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1854–65: A CONSCIOUS DIVINITY

For more than 100 years prior to the battle of Waterloo, Britain had been almost continuously at war. The hundred years that followed from 1815 to 1914 was a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity, the Pax Britannica, interrupted by just one war involving other European powers: the costly, inconclusive, but distant Crimean War (1854–56). While much of Europe was convulsed by periodic wars and the revolutions of 1848, a mastery of metallurgy, steam and finance turned Britain into a superpower, with an apparently unassailable lead in trade, industry and military force. By the 1850s, Britain was the workshop of the world, London was the global financial capital and more than half the world’s shipping by tonnage was British. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a celebration of British success, with a Crystal Palace assembled in Hyde Park to show off the science and technology that powered the Empire. It was an age of supreme optimism. After visiting the exhibition, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary: ‘We are capable of doing anything’, and this sense of unbounded possibilities gave individuals the self-confidence to contemplate things that would previously have been unthinkable.

The early mountaineers were more akin in spirit to the Hudson Bay fur trappers, the Indian nabobs and the other merchant adventurers who built the Empire than they were to the colonial administrators and army officers who later ran it. There was an unconventional, ambitious, romantic fearlessness about the pioneers. Trollope wrote his six ‘Barchester’ novels between 1855 and 1867, coinciding almost exactly with the Golden Age of mountaineering. The novels describe the lives of clerics, professionals and gentry – exactly the social class from which the early mountaineers emerged – and their popularity stemmed partly from the fact that the main characters were instantly recognisable ‘types’ to contemporary readers. Trollope describes a society preoccupied with money, property, marriage and status. The idea of climbing the highest peaks in the Alps for pleasure must have seemed far more unconventional to contemporaries of the pioneers than the most outrageous behaviour of modern climbers. The British mountaineering establishment, like the British Empire itself after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, may have become increasingly hidebound, conceited and arrogant, but during the Golden Age it had a spontaneous, joyous heedlessness that must have provided an extraordinary contrast to ‘civilised’ society and an almost Jekyll and Hyde existence for its adherents. More than any other, it was an age when climbers really did ‘escape’ from the strictures and conventions of contemporary society.

From the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century several remarkable ascents of alpine peaks were made by monks, priests, scientists and others living in the alpine countries, some of whom no doubt climbed purely for pleasure and enjoyment. Prior to 1854, nine major alpine peaks had been climbed: Mont Blanc (1786); the Grossglockner (1800); Monte Rosa (whose various peaks were climbed from 1801 onwards, although the highest point of this mountain range was not reached until 1855); the Ortler (1804); Jungfrau (1811); Finsteraarhorn (1829); Wetterhorn (1844); Mont Pelvoux (1848); and Piz Bernina (1850).¹ The British played almost no part in these early developments, but the activities of these adventurous individuals did not coalesce into a recognisable sport, and alpine climbing failed to gain the momentum of a new movement. All of that changed with the arrival of the British in the mid-1850s. During the decade that followed, almost every major mountain in the Alps was climbed in an orgy of peak-bagging that gave birth to the sport of mountaineering. Of the 39 major peaks ascended for the first time during this period, 31 were climbed by British parties.

It was a remarkable achievement. There were no maps of the glacier regions, few paths above the alpine meadows and forests, no experienced guides and no mountain huts. Access to the foothills of the Alps was possible by rail, but from the railhead it was necessary to travel by public stage coach and then walk long distances to reach the highest peaks. The early climbers slept out in all weathers and climbed well above the snowline in clothes designed for the English countryside. All of them joked about the fleas that they invariably picked up in their lodgings in the valleys. With no sun-block and inadequate sunglasses, severe sunburn and snow blindness were common. Many climbers wore veils to protect themselves, but when Ruskin wrote of climbers being ‘red with cutaneous eruptions’ he undoubtedly spoke the truth. Oscar Brown, a schoolmaster at Eton, confessed that ‘one became tired of living upon a knapsack, and never being absolutely clean, of seldom sleeping in a decent room or enjoying wholesome food, and when September arrived I began to long for the fleshpots of civilisation’.² Offsetting these hardships, labour was cheap and porters carried blankets, fire wood and provisions up to bivouac sites at the foot of the highest peaks. As a consequence, climbs were often noisy, boisterous affairs with large quantities of food and wine consumed before, during and after the ascent.

The ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 by Alfred Wills and his four guides signalled the start of the ‘Golden Age’ of British alpine exploration. The Wetterhorn is clearly visible from Grindelwald, which had already become a popular tourist destination because of its marvellous views of the Bernese Alps and easy access to two glaciers. Although it was probably the fifth or sixth ascent, the decision by a young Englishman, on his honeymoon, to climb the 3,692m/12,137ft snow-covered mountain, wearing elastic-sided boots and cricket flannels, is traditionally taken to mark the beginning of the sport of mountaineering. His account of the climb in Wanderings Amongst the High Alps (1856) makes passing reference to botany and geology, but it is clear that Wills’ primary motive was physical exercise and self-improvement, and there is a strong suggestion that it is the duty of any self-respecting Englishman to undertake such endeavours. The choice of Wills’ 1854 ascent to mark the start of the Golden Age was in many ways quite arbitrary. Albert Smith’s ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 has at least an equal claim, but the mid-Victorian historians of the Alpine Club gave Wills the honour, probably because Smith was never quite regarded as respectable.

