Elizabeth Hawley

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Elizabeth Hawley in her New Zealand Consulate apartment (1999)

Elizabeth "Liz" Ann Hawley (* 9. November 1923 in Chicago , Illinois ; † 26. January 2018 in Kathmandu , Nepal ) was an American journalist and chronicler of Himalayan - expeditions . Hawley's Himalayan Database , which has been almost completely maintained since the early 1960s, contains more than 9,600 expeditions and 70,000 climbers (as of January 2018). She was a supporter of the Himalayan Trust , founded by Edmund Hillary , which promotes the economy in Solukhumbu and improves the living conditions of the people there. Hawley was the Honorary Consul of New Zealand in Nepal.

Life

Family background

Elizabeth Hawley's maternal grandfather was Edward Everett Gore, an entrepreneur and auditor from Carlinville . He had graduated from a business college in Jacksonville, Illinois and trained in a law firm before moving to Chicago with his wife and children in 1895 . There, entrepreneurial success as well as social and political commitment made him one of the most respected citizens of the city. As President of the Chicago Crime Commission , he led the fight against alcohol smuggling in the United States during alcohol prohibition . The Al Capone criminal syndicate therefore threatened him several times with his murder. His wife, Amanda, was also an academic , which was particularly unusual for a woman of her time. In 1894 the couple's first child was born, Elizabeth Hawley's future mother, Florelle. Florelle studied English literature at Northwestern University and graduated summa cum laude . While at college, she met Elizabeth's father, Frank, a descendant of immigrants who settled in Hawleyville in the 17th century , and married him. Born in 1893, he was in the First World War in the US Navy served. After graduating as an auditor , he joined his father's company. Florelle worked for the women's rights organization League of Women Voters . The couple first moved to the Chicago suburb of La Grange .

Childhood and youth

Elizabeth Hawley was the second child of the Hawleys, born three years after her brother John. The family soon moved to Yonkers in the US state of New York , but the mother and the children moved to Indiana only a little later to take care of her father's estate. This took a total of four years, during which she and the children lived apart from her husband and father. Although Elizabeth Hawley's parents were not particularly religious, she attended Sunday school here , as was expected of a middle-class child of the day. After Elizabeth's mother's inheritance issues had been resolved, the family moved into a shared home in Birmingham, Michigan , where young Elizabeth attended secondary school. During this time, she became seriously ill with polio , but survived the infection without lasting consequences. When the Great Depression made it impossible for her father to do business in Michigan, the Hawleys moved to New York City and chose the prestigious Scarsdale school for Elizabeth . During Elizabeth's high school years, they bought a summer home in Dorset, Vermont . From here, Frank Hawley and his daughter went on long walks through the surrounding hills. Although Elizabeth Hawley was not as close to him as to her mother - Hawley biographer Bernadette McDonald suspects the cause of this was the four-year separation of the family - her father had a strong influence on his daughter's career. He showed an interest in their school education and their social interaction, introduced them to people and, thanks to his financial skills, ensured the family's standard of living even during the economically difficult times of the Depression and World War II , which made it possible for both children to go to university.

Education

In 1941, Elizabeth Hawley began her studies at the University of Michigan . She took courses in political science , English , zoology , history and temporarily - without her own interest, but following the will of her father - mathematics . She showed particular enthusiasm for the lectures given by history professor Preston Slosson. Slosson's attention was drawn to the dedicated student Hawley, and he and his wife invited her to evening social gatherings to discuss topical political or economic issues. Hawley also served on the board of a student association that hosted faculty-wide lectures and debates between faculty and students. What she liked about this position was that it enabled her to get to know how organizations work and to establish close contacts with professors and other decision-makers.

In November 1944 she accepted a position as a research assistant in the history department of her university. With Slosson's support, she also appeared on several occasions as a speaker on international affairs. The private connection with the Slosson couple deepened, and in the summer of 1944 Hawley even moved in with them. In September of the same year, she completed her studies with a BA thesis in history, in which she investigated the causes of war. Through further studies, she finally obtained the academic degree Master of Arts .

Career entry and travel years

In 1946 Hawley accepted a position as a researcher and documentary journalist in New York with the business magazine Fortune . The employment involved travels within the USA, but also to Canada and Brazil ; Hawley's frugal lifestyle saved herself the money for additional trips abroad during her vacation time. The first took her in 1948 on board the RMS Queen Mary across the Atlantic to London , after which she first visited rural parts of Great Britain , then the European cities of Paris , Rome and Florence . In 1949, shortly after she returned from Europe, her brother John died unexpectedly of cancer at the age of 35. Hawley's early death hit Hawley - now sibling - hard, but reports from friends and relatives say she remained composed.

