during the Golden Age was in fact remarkably accident-free, bearing in mind the primitive equipment being used and the almost total lack of understanding of ropework, snow and ice conditions, and avalanche risk. But the public vented its anger on the Alpine Club, and for a time it seemed as if the nascent sport of mountaineering might end almost before it had really begun. Alfred Wills, who started the Golden Age with his ascent of the Wetterhorn and was president of the Alpine Club at the time of the Matterhorn tragedy, wrote to Whymper encouraging him to break his self-imposed silence: ‘Give your own account, let it be truthful, manly and unflinching – wherever blame is due (if blame there be) let it rest – but do not let people go on conjecturing the worst, when you could silence the greater part of it by your utterance.’43 Whymper did not provide a thorough public account until Scrambles Amongst the Alps was published in 1871. Although climbing continued, it did so discreetly. ‘After that frightful catastrophe of July 14, 1865,’ Coolidge wrote, ‘[British climbers], so to speak, climbed on sufferance, enjoying themselves much, it is true, but keeping all expression of that joy to themselves in order not to excite derision.’44
The Golden Age had ended.
4
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
