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1865–1914:GENTLEMEN AND GYMNASTS

In climbing history, the period from 1865 to 1914 starts with the death of four climbers on the Matterhorn and ends with the destruction of a generation in the First World War. By the time that Whymper’s account of the Matterhorn accident in Scrambles Amongst the Alps appeared in 1871 public anger at the incident had already died down. A number of ‘penny dreadfuls’ involving cut ropes and climbing accidents followed the publication of Whymper’s book, presaging the huge popularity of the authentic rope-cutting drama of Joe Simpson’s book and film documentary, Touching the Void, over a century later. Public interest in the accident also gave a boost to alpine tourism. After the interruption of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Thomas Cook tours to Zermatt increased in popularity throughout the decade. Leslie Stephen’s elegant portrayal of alpine adventures in The Playground of Europe, also published in 1871, further smoothed away opposition to climbing. Slowly but surely the sport was rehabilitated, and climbers emerged from self-imposed obscurity.

At home, the period of peace and prosperity that had started with victory at Waterloo in 1815 continued until the outbreak of the First World War, but the British Empire reached the peak of its economic power and influence in the 1870s. The decades leading up to the outbreak of the war were a period of relative decline and increasing preoccupation with the threat posed by Germany and the United States to Britain’s economic and military supremacy. At the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, one-quarter of the earth’s surface and nearly a quarter of its population was subject to British rule, but while the Empire continued to expand, the British Isles were becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised and overcrowded. As the population passed 40 million, and a better educated generation reached maturity, the more adventurous Britons were feeling cramped.

The Empire provided one outlet, with mass emigration to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and British South Africa, as well as to the United States, and opportunities for derring-do in small but frequent colonial wars, generally against rather poorly armed opposition, including Abyssinia (1867), the Ashanti War (1874), the Zulu War (1878), Afghanistan (1879), Egypt (1882) and the Sudan (1896). John Stuart Mill observed that the Empire represented ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes’,¹ and even those that remained behind in Britain were obsessed by the idea of imperial adventure. Authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling catered to the public taste for tales of heroism, and explorers such as Richard Burton, John Speke, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley were household names. Young urban professionals in Britain sought out these tales of romance and adventure in part because their day-to-day lives were so unremittingly unromantic. For some, the mountains offered an escape.

The British may have invented the sport of climbing but they did not at first climb in Britain. The sport had been established in the Alps for more than two decades before any real climbing, as opposed to hill walking, took place in the British hills. During the Golden Age of alpine climbing from 1854 to 1865, the unquestioned objective of the sport was to reach the summit of a mountain by the easiest means. In Britain this might involve long, rough walks but, with one or two rare exceptions, it does not require the use of hands. Tyndall, who made the first ascent of the Weisshorn, wrote an account of walking up Helvellyn in a snow storm in the 1850s and climbed Snowdon in December 1860 using a rudimentary ice axe made by a blacksmith in Bethesda. He described the view from the summit as equal to the splendours of the Alps. Leslie Stephen visited the Lakes in the 1860s and spent several hours trying to find the scrambling route to the summit of Pillar Rock, but it was not until the late 1870s that climbers seriously started to examine the sporting potential of the British crags as a preparation for a summer visit to the Alps. Since most of the early alpine climbs were predominantly on snow and ice rather than rock, interest initially focused on the gullies of the highest mountains that tended to hold the greatest accumulations of snow and ice, at Christmas and Easter. Gradually attention shifted from the gullies to the rocky ridges, slabs and walls, and the sport of rock climbing was born. The first ascent of Napes Needle, traditionally taken as the ‘birth of British rock climbing’, took place in 1886, more than 30 years after the start of the Golden Age of alpine climbing and three years after the first climbing expedition to the Himalaya. The development of rock climbing in Britain coincided with the conquest of the last remaining unclimbed peaks in the Alps and the growing realisation that ‘the essence of the sport lies not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties’.² Ironically, because of the continuing emphasis on alpine climbing, long after the exploratory phase had come to an end in France and Switzerland there were still many unclimbed mountains at home. The summit of the last major peak in Britain was finally reached in 1896.

Alpine climbing remained largely the preserve of wealthy professionals with long summer holidays until the start of the First World War, but from the outset British rock climbing assumed a more democratic character. Victorian society was obsessed by class, with very precise gradations of status. At the top, there was a tiny but powerful upper class consisting of aristocrats and landed gentry. Some 80 per cent of members of parliament in the 1860s were drawn from this elite group. Very few of them took an interest in climbing, preferring the traditional country pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing. At the time of its formation, the Alpine Club was dominated by two of the three traditional professions: the church and the law. The third acceptable occupation for a gentleman who was obliged to earn a living was the military. Army officers were frequently posted overseas and played a limited part in the development of climbing in Britain and the Alps, but officers posted to India played a major role in Himalayan climbing. Naval officers with exploratory instincts tended to be drawn to the polar regions rather than the mountains. As the century progressed the newer professions, such as medicine, civil engineering and the civil service, and even people in ‘trade’ – bankers, merchants, manufacturers and others engaged in business – came to be represented in the membership of the Alpine Club. However, the lower middle class – clerks, commercial travellers, national and local government workers, teachers and other white-collar workers – were almost totally excluded. The pool from which the Alpine Club drew its membership was therefore largely restricted to a professional upper middle class, consisting of perhaps 70,000 people, less than one per cent of the male workforce in 1850.³ The achievements of the pioneers are even more remarkable, given the tiny segment of the population from which they were drawn.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the professional class grew slightly, but the numbers engaged in lower-middle-class occupations swelled dramatically. In 1850 there were perhaps 130,000 white-collar workers, representing about two per cent of the male workforce. By 1900 this had grown to 500,000 or five per cent. The growth of the middle class reflected the expansion of industry, trade and services and improvements in education. Many of the young people who entered middle-class occupations in the second half of the nineteenth century came from working-class backgrounds and were not necessarily materially better off than well-paid artisans. What distinguished the two was not so much money as the very Victorian concept of ‘respectability’, the maintenance of which by ‘keeping up appearances’ placed an additional financial burden on the aspiring middle classes. In the days before the mass production of consumer goods, one way that a young man could signal his membership of the middle classes was to travel. The increasingly fashionable and manly pursuit of mountain climbing provided the perfect status symbol.

In contrast to the alpinists, from the outset many British rock climbers were in ‘trade’ or lower-middle-class occupations. Especially in the Lake District, the sport came to be dominated by northern manufacturers, shopkeepers and teachers, some of whom came from working-class family backgrounds. As the social base from which climbers were drawn began to broaden, the numbers entering the sport expanded and standards inevitably began to rise. Similar developments were occurring in every other sport. Wherever it was possible to make money (by charging spectators or from gambling), a new form of employment – the professional, and typically working-class, sportsman – was born and standards increased dramatically. Football was the first to professionalise and became overwhelmingly a working-class sport after Blackburn Olympic defeated the Old Etonians in the FA Cup final of 1883. Cricket reached a halfway house with amateur ‘gentlemen’ and professional ‘players’ in the same side. Rugby fractured into the professional, and predominantly working-class, rugby league and the amateur, and predominantly middle-class, rugby union. Climbing, like other field sports, did not easily lend itself either to spectators or to gambling. As a result it remained overwhelmingly an amateur sport and participation was restricted to those with some money and leisure. But in Britain, unlike the Alps, it was never exclusively a rich man’s sport.

In keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, a few climbers tried to make money from the sport. Edward Whymper earned a reasonable living producing mountain illustrations and from lecturing and writing. Owen Glynne Jones and the Abraham brothers made money from writing and photography. But climbing remained a minority sport and income from these sources was sufficient to sustain only a small number of ‘professional’ climbers. Guiding, which played such a significant role in the development of the sport in the alpine countries, did not take off in Britain until the introduction of outdoor education in the 1950s, and it was only after the development of outdoor television broadcasting in the 1960s that climbing became a spectator sport and entered the mainstream.

Improvements in transport played a critical role in the growth of the sport in the second half of the nineteenth century. Often financed and built by the British, railways extended across every continent and shipping lines crossed every ocean. In Britain, as the cost of travel declined, Sunday excursion trains ran from the mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire into the surrounding countryside from the 1860s onwards, carrying both young professionals and factory workers, many of whom were first or second generation migrants to the cities and still felt strong ties to the countryside. The Snowdon Mountain Railway was completed in 1896 and a café built on the summit to refresh the tourists who paid to go there. The current Prince of Wales described a recent incarnation of the building as the highest slum in the country. In the Alps too, modern transport began to encroach upon the highest peaks. By 1880 nearly a million people, mainly from England, Germany, America and Russia, visited Switzerland each year, justifying increased investment in infrastructure. The railway reached Grindelwald in 1890, Zermatt in 1891 and Chamonix in 1901. In 1911 engineers tunnelled their way up through the Eiger to reach the Jungfraujoch (3,573m/11,722ft) and would have carried on to the summit of the Jungfrau had better sense, and a weaker economy, not prevailed. However, in both Britain and the Alps, once the railhead was reached, the pace of life returned to that of a man walking or a horse and cart, until the appearance of motor cars at the turn of the century.