In the following years Hawley made extensive trips, most of the time alone. In the summer of 1949 she visited the war-torn countries of Germany and Austria , then she was in Monte Carlo and took the Orient Express to Trieste . Then followed a tour of Yugoslavia . Hawley met people from a wide variety of social classes, from the rural population from the poorest backgrounds to the highest government officials such as Marshal Tito . Two years later she traveled to bombed-out Berlin , then to Finland . In 1953 she began her first trip to Africa, which took her to Tunisia , Algeria and Morocco . In the following years she was in the Middle East and again in Africa, this time in Sudan and in not yet independent Kenya .

After eleven years with Fortune , Hawley quit her job with the magazine in 1956. Although her work there was always recognized, she saw no possibility of professional advancement. At that time, research at Fortune was done exclusively by women, while the journalists were all male. Hawley also wanted to expand her travel activities.

On April 16, 1957, she set out on a two-year trip around the world. Mostly traveling by train or bus, she initially opened up Eastern Europe. It reached Warsaw via Paris , followed by a tour of Poland , Sweden and Finland , then Leningrad , Moscow , Stalingrad and the rural areas of the Soviet Union . A boat trip on the Volga and Don took them to Rostov and as far as the Georgian Gori , and via Kiev they came back to Moscow. In July she made a stopover in Vienna and had to change her further travel plans because as an individual traveler she had been refused entry to Romania . She arrived in Prague at the end of the month , then drove through West Germany , Greece and Italy to arrive back in Belgrade in December. The following year, Hawley toured the Middle East again with stops in Turkey , Israel , Iran , Lebanon and Jordan . In order to be able to travel between Israel and the Arab states without any problems, Hawley had her visas not stamped on their passports by indulgent officials, but certified on a separate piece of paper. She also carried a certificate from her previous Sunday School with her; so she could prove that she was not a Jew. In 1959 she traveled through South Asia with Nepal , then by boat to Southeast Asia and via Japan back to the United States. She was particularly fascinated by the strangeness of Nepal, which had only opened its borders to foreigners in 1950. After the trip, she decided to emigrate to Nepal.

Emigration and Living in Nepal

In September 1960, Elizabeth Hawley moved to Kathmandu , where she lived until her death. In Kathmandu, she was interested in the history of mountaineering in the Himalayas from the start, and she made many personal contacts with mountaineers whose expeditions started in Kathmandu. From 1960 she worked as a correspondent for the American news magazine Time , in 1962 she became a correspondent for the Reuters news agency . Much of their coverage was on expeditions to the eight-thousanders . She began conducting interviews with every expedition that climbed a mountain in Nepal before setting off and after returning . When Tibet was also opened to mountaineers, it also met those expeditions that climbed the Nepalese mountains from the north. A dense network of whistleblowers informed her of the arrival of a new expedition in Kathmandu within hours, so that she could not miss any expedition, and she soon earned a reputation as the best expert on the region. For example, in 1963 she was able to report exclusively on the crossing of Mount Everest by an American expedition from the west side. In addition to Reuters , Hawley recently wrote for mountaineering magazines from nine countries, including climbing and alpine from Germany.

Work as a chronicler

Hawley has been keeping records of Himalayan mountaineering since the early 1960s, including over 4,000 expeditions and 36,000 mountaineers. As of March 2011, she conducted around 15,000 interviews with mountaineers, researching data on around 80,000 ascents on around 340 different peaks in Nepal, including those on the borders with China and India. These form the basis for the Himalayan Database (German: 'Himalaya Database') of the American Alpine Club , an almost complete chronicle of the ascents of the seven and eight-thousanders in Nepal and Tibet.

