WHILE Britain looked to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II, a small group of hardy men were preparing to tackle one of the holy grails of the explorer - the conquest of Everest.

One of the leading members of the team was a man well known to Malvern, Wilfrid Noyce.

Old Carthusian and expert mountain climber, Mr Noyce was for several years a master at Malvern College and co-founder of Malvern Writers Circle.

It was also while he lived in Malvern that he met Rosemary Davies, who taught modern languages at Malvern Girls' College and in August 1950 they were married at Malvern Priory.

Mr Noyce was killed in a mountaineering accident some years after the Everest expedition, but his widow, now Mrs Rosemary Ballard, still lives in Colwall.

"The time we really got together was when we both took part in an amateur dramatic production of Our Town by Thornton Wilder. That was in 1950 and we were married the same year.

"He had climbed mountains since he was a boy; his family had a cottage in North Wales and he started to climb there.

"He had quite a climbing reputation and also wrote good books. He was a friend of John Hunt, who led the expedition."

It was in fact the day of their son's christening that Mr and Mrs Noyce learned he had been selected. "Wilfrid went by ship and I went to Tilbury to see him off," she said.

Mr Noyce never reached the peak of Everest, but he played a crucial part in the success of the mission.

He, along with a Sherpa, were sent by Sir John Hunt to establish a path up the South Col, the small plat-eau just below the mountain's summit.

They were the first men from the expedition to reach it, and this paved the way for the successful assault on the summit by Sir Edmund Hillary and sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

Nowadays, expeditions to far-flung places can stay in touch with satellite phones, e-mail and so on, but, sitting at home in England, Rosemary, looking after the couple's baby son, only heard from her husband via letters that had travelled the thousands of miles back from Nepal.

"The news came through on the evening of Coronation Day, but I was staying in the Lake District and we had no radio, but someone phoned up and told me that evening," she said. "I was very proud that Wilfrid was part of it."

The Malvern Gazette celebrated the successful ascent by reprinting an article that Wilfrid Noyce wrote for the paper on 1949, extolling the virtues of a lesser mountain, the Worcestershire Beacon.

He recalled the one occasion he saw that rare optical illusion, the Brocken Spectre, at the top of the Beacon, his shadow projected on clouds below with a rainbow around his head.

A fortnight later, the paper published a poem, On Mount Everest, which Wilfrid wrote at 20,000 feet especially for the Gazette.

The expedition did not return to Britain until July, and in August, Mr and Mrs Noyce returned to Malvern, where they were feted at a civic dinner and Wilfrid sat for a portrait by Victor Moody, head of Malvern Art School.

Wilfrid Noyce perished during a mountain-climbing expedition in the Pamirs in Central Asia in 1962, but Rosemary picked up her life and later married Stephen Ballard of Colwall, which brought her back to the area where she has lived ever since.

Yesterday (Thursday) she was due to attend a reunion of the expedition members in London, attended by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.