KEY POINTS:
The service in the lovely wooden church of St Mary's in Holy Trinity for Sir Edmund yesterday was as straightforward and as plain spoken as the man himself.
Thankfully, it appeared that great care had been taken not to let pomp and ceremony creep in.
There was laughter as Sir Ed's son Peter remembered he and his sister Sarah's childhood, agreement when the Prime Minister, Helen Clark, said that all of us were saying goodbye to a friend and delight among his old friends as we swapped stories before and after the service.
From around 9.30am we had begun gathering at the church - alpine companions to provide a guard of honour, men and women who had known the families all their lives, and those of us who had been privileged to share some of Sir Ed's experiences on mountains, in the Antarctic or, more significantly, with the great work of his Himalayan Trust whose members were strongly represented.
George Lowe, his companion on Everest, arrived with his wife and son and joined the handful of those remaining who had also been on the Everest expedition.
Only two of the Antarctic expedition wintering party made it, the expedition pilots John Clayton and Bill Cranfield. Three more, including Jim Bates, who is the last member of "The Old Firm" that took the Ferguson tractors to the South Pole, are too ill and the rest are no longer with us.
George, a veteran of both Everest and Sir Vivian Fuchs' Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition is the last link between the two. Yesterday was exactly 50 years and two days since Sir Ed flew back to the South Pole with a small group, including myself, to meet the Fuchs party.
Peter's tribute had an endearing sense of a final bonding between father and son, punctuated with video and photographic clips - his mother Louise scrambling on a yak, he as a child proudly standing with his father on a snow-covered ridge - and a shot of them talking by satellite phone just moments after Peter had stood on the summit of Everest for the second time.
"Tell me," said Sir Ed in Auckland, as he looked at the camera and gave a great wink, "how was the Hillary steps?"
St Mary's erupted in laughter.
The tears began to flow as the service concluded. When a piper played Abide with Me and Sir Edmund's coffin was carried through the church, realisation came that Ed was making a final farewell.
As Ed's old friends then stood in the church grounds and yarned, they recounted again not only his modesty, his delight in making plans and then scrubbing them and constructing new plans, but also remembered his toughness, sometimes stubbornness, when he felt it was needed.
Ed in many ways wrote his own obituary in his autobiography Nothing Venture, Nothing Win.
"In general," Sir Ed wrote, "I dislike controversy but sometimes it is better to speak up and suffer criticism than to try to conserve a lukewarm friendship."
Peter in his eulogy put it another way: "Dad was always working to drive further, look harder - he told me 'don't be afraid to stand alone'."
* Geoffrey Lee Martin was a member of Sir Edmund's Antarctic team and is a former Herald staff reporter. His book Hellbent for the Pole, published last year, recounts the ice adventure.