Alfred Wills epitomised the urban, middle-class, professional background of the climbers who dominated the sport until the First World War. His father was a lawyer and he too went into the law, becoming a high court judge when his predecessor died of a heart attack in a brothel. In 1895 he presided over the trial of Oscar Wilde and sentenced him to two years’ imprisonment for gross indecency. Wills visited the Alps almost every year from 1846 to 1896. His son William was an active climber in the 1880s and 1890s, and his grandson Major Edward Norton was leader of the 1924 Everest expedition. A founding member of the Alpine Club when it was formed in 1857, Wills became president in 1864. After The Times described members of the Club as men who ‘seem to have a special fondness for regions which are suitable only as dwelling-places for eagles’, he named his chalet in Sixt ‘The Eagle’s Nest’.

Where There’s a Will There’s a Way by Charles Hudson and Edward Kennedy was published in the same year as Wanderings and describes the first guideless ascent of Mont Blanc in 1855. Kennedy inherited a fortune at the age of 16 but lost most of it during the course of his life as a result of a series of bad investments. He became something of an expert on the underworld of his day, living for a time with thieves and other low-life in Liverpool and London. For a mid-Victorian gentleman, a journey into the East End of London was probably as great an adventure, with a similar threat of physical harm, as a climb in the Alps, but Kennedy was also a deep thinker, famous for persistently asking the question ‘Is it right?’ and the author of Thoughts on Being, suggested by Meditation upon the Infinite, the Immaterial, and the Eternal (1850). In climbing, he found a purpose in life that satisfied both his thirst for adventure and his quest for meaning, and he set about persuading others to follow. He was a prime mover in the formation of the Alpine Club and its president from 1860–62.

Charles Hudson, the co-author of Where There’s a Will There’s a Way, was an Anglican chaplain during the Crimean War and subsequently became a vicar in Lincolnshire. For him, the mountains offered a reassuring reminder of the mystery and beauty of God’s creation. He was ‘as simple and noble a character as ever carried out the precepts of muscular Christianity without talking its cant’,³ according to Leslie Stephen. Relaxed, handsome and self-effacing, Hudson was a man of extraordinary stamina and almost reckless courage. At the age of 17, he averaged 43km/27 miles per day on a tour of the Lake District and once walked from Saint-Gervais, near Chamonix, to Geneva and back in a day (a distance of 138km/86 miles). His first ascents in 1855 included the Breithorn (grade F, 4,164m/13,661ft), without guides, and the Dufourspitze (PD, 4,634m/15,203ft), the highest point of the Monte Rosa, with James and Christopher Smyth, who were also parsons, John Birkbeck, a Yorkshire banker, and Edward Stevenson. A fortnight later he climbed Mont Blanc with Edward Kennedy and made the first ascent (solo) of Mont Blanc du Tacul (PD, 4,248m/13,937ft). Hudson continued to climb throughout the Golden Age, making the first ascent of the Moine Ridge on the Aiguille Verte (AD, 4,122m/13,524ft) with Thomas Kennedy (no relation to Edward) in 1865. Thomas Kennedy once rode the Nile cataracts on a log for fun and was also a noted polo player and huntsman: ‘No man has ever ridden straighter or harder’,⁴ Lord Harrington noted approvingly in his obituary.

Several of the pioneers were accomplished sportsmen in other fields, including Charles Barrington who won the Irish Grand National on his horse Sir Robert Peel. During his first and only holiday in the Alps in 1858, Barrington climbed the Jungfrau and then asked some members of the Alpine Club whom he happened to meet which peaks had yet to be climbed. They suggested either the Matterhorn or the Eiger. Barrington chose the Eiger (3,970m/13,025ft) because he could not be bothered to travel to Zermatt and duly completed the first ascent of the mountain, via the West Ridge (AD). As the party approached the summit, Barrington allegedly pulled a pistol from his jacket and informed his guides that if they attempted to reach the summit before him he would blow their brains out. His account of the climb simply noted that ‘the two guides kindly gave me the place of first man up’.⁵

Observing the growing popularity of the sport in 1857, the Rev. S. W. King wrote of ‘young Cantabs and Oxonians scampering over pass after pass, with often apparently no other object than trying who can venture in the most novel break-neck situations’.⁶ These young men were led in their scamperings by local mountain guides, a small minority of whom became outstanding climbers. Melchior Anderegg, born in 1828 near Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland, was one of the best. As a boy he tended cattle, hunted chamois and became an accomplished wood carver. A big, genial man, he made numerous climbs with the Walker family and was the favourite guide of Leslie Stephen and Charles Mathews. His first ascents included the Dent d’Hérens, Zinal Rothorn, the Grandes Jorasses and the Brenva Spur of Mont Blanc (where his cousin, Jakob, led the crucial ice arête). Despite this, it was Anderegg who confounded Leslie Stephen by finding the view of London finer than the view from Mont Blanc. Christian Almer, born two years earlier in 1826 near Grindelwald, had a similar background as a shepherd and cheese-maker and achieved a similar status as a guide. He climbed the Wetterhorn with Alfred Wills and went on to make many of the first ascents of the Golden Age, climbing with Adolphus Moore, Edward Whymper and others. Later he climbed with William Coolidge and lost several toes to frostbite after a winter ascent of the Jungfrau in 1884. He made a golden wedding anniversary ascent of the Wetterhorn with his wife in 1896 when he was 70 and she was 71.