Increasing prosperity and shorter working hours also played a significant role. By the 1870s, the most extreme labour abuses had largely been removed but working hours were still long by modern European standards. In the textile industry a ten and a half hour day and a 60 hour week, with Saturday afternoon and Sunday off, was typical. Statutory bank holidays were introduced in the late 1870s, and in the following decade some workers started to receive one week of unpaid leave in the summer. Religious observance remained strong, but gradually leisure activities increased even on the Sabbath. Since the price of food rose relatively slowly, industrial workers benefitted more than agricultural workers from rising wages and some were able to save modest amounts with the newly established Post Office Savings Bank. The union movement, which had 2 million members by 1900, campaigned for shorter hours and better wages, and there were numerous grassroots self-help organisations including the Co-operative Society and the Workers’ Educational Association. Industrialisation created a demand for a better educated work force and there was a significant expansion of both secondary and tertiary education, increasing the size of the young middle class that could afford some leisure activities and holidays. The early years of climbing were dominated by men educated at Oxford and Cambridge, but in later years graduates from Manchester University (founded in 1880), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904) and Sheffield (1905), all located close to the outcrops and mountains, played a very significant role in the development of the sport.

When Queen Victoria died in 1901, she was succeeded by Edward VII who, at the age of 57, was a polished sporting man of the world. Like the new king, Britain had come to feel somewhat stifled by the pious propriety of the Victorian age, and the style and manner of Edward VII was more in keeping with the emancipated tastes of the opening years of the twentieth century. But the individual flair, heroism and eccentricity that had built the Empire was progressively being replaced by a more ordered and conceited bureaucracy. Like the Empire, the British climbing establishment also became increasingly grandiloquent and chauvinistic, losing its ability to innovate and placing its faith in tradition. While members of the Alpine Club continued to dominate British climbing overseas, advances in Britain were increasingly led by climbers drawn from a broader social background and brought up outside the alpine tradition.

THE ALPS

At the conclusion of the Golden Age in 1865 most of the alpine peaks had been climbed by their easiest routes. During the ‘Silver Age’ that followed, from 1865 to 1882, the few remaining major peaks were climbed, and the younger members of the climbing community recognised that, with the end of the exploratory phase of alpine development, they were faced with two choices: to go in search of virgin peaks in other parts of the world; or to climb alpine peaks by new and harder routes involving greater risk.

In the Middle Ages several passes over the Alps that are today glaciated were free of snow and ice and were in regular use. The glaciers began to advance from the fifteenth century onwards and by the eighteenth century were far more extensive than they are today. The present retreat began in the nineteenth century and has accelerated in recent years due to the impact of global warming. As a consequence, the appearance and character of many alpine peaks has changed considerably since the pioneers first climbed them in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the retreating glaciers have exposed extensive areas of moraine, the peaks are rockier in appearance, and many rock faces and ridges are looser because they are not bound together with ice. The pioneers of the Golden Age climbed nearly all the major peaks by following routes that were largely on glaciers and snow fields. Climbers and their guides rapidly developed relatively sophisticated snow and ice climbing techniques but tried, wherever possible, to avoid the rocks. As a result, at the end of the Golden Age in 1865, there were still numerous unclimbed rocky peaks in the Alps that demanded greater rock climbing skills than those possessed by the pioneers.

Clinton Dent elegantly summed up the situation in 1876: ‘The older members of the Club (I speak with the utmost veneration) have left us, the youthful aspirants, but little to do in the Alps...We follow them meekly, either by walking up their mountains by new routes, or by climbing some despised outstanding spur of the peaks that they first trod under foot...They have picked out the plums and left us the stones.’⁴ His reference to ‘walking’ delighted the young Turks and infuriated the senior members of the Alpine Club. Dent was an eminent surgeon and one of the leading members of the second generation of alpine pioneers. He was ‘inclined to pursue his own line of thought, and had not always the ear of a ready listener’⁵ and soon broke with tradition by focusing on rock climbs. Often guided by Alexander Burgener, who came from the Saas valley rather than the traditional and more complacent climbing centres of Zermatt or Chamonix, Dent made the first ascent of the Lenzspitz (PD, 4,294m/14,088ft) in 1870 and the Zinal Rothorn from Zermatt (AD) in 1872, but it is for his ascent of the Grand Dru (AD, 3,754m/12,316ft) in 1878, after 18 attempts over six seasons, that he is chiefly remembered. The Dru, which towers over the town of Chamonix, exemplifies the challenge posed by the slightly lower, but far steeper and rockier subsidiary peaks of the Mont Blanc massif. Its first ascent prompted major celebrations in Chamonix: ‘I believe there were fireworks; I rather think some cannon were let off. I am under the impression that a good many bottles were uncorked. Perhaps this last may be connected with a hazy recollection of all that actually took place.’⁶ One year earlier Lord Wentworth, the grandson of Lord Byron, succeeded in climbing the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey (AD, 3,772m/12,375ft), another imposing and rocky peak, with the Italian guide Emile Rey. Rey went on to climb the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey (D, 4,112m/13,491ft), the last and hardest of the major peaks of the Mont Blanc massif to be climbed, with Sir Henry Seymour King, a respected banker and member of parliament, in 1885.

The new generation of climbers also explored the steep and sometimes narrow snow and ice couloirs that had previously been dismissed because of the risk of rock and icefall. The unclimbed ridges of the higher peaks presented an obvious challenge as well. Although relatively free from the objective risk of stone and icefall, they were often technically more difficult and far more exposed than the broad glaciers and snow fields that provided the traditional routes to most summits. As the Silver Age progressed, climbing without guides and winter mountaineering also gained a following, as climbers sought out new ways to maintain the novelty and challenge of the sport.

The end of the Silver Age is usually taken to be the ascent of the twin summits of the Dent du Géant (AD, 4,013m/13,166ft) in 1882. The first summit was ascended by the Sella brothers and their guides, the Macquignaz brothers, of Italy. The second, slightly higher summit was climbed two days later by William Graham, who went on to be the first person to climb in the Himalaya for sport rather than for science. The significance of the ascent of the Dent du Géant lay in the fact that it was the last peak to be climbed that was named and famous before it was climbed and the first to be climbed by ‘artificial’ means, using pitons and fixed ropes. For the British climbing establishment, committed to a ‘pure’ climbing ethic, the use of pitons signalled the end of the Silver Age and the start of the ‘Iron Age’.⁷ It was an avowedly romantic view of climbing history. While their contemporaries divided Mankind’s progress and development into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, British mountain historians saw a regression from the Golden Age, to the Silver Age to the Iron Age. The prevailing mountaineering ethos was a rejection of modernity and a celebration of the primitive, the mysterious and the unknown. But while British views on ‘artificial aid’ were strongly held, they were never entirely logical or consistent. Cutting a step in ice was acceptable. Cutting a step in rock was unforgiveable. A ladder might be used to cross a crevasse, but to use one on rock was immoral. As Clinton Dent observed in 1878: ‘Grapnels, chains, and crampons are the invention of the fiend. Why this should be so is hard to see. Perhaps we should not consider too curiously.’⁸ It took a further 90 years before a widely accepted and reasonably consistent framework of climbing ethics was to emerge.

