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’),
