The Edward Norton’s story, the «Argentine» of the 1924 Everest expedition

British Colonel Edward Felix «Teddy» Norton was actually born in Argentina. He was the leader of the expedition that took Mallory and Irvine to Everest in 1924. Here is his full story, taken from the book «Diaries of Chomolungma», which recounts that epic.

When I started working on this book, at the beginning of 2024, my main objective was to try to get to the story of Edward Norton in Argentina, beyond his participation in that memorable expedition of 1924, which has gone down in history.

The information available on this topic was very limited and, logically, did not in the least satisfy the requirements for preparing a complete story.

It was a job that took me no less than three months of research, where the time elapsed did not play in favor of a happy ending. To get started, it was simply necessary to find the «beginning of the rope» and then, to pull little by little, until reaching the goal.

After several days, without results, beyond the little known, that he was born in San Isidro, province of Buenos Aires, and that as a child he grew up in Great Britain, and well, everything that was known up to that point, I was finally able to get to the «beginning of the rope.»

And that beginning was none other than the family tree of «Teddy Norton», which I found almost by chance on a genealogy website, where, through which, I was able to come to the conclusion that the colonel had a grandson, living in Great Britain, and that he was alive.

The second part of the investigation, which took a few weeks, was to be able to contact him. It was an almost impossible task to find a Christopher Norton, living in Great Britain, who is a descendant of Colonel Edward Norton, who was on the Everest expedition of Mallory and Irvine. And who was born in Argentina. But it was achieved, after sending a significant number of letters to different places and institutions in England.

Christopher Norton is the grandson of Colonel Edward Felix Norton. He is a professor at a British university, and through that institution I was able to locate him. From the very beginning, he was, as could not be otherwise, very kind and willing to provide me with the information we were needing.

What comes now are the most important paragraphs of the chapter dedicated to Colonel Norton, in my book «Diaries of Chomolungma», Alpinismonline Editions, 2024. The chapter titled «Diary of Edward Norton», here below, so that we can learn about his time in Argentina.

The Edward Norton Diary

Extract from Diarios del Chomolungma, Carlos Eduardo González, alpinismonline ediciones, 2024

Edward Felix Norton, “Teddy,”He was born on February 21, 1884, in the Argentine Republic, almost by chance, since his family was residing in the country for business reasons. It was in the town of San Isidro, in the province of Buenos Aires.

However, much of his childhood, and his life in general, was spent in the United Kingdom. He attended Charterhouse School, and the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, from where he joined the army in 1902.

He was the third son of Edward Norton, forty-four, a shipping investor, and Edith, daughter of Sir Alfred Wills. His elder brother Jack, and sister Amy, were followed by three younger brothers, and a younger sister. The first three of the seven children were all born in Argentina, the last four in England. Their birth dates spanned a period of eighteen years, the gap separating the eldest son, Jack, from the youngest, Dick.

Edward NortonTeddy’s father, later to be appointed director of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the Union-Castle Steamship Company and the Nelson Line, had started life as an entrepreneur. He set up a shipping and trading agency in Hong Kong in his early twenties, and lived there for ten years.

During this time he made and lost two fortunes, the first of which was at the gambling tables of Shanghai. The way he lost his first fortune was simple and instantaneous; he was mugged and knocked unconscious as he left the casino with his winnings.

The story goes that a kind Chinese lady picked him up, brought him home and nursed him back to health. The second episode involved him in a lengthy lawsuit in London, trying to recover his losses from a former business partner.

In this suit, his case was represented by Alfred Wills, his future father-in-law, a promising lawyer. Indeed, Edward may have had a litigious bent, as his wife’s diary mentions that he sued an agency he did business with twice in later years. He won both cases.

He appears to have been an active and enterprising member of Hong Kong society. In 1869, at the age of twenty-eight, he was a founding member of the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club. Teddy spoke of Edward’s «great love of small-boat sailing» after his death.

On leaving Hong Kong, Edward Norton returned to England and quickly became interested in the trade between Liverpool and Argentina, in which he and two of his brothers became involved. Argentina was at the time one of the leading economies in Latin America, and a magnet for many European, especially British, investors.