When the sport of climbing started in the Alps only the most prominent peaks had names and these tended to be monotonously descriptive (Mont Blanc, Weisshorn, Schwarzhorn, Aiguille Noire), geographic (Dent d’Hérens) or fearful (Mont Maudit, Schreckhorn). As the lesser peaks were climbed, it became necessary to name them too, and in the years before the First World War ‘personal’ nomenclature was adopted with a vengeance, including numerous Younggrats and Voies Ryan-Lochmatter, but there were also some humorous names. When Stafford Anderson and his companions reached the summit of the Dent Blanche by a new route along a crumbling ridge, their guide Ulrich Almer summed up the situation by saying, ‘Wir sind vier Esel!’ (‘We are four asses!’). The ridge became known as the Viereselsgrat. Martin Conway, later Lord Conway, was particularly active in naming peaks: ‘The secret of getting a name accepted is to put it about among the guides...as long as no one knows where a name originated no one will object.’⁹

With the trend towards harder routes and guideless climbing, the death toll inevitably began to rise, and the more senior members of the Alpine Club became increasingly concerned about what they regarded as the ‘unjustifiable risks’ taken by the younger generation. After three serious accidents in 1882, Queen Victoria’s private secretary wrote to Gladstone, the prime minister: ‘The Queen commands me to ask you if you think she can say anything to mark her disapproval of the dangerous Alpine excursions which this year have occasioned so much loss of life.’¹⁰ Gladstone wisely counselled against it. Swiss Alpine Club records show that during the period 1859–85 there were on average just five fatalities from climbing accidents each year, whereas during the six years from 1886 to 1891 there were 214 deaths.¹¹ Partly this reflected the increasing numbers of people climbing, but even by the end of the century, there were probably only a thousand or so active climbers. Apart from the British, German students were the other large group that were active in the Alps in the last decades of the nineteenth century, although they tended to confine their activities to the Eastern Alps, which most British climbers regarded as too small to be of interest. In 1887 the Alpine Club had 475 members, not all of whom were active, whereas the Austrian and German Alpine Club (which merged into one in 1874) had 18,020, the French 5,321, the Italian 3,669 and the Swiss 2,607. However the continental clubs were organised along very different lines from the Alpine Club. Deliberately set up as inclusive national clubs, they provided cheap accommodation and their membership included large numbers of mountain walkers. The number of members actively involved in true alpinism remained very small until after the Second World War.

The British climbing establishment was also concerned that in their quest for ever harder technical difficulties the aesthetic aspects of the sport were being ignored. Walter Larden criticised the heroic instincts of rock climbers: ‘There are those amongst them who climb for the excitement only; who would sooner spend their day climbing in a gully that affords exciting “pitches”, but makes no demand on endurance or mountaineering knowledge...than in gaining the sublime heights of Monte Rosa or in traversing the magnificent Col d’Argentière. Let such recognise frankly that they don’t care for the mountains.’¹² The conflict between ‘gymnasts’ and ‘mountaineers’, with the latter doubting the ability of the former to appreciate the beauty and spiritual aspects of the mountain landscape, continued until well into the 1930s. Writing in 1904, Cecil Slingsby noted that ‘all who are worthy of being termed mountaineers, in contradistinction to climbing acrobats, find that year by year their love of mountains increases, and so too does their respect and veneration’,¹³ and even in 1935 R. L. G. Irving, the romantic and reactionary mountain historian, still felt obliged to note that rock climbers are ‘good cragsmen and indifferent mountaineers, with a somewhat limited and unimaginative way of regarding mountains’.¹⁴ The younger climbers suspected, probably correctly, that their elders used their increasing veneration of the landscape to disguise their declining physical powers.

The Pendlebury brothers, Richard and William, were typical of the second generation of alpinists that began to emerge at the end of the Golden Age. In 1870 they traversed the Wildspitze (3,768m/12,362ft) via the Mittelberg Joch, creating what is now one of the most popular climbs in the Eastern Alps. In 1872 they shocked the climbing world by making the first ascent of the huge East Face of the Monte Rosa from Macugnaga (D+) with the Rev. Charles Taylor and their guide Ferdinand Imseng. The East Face is a steep wall with rocky ribs and couloirs filled with snow and ice. As the sun rises and melts the ice, the couloirs form a natural funnel for rock and icefall. The climb therefore involves a far greater degree of ‘objective risk’ (risk that is beyond the control of the climber) than would have been acceptable in the early years of alpinism, and both the climbers and their guide were thought by many to have displayed courage bordering on recklessness. The climb was also Imseng’s first as chief guide, though he had previously been employed as a porter, an illustration of a recurring theme of major breakthroughs being made by people outside the mainstream of the sport. Nine years later Imseng died in an avalanche attempting to make the third ascent of the same route with his client Marinelli. The Pendlebury brothers went on to make several other first ascents, including the Schreckhorn from the Lauteraarsattel (D+, 1873), which was a remarkable achievement for the time. Richard Pendlebury, who was Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1870 and a Fellow of St John’s College, was also one of the founders of British rock climbing, ascending Jake’s Rake on Pavey Ark and making the Pendlebury Traverse (M, 1872) on Pillar Rock in the Lake District.

The ascent of the Col des Grandes Jorasses in 1874 by Thomas Middlemore, a Birmingham leather merchant, created a similar controversy, particularly regarding the morality of taking professional guides into areas with significant objective risk. Middlemore confessed to being black and blue with bruises caused by falling rocks. Climbing with Henri Cordier, a Parisian student who died in a climbing accident at the age of 21, and John Oakley Maund, a quick-tempered London stockbroker, Middlemore made first ascents of the Aiguille Verte from the Argentière Glacier (D+/TD-), Les Courtes (AD, 3,856m/12,651ft) and Les Droites (AD, 4,000m/13,123ft) all within the space of a week. The Cordier Couloir on the Aiguille Verte once again involved climbing a route that was obviously exposed to frequent rockfall and was not repeated for nearly 50 years. With Cordier, Middlemore also made the first ascent of the beautiful snow and ice arête of the Biancograt on the Piz Bernina (AD, 4,049m/13,284ft), one of the great alpine ridges which, while relatively free from objective risk, is technically more difficult and exposed than many traditional routes. In later life Middlemore bought the Melsetter estate in Orkney which comprised a number of islands including Hoy, whose famous sea stack was to become the setting for a television climbing spectacular in the 1960s.

Middlemore also climbed with James Eccles, who made numerous first ascents on the Mont Blanc massif with the outstanding guide Michel Payot, including the Aiguille de Rochefort (AD, 4,001m/13,127ft) in 1873, the Dôme de Rochefort (AD, 4,015m/13,173ft) in 1881 and, most famously, the upper section of the Peuterey Ridge in 1877, where he camped at the side of the Brouillard Glacier beneath what is now called Pic Eccles and next day crossed the Col Eccles, reached the Frêney Glacier and ascended the ridge. The Peuterey Ridge, which in its entirety still merits a grade of D+, was repeated just twice before the Second World War.

Charles and Lawrence Pilkington, of the glass-making and colliery-owning family, were also active climbers at this time. With their cousin, Frederick Gardiner, a Liverpool ship-owner, and George Hulton, a Manchester businessman, they pioneered guideless climbing in the Alps. They made the first guideless ascents of the Barre des Écrins (PD, 1878), La Meije (AD, 1879) – the last and one of the hardest of the major alpine peaks to be climbed – the Jungfrau from Wengern Alp (PD, 1881) and the Finsteraarhorn (PD, 1881). All four were also active climbers in Britain. The Pilkington brothers climbed Pillar Rock in 1869 when Lawrence was just 14 and were amongst the first to climb on Skye, which at that time was harder to reach than the Alps, making the first ascent of the Inaccessible Pinnacle (M, 1880) on Sgurr Dearg, the only major Scottish peak that requires rock climbing to reach the summit.

One area that remained almost unexplored in the 1870s was the French Dauphiné Alps, and for that reason it attracted the attention of William Coolidge and his formidable aunt Meta Brevoort. Born in 1850 near New York, and brought up by his aunt, Coolidge left the United States at the age of 14 and lived first in France, then England, and finally Switzerland. Since it was possible in those days to travel anywhere in Europe, except Russia and the Balkans, without a passport, Coolidge never obtained one, and at the outbreak of the First World War he found that he was stateless, having lost his US citizenship. Coolidge was introduced to climbing at the age of 15 by Miss Brevoort, a spirited explorer who climbed over 70 major peaks and did not hesitate to beat some mule drivers whom she saw mistreating their animals. They were frequently accompanied by their pet bitch Tschingel – described by a Swiss gentleman who was obliged to share a hut with her as a ‘formloser, watscheliger fettklumpen’ (‘a shapeless, waddling fat lump’) – who nevertheless succeeded in climbing 66 major peaks. Coolidge too did not possess an athletic physique – a contemporary at Magdalen College where he became a Fellow in 1875 remembered him as a ‘tubby, undersized little man’¹⁵ – but he was tough and resolute. Coolidge was inordinately fond of his aunt, and after her death in 1876 he took Holy Orders and turned his attention to the academic study of the history of alpinism, becoming increasingly obsessive in his pedantry and the vehemence with which he defended his views on the subject. Between 1865 and 1898 he spent 33 seasons in the Alps, amassing a staggering total of 1,700 climbs, including first ascents of Pic Centrale de la Meije (PD) in 1870, Ailefroide (F, 3,953m/12,969ft) in 1870, the Piz Badile (PD, 3,308m/10,853ft) in 1876, and numerous lesser peaks in the Maritime and Cottian Alps. During most of this time he was guided by Christian Almer and later his son of the same name. He made the first winter ascents of the Wetterhorn and Jungfrau in 1874, with Miss Brevoort, and the Schreckhorn in 1879, and is generally regarded as the father of winter mountaineering. He also climbed in the Caucasus with Douglas Freshfield in 1868.