The relationship between Herr and guide was a complex one. At the start of the Golden Age, both were equally inexperienced and incompetent. However, over time a small number of outstanding guides emerged, and they were in great demand with the leading climbers of the day. By the end of the Golden Age, the best guides were undoubtedly better climbers than the amateurs, not least because of their greater fitness and experience. ‘The guide’s skills cannot, in the nature of things, be attained by Englishmen living in England,’ pointed out Florence Grove in 1870, ‘any more than a Frenchman living in France can become a good cricketer.’⁷ The roles of the employer and of the guide were quite distinct. The employer selected the mountain to be climbed and played some role in deciding which route to follow. However, just as British explorers in the tropics used ‘natives’ to cut the trails and carry the stores, so in the Alps the guide generally cut all the steps on snow and ice and invariably led on rocks. At a slightly later date, Clinton Dent reviewed the respective roles of the gentleman amateur and the professional guide: ‘Any guide was immeasurably superior to an amateur in the knack of finding the way...in quickness on rocks the two could hardly be compared. But I had always thought that the amateur excelled in one great requisite – pluck.’⁸ In fact, as Dent acknowledged in his account of the first ascent of the Dru, the best guides were often superior in this respect as well. Leslie Stephen observed that ‘the true way...to describe all my ascents is that [my guide] succeeded in performing a feat requiring skill, strength and courage, the difficulty of which was much increased by the difficulty of taking with him his knapsack and his employer’.⁹ However, guides rarely climbed peaks by themselves and certainly did not make first ascents, since this would deprive them of the bonus that an English gentleman would pay for the conquest of a virgin peak.

Most guides probably regarded climbing as a pointless, hazardous, but well-remunerated job, but among the top guides there was also great professional pride and considerable competition. Stephen noted that his guide, Ulrich Lauener, held strong views on the superiority of guides of the Teutonic, rather than Latin, races which he endeavoured to communicate to some guides from Chamonix. ‘As...he could not speak a word of French...he was obliged to convey this sentiment in pantomime, which did not soften its vigour.’¹⁰ Some years later, Fred Mummery recalled an incident when he and his guide, the great Alexander Burgener from the Saas valley, met a party led by a famous Oberland guide who advised them to give up their attempt on the Grépon, because ‘I have tried it, and where I have failed no-one else need hope to succeed’. Mummery observed that ‘Burgener was greatly moved by this peroration, and I learnt from a torrent of unreportable patois that our fate was sealed and even if we spent the rest of our lives on the mountain (or falling off it) it would, in his opinion, be preferable to returning amid the jeers and taunts of this unbeliever’.¹¹ On the mountain the relationship between client and guide was often friendly and informal but when they returned to the valley the social divide between gentleman and peasant reasserted itself. While the English gentleman headed to the table d’hôte to celebrate his triumph, his guide went to the servants’ quarters in the cellar or the attic.

Since the new breed of amateur mountaineer consisted almost exclusively of Englishmen of a certain class, it was inevitable that they should form a club, and the Alpine Club was duly inaugurated on 22 December 1857. It was initially conceived as a dining society at which members could exchange information on alpine climbing. As the first of its kind in the world, its members did not feel the need to attach a prefix, such as ‘English’. There were just 29 founding members, but by 1865 their number had grown to over 300. The membership was almost entirely composed of professional men – lawyers, clergymen, academics, civil servants and bankers – educated in English public schools and old universities, who were granted long summer holidays by their employers. Of the 281 members in 1863, just three belonged by birth to the old landed aristocracy.¹² As time went on, they took to signing themselves ‘AC’ in hotel registers, and a ‘murmur of approval would greet their entrance into the dining room’.¹³ Anthony Trollope described the Alpine Club Man in his Travelling Sketches (1866): ‘He does not carry himself quite as another man, and has his nose a little in the air, even when he is not climbing...To be one of a class permitted to face dangers which to us would be suicidal, does give him a conscious divinity of which he is, in his modesty, not quite able to divest himself.’¹⁴ Within a few years of its formation, members of the Alpine Club had become a recognisable ‘type’ of rich, well-educated, assertive and slightly flippant young men. A quotation from Theocritus, ‘one must be doing something while the knee is green’, was once proposed as a motto for the Club. As the years went on, membership of the Alpine Club came to be regarded by some ambitious young men as a necessary ‘badge of honour’. Courage was a greatly admired virtue in Victorian society and alpinism provided a perfect peacetime means of demonstrating it. Ewart ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ Grogan, the first man to traverse Africa from south to north and one of the founding fathers of colonial Kenya, never climbed again after joining the Club at the age of 22. To have been elected was sufficient.