His business, and that of his younger brother Robert, prospered, although his elder brother Herbert died, and was buried in Argentina. By the time he became engaged to Edith Wills, his second wife, in 1876 (his first wife, coincidentally also named Edith, had died in Hong Kong), he was busy acquiring land in a district in Buenos Aires Province, southwest of the capital, and turning it into a cattle ranch, an «estancia» as we know it here.

This enterprise also prospered and a successful ranch, called “Estancia La Ventura,” was established near the Sierras de la Ventana, which by 1883 had a family residence comfortable enough for his wife and young children to join.

Their home in Argentina, however, was a house called Quinta MacKinlay in San Isidro, in which they began their married life after being married by the British Consul in Rio de Janeiro, in October 1878. “La Ventura” was not Edward’s only business interest in Argentina, nor his main one.

This was a shipping line that he co-founded with his brother, based in Buenos Aires, under the name of ‘Norton Hermanos’. And again this venture was a success. It was still in operation until the 1930s.

Edward’s brother, Robert, also had residence in Argentina.

It was clear that the Norton family’s ties to this country were strong. Edward’s investment in agricultural land in the province of Buenos Aires was by no means unique for Italian expatriates with interests in Argentina, and when he and his family returned to England he placed the management of his estancia in the hands of a resident British manager.

Over time, their heirs were among the absentee landowners who became popular political targets during and after the presidency of Juan Domingo Perón. In the case of the Norton family, this led to the expropriation of the property in 1959, and the cessation of their ties with Argentina.

Edward Norton’s father (Teddy’s grandfather), who also bore the same name, had been a country lawyer in Norfolk during the first half of the 19th century. Before him, the Nortons traced their ancestry to a Norman family who supposedly came with the Conqueror.

In the last years of Teddy’s life, during this six-year period from 1948 to 1954, there was an exception to the family rule of not spending holidays abroad. The Norton family owned two chalets in France, in the Plateau d’Anterne region, which had been requisitioned and used for some time by the French resistance, the Maquis, during the German occupation.

The Collet Chalet had been vandalised and abandoned in a terrible condition, and the other one itself, although not badly damaged, was also in poor condition. Jack and Teddy visited briefly in 1946 to assess the damage, and again in 1947 and 1948, to clean up the Chalet and make some minor repairs. It was considered impossible to save the Collet Chalet from its decayed state, and with great regret, as it held many fond memories for them, they arranged for it to be dismantled.

The other chalet was put into a condition that made it suitable for reoccupation, but at some point during these three years they decided that it would be too difficult to maintain as a summer holiday home, and they began looking for a buyer. Despite some nibbling from prospective buyers, no sale was made.

By August 1948, the family business on another continent beckoned. Teddy had already visited Argentina in the fall of 1946 in connection with the family’s cattle business.

In January 1949, both Jack and Teddy, accompanied this time by their wives, undertook an extended four-month trip to visit the ranch and review its potential as a family asset – some ten years, coincidentally, before its final expropriation in 1959 by the provincial government.

They sailed both legs of the journey by transatlantic, from Tilbury to Buenos Aires and back. Purposeful air travel like theirs was still a rarity, and the much slower process of sea travel could be enjoyed without stress.

They stayed for several weeks at the estancia, inhabited by the British manager Robert Raikes, walking around the estate, playing ball, and climbing the local mountains. On the return trip, Teddy became captivated by an attractive traveling companion, an Argentinean lady who was the wife of the director of the Buenos Aires zoo, and who regaled him with stories of the zoo’s various exotic animals.

He was particularly fascinated by her account of the hatching of an iguana’s eggs, and spoke about it more than once on his return to Morestead. He eventually looked up the appropriate volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to verify a point, and was considerably disconcerted to find that it described the iguana as «giving birth to its young alive,» much to the amusement of Joyce, who felt that he had become unduly enthralled by his new acquaintance.

This trip seems to have marked a turning point in his general health. Up to and certainly during his holiday in Argentina, he had been lively and vigorous, and still enjoyed various active sports, but soon afterwards his health took a turn for the worse.

Under Argentine inheritance law, title to the property was passed on to all direct descendants of the original owner, his father Edward Norton, so that with each generation it was divided into an increasing number of ever-smaller shares.

