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Myth 3 (also featuring the illustrious coronet): Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were wearing Rolex watches when they reached the peak of Mount Everest in 1953
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay wearing Rolex watches while summiting Everest is a dual myth that needs to be doubly scotched. No ice.
Tenzing Norgay (left) and Sir Edmund Hillary on Mount Everest Everest, both wearing watches (photo courtesy Royal Geographical Society)
The first part is easy: it is frequently claimed that Hillary and Tenzing were wearing Rolex Explorers on their conquest of the peak, or at least some form of “pre-Explorer.”
It has been clearly documented that the 1953 team led by Sir John Hunt was equipped with 13 watches from Rolex: six given to team members who had been on the previous year’s unsuccessful Cho Oyu expedition and seven for the new members of the 1953 team.
But as collector James Dowling explains in his article in the final issue of the now-defunct QP magazine, these watches were standard Rolex Oyster Perpetuals, not Explorers, as the Explorer model with its distinctive 3-6-9 dial was still in development and would not emerge in that form, with or without the Explorer name on the dial, until later in 1953. The famous Mercedes hands would not be added for another 18 months.
The second aspect of the myth is more controversial and has remained so for many years due to lack of clear photographic or written evidence. Particularly the absence of a categorical statement either way by the persons concerned or by Rolex itself.
The myth perpetuated to this day by numerous print and online publications, some of which ought to know better, and backed up by a stream of almost subliminal advertisements by Rolex, is that Sir Edmund Hillary was wearing his Rolex Oyster Perpetual when he reached the peak of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953 accompanied by Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.
Sometimes the myth is extended to include Tenzing Norgay as well, claiming that he was wearing the gold Rolex Day-Date given to him by mountaineer Raymond Lambert on the Swiss Everest expedition in 1952.
For example, the following publications categorically claim that Sir Edmund Hillary was wearing a Rolex Oyster Perpetual at the peak of Everest.
Hodinkee.com: FOUND – The Rolex Sir Edmund Hillary Wore To The Peak of Mount Everest states: “In 1953, the not-yet-Sir Edmund Hillary became the first man to summit Mount Everest along with expedition partner Tenzing Norgay. And he did so with a Rolex on his wrist, an Oyster Perpetual that would prove to be the ancestor of the Explorer.”
The Watch Book Rolex by Gisbert Brunner, published by now-bankrupt TeNeues, states authoritatively that, “When Edmund Hillary glanced with a mixture of relief and joy at his wristwatch on May 29, 1952, its dial showed 11.30 A.M. . . . Like all other members of the official expedition, he had picked up his watch two months previously in Jaynagar, an Indian city along the border with Nepal, where it had been sent by Geneva-based Montres Rolex S.A.”
Phillips Hong Kong watch auction XI, November 29, 2020: “The story of the Rolex Explorer was really made when it was the very first wristwatch worn on the summit of Everest by none other than Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa Tenzig [sic] Norgay.”
Online retailer analogshift.com gets it even more muddled: “The Explorer traces its heritage back to the first successful summit of Everest in 1953. While we know now that the watch on Sir Edmund Hillary’s wrist was a Rolex Oyster Precision.
The Oyster Precision was the precursor to the Explorer, and it was the Precision that introduced the 3-6-9 Arabic dial that we associate with the Explorer today. It was after the successful summit that Rolex rechristened the model as the Explorer in honor of Hillary and Norgay’s historic accomplishment.”
So it is hardly surprising that, like the mist that shrouds the peak of Kanchenjunga for much of the year, the truth of the matter is shrouded in myth, which is in turn enveloped in nonsense.
The key to this mystery is encapsulated in that last sentence: “It was after the successful summit that Rolex rechristened the model as the Explorer in honor of Hillary and Norgay’s historic accomplishment.”
If Sir Edmund Hillary was wearing a Rolex (of any sort) at the summit, why didn’t Rolex re-issue a Rolex Everest in celebration of the fact, just as French watch manufacturer LIP did with its LIP Himalaya after Maurice Herzog’s conquest of Annapurna in 1954?
And why did a now-defunct English watch manufacturer by the name of Smiths issue a Smiths Everest in 1953?
Furthermore, when I interviewed professional diver Nigel Band about his father George’s Everest and Kangchenjunga Rolexes, he described attending a Royal Geographical Society talk given by Sir Edmund Hillary in the 1970s, where he overheard one of the regular society members leaning over to another member and muttering “of course it wasn’t a Rolex he was wearing at the top, it was a Smiths . . .”
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