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