Coolidge wrote numerous books and articles, including the Conway and Coolidge Climbers’ Guides to the Alps (1881–1910), co-authored with Martin Conway, which were the first practical alpine guidebooks. Coolidge contributed long, pedantic, heavily annotated volumes, while Conway smoothed out the ferocious rows that took place between Coolidge and the publisher. In keeping with Conway’s exploratory instincts, the guides were originally conceived as a means of ensuring that pioneering parties avoided routes that had previously been climbed. Of course, they were overwhelmingly used for exactly the opposite purpose. The slim volumes gave descriptions of the routes and also named the first ascensionists. Conway noted that even those members of the Alpine Club who abhorred competition and self-advertisement in others were quick to correct any omissions with respect to their own achievements. From 1880 to 1889 Coolidge was also editor of the Alpine Journal, a position that brought him into bitter conflict with most of the leading climbers of the day. Famous for his stubbornness, Coolidge ‘could do anything with a hatchet but bury it’,¹⁶ according to Arnold Lunn, one of his many victims. He resigned from the Alpine Club in 1899, was re-elected as an honorary member in 1904, resigned again in 1910 and was re-elected again in 1923. He is the only member ever to have resigned an honorary membership.

Coolidge’s arguments with Whymper, over ‘Almer’s leap’, an illustration in Scrambles Amongst the Alps showing Christian Almer apparently making a daring leap during the descent of the Barre des Écrins, were legendary, but towards the end of Whymper’s life the two men were reconciled. Coolidge was, in many respects, quite similar to Whymper. Both were fired by single-minded ambition, both had an apparent indifference to the opinion of others, and both appeared completely immune to the beauty of the mountain landscape. Coolidge often regretted that he had not been born earlier so that he might have taken part, with Whymper, in the Golden Age of alpine exploration. His obituary in The Times talked of his ‘adeptness at the gentle art of making enemies’,¹⁷ but without his scholarship much early alpine history would have been lost. Furthermore, Coolidge was a balanced judge of climbing ability. He argued with Fred Mummery, as he did with everyone else, but was appalled when Mummery was blackballed by the Alpine Club in 1880, despite being proposed by Dent and Freshfield. When Mummery finally allowed himself to be put forward for membership again in 1888, Coolidge surreptitiously slipped some of the ‘noes’ in the ballot box into the ‘ayes’ to ensure that he was elected.

Fred Mummery was born in Dover in 1855, the son of a tannery owner. He was a sickly child with a deformed back, which prevented him from carrying heavy loads, and was amongst the first in a long line of climbers whose tolerance of huge exposure was attributed to his acute short-sightedness. He spent the first part of his career climbing with Alexander Burgener, and then went on to revolutionise the sport by putting up hard new routes without the use of guides. Even when accompanied by guides, he impressed upon them that his requirement was for another man on the rope, not a leader. Burgener stated that Mummery ‘climbs even better than I do’,¹⁸ which was high praise from a proud man.

Mummery was a charismatic individual who made many staunch friends in the climbing community, including Norman Collie, Cecil Slingsby, Geoffrey Hastings and Henri Pasteur, as well as some enemies, including Whymper and Edward Davidson. ‘Wherein lay his great superiority is a difficult question to answer’, wrote Pasteur. ‘He was a clumsy walker and no one who had not seen him at work would credit him with his outstanding powers as a climber and a leader. He was a man of will-power and energy tempered with a marvellous patience.’¹⁹

His first ascents included both unclimbed ridges on the highest mountains and hard rock climbs on the lesser peaks. With Burgener he ascended the Zmutt Ridge (D) on the Matterhorn in 1879. A race developed with William Penhall, a medical student, and the daring guide Ferdinand Imseng. Penhall and Imseng traversed onto the West Face of the mountain, crossing the dangerous Penhall Couloir, and completed a route that has seldom been repeated. Penhall died three years later on the Wetterhorn. Meanwhile, Mummery attempted the fourth unclimbed ridge of the Matterhorn, the Furggengrat (D+/TD), in 1880 but was forced to traverse across the east face to the Hörnli Ridge. The Furggen Ridge was finally climbed in its entirety in 1911. In the Mont Blanc massif, Mummery climbed the Charpoua Face of the Aiguille Verte (D, 1881) and the Grépon (D, 1881). His guideless climbing commenced in 1889 and included the first traverse of the Grépon with Hastings, Collie and Pasteur in 1892; the Dent du Requin (D) and an attempt on the Aiguille du Plan with Slingsby, Collie and Hastings in 1893; and the first guideless ascent of the Brenva Route on Mont Blanc with Collie and Hastings in 1894. The Dent du Requin (the ‘Shark’s Tooth’) was named by Martin Conway and the route was devised by Slingsby, possibly because Mummery could not see it. Nevertheless on this and other ascents, it was Mummery who led the difficult pitches on rock and particularly on ice, where he was probably the best amateur climber of his generation.

Mummery was unusual for his time in that he also climbed with women. He ascended the Täschhorn (4,490m/14,731ft) via the Teufelsgrat (D) with his wife Mary and Burgener in 1887. During the descent, Burgener encouraged Mrs Mummery to lead the way down the steep slope with the words, ‘Go ahead; I could hold a cow here!’²⁰ Mary later wrote that Burgener held ‘many strange opinions; he believes in ghosts, he believes also that women can climb’.²¹ Mummery also climbed with Miss Lily Bristow (until he was apparently forbidden to do so by his wife). His traverse of the Grépon with Slingsby and Miss Bristow in 1893 gave rise to the observation that all mountains are doomed to pass through three phases: an inaccessible peak; the most difficult climb in the Alps; an easy day for a lady (a phrase invented by Leslie Stephen). Lily Bristow wrote to her parents describing the route as a ‘succession of problems, each one of which was a ripping good climb in itself’.²²

Mummery climbed in the Caucasus in 1888, making the first ascent of Dychtau (5,204m/17,073ft), and was invited by Martin Conway to go to the Karakoram in 1892, but after a visit to the Alps together Mummery declined because it was clear that Conway’s priority was exploration whereas his was climbing. Nevertheless, the two remained friends, with Conway describing Mummery as ‘the greatest climber of this or any other generation’, although he observed that ‘he loved danger for its own sake’.²³ Mummery died in 1895 attempting to climb Nanga Parbat in the Himalaya, the first attempt on an 8,000m peak.

The final chapter of his book My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, which was written shortly before his death, is entitled ‘The Pleasures and Penalties of Mountaineering’. It was highly influential in the development of the sport, particularly in France and Germany. He was perhaps the first climber fully to recognise the risks of climbing and to judge those risks worth taking. ‘He gains a knowledge of himself, a love of all that is most beautiful in nature, and an outlet such as no other sport affords for the stirring energies of youth; gains for which no price is, perhaps, too high. It is true that great ridges sometimes demand their sacrifice, but the mountaineer would hardly forego his worship though he knew himself to be the destined victim.’²⁴ This attitude to climbing and to risk was new and revolutionary, and probably accounted for some of the opposition to his membership of the Alpine Club. However, his equally radical views on politics and economics – he was co-author of Physiology of Industry (1889) with John Hobson, the left-wing economist whose later critique of imperialism influenced Lenin and Trotsky – and his social background in ‘trade’ may also have counted against him with some of the more conservative members. His belief that ‘the essence of the sport lies, not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties’²⁵ resonated with continental climbers but did not reflect the mainstream of British climbing until the 1950s. However, in his attitude to the use of artificial aid, he firmly upheld the British approach: ‘Someone...mooted the point whether [wooden] wedges were not a sort of bending the knee to Baal, and might not be the first step on those paths of ruin where the art of mountaineering becomes lost in that of the steeplejack. Whereupon we unanimously declared that the Charmoz should be desecrated by no fixed wedges.’²⁶

Martin Conway observed that Mummery was ‘intellectually rather than aesthetically well endowed’,²⁷ but Mummery always defended himself against the accusation that adventure and aesthetic appreciation are incompatible. ‘To the (self-dubbed) mountaineers, the right way up a peak is the easiest way, and all other ways are wrong ways. Thus...if a man goes up the Matterhorn to enjoy the scenery, he will go up the Hörnli route; if he goes by the Zmutt ridge it is, they allege, merely the difficulties of the climb that attract him...To say that this route, with its continuously gorgeous scenery is, from the aesthetic point of view, the wrong way, while the Hörnli route, which is marred by...its paper-besprinkled slopes, is the right, involves total insensibility to the true mountain feeling.’²⁸ From his writing it is clear that Mummery appreciated both the heroic and the aesthetic aspects of the sport: ‘Above, in the clear air and searching sunlight, we are afoot with the quiet gods, and men can know each other and themselves for what they are.’²⁹

As well as playing a supporting role to Mummery, his companions Slingsby, Collie and Hastings were outstanding mountaineers in their own right. Cecil Slingsby was a textile manufacturer from an old landed family. Born in 1849, he was ‘a thorough Yorkshire dalesman, stalwart, broad-shouldered, full-bearded, with a classic profile, a fine complexion even in age, and shrewd, laughing grey eyes’,³⁰ according to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who married his daughter Eleanor. As well as climbing in the Alps, Slingsby made 15 visits to Norway from 1872 onwards and was known in both England and Norway as the father of Norwegian mountaineering. During the first ascent in 1876 of the impressive Skagastølstind (2,340m/7,677ft), the third highest mountain in the country, he climbed the final 150m/500ft alone after his companions refused to go any further. He was possibly the first Englishman to learn to ski, helped to establish the sport of ski-mountaineering, and was regarded as an incomparable route-finder across unmapped and difficult terrain. He was also passionate about British rock climbing and potholing and put up numerous new routes, including Slingsby’s Chimney on Scafell Pinnacle (VD, 1888), climbed with Hastings, Hopkinson and Haskett Smith, which involved a pitch of 33m/110ft – a very long run-out in the days when there was no protection for the leader.