The object of the Alpine Club was ‘the promotion of good fellowship among mountaineers, of mountain climbing and mountain exploration throughout the world, and of better knowledge of the mountains through literature, science, and art’. The Club did admit a few members purely for their literary and artistic qualifications. Matthew Arnold (‘The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth’) was a member and so too was Ruskin which, given his hatred of climbers, seems odd. The Club’s aspiration to advance the knowledge of science was derided by Charles Dickens, who noted that ‘a society for the scaling of such heights as the Schreckhorn, the Eiger, and the Matterhorn contributed about as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weather-cocks of all the cathedral spires in the United Kingdom’.¹⁵ Nevertheless, the Alpine Journal to this day describes itself as a ‘record of mountain adventure and scientific observation’, and the Club’s early members included a number of distinguished scientists.

John Ball, the first president of the Club, was an Irish politician, who became Under Secretary for the Colonies in Palmerston’s administration but was also a respected amateur naturalist. Educated at Cambridge, he travelled widely and published papers on botany and glaciers. An enthusiastic and determined mountain explorer, he published the Guide to the Western Alps (1863), Guide to the Central Alps (1864) and Guide to the Eastern Alps (1868), which were the standard texts until they were rewritten and reissued by Coolidge at the end of the nineteenth century. He also edited the first volume of Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1859), the forerunner of the Alpine Journal, which first appeared in 1863 and is the world’s oldest mountaineering periodical.

John Tyndall, another early member of the Club, was also a distinguished scientist. Amongst his many areas of research, he was one of the first to investigate the relationship between water vapour, carbon dioxide and climate change. The son of a sergeant in the newly formed constabulary in County Carlow, Ireland, Tyndall was living proof of the social mobility that could be achieved in Victorian society through a combination of hard work, great intellect and absolute determination. In addition to the Alpine Club, he became a member of the small but influential X Club, together with Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, the botanist and pioneering Arctic and Himalayan explorer, and Herbert Spencer, the political philosopher. The purpose of the club was ‘devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogma’.¹⁶ Tyndall was a committed agnostic who argued fiercely and frequently and once offered to fight a man who disagreed with his high opinion of Thomas Carlyle. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1852, he became a close friend and colleague of Michael Faraday who, unlike Tyndall, never climbed but nevertheless walked from Leukerbad in the Valais over the Gemmi Pass to Thun in the Bernese Oberland, a distance of 70km/44 miles, in ten and a half hours.

As a young man, Tyndall obtained a doctorate at the University of Marburg and appears to have been imbued with some of the more grimly heroic aspects of Teutonic romanticism. He suffered from ill-health and insomnia all his life and focused his attention on the most difficult peaks: a solitary ascent of the Monte Rosa, in 10 hours from the Riffelberg, in 1858; the Weisshorn (AD, 4,506m/14,783m) in 1861; and the Matterhorn (AD, 4,478m/14,690ft), where he got to within a few hundred feet of the top in 1864, the year before Whymper’s success, and later made the first traverse from Breuil to Zermatt. Tyndall sought, in climbing, an escape from the stresses and pressures of city life: ‘I have returned to [the Alps] each year and found among them refuge and recovery from the work and the worry – which acts with far deadlier corrosion on the brain than real work – of London.’¹⁷ Over time, the beauty and solace that he found in the mountains became almost as important to him as his scientific work. In 1862 he wrote: ‘The glaciers and the mountains have an interest for me beyond their scientific ones. They have given me well-springs of life and joy.’¹⁸ He died in 1893 from an overdose of chloral administered by his wife to combat his insomnia.

When Leslie Stephen read a paper at the Alpine Club describing his first ascent of the Zinal Rothorn (AD, 4,221m/13,848ft) in 1862 he included the passage: ‘ “And what philosophical observations did you make?” will be enquired by one of those fanatics who, by a reasoning to me utterly inscrutable, have somehow irrevocably associated Alpine travel and science.’¹⁹ Tyndall was convinced that the word ‘fanatic’ was directed at him and stormed out of the meeting, resigning from the Alpine Club shortly afterwards. As Stephen observed: ‘My first contact with Tyndall was not altogether satisfactory.’²⁰ In fact, the target of his parody was not Tyndall at all; it was Francis Tuckett, a Bristol Quaker and leather merchant who was with Stephen on the first ascent of the Goûter Route (PD) on Mont Blanc in 1861. Tuckett explored the virtually unknown mountain ranges of Corsica, Greece, Norway, the Pyrenees, Algeria and the Dolomites, but he had the reputation of being slow and ponderous and was obsessed with collecting and recording scientific data. Nevertheless, he amassed a tally of over 40 new peaks and passes between 1856 and 1865, including the Aletschhorn (PD, 4,193m/13,756ft) and the Königspitze (PD, 3,851m/12,634ft).

The three principal centres for the early mountaineers were Chamonix, Grindelwald and Zermatt. Seiler’s Hotel in Zermatt, in particular, became a second home for the Alpine Club, where members gathered to plan their routes while the guides sat on the low wall in front of the hotel, waiting for their clients. A conversation outside the hotel recorded by the Rev. J. F. Hardy in August 1861 captures the mood of the early days of alpine exploration:

‘I say, old fellow, we’re all going up the Monte Rosa to-morrow, won’t you join us? We shall have capital fun.’

