Norton of Everest: The Biography of E.F. Norton, Soldier and Mountaineer

Hugh Norton Vertebrate Publishing 2017

It’s a photograph that captures the spirit of 1930s Everest mountaineering – Teddy Norton heading out alone across the North Face in hobnailed boots and a long ice axe, the summit pyramid a scant thousand feet above. That clear June day, on leave from the Army, Norton would establish an oxygen-less altitude record that would stand for a half-century. The route he established would be the one chosen by Reinhold Messner when he made his epochal solo ascent in 1980.

establishes the mountaineer firmly in the social fabric of a career soldier. A second son of a merchant family, he leaves boarding school as early as possible to join off icer training in artillery. He leads a battery through many of the prominent battles of the First World War and serves many tours of command in India. As stated empathetically, “a life lived at first in the high noon of the British Empire, and then through its slow decline and twilight,” this biography written by his son brings these words to life through prose and the memoirs of those that knew Norton.—