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