‘What, is that Hardy? Oh yes, do come, there’s a good fellow.’

Before I had time to answer, a voice, discovered to be J. A. Hudson’s was heard to mention the Lyskamm, upon which hint I spake.

‘Ah, the Lyskamm! That’s the thing. Leave Monte Rosa and go in for the Lyskamm; anybody can do the Monte Rosa, now the route’s so well known; but the Lyskamm’s quite another affair.’

‘Yes, indeed, I expect it is. Why, Stephen couldn’t do it.’

‘He was only stopped by the bad state of the snow.’

‘Well, Tuckett failed too.’

‘He was turned back by the fog.’

‘So may we be.’

‘Certainly we may, also we mayn’t, and in the present state of the weather the latter’s more likely of the two.’²¹

And so a party of eight British climbers, including Hardy and Hudson, and six guides made the first ascent of the Lyskamm (AD, 4,527m/14,852ft) and on the summit they sang the National Anthem.

The Playground of Europe by Leslie Stephen and Scrambles Amongst the Alps by Edward Whymper, both published in 1871, are perhaps the best contemporary accounts of the Golden Age of alpine climbing. Stephen and Whymper epitomised two contrasting approaches to climbing: the former primarily concerned with the aesthetic, almost mystical appeal of the landscape; the latter searching for self-fulfilment and personal achievement.

In later life, Leslie Stephen was an eminent literary critic and biographer who encouraged Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson in the early stages of their careers and was knighted for services to literature. His father, Sir James Stephen, was said to have ruled large parts of the Empire as Under Secretary for the Colonies, and was later appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. His first wife was the daughter of William Thackeray, at that time regarded as second only to Charles Dickens as a novelist, and his children included Virginia Woolf, the author, and Vanessa Bell, the painter, who later formed part of the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.

Stephen was educated at Eton and Cambridge and taught philosophy at Cambridge until increasing religious doubts forced him to renounce Holy Orders in 1862 and consequently his fellowship. In The Playground of Europe he wrote: ‘The mountains represent the indomitable force of nature to which we are forced to adapt ourselves; they speak to man of his littleness and his ephemeral existence; they rouse us from the placid content in which we may be lapped when contemplating the fat fields which we have conquered and the rivers which we have forced to run according to our notions of convenience. And, therefore, they should suggest not sheer misanthropy, as they did to Byron, or an outburst of revolutionary passions, as they did to his teacher Rousseau, but that sense of awe-struck humility which befits such petty creatures as ourselves.’ Like so many agnostic or atheistic climbers since, he felt a sense of awe and wonder in the Alps that he found difficult to explain in rational terms: ‘If I were to invent a new idolatry...I should prostrate myself, not before beast, or ocean, or sun, but before one of these gigantic masses to which, in spite of all reason, it is impossible not to attribute some shadowy personality.’

A man who substituted ‘long walks for long prayers’,²² Stephen was proud of the fact that he once covered 80km/50 miles from Cambridge to London in 12 hours in order to attend the Alpine Club annual dinner. In the Alps he made numerous first ascents including the Rimpfischhorn (PD, 4,199m/13,776ft) in 1859, the Schreckhorn (AD, 4,078m/13,379ft) in 1861, Monte Disgrazia (PD, 3,678m/12,067ft) in 1862 and the Zinal Rothorn in 1864. In common with many early alpinists he did not enjoy climbing in Britain, perhaps because of the absence of guides, and failed to find the way up Pillar Rock in 1863: ‘The atmosphere of the English Lakes is apt to be enervating’,²³ he observed. However he did put up the first recorded sea cliff climb in Cornwall near his holiday home in St Ives, in 1858. In 1867, at the age of 35, he married and curtailed his climbing activities, later establishing a society called the ‘Sunday Tramps’, who went on long walks through the English countryside. Their motto was ‘High Thinking and Plain Living’, and Douglas Freshfield, Martin Conway and Clinton Dent (all three future presidents of the Alpine Club) were members.

Although self-revelation (no doubt selective) was not uncommon, critical comments about the personalities of fellow climbers (but not guides) were largely banished from nineteenth-century mountain literature by the conventions of the time. In many cases companions were simply referred to by an initial. Candid accounts of fellow climbers were not at all common until well after the Second World War, and therefore reliable descriptions of the character and personality of the early climbers by third parties are comparatively rare, barring obsequious, or at least highly coded, obituaries. However, because of his many literary associations, it is possible to obtain several different descriptions of Stephen. In To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, the father, Mr Ramsay, is clearly based on Stephen. He is a distant, austere and needy individual, self-centred and insecure. The character of Vernon Whitford, a scholarly, unworldly idealist, in George Meredith’s The Egoist was also based on Stephen. In later life, he appears to have become a solitary, difficult and demanding man. When a visitor outstayed his welcome he became visibly agitated and muttered, quite audibly, to himself, ‘Why can’t he go? Why can’t he go?’ A contemporary described him as ‘critical yet deprecating, sarcastic and mournful...not one who ranks either himself or others very high’.²⁴

