Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me Louise Clarke.

I'm taking you back to May 1953 and the first conquest of Everest.

This is London calling the British Mount Everest expedition.

Here is the latest weather quality.

Western disturbance, apparently moving eastwards across the extreme north of the border.

A British expedition is a tent since a climb the highest mountain in the world, Everest.

In the Himalayas, struggling the border of Tibet and Nepal, it arches into the sky at 8,848 metres.

One of the tank climbers is Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand.

Peter Hillary's Edmund son, he grew up immersed in the stories his father used to tell about that heroic climb of Everest.

From all my conversations with my father and from knowing him and the sort of temperament the man had,

he always knew that he wanted to be out in front.

He was an ambitious guy, he was one of those in a way shy retiring types on the outside but nothing could be further from the truth with Ed.

It was the ninth British attempt to conquer the mountain and Peter says his father had always wanted to be part of the expedition.

I think my father was aware this was an opportunity to make the first descent of the world's highest mountain.

They were all very excited and very ambitious that they should be able to achieve that.

But there was also an element I think amongst them all that they were just a group of mountaineers heading out on a marvelous adventure.

When visiting mountaineers came to see his father when Peter was a child, the talk always came around to Everest.

Conversations would obviously go back to so what happened that morning up there on that high camp or on Mount Everest.

I remember Dad saying, well you know of course there was the setback of his boots having frozen up and having to fall them out to pull them on and then checking the oxygen equipment both for himself and for tensing before they set off.

One of the things I remember most was his description of moving up the steep snow and ice flanks up towards the south summit.

He said he was out in front, cutting these steps, great sheets of snow and ice breaking loose and just taking off down the steep slope into the can shun face of Everest dropping down into Tibet.

And he said and I've seen it in his diary as well, he started having some doubts about the conditions whether it was safe to go on.

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