Norman Collie was born in Alderley Edge in Cheshire. His family had been the largest cotton importers in Britain, but trade was disrupted by the American Civil War (1861–65) and the family firm went bankrupt while Collie was still at school. He therefore had to work for a living. After studying chemistry at Bristol University and Queen’s University, Belfast, he was awarded a doctorate at the University of Würzburg in Germany before taking up a teaching post at Cheltenham Ladies College. His niece recalled that ‘he was far from being a ladies’ man and probably found that schoolgirls in bulk were rather more than he could stomach’.³¹ Collie never married, and after four years at Cheltenham he moved to University College London, where he later became Professor of Organic Chemistry. Collie was involved in the discovery of the noble gases, invented the neon light and took the first x-ray photographs used for medical purposes. He is also credited with inventing the ‘Grey Man of Ben Macdui’, a ghostly apparition that walked with him to the summit in 1920 and has been seen several times since. An acknowledged aesthete and expert on oriental art, wine, food and cigars, Collie was a distinguished figure in many different fields. When he visited Norway, ‘crowds flocked to see him under the impression that he was Sherlock Holmes’,³² but many who knew him well found him cold and disdainful. Geoffrey Winthrop Young wrote: ‘When he became interested in a man, his penetrating eyes flashed suddenly into an observant personal sympathy; when he was not, he was incapable of pretence, even of awareness.’³³

Collie was one of the first British alpinists not to serve an apprenticeship with alpine guides, moving directly to guideless climbing based on experience acquired in the British hills. He pioneered climbs in Scotland and the Lake District, including the first ascent of Moss Ghyll on Scafell (S, 1892) with Hastings and John Robinson, where he chipped the ‘Collie Step’ in the rock with an ice axe; the first ascent of Tower Ridge (Diff. in summer, grade IV in winter, 1894) on Ben Nevis with Hastings and others; and the first winter ascent of Steep Gill on Scafell which merits a grade V today, a standard of difficulty not widely achieved until the 1950s. Collie also climbed on the remote Isle of Skye with the local guide John Mackenzie, making the first ascent of Sgurr an Lochain (1,004m/3,294ft), the last major peak in Britain to be climbed, with Mackenzie and William Naismith in 1896.

From 1898 to 1911 Collie visited the Canadian Rockies five times, making 21 first ascents and naming more than 30 mountains. Mount Collie in Canada and Sgurr Thormaid (Norman’s Peak) on Skye are named after him, and he is buried within sight of his beloved Cuillin in Struan, Skye, next to his guide and life-long friend John Mackenzie. Just before his death in 1942 he was observed at the Sligachan Hotel on Skye by a young RAF officer who was on leave: ‘We were alone in the inn, save for an old man who must have returned there to die. His hair was white but his face and bearing were still those of a great mountaineer, though he must have been a great age. He never spoke, but appeared regularly at meals to take his place at the table, tight pressed against the windows, alone with his wine and his memories. We thought him rather fine.’³⁴

Shortly before he died, Collie described the climbing companions of his youth: ‘Slingsby was a magnificent mountaineer, a perfectly safe man to climb with’, he wrote, ‘and Mummery was not.’³⁵ The difference, perhaps, was that Mummery was a climber in the modern idiom, while Slingsby, like Collie, was a traditional mountaineer.

Geoffrey Hastings had a worsted spinning business in Bradford and started climbing with Slingsby in 1885, visiting Norway five times with him between 1889 and 1901. In Britain he put up numerous rock climbs including the first ascent of Needle Ridge on Great Gable (VD, 1887) and North Climb on Pillar Rock (S, 1891) with Slingsby and Haskett Smith. Always the strong man of the team, Hastings was renowned for producing unexpected luxuries from his rucksack at critical moments on a climb. Dorothy Pilley recalled seeing him at the foot of the Dent du Géant in 1920 when he was 60 years old: ‘There I spied Mr. Geoffrey Hastings and worshipped. Was he not the doughtiest hero remaining from the Mummery Epoch? He did not let my expectations down. An enormous sack jutted out from between his shoulders. When he lowered it the ground shook and he divulged that he made a practice of filling it with boulders to keep himself in training!’³⁶

The standards of mountaineering established by Mummery, Slingsby, Collie and Hastings in the closing years of the nineteenth century were well ahead of other Britons climbing at the time and were at the forefront of amateur climbing worldwide. In the years that followed, leading up to the First World War, the sport continued to expand but, with one or two exceptions, did not advance appreciably. In some ways it even regressed, with a return to guided climbing.

One development that did take place in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was the growing number of women participating in the sport and the appearance of the first all-female climbing parties. Women climbers played a particularly significant role in the development of winter mountaineering, including the first winter ascent of Mont Blanc in 1876 by Isabella Straton, who later married her guide, Jean Charlet, the inventor of abseiling. While male alpinists’ participation in the sport helped to reinforce their masculinity and social status, women had to overcome significant prejudice. Climbing was incompatible with traditional concepts of femininity and therefore posed a direct threat to a male-dominated social order. Many of the female pioneers were financially independent and nearly all had a rebellious streak. When Isabella Straton married Jean Charlet she had an income of £4,000 a year, whereas her husband might have expected to earn £25 during the summer season. Mary Mummery, who was clearly a very proficient mountaineer, probably expressed the views of many female climbers when she observed that: ‘The masculine mind is, with rare exceptions, imbued with the idea that a woman is not a fit comrade for steep ice or precipitous rock and [believes that] she should be satisfied with watching through a telescope some weedy and invertebrate masher being hauled up a steep peak by a couple of burly guides.’³⁷ Women also had to overcome the difficulty of climbing in long skirts. As the popularity of the sport increased, a ‘convertible skirt’ was designed for female mountaineers in 1910: ‘By undoing the waist straps and the studs which ran from the waist to the hem the wearer appeared in the smartest of knickerbocker suits...and the discarded skirt became a smart and well-fitting cape. In this way the woman mountaineer could dispense with her skirt when a difficult bit of climbing had to be tackled, and yet be garbed according to the demands of convention when returning to civilisation.’³⁸ For women, even more than for men, any escape from the demands of ‘civilisation’ was only temporary.

Lizzie le Blond, née Hawkin-Whitshed, was amongst the first women to practise ‘man-less climbing’, traversing the Piz Palü (AD, 3,905m/12,812ft) with Lady Evelyn McDonnell in 1900. As a young woman she was part of the social set that revolved around Queen Victoria’s playboy son Edward, the Prince of Wales. Sent to the Alps because of her weak health, she immediately took to climbing: ‘I owe a supreme debt of gratitude to the mountains for knocking me from the shackles of conventionality.’³⁹ Her great aunt, Lady Bentinck, was so shocked by her behaviour that she wrote to her mother exhorting her to ‘stop her climbing mountains; she is scandalising all London and looks like a Red Indian’.⁴⁰ Lizzie le Blond’s career is somewhat difficult to follow because she turns up successively as Mrs Burnaby, Mrs Main and Mrs Aubrey le Blond. Her first husband, a colonel in the Royal Horse Guards, was speared by Dervishes at the battle of Abu Klea in the Sudan while seeking to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. The second died after an adventurous trip to China. Lizzie wrote nine books under her various married names and became the first president of the Ladies’ Alpine Club, which was initially formed as a section of the Lyceum, an intellectual ladies’ club.