Even allowing for increasing age, it is hard to believe that this is the same man who played cricket in the main square of Zinal in Switzerland ‘with a rail for a bat and a granite boulder for a ball. My first performance was a brilliant hit to leg...off Macdonald’s bowling. To my horror I sent the ball clean through the western window of the chapel.’²⁵ Or who, returning from the first ascent of Monte Disgrazia in two carriages with Edward Kennedy and Melchior Anderegg, tried to ‘get up an Olympic chariot race’ and then sat up drinking champagne until the early hours. His account of climbing in the Golden Age is full of the heedless fun of climbing: ‘It was necessary to cut steps as big as soup tureens, for the result of a slip would in all probability have been that the rest of our lives would have been spent sliding down a snow slope and that the employment would not have lasted long enough to become at all monotonous.’²⁶ The apparent contradiction between the levity, humour and mild anarchism of Stephen the climber and the melancholic austerity of Stephen the father and intellectual perhaps explains the appeal of alpinism for many mid-Victorians.

Stephen was president of the Alpine Club from 1866 to 1868 and Editor of the Alpine Journal. Together with John Tyndall, he was in many ways the Club’s intellectual mentor in its early years. Elected to the Metaphysical Society, whose diverse membership included William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Cardinal Manning, Alfred Tennyson, John Ruskin and Thomas Huxley, Stephen helped to turn the Alps into a ruggedly congenial meeting place for members of the intellectual upper middle class of the mid-Victorian generation, in much the same way as Geoffrey Winthrop Young did for a later generation with his Pen-y-Pass meets in Wales. On a rare visit to the Club towards the end of the century he wrote: ‘It was queer enough to go to the old place, and I feel that I was regarded with curiosity like a revived mammoth out of an iceberg.’²⁷ Safety-conscious, despite his apparently flippant attitude, he was an opponent of guideless climbing but recognised that risk and danger are a vital part of the sport, noting that ‘no advertisement of Alpine adventure is so attractive as a clear demonstration that it is totally unjustifiable’. Writing of his first ascent of the Zinal Rothorn, he made two observations that have stood the test of time: ‘One, that on the first ascent a mountain, in obedience to some mysterious law, is always more difficult than at any succeeding ascent; secondly, that nothing can be less like a mountain at one time than the same mountain at another.’²⁸

If Stephen was the scholarly aesthete of the Golden Age, Edward Whymper was its flawed hero. Stephen called him the Robespierre of mountaineering.²⁹ The son of a commercial artist, he trained as a wood engraver and always felt a sense of social inferiority, trying hard not to drop his ‘aitches’. Throughout his life he was incapable of close relationships or lasting friendships, and from boyhood he exercised a steely self-discipline and pursued the goal ‘that I should one day turn out some great person’.³⁰ His original ambition was to become an Arctic explorer, which would have suited his temperament well, but in 1860 he was commissioned to produce a series of alpine sketches and transferred his ambitions to the mountains. In 1861 he climbed Mont Pelvoux (PD, 3,946m/12,946ft) and was elected to the Alpine Club. He then set his sights on the Weisshorn, ‘the noblest [mountain] in Switzerland’,³¹ but immediately lost interest when he heard that it had been climbed by Tyndall. Thereafter he focused his attention on the Matterhorn which, because of its magnificent shape, commanding position above Zermatt and apparent impregnability, had become the greatest prize in the Alps.

After making unsuccessful attempts on the Matterhorn in 1862 and 1863, Whymper joined forces with Adolphus Moore and Horace Walker in 1864 for a successful 10 day campaign in the Dauphiné Alps, including the first ascent of the Barre des Écrins (PD, 4,101m/13,454ft). He then made three first ascents in the Mont Blanc area before being summoned back to London before the end of the season. Following a winter of detailed planning, over a period of 24 days from 13 June to 7 July 1865, he made four first ascents, including the Grandes Jorasses Pointe Whymper (AD, 4,208m/13,805ft) and the Aiguille Verte by the Whymper Couloir (AD, 4,122m/13,524ft), and crossed 11 passes.

He also climbed the Dent Blanche (AD, 4,356m/14,291ft) in poor weather, apparently believing that Thomas Kennedy had failed to reach the summit in 1862 and unaware that it had also been climbed by another party in 1864. When he saw through a break in the clouds ‘about twenty yards off’ the outline of a cairn on the summit ‘it was needless to proceed further; I jerked the rope...and motioned [to my guide] that we should go back’.³²

On his ninth attempt, at the age of 25, Whymper finally succeeded in climbing the Matterhorn by the Hörnli Ridge (AD) on 14 July 1865. On the descent disaster struck. Four members of the party fell to their death: Charles Hudson; the young and inexperienced Douglas Hadow; Lord Francis Douglas, the younger brother of the Marquis of Queensberry; and their guide Michel Croz. The death of Hudson was particularly shocking because he was regarded as the best amateur climber of the day. The triumph of reaching the summit of the Matterhorn was the crowning achievement of the Golden Age. The tragedy on the descent marked the end of the era. Whymper effectively abandoned alpine climbing after the accident, although he did return to the Matterhorn in 1874, making the 76th ascent. ‘Soon the biggest duffers in Christendom will be able to go up’,³³ he wrote in his diary. Today the Zermatt guides claim that they could take a cow to the summit.