Teddy’s father, as I said earlier, was the son-in-law of Sir Alfred Wills, one of the presidents of the most prestigious mountain club, the Alpine Club, as well as having been a prominent judge in his country.

It was Wills who introduced Teddy to the world of the mountains, which he would not abandon throughout his life. It was a link between mountain activities and military life. After joining the Gunners he spent some time in Tipperary, and combined sport, especially horse riding, with his military duties.

In the First World War he was a brigade major in the artillery and later joined the Canadian Army Corps. Before and after the war he served in India, where he gained a reputation as a fearless horseman and was runner-up in the 1922 Kadir Cup.

That same year he joined the Everest Expedition. He was an instructor at the Staff College, Quetta, 1929–32, and at Aldershot, 1934–38. He then returned to India, to command the Madras District and later the Western District of the Indian Army. While acting Military Governor of Hong Kong in 1940, he suffered a serious accident which led to his retirement in 1942, but at home he devoted himself to the Home Guard and other duties.

In early 1954 he suffered a «stroke» from which he was slowly recovering when, in November, a second stroke occurred which quickly proved fatal. The Norton family had a chalet, The Eagle’s Nest, near Sixt in Haute-Savoie, where Teddy learned to climb and to learn his way around the rock and snow.

His instinct for such things was remarkable and, in addition to the major climbs, he had done a tremendous amount of climbing and some very difficult climbing on lesser peaks in Savoy and elsewhere, much of it with his brother, and friends.

In 1922 he was chosen for the Everest expedition not only as a climber, but because he knew India, the Himalayas and some of the local varieties of Hindustani, and was accustomed to dealing with people from northern India.

He soon established himself as a very valuable member of the party, adding to these other qualities his great knowledge of birds and wildlife and his charming personality. As he was the eldest of the younger party on the expedition, he was always looked to for guidance, and this was given to us in the best possible way, with free discussion and asking advice from his juniors.

It is generally assumed that people of average height and build are better able to withstand serious expeditions. Norton was very tall, wiry and somewhat elderly, yet he climbed higher than anyone else without oxygen, both in 1922 and 1924. In the latter year, when General Bruce fell ill with malaria, Norton became the leader, as we have seen above.

He combined mental strength with humility of the highest kind. He was eager to climb the mountain, always in good humour, absolutely reliable and solid, but always ready to discuss plans and methods and to ask advice. When Mallory and Irvine got lost, Norton took the right attitude, as he had done before, just as he had done when four Sherpas were stranded on the North Col in the fresh snow.

Somervell describes him literally: “As a mountain companion he was ideal; when I was alone with him on Everest in 1924, I wondered how his tall, slender body was supported at a height never before attained by man, not only by his muscles, for he was not exceptionally strong, but by his indomitable spirit. After I had stopped defeated on a ledge at 28,000 feet, Norton advanced another hundred feet until snow-blindness and the lateness of the hour drove him back.

As a friend for over thirty years, he continued to display his three main characteristics: stability, humility and generosity. He never let anyone down and always tried to see the best in others and bring it out when the opportunity presented itself. He was a great lover of birds, and a great connoisseur of them, and he was also an accomplished draughtsman of all that is beautiful in the landscape and in natural life.”

His wife came from the old climbing family, the Pasteurs, and they did many climbs together, in the Alps as well as around Quetta in later days.

Wherever he was posted, he took every opportunity to visit mountains, such as the Patagonian Andes, the Nilgiris, Table Mountain, and many districts of the Himalayas. One of his greatest disappointments was that when his sons were old enough to climb mountains, his ill health prevented him from climbing with them. He travelled several times to Argentina, as we have seen, where climbing was always the perfect excuse.

And this is precisely a very interesting spice in the history of the Everest expedition of 1924, in which the Royal Geographical Society and the Everest Committee took special care in choosing their climbers, ensuring that they were all British.

Teddy Norton was undoubtedly British. But they overlooked one small detail, which would have been a topic of conversation if he had reached the summit of Everest for the first time that day in May 1924. Yes, Teddy was British, but also a little bit Argentine.

Did you like this article? You can read the entire DIARIOS DEL CHOMOLUNGMA, in spanish from this site, from the following image. We will publish it in English soon, we are working on the translation. If you want us to notify you, leave a comment on this note, registering your email, and we will notify you.

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