there had never been any doubt that when he and Sherpa Tenzing set off for the last push from the South Col they would make it to the summit of Everest.

      The truth at the time was different. The winds had been high and the weather bad. The two climbers who had been selected to make the first assault had been beaten back on the last, lonely ridge and at base camp no one could be sure that Hillary and Tenzing would do any better. They spent the last night less than 2,000 ft from the summit, but awoke in the dark just before dawn on 29 May to a calm that brought a surge of relief. The wind had dropped: they had a chance.

      Then Hillary saw that his boots had frozen solid in the night and were like lumps of black iron. The first two hours of that day were spent thawing the boots over a flickering stove so that he could get them on. They couldn’t be sure that their oxygen would last; that the weather wouldn’t close in; that they’d have the energy for the last slow slog to the top.

      Picture them at the stove: the tall New Zealander and the short, wiry Sherpa, who had been high up the mountain seven times, but never so close to the summit. They had no navigation system, none of the clothing and equipment that would make the next generation of climbers look like quite different animals, not even a radio. Hillary had a little camera tucked under his clothes to stop it freezing up. Their small tent, and the gear they laid out for the last day’s work, would have seemed familiar to the adventurers of a generation earlier, and antique to those who had taken the same route when they had become old men.

      The two men preparing for the final trudge to the top were fit and strong, and had the streak of imagination that drives the best climbers to the highest places, where others can’t go. But the expedition – with 362 porters and 20 Sherpa guides – had something of an air of majestic amateurism, connecting it to the memory of wildly optimistic outings when men in hairy socks and polished leather boots forged through the snow or set sail for unknown places. There was nothing ramshackle about the Everest expedition of 1953, planned to the last detail, but the spirit did hark back: to a time when there was no oxygen, patchy maps, and an ever-present feeling of the unknown.

      This story had two irresistible elements: ice and suspense. The coldest places on earth had seemed, for more than a generation, to invite the greatest effort of imagination. One of the reasons was the obsession of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. His journeys were the first truly dazzling exploits of the twentieth century as far as any British schoolchild was concerned, and the fact that his fame was sealed by a failure (to beat Amundsen to the South Pole) only proved what a stalwart he was.

      Knowing that he was doomed, Scott wrote his Message to the Public: ‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’

      As a youngster in New Zealand, on his two-hour journey to school, Hillary read the stories of such men. Their names cascaded down the years and inspired the expedition put together by John Hunt to conquer the unconquerable mountain, which they all saw as part of an old story – daring and sad. Where Mallory and Irvine were assumed to have failed in 1924, died and lost near the summit without having reached it, there was still a game to be played, and won.

      In 1953, time and distance meant that such drama was spun out: no pictures from the scene, no breathless commentary day by day, but weeks of silence. The result, the benefit you might say, was that when good news came, of unexpected progress, or triumph, it came out of a clear blue sky like a roll of thunder. And the Everest expedition had another ingredient that infused the suspense with poetry.

      James Morris of The Times was 26 when he was told over lunch at the Garrick Club in London that he could, if he wanted, become Special Correspondent to cover the Everest expedition. The paper had put up some money, and as a result had secured the rights to all the dispatches sent home by Hunt and his men. And in Morris they had found their man, a storyteller of brilliance and effervescent panache whose travels and portraits of people and places would make him one of the most celebrated writers of his age, both as James, and later as Jan, after he decided to become the woman who’d always been inside him.

      Morris trekked to base camp with the expedition, though he had no experience of real mountains, and began to plan how he might break the great news, if it came. The problem was that Fleet Street was not going to accept for a moment the deal that The Times had done with Hunt, and dispatched reporters to Kathmandu with instructions to do whatever was necessary to get the story first. You can imagine the Mail and the Telegraph and the Express working on Sherpa guides to make sure that the news would reach them first, perhaps carried on cleft sticks from the slopes of Everest, in an icy echo of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.

      Morris was up to the task. He described the expedition’s progress to base camp, at 22,000 ft, with elegant verve, and he wasn’t going to let the story slip away. So he devised a code that would confuse any of his competitors who might see the telegram that would be flashed to the British Embassy in Kathmandu: he had no doubt that they would. And with the rest of the expedition, the only reporter in the camp, he waited.

      They had no means of knowing that Hillary and Tenzing were on the way, only the knowledge that the wind might have dropped. But they were, carrying heavy backpacks and worried about their oxygen. Hillary wrote of the climb up the last ridge: ‘My solar plexus was tight with fear as I ploughed on. Halfway up I stopped, exhausted. I could look down 10,000 feet between my legs and I have never felt more insecure. Anxiously, I waved Tenzing up to me.’

      And they were there, alone. Afterwards, to put an end to the argument about who got there first, they issued a joint