Mr George Lowe CNZM OBE

Mr George Lowe was born in Hastings and attended Hastings Boys’ High School from 1938-1943. At school George represented the school in athletics, was a School Prefect, the Headquarters Platoon Sergeant in the Cadet Company, and a member of the 1st XV Rugby Team.

After leaving school and graduating from Wellington Teacher’s College, George was given sole charge of a rural primary school. In the summer he trained as a mountain guide, and it was in the Southern Alps that he meet Sir Edmund Hillary. Their climbing skills and ability was quickly recognised as they were invited to be part of the British attempt at Everest. The rest is history as Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest on the 29th of May 1953. George Lowe played a crucial part in the party’s success, displaying phenomenal strength and stamina to ferry kit up to the South Col, just shy of the peak, from where his fellow New Zealander and friend Edmund Hillary, with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, pushed on to the summit itself.

Spending day after day at altitudes of more than 23,000ft, Lowe often had to wade through waist-high snow to ensure everything was where it needed to be. According to John Hunt, the expedition’s leader, Lowe “put up a performance which will go down in the annals of mountaineering as an epic achievement of tenacity and skill.” It was nothing less, Hunt added in his memoir ‘The Ascent to Everest’ (1953), than an “astonishing feat of endurance”.

After his Antarctic Expedition in 1958, George settled in to education as a Principal of Grange School, Santiago, Chile and later in England as an Inspector of Schools. George Lowe was our guest speaker at our centenary in 2004.