Word: izzard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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WORLD SCOOP, blared a Page One banner headline announcing Mailman Noel Barber's series on "a war nobody knows about." To gather the "whole wicked story" in Tibet, Barber (TIME, Jan. 13, 1958) and Fellow Mail Correspondent Ralph Izzard trekked 200 miles along the rugged Nepal-Tibet border with four Sherpa guides and 40 coolies, who carried their six tents, snow boots, whisky, double-lined sleeping bags, tinned food, drugs and 4,000 French cigarettes. For serious Tibet experts, Barber's panting prose about the guerrilla warfare between Chinese Communists and Tibetan warriors brought guffaws. But then Adventurer...
Lanky Ralph Izzard, foreign correspondent of the London Daily Mail, is not one to be intimidated by the impossible. When his editor ordered him off to Nepal to cover the British Everest Expedition and beat the Times of London, off he went. But how he could beat the Times, or even get the story, was a puzzler. The Times was subsidizing the expedition; by excluding all rivals from climb and climbers, it had a guaranteed airtight exclusive. Nonetheless, Correspondent Izzard, innocent as a fox, timid as a lion, moved in. An Innocent on Everest is his modest and amusing story...
...expedition leader, Colonel Sir John Hunt, told Izzard: "I am forbidden to tell you anything, and that applies as well to all members of the expedition." The British ambassador promised to be equally unhelpful and kept his promise so brilliantly that frozen-out newsmen later called him "the extra-special correspondent of the Times." Soon the expedition set out from the Nepal capital weighted down with 7½ tons of equipment. Izzard sadly watched his story climb away from him. It was going to take place three weeks away as a man walks (nearly 200 miles over murderously wild, roadless...
Compared to the splendid enterprise led by Hunt, the Izzard expedition was a joke. Against some 360 coolies, Izzard had five. He had no map or compass and his equipment consisted in part of two pairs of sneakers, a few pots, an old U.S. Army pup tent, an umbrella to ward off the leeches that fell like leaves from the trees. The incongruous team traveled fast and far over rough country carpeted with rhododendrons, orchids and magnolias. Izzard had never climbed anything more formidable than a flight of stairs, but he caught up to the British advance party after...
Back at sea level Izzard was 18 lbs. lighter, but pounds (sterling) richer in bonus money. His feat made fat headlines and dazzling copy. It also gave him a clean beat on the Times, during the first crucial days of the expedition that conquered Mount Everest, though the Times beat everyone on the big story, the climb to Everest's summit...