Margaret Jackson had 140 major climbs to her credit, including the first winter ascents of the Lauteraarhorn (4,042m/13,261ft), the Pfaffenstöckli (3,114m/10,217ft), the Gross Fiescherhorn (4,049m/13,284ft) and the first winter traverse of the Jungfrau, all in the space of 12 days in 1888. She lost several toes to frostbite after a bivouac on the Jungfrau. Katie Richardson’s record was perhaps even more impressive. Described by an admirer as ‘resembling a piece of carefully kept Dresden china’,⁴¹ her guides took a somewhat different view: ‘She does not eat and she walks like the devil.’⁴² She began climbing in 1871 and completed 116 major climbs of which six were first ascents and 14 first women’s ascents. She made the first traverse of Piz Palü in 1879, became the first woman to climb La Meije in 1885 and made the first traverses from the Bionnassay to the Dôme de Gôuter (AD) in 1888 and from the Petit to the Grand Dru (D-) in 1889.

Gertrude Bell was the first woman to be awarded a first class degree in modern history at Oxford. After leaving university she travelled throughout the Middle East, studying languages, archaeology and politics. During the First World War she joined the Arab Bureau and was appointed Oriental Secretary. After the war she settled in current-day Iraq, where she played a key role in the succession of the Hashemites to the throne. She held the most senior position of any woman in the British Empire in the 1920s and was therefore one of the most powerful women in the world:

From Trebizond to Tripoli

She rolls the Pashas flat

And tells them what to think of this

And what to think of that.

Her proudest achievement was the creation of the Baghdad Museum (‘like the British Museum only a little smaller’), now sadly looted of many of its treasures, but she was also an exceptional alpinist. With Ulrich Führer as her guide, she completed the first traverse of the Lauteraarhorn–Schreckhorn (AD, 1902) and made an epic attempt on the unclimbed North-East Face of the Finsteraarhorn (now graded ED1 with several pitches of V) lasting 57 hours with a retreat in a blizzard. This climb was well ahead of its time, more appropriate to the bitter Teutonic struggles of the 1930s than an English lady climbing at the turn of the century. Despite these very considerable achievements, women were not admitted to the Alpine Club for over a hundred years, and even then several male members (including Bill Tilman) resigned in protest.

The two leading male alpinists in the years leading up to the First World War were John Ryan, who almost always climbed with the guides Franz and Josef Lochmatter, and Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who often climbed with Josef Knubel. Ryan was an Anglo-Irish landowner. A difficult and charmless man who ‘seldom carried rucksack or ice axe, and...never cut a step’, he was blackballed by the Alpine Club for ‘incivility to some older members’.⁴³ As Geoffrey Winthrop Young observed: ‘The gods who showered on him all worldly gifts, withheld the power of ever appearing happy.’⁴⁴ He was, nevertheless, a very able climber. In 1905 he made 25 ascents including the North Face of the Charmoz (D+). In 1906 he climbed the North-West Ridge of the Blaitière (TD), the Ryan–Lochmatter Route on the Plan (D+) and the Cresta di Santa Caterina on Monte Rosa (TD). He also climbed the South-West Face of the Täschhorn with Young, Knubel and the Lochmatters, a huge, loose rock face almost 900m high that was not repeated for 37 years (and then using pitons) and still maintains a serious reputation with a grade of TD+. During the climb Ryan confided in Young that the year before he would not have cared a damn which way it went, live or die, but that year he had married. He did not climb at a similar standard again until 1914, when he put a new route up the Nantillons Face of the Grépon. He was badly injured in the First World War and did not climb again.

Geoffrey Winthrop Young was perhaps the best British alpinist in the early part of the twentieth century and had a profound influence on the development of the sport over the next 40 years. He was proposed for membership of the Alpine Club by Sir Alfred Wills, whose ascent of the Wetterhorn opened the Golden Age in the 1850s, and he knew Joe Brown who played a key role in re-establishing Britain as a leading climbing nation in the 1950s.

Born in 1876, the second son of Sir George Young, although he never exactly fitted the mould of an establishment figure, he was nevertheless part of the British ruling class and saw nothing wrong with using his extensive network of friends and relations to advance his career and various causes. When he was a boy, Sir Leslie Stephen and Lord Alfred Tennyson visited his family home on an island in the Thames near Cliveden. It was a prophetic meeting since in later life Young would gain recognition as both a climber and a poet. His father made the first ascent of the Jungfrau from Wengern Alp in 1865, but all mention of climbing was forbidden in the Young household following the death of Sir George’s brother while climbing Mont Blanc in 1866. Despite or perhaps because of this, Young was attracted to climbing while a student at Cambridge, where he wrote The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity in 1900, in a style parodying early alpine guides: ‘In these athletic days of rapid devolution to the Simian practices of our ancestors, climbing of all kinds is naturally assuming an ever more prominent position...’⁴⁵

A climber, poet, educationalist and ‘athletic aesthete’, Young knew that climbing was just a sport, but was convinced that it had an intellectual and spiritual aspect lacking in other sports. He combined a mystical approach to climbing with practical organisational abilities which he put to use in his Pen-y-Pass meets, as president of the Alpine Club and in the formation of the British Mountaineering Council.

Young was sacked as a teacher at Eton in 1905 and as a school inspector in 1913, in both cases probably because of some homosexual impropriety. When he was not climbing he was drawn to the homosexual clubs and boxing booths of Soho, Paris and Berlin, where the thrill of illicit sex and danger of public exposure seems to have appealed to his risk-taking instincts. His writing combines romanticism with striking homo-erotic imagery, such as his description of a rail journey to the Lake District: ‘That first rough hug of the northern hills, where the arms of Shap Fell reached down in welcome about the line, and the eye, bored with the dull fleshiness of plains prostrate and flaccid under their litter of utility, can delight in the starting muscles and shapely bones of strong earth, stripped for a wrestle with the elements – or with the climber!’⁴⁶ He also reveals something of his motivation for climbing, and perhaps his sense of guilt at his (then illegal) sexual orientation: ‘In return for my guardianship of their integrity [the mountains] offered me a sanctuary for all the higher impulses, all the less sordid hopes and imaginings which visited me anywhere through the years.’⁴⁷

Since most climbers were (not surprisingly) less than forthright about their sexual orientation it is hard to judge how prevalent homosexuality was in climbing circles at this time, but it was probably fairly common. Many leading climbers, both before and after the First World War, went to Cambridge University, where homosexuality was both widespread and generally accepted. On Young’s side, at least, part of the attraction in his relationship with George Mallory and Siegfried Herford appears to have been physical. All three climbed naked together on the granite sea cliffs of Cornwall, which must have encouraged a good climbing style. Herford also joined Young on some of his visits to boxing clubs, but whether he went in search of sex or simply the thrill of ‘slumming it’ is unclear.

After climbing in Wales and the Lakes, Young met Josef Knubel in 1905 and started his alpine career. In 1906 he climbed the South-West Face of the Täschhorn with Ryan. In 1907 he climbed the Breithorn Younggrat (D) and the Weisshorn Younggrat (D). He followed this in 1911 with the Brouillard Ridge of Mont Blanc (AD+), the West Ridge of the Grandes Jorasses (D) and the Mer de Glace Face of the Grépon (D), which he climbed with Ralph Todhunter, who had the strange affectation of climbing in white gloves, and Humphrey Jones. Jones became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society the following year before dying with his wife and guide while climbing in the Alps on their honeymoon. Todhunter was killed in the Dolomites in 1925. Young’s last major route in the Alps was the Rote Zähn Ridge of the Gspaltenhorn (TD- with pitches of V), which he climbed with Siegfried Herford in the last summer before the outbreak of war in 1914.

Young hated the war hysteria that gripped Britain in 1914 and attended a peace demonstration in Trafalgar Square, ‘the last protest of those who had grown up in the age of civilised peace’.⁴⁸ However, he felt unable to remain inactive when so many of his friends were volunteering and so acted as a war correspondent and subsequently helped to found the Friends Ambulance Unit, ‘work...for men who wished to die if need be with their contemporaries but not to fight with them’.⁴⁹ A man of extraordinary personal courage, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he received several decorations, including the Légion d’Honneur. He lost his left leg in Italy in 1917, but his commitment to climbing and love of the mountains remained undiminished:

I dream my feet upon the starry ways;

My heart rests in the hill.

I may not grudge the little left undone;

I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.⁵⁰

THE LAKE DISTRICT

The inn at Wasdale Head was the first home of the British climbing community that began to form in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.⁵¹ Originally called the Huntsman’s Inn, later the Wastwater Hotel, it was started by Will Ritson, who added a wing to his farmhouse to accommodate visitors and obtained a licence in 1856. Ritson boasted that Wasdale had the highest mountain, the deepest lake, the smallest church and the biggest liar in England. He once won a lying contest outright by declaring that, like George Washington, he could not tell a lie. He was a sportsman, drinker and raconteur: ‘Landlord, waiter and customer by turns.’⁵² Although he retired in 1879, his spirit lived on in the hotel, which continues to attract fell walkers, climbers and other eccentrics to this day.