As a result, Hawley, although she was not a mountaineer herself and never stood on one of the peaks, was internationally recognized as an authority for recognizing the summit successes in Nepal and was nicknamed "Mama Himalaya". Their information was trusted in specialist circles, and their assessment was considered decisive for the recognition of summit successes. The fact that she has already been able to expose alleged ascents as lies or errors several times earned her additional nicknames " Miss Marple from Kathmandu" and " Sherlock Holmes of the mountains". For example, she was able to prove to the Dutchman Bart Vos that his alleged solo ascent of Dhaulagiri I over the east face in autumn 1996 had not taken place as claimed; she showed the Russian Anatoly Bukrejew that he had not reached the summit of Shishapangma , but only on a pre-summit. In her research for the Himalayan Database , Hawley was supported by the German Billi Bierling . Hawley gave up running the Himalayan Database several years before her death. In order to visit climbers in the mountain area for research, she last drove a sky-blue VW Beetle, built in 1965.

Since 1990 Hawley was New Zealand's Consul General in Nepal.

Elizabeth Hawley was unmarried and had no children.

Awards

Works

  • Elizabeth Hawley, Richard Salisbury: The Himalayan Database: The Expedition Archives of Elizabeth Hawley . American Alpine Club Press, Golden (Colorado) 2004, ISBN 0-930410-99-8 .
  • Elizabeth Hawley, Richard Salisbury: The Himalaya by the Numbers. A Statistical Analysis of Mountaineering in the Nepal Himalaya . 2007 ( himalayandatabase.com [PDF; 6.9 MB ]).

Remarks

  1. ↑ Entry with a passport that contains a stamp from an Israeli authority is regularly refused by various Arab states. Conversely, entry into Israel is made more difficult if the passport has official notices from an Arab country with which Israel has no diplomatic relations.

literature

  • Michael Kern: Our wife in Kathmandu . In: climb . No. 5, 2003. ISSN  1437-7462 , p. 31.
  • Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu: Elizabeth Hawley - the chronicler of Himalayan mountaineering . With a foreword by Sir Edmund Hillary . Bergverlag Rother, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-7633-7048-X ( limited preview in the Google book search - American English: I'll Call You in Kathmandu: The Elizabeth Hawley Story . Translated by Monika Einstrieber, Anja Rauchatz).
  • Michael Wulzinger: Extreme mountaineering: Mama Himalaya . In: Der Spiegel . No. 1 , 2007 ( online ).
  • Folkert Lenz: "Miss Hawley, just Miss Hawley, please ..." In: DAV Panorama. Announcements from the German Alpine Club . No. 1/2010 , February 2010, p. 48 ff .

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Hawley  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gopal Sharma: Everest climb chronicler Elizabeth Hawley dies in Nepal . Reuters article from Business Insider , January 26, 2016, accessed January 26, 2016.
  2. ↑ a b Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 30th f .
  3. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 31 f .
  4. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 32 ff .
  5. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 32 .
  6. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 35 .
  7. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 36 ff .
  8. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 43 ff .
  9. ↑ a b c d Biography Miss Elizabeth Hawley. The King Albert I Memorial Foundation, archived from the original on September 6, 2009 ; accessed on July 31, 2010 (English).
  10. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 48 ff .
  11. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 51 ff .
  12. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 48, 55 .
  13. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 56 ff .
  14. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 61 ff .
  15. ↑ Folkert Lenz: "Miss Hawley, just Miss Hawley, please ..." In: DAV Panorama . No. 1/2010 , p. 48 .
  16. ↑ Folkert Lenz: "Miss Hawley, just Miss Hawley, please ..." In: DAV Panorama . No. 1/2010 , p. 49 .
  17. ↑ a b Eric Hansen: The High Priestess of Posterity. In: Online edition of Outside . March 9, 2011, accessed October 18, 2011 .
  18. ↑ a b c d Folkert Lenz: "Miss Hawley, just Miss Hawley, please ..." In: DAV Panorama . No. 1/2010 , p. 50 .
  19. ↑ Bernadette McDonald: See you in Kathmandu . S. 47 .
  20. ↑ Folkert Lenz: "Miss Hawley, just Miss Hawley, please ..." In: DAV Panorama . No. 1/2010 , p. 51 .
  21. ↑ Mount Everest chronicler Hawley died at the age of 94 . orf.at , January 26, 2018, accessed January 26, 2018.
  22. ^ Literary Award. The American Alpine Club, archived from the original on April 16, 2012 ; accessed on April 16, 2012 (English).
personal data
SURNAME Hawley, Elizabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hawley, Elizabeth Ann (full name); Hawley, Liz Ann (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and chronicler of Himalayan expeditions
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Chicago , Illinois
DATE OF DEATH January 26, 2018
Place of death Kathmandu , Nepal