The ascent of the Matterhorn was the first climb to receive widespread media coverage, as a result of the accident, and the first to become the focus of competition inspired by nationalism. Both were to become major features of the sport in later years. In the patriotic fervour created by the unification of Italy, the Italian guide Jean Antoine Carrel, who had fought against the Austrians at the battle of Solferino in 1859, was determined that the peak should be climbed by an Italian from the Italian side. When Whymper succeeded in reaching the summit first from the Swiss side, he triumphantly threw rocks down the face to attract the attention of Carrel and his party below. Carrel climbed the Matterhorn by the harder route from Breuil (now called Cervinia) three days later, ‘to avenge our country’s honour’.³⁴

Whymper was the first leading climber apparently motivated solely by the heroic impulse. He found little beauty in the mountains. Seeing for the first time the mountain with which his name would forever become linked, he recorded in his diary: ‘Saw of course the Matterhorn repeatedly; what precious stuff Ruskin has written about this, as well as about other things...Grand it is, but beautiful I think it is not.’³⁵ His writing contains few descriptions other than the act of climbing, and first ascents were his sole preoccupation. He saw himself as fighting and overcoming nature. His interests were not primarily in the mountains, they were in himself: ‘We exult over the scenes brought before our eyes...but we value more highly the development of manliness, and the evolution, under combat with difficulties, of those noble qualities of human nature – courage, patience, endurance and fortitude.’³⁶

Not surprisingly, opinions on such a figure are divided. Chris Bonington is an admirer: ‘His single-minded competitiveness and drive, whilst being very understandable to later generations, was suspect not only to Victorian mountaineers, but to the majority of the British climbing establishment until very recently.’³⁷ Geoffrey Winthrop Young, the early twentieth-century poet mountaineer, was enthusiastic about Whymper’s book Scrambles Amongst the Alps but dismissive of its author: ‘Whymper founded no school. No one has succeeded in imitating anything but his egoism.’³⁸ Part of the contemporary antipathy undoubtedly arose because Whymper was amongst the first to commercialise the sport of mountaineering, earning a living as a mountain illustrator, lecturer and writer. But he was also a supremely selfish man. In the preface to Fred Mummery’s book My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, published soon after his disappearance while attempting to climb Nanga Parbat in 1895, Douglas Freshfield wrote that Mummery’s death was a grievous loss to the Alpine Club. In the margin of his copy of the book, Whymper wrote: ‘I do not agree.’³⁹ Joe Simpson lamented the decline of climbing ethics in the 1990s in his book Dark Shadows Falling (1997) and berated two Japanese climbers who in 1996 failed to assist three dying Indian climbers that they passed on their way to the summit of Everest. Simpson asked the rhetorical question: ‘Would Whymper or Mummery have behaved like this?’ In the case of Mummery there can be little question that he would not. But with Whymper it is harder to be so categorical. In the close-knit community of British climbing in the 1860s, peer group pressure was just sufficient to keep his ambition and selfishness in check, but in the large, impersonal climbing world of the 1990s perhaps Whymper would have sympathised with one of the Japanese climbers who allegedly said ‘above eight thousand metres is not a place where people can afford morality’.⁴⁰

In 1867 Whymper achieved his original ambition of visiting the Arctic when he organised an expedition to Greenland which made some advances in exploration by sledge. In 1880 he travelled to South America, climbed Chimborazo (6,267m/20,561ft), once thought to be the highest mountain in the world, and spent a night on the summit of Cotapaxi (5,897m/19,347ft). He planned the expedition with his usual meticulous attention to detail and made a systematic study of altitude sickness. His account served as a blueprint for future expeditions to remote mountain areas. Mount Whymper in the Canadian Rockies marks a visit to the region in the 1900s, but by then his best climbing days were over. At the age of 66 he married Edith Lewin, aged 21. Women had played no previous part in his life and the marriage was an unhappy one. It broke up four years later. In 1911, feeling unwell during a visit to the Alps, he returned to his hotel and locked the door, refusing any medical help. He died some days later at the age of 71.

Unaware of events unfolding in Zermatt, the day after the Matterhorn tragedy Frank and Horace Walker, George Mathews, Adolphus Moore and their guides Melchior and Jakob Anderegg made an ascent of the Brenva Spur on the Italian side of Mont Blanc which was well ahead of its time. The climb is still graded AD+/D and was the only route up the daunting Brenva Face for the next 62 years. Frank Walker was a prosperous lead merchant from Liverpool who took up climbing at the age of 50 and was 57 at the time of the ascent of the Brenva Face. He climbed the Matterhorn with his daughter Lucy in 1871 at the age of 63, but died the following year. His son Horace Walker climbed his first mountain, Mont Velan, at the age of 16 and his last, Pollux, 51 years later in 1905. He made numerous first ascents in the Alps, with Whymper and others, including reaching Pointe Walker in 1868, the highest point of the Grandes Jorasses, made famous by the magnificent rocky spur to the north. He also climbed Elbrus (5,642m/18,510ft) in the Caucasus in 1874 and was an enthusiastic British rock climber, making the second ascent of North Climb (S, 1892) on Pillar Rock in the Lakes.