The hotel is located at the head of a valley, 12 miles’ walk from the nearest railway station. In the early years, women guests rarely, if ever, visited it, and it had a sense of remoteness that allowed a relaxed and convivial atmosphere far removed from the social conventions of Victorian domestic life. It was a place that appealed to those with ‘a taste for companionable chaos’⁵³ where the atmosphere was pervaded by the smell of pipe tobacco and wet tweeds. The climbing world consisted of a small group of enthusiastic amateurs, who would regularly meet each other at Wasdale or in the Alps, but they were remarkably welcoming to newcomers; the cliquiness that characterised so many climbing clubs in later years was notably absent. A book in the hotel recorded the activities of the guests, which included long hard walks and, increasingly, scrambles and climbs.

The Alpine Journal first carried an article on fell walking in the Lakes in 1870, and established alpinists, including the Pilkington brothers, Norman Collie, Cecil Slingsby, Geoffrey Hastings, Horace Walker, the Pendlebury brothers and Frederick Gardiner, all visited the district. An increasing number of people also started their climbing in the British hills rather than the Alps. The Rev. James Jackson, self-proclaimed Patriarch of the Pillarites, was an early enthusiast who scrambled up Pillar Rock in 1876 at the age of 80 and died attempting to do the same thing at the age of 83. Walter Haskett Smith was a more conventional figure who also started his climbing career in Britain rather than the Alps. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Haskett Smith excelled at athletics, establishing an unofficial long jump world record of 25 feet in practice. While a student he went on a walking tour of the Pyrenees with Charles Packe, the botanist and pioneering mountain explorer, and visited Snowdonia but did not attempt any scrambling or climbing. In 1881 he was appointed by a group of friends to decide where they should gather for a summer reading party. After studying an Ordnance map of Cumberland he selected an inn in a ‘sombre region thronged with portentous shadows’⁵⁴ and took rooms at Wasdale Head. His choice was probably influenced by Wordsworth’s description of the valley in his Guide to The Lakes: ‘Wastdale is well worth the notice of the Traveller who is not afraid of fatigue; no part of the country is more distinguished by sublimity.’ The group read Plato in the morning and tramped the hills in the afternoon. They also made the acquaintance of Herman Bowring, nearly 40 years their senior, who introduced them to the art of scrambling.

Haskett Smith was a man of private means. He qualified as a barrister but was appalled when a friend offered him a brief. Instead, he devoted his life to philology and climbing, returning to the Lakes each year and progressively moving from scrambling to true rock climbing. Early climbs included Deep Ghyll on Scafell in 1882. Four years later he made the first ascent of Napes Needle with ‘no ropes or illegitimate means’,⁵⁵ often cited as the birth of British rock climbing. Graded HVD today, Napes Needle was a hard route for the mid-1880s but ironically, like the first routes on Pillar Rock and Scafell Pinnacle, it is truly a summit ascended by the easiest route and therefore, in some respects, more in the tradition of alpine climbing than British rock climbing, where reaching a summit is irrelevant. The real significance of Napes Needle was not so much that it was the ‘first British rock climb’ but rather that it is a very photogenic piece of rock and publicity surrounding subsequent ascents helped to establish rock climbing in Britain as a sport. Just as the Matterhorn became the symbol of alpine climbing, so Napes Needle became the symbol of British rock climbing (and remains the logo of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club to this day).

Haskett Smith was accompanied on many of his climbs by John Robinson, a successful estate manager born near Cockermouth. Robinson visited the Alps once, in 1898, climbing several mountains, including the Matterhorn, but was not impressed. His first love was always the Lake District. During a visit to the Lakes in about 1900 Geoffrey Winthrop Young recalled being hailed at Keswick station by a stranger, who turned out to be Robinson: ‘Hullo, young man, oughtn’t you and I to talk? Nailed boots go straight to my heart!’ As Young commented (in the 1920s): ‘Nails, I fear, are now too common a sight upon the fells to pass for an introduction; so much the mountains have gained in the number of their followers and lost of their one-time fellowship.’⁵⁶

The ascent of Napes Needle by Haskett Smith prompted Cecil Slingsby, who first climbed in the Lakes in 1885 with Geoffrey Hastings, to write an article for the Alpine Journal exhorting members of the Club to visit the Lakes: ‘Do not let us be beaten on our own fells by outsiders, some of whom consider ice axes and ropes to be “illegitimate”. Let us not neglect the Lake District, Wales and Scotland whilst we are the conquerors abroad.’⁵⁷ Five years later Godfrey Solly, a pious solicitor who became Mayor of Birkenhead and visited the Alps over 40 times, led Slingsby up Eagle’s Nest Ridge Direct, a climb that was well ahead of its time and is still graded mild VS today. As Solly recorded: ‘I went first and found it difficult enough to get to the little platform. When there, I sat down to recover my breath with my back to the ridge and a leg dangling on each side. The party below made some uncomplimentary remark as to what I looked like perched up there, and I suggested that I was more like an eagle on its nest. That is, I fear, the very unromantic but truthful origin of the name.’⁵⁸

In an influential article written in 1937, H. M. Kelly and J. H. Doughty distinguished four phases in the development of rock climbing in the Lake District: the easiest way (up to 1880); the gully and chimney period (1880–1900); the ridge and arête (rib) period (1890–1905); and the slab and wall period (1905–present).⁵⁹ The dates are necessarily approximate but the overall trend towards more open, exposed and steep climbing is borne out by the record. The gullies and chimneys were climbed first partly because they provided the best winter routes, but also because in their dark and wet confines the climbers felt less exposed to a dizzying sense of height. The transition to more open climbing on slabs and walls involved climbers accepting far greater exposure and also demanded a change of technique from brute strength to balance. Solly and Slingsby’s ascent of Eagle’s Nest Ridge Direct in 1892 was ahead of its time because it was both hard and exposed.

As awareness of the rock climbing potential in the Lakes began to spread, the sport started to attract climbers from the northern industrial cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Hopkinson brothers typified the social background, ambitions and attitudes of many Lake District climbers in the late Victorian era. A distinguished Manchester family, related to the Slingsby family and close neighbours of the Pilkingtons in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, their father was a self-made man who rose through hard work and ability from mill mechanic to Lord Mayor of Manchester. There were five brothers: John became a Fellow at Cambridge and subsequently improved the management and equipment of lighthouses, designed a lighting system for Manchester, and tram systems for Leeds and Liverpool. Alfred read classics at Oxford and then went into the law, becoming Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University and a member of parliament. He was knighted in 1910. Charles was probably the best climber amongst them and was content to remain with the family firm, although he was active in local government. Edward went to Cambridge and became an electrical engineer, designing the engine for the first electrically driven underground train. He too became an MP. The youngest brother, Albert, studied medicine at Cambridge and became a surgeon in Manchester before returning to Cambridge to lecture in anatomy. As with Leslie Stephen, we gain an insight into the lives of the Hopkinsons because Edward’s daughter, Katherine Chorley, wrote a book about her childhood. In Manchester Made Them (1950) she portrays her father as a ‘vital, unresting man, radiating energy’, and his brothers as being ‘charged with ambition...they almost worshipped brains and too readily judged a successful life in terms of getting to the top of the tree’.⁶⁰ She ascribed their ambition to a strict non-conformist upbringing, believing that they ‘tried to contract for the kingdom of heaven by means of the laborious days they lived on earth...Success was a yardstick of hard work and therefore all too easily a sign that you had lived well and frugally in the sight of God.’

The Hopkinson brothers climbed on the East Face of Tryfan in Wales in 1882, four years before Haskett Smith climbed Napes Needle. In 1892 they climbed the North-East Buttress of Ben Nevis (VD) and descended Tower Ridge (Diff.), two of the best known climbs in Britain today. In doing so, they demonstrated a willingness to exit the gullies and accept the increased exposure of climbing on ridges and open faces. Like many of their peers, the Hopkinsons considered ‘bragging’ to be the worst offence for a climber. They kept few records of their climbs and did not approve of others doing so. As Alfred wrote: ‘The labels – Cust’s Gully, Westmorland’s Climb, Botterill’s Slab – convey nothing to my mind. These proprietary brands...are sometimes a little trying to those who like to find out things for themselves.’⁶¹ In 1898 John Hopkinson and three of his children died while climbing near Arolla in Switzerland. The other brothers never climbed again. Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast 666’ (who will re-appear later in this book), appears to have played some part in the accident. Crowley had succeeded in descending a route which the local guides had said was impossible. He recommended it to Hopkinson as being without difficulty or danger for a responsible party and it is possible that they were attempting to find it when they fell. By that time, Crowley had already left the valley. John Hopkinson’s two surviving sons were killed in the First World War.

