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.
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