Lucy Walker first visited the Alps in 1859 at the age of 28. She climbed only with her family, guided by the Anderegg cousins, but had many notable achievements including climbing the Balmhorn (3,698m/12,133ft) in 1864, the first time that a woman had taken part in the first ascent of a major peak. She was also the first woman to climb the Matterhorn, three days after ascending the Weisshorn. Punch celebrated her triumph in verse:

No glacier could baffle, no precipice balk her,

No peak rise above her, however sublime.

Give three times three cheers for intrepid Miss Walker,

I say, my boys, doesn’t she know how to climb!

Inclined to plumpness, whilst she was in the mountains she relied on a diet of sponge cake and champagne and, apart from climbing, her only other sporting interest was croquet. The entire Walker family enjoyed a particularly close relationship with their guide Melchior Anderegg, who called Frank Walker ‘Papa’ and was a life-long companion of Lucy, who never married. As she said, ‘I love mountains and Melchior, and Melchior already has a wife’.⁴¹ Lucy Walker became the second president of the Ladies’ Alpine Club in 1912 at the age of 76.

Adolphus Moore, who accompanied Frank and Horace Walker on the Brenva Route, was another great Victorian mountaineer with many alpine first ascents to his credit. He went on to visit the Caucasus in 1867 and 1869, climbing Kazbek (5,047m/16,558ft) and the East Summit of Elbrus. A senior official at the India Office and private secretary to Lord Randolph Churchill, Moore died from exhaustion brought on by overwork at the age of 46.

George Mathews, the final British member of the team, was one of three brothers who played a major role in the development of British climbing. William, Charles and George Mathews took part in many pioneering climbs during the Golden Age, including first ascents of Grande Casse (3,855m/12,648ft) and Monte Viso (3,841m/12,602ft). The decision to form the Alpine Club was taken at their uncle’s home, following a discussion during an ascent of the Finsteraarhorn (4,274m/14,022ft) in the summer of 1857. William subsequently became president in 1869–71 and Charles in 1878–80. Charles went on to play a particularly influential role in the development of Welsh climbing.

The ascent of the Brenva Spur was a great climbing achievement, but it was completely overshadowed by the Matterhorn accident. The news was greeted by the British public with a combination of rage and incomprehension. The Editor of The Times wrote: ‘What right has [the mountaineer] to throw away the gift of life and ten thousand golden opportunities in an emulation which he only shares with skylarks, apes and squirrels?’⁴² The reaction was very different from that which greeted the equally famous loss of Mallory and Irvine on Everest some 60 years later. During the intervening period, increasing coverage of the sport in books and the press had gradually created an understanding of both the risks and rewards of climbing, and Mallory and Irvine were treated as heroes. In 1865, however, the public was totally unprepared for the loss of four young lives, including a lord. The public outcry may at first seem surprising, given that the mid-Victorian generation was so accustomed to premature death. In the mid-1860s there were extremely high levels of child mortality, over six per cent of soldiers sent to imperial outposts died each year from disease alone and the charge of the Light Brigade had taken place just 10 years earlier. Even in sport, members of the middle and upper classes regularly killed or injured themselves in hunting accidents, but hunting was regarded as a worthy occupation because it was a good preparation for military service (even the Indian Civil Service entrance exam included a rigorous riding test). The thing that the public found so shocking about the Matterhorn accident was that three Englishmen should have died undertaking such a useless activity. In the decades that followed, the public gradually became accustomed to the idea that men might choose to take such risks, but 130 years after the Matterhorn accident, in 1995, some of the same shock and incomprehension resurfaced in the mass media when Alison Hargreaves, a talented climber who was also the mother of two young children, died on K2.

Since those first four fatalities in 1865, over 500 climbers have lost their lives on the Matterhorn, the majority quite recently as the popularity of climbing has soared. Climbing during the Golden Age was in fact remarkably accident-free, bearing in mind the primitive equipment being used and the almost total lack of understanding of ropework, snow and ice conditions, and avalanche risk. But the public vented its anger on the Alpine Club, and for a time it seemed as if the nascent sport of mountaineering might end almost before it had really begun. Alfred Wills, who started the Golden Age with his ascent of the Wetterhorn and was president of the Alpine Club at the time of the Matterhorn tragedy, wrote to Whymper encouraging him to break his self-imposed silence: ‘Give your own account, let it be truthful, manly and unflinching – wherever blame is due (if blame there be) let it rest – but do not let people go on conjecturing the worst, when you could silence the greater part of it by your utterance.’⁴³ Whymper did not provide a thorough public account until Scrambles Amongst the Alps was published in 1871. Although climbing continued, it did so discreetly. ‘After that frightful catastrophe of July 14, 1865,’ Coolidge wrote, ‘[British climbers], so to speak, climbed on sufferance, enjoying themselves much, it is true, but keeping all expression of that joy to themselves in order not to excite derision.’⁴⁴

The Golden Age had ended.