As the popularity of hill walking and rock climbing increased, so too did media interest in the activity, which in turn contributed to the growth of the sport. In 1894 Haskett Smith published Climbing in the British Isles, which provided brief details of climbs to be found in Britain, including some outcrops and sea cliffs. Haskett Smith’s book suggests that the subsidiary sport of bouldering (climbing small but technically difficult rock faces, without ropes) also had its origins around this time. His description of Bear Rock notes that it is ‘a queerly-shaped rock on Great Napes, which in the middle of March, 1889 was gravely attacked by a large party comprising some five or six of the strongest climbers in England. It is difficult to find, especially in seasons when the grass is at all long.’⁶² The most influential book on British climbing during this period was undoubtedly Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District, a collaboration between Owen Glynne Jones and the Abraham brothers, published in 1897, which contained lively descriptions of climbs and superb photographs. The success of the book ensured that Jones became the most famous rock climber of his generation. Like all successful self-publicists, he also attracted much criticism from his climbing peers.

Jones, like Whymper, was firmly part of the heroic rather than aesthetic school of climbing. He wrote about the challenge and excitement of climbing and rarely referred to the beauty of the mountain landscape. Also like Whymper, he was from a lower social class than many climbers of the day; his father was a Welsh carpenter and builder who moved to London shortly before Jones was born. Members of the Alpine Club dubbed the new wave of British rock climbers ‘gymnasts’ or ‘chimney sweeps’, by which they intended to imply both the intellectual and social inferiority of the sport as compared with alpinism. Jones was unrepentant: ‘A line must be drawn somewhere to separate the possible from the impossible, and some try to draw it by their own experience. They constitute what is called the ultra-gymnastic school of climbing. Its members are generally young and irresponsible.’

Born in 1867, Jones showed early promise at school and won a series of prizes and scholarships culminating in a Clothworkers’ Scholarship to the Central Institution in Exhibition Road, South Kensington, where in 1890 he obtained a first in experimental physics. He subsequently became a teacher at the City of London School. While a young man he read accounts of the Golden Age of mountaineering, including those by Stephen and Whymper. As C. E. Benson noted at the turn of the century: ‘About this time, too, certain striking and somewhat sensational photographs of rock-climbing began to find their way into shop windows, and immediately attracted attention and comment, the latter generally criticizing the intellectual capacity of climbers.’⁶³ Jones’ attention was attracted by just such a photograph in a shop on The Strand and he decided to become a climber. Had he been born just a few years earlier, it is doubtful whether he would ever have considered the sport, but having once discovered it, he was addicted. When unable to get to the mountains, he climbed whatever else was available, including several London church towers, Cleopatra’s Needle and a complete traverse of the Common Room at the City of London School.

For Jones, the mountains were simply a stage upon which the climber performed. As a contemporary reviewer of Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District (1897) observed: ‘The soul of mountaineering did not appeal to him so much as its physical charms.’⁶⁴ He had an apparent disregard for height and exposure (allegedly because of his short-sightedness), and days out with Jones had a habit of turning into epics which many partners were loath to repeat. Jones climbed in the Alps, including a guideless traverse of the Zinal Rothorn and the Weisshorn with the Hopkinsons, but it is chiefly for his contribution to British rock climbing that he is remembered. When he died, in a climbing accident on the Dent Blanche, his landlady said: ‘I always knew that he must come to this end, and he knew it too. He used to say so and say it was the death he would choose.’⁶⁵

An outstanding gymnast, ‘he studied his own physical powers as a chauffeur studies a car and for that reason he talked a great deal about himself’,⁶⁶ according to Haskett Smith. Although a fearless leader – ‘strong, cool and resolute’⁶⁷ – he sometimes pre-inspected difficult pitches using a top rope, a technique he adopted on Kern Knotts Crack (VS 4c, 1896). This practice started an ethical debate that has continued in various forms to the present day. In typically acerbic style, Aleister Crowley argued that Jones’ reputation ‘is founded principally on climbs he did not make at all, in the proper sense of the word. He used to go out with a couple of photographers and have himself lowered up and down climbs repeatedly until he had learnt its peculiarities, and then make the “first ascent” before a crowd of admirers.’⁶⁸

The ‘couple of photographers’ referred to by Crowley were the Abraham brothers, George and Ashley, who collaborated with Jones on Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District and who were amongst the leading rock climbers of their generation. Born in Keswick, they began climbing around 1890, but many of their most famous routes were climbed with Jones from 1896 onwards, including Jones’ Route Direct from Lord’s Rake (HS, 1898) on Scafell Pinnacle, a route that involved open climbing on steep slabs. After Jones died, the Abraham brothers continued climbing with other partners, completing Crowberry Ridge Direct on Buachaille Etive Mor (S 4a, 1900) with the gritstone specialists Jim Puttrell and Ernest Baker and the North East Climb on Pillar Rock (S, 1912). Ashley also put up numerous routes on Skye with H. Harland, including Cioch Direct (S 4a, 1907). As professional photographers and guide writers, the Abraham brothers were the first people to earn a living from rock climbing as opposed to mountaineering. Their British Mountain Climbs, published in 1908, was particularly successful, remaining in print for 40 years until 1948.

Partly under Jones’ influence, rock climbing became more competitive and more rowdy than it had been in the early years. Until surprisingly recently British climbing circles have maintained the pretence that climbing, despite being a sport, is not competitive in the conventional sense of the word. However, the reality is that climbing has always been intensely competitive. Haskett Smith, the ‘father of British rock climbing’, made numerous gully climbs before and after his famous ascent of Napes Needle. He justified his choice of gullies as follows: ‘When A makes a climb, he wants B, C, and D to have the benefit of every single obstacle with which he himself met, while B, C, and D are equally anxious to say that they followed the exact line that Mr A found so difficult, and thought it perfectly easy...If you climb just to amuse yourself you can wander vaguely over a face of rock; but if you want to describe your climb to others, it saves a lot of time if you can say – “There, that is our gully! Stick to it all the way up!” ’⁶⁹ Despite his later protestations, what Haskett Smith was describing is competition. Jones simply took it one step further by introducing the concept of grading rock climbs according to their difficulty and by publicising his ascents. But for the climbing establishment, competition, grading and publicity were all anathema.

The social atmosphere of the sport was also changing under the influence of the new generation of rock climbers. In the early days, a scholarly atmosphere pervaded meets at Wasdale Head. In many respects the ambience resembled that of an Oxbridge Senior Common Room. From the 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War, more boisterous behaviour became the norm, particularly amongst the younger climbers.⁷⁰ While the smoke room remained a place of discussion, where Haskett Smith, Collie and others held court, the younger men indulged in energetic games and disputes in the billiard room. Popular tests of strength and agility included leaping over the billiard table in a single vault and ‘the passage of the billiard table leg’, passing over and under the table without touching the floor. Inevitably the cloth was torn, and remained so, leading to the development of ‘billiard fives’ a strenuous and rowdy game that soon resulted in the room resembling a war zone, with pock-marked walls and wire netting to protect the windows. The final of a knock-out doubles competition in 1909 pitted Slingsby and Young, for the Alpine Club, against the Abraham brothers, for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. The Abrahams won. Billiard fives continued to be played until the 1930s, when the much-abused table was finally removed and the room converted into a lounge. Writing in 1935, Dorothy Pilley remembered: ‘Through a cloud of smoke, when the clamour of that extraordinary game, billiard fives (now alas! a thing of the past since the table was mistakenly banished), died down, strained figures could be seen – hands on the edge of the table, feet up on the wall – working their way round it.’⁷¹ The hotel was frequently so overcrowded that the billiard table also functioned as a bed.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Norman Collie, the great late Victorian scientist, aesthete and mountaineer, bemoaned the arrival of the younger generation: ‘The glory of the mountains is departing. The progressive, democratical finger of the “New Mountaineer” is laid with...irreverence and mockery.’ George Abraham hinted at the coming social revolution, of which Jones was just the beginning, when he wrote: ‘[Jones’] favourite theory was that all men should climb and that they would be better for it. This was in contradistinction to the somewhat dog-in-a-manger idea which then prevailed, that the joys of the mountain were only for men of liberal education and of the higher walks of life.’⁷² Jones’ death in the Alps in 1899 did two things: it reduced the speed of development of climbing in Britain and increased the influence of those for whom the beauty and romance of climbing were more important than the standard of difficulty.

By the early 1900s, the motor car was beginning to have an impact on climbing, extending the number of crags that could be reached during one holiday. In the Lakes, where many roads terminate at the ends of major valleys, only the crags in Langdale and Dow Crag, near Coniston, were readily accessible by car from the major towns. In Snowdonia, where the roads cut right across the district, it was possible to access all the major crags relatively easily by car. Partly for this reason, attention started to shift from the Lakes to Wales. The trend accelerated when four climbers fell to their death on Scafell Crag in September 1903.