shared experience of hardship and danger on a climb can be the basis of the strongest friendships, but climbing is essentially a solitary sport and there are few more lonely situations (voluntarily entered into) than leading a long pitch at the absolute limit of your ability. While the activity itself tends to be solitary, the climbing community is gregarious and tribal. Perhaps because of the collective release of nervous tension, climbers are known for their excesses when they return to the valleys and the sport has a well-deserved reputation for wild and reckless behaviour. This strange and contradictory mixture of ingredients – heroic and aesthetic, gregarious and solitary, self-disciplined and reckless, ascetic and debauched – has attracted an equally strange and eclectic mixture of people to the sport. It has also created tensions between those whose motives are primarily heroic – the vigorous pursuit of liberty, adventure and self-fulfilment – and those whose motives are primarily aesthetic – concerned with man’s emotional response to the mountain landscape.
Much has changed in the climbing world since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, but even more has remained the same. In many respects British climbers of today would be instantly recognisable to their Victorian predecessors, with their desire for adventure, love of wild places and need to escape from ‘civilised’ society. But the sport has also evolved, reflecting changes in British society, from a pastime undertaken by an eccentric and privileged minority to a part of the mainstream leisure and tourist industry. Society’s attitude to climbing and to climbers has also changed. When British climbers first ‘conquered’ the Alps in the mid-Victorian era, the sport was regarded with mildly disapproving incomprehension, that men should risk their lives for such a useless ambition. By late Victorian and Edwardian times, as they extended their activities to almost every corner of the globe, climbers came to be seen as plucky heroes whose achievements underscored Britain’s right to rule a quarter of the world. In the aftermath of the First World War, the disappearance of Mallory and Irvine, enveloped by clouds as they tried to reach the highest point on earth, had an almost redemptive quality after the mechanised mass slaughter of the trenches. When Hillary and Tenzing finally reached the summit of Everest after the Second World War, even though neither of them was British, they were part of a proudly nationalistic project, marking the end of Empire but heralding the dawn of the New Elizabethan Age. As climbing has progressively become a mass activity in the post-war years, the heroic status of climbers has come under increasing scrutiny. In the secular twenty-first century, the British like their heroes to be banal celebrities or saintly figures who combine benevolence with bravery. Most top climbers are neither banal nor benevolent, but they are brave. They deliberately set out to do things that no-one has attempted to do before: things that most normal, rational people would find quite terrifying. Yet the motives and desires of elite climbers, as they grapple with their icy peaks, are not so very different from those of the 4 million ordinary climbers and hill walkers active in Britain today, and it is partly this sense of recognition and shared experience that makes the lives of these flawed heroes so compelling.
I first started rock climbing in the long, hot summer of 1975. Within a week I seconded an HVS in hiking boots and by the end of the summer I was leading VS (see Appendix I for an explanation of climbing grades and Appendix II for a glossary of climbing terms). I was completely obsessed by the sport and flattered myself that I had the makings of a good climber. By the end