Wigtown Book Festival 2012: Jan Morris: 'The British Empire was disintegrating'
At Wigtown Book Festival, Jan Morris, the journalist who broke the news of Edmund Hillary's success climbing Everest, believed it was vital for the Empire that a British subject was the first person to reach the summit.
By Daisy Bowie-Sell
6:13PM BST 05 Oct 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/wigtown-book-festival/9590639/Wigtown-Book-Festival-2012-Jan-Morris-The-British-Empire-was-disintegrating.htmlTalking to a packed room at Wigtown Book Festival this week, the 86-year-old travel writer and journalist Jan Morris relived the moment when, on May 29 1953, she witnessed Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay's feat in becoming the first people to reach the summit of Everest.
"I was the one newspaper correspondent with their expedition and I climbed up some 22 thousand feet to meet them. It was a marvellous day: the sun was shining, the sky was a dazzling blue and I was raring to get the news away and secure the one and only scoop of my journalistic career", she said.
[...]
She talked with charm and eloquence on death and notions of paradise, and also touched on her relationship with her long-term partner Elizabeth Tuckniss. The two were first married in 1949, then were forced to divorce in 1972 after Morris underwent a sex-change to become a woman. In 2003, the two married again in a civil partnership which Morris thought of as: "a gesture of high romance ... a final page of fidelity before the registrar ... a gesture which would provide a harmonious conclusion if not life itself than at least to this last attempt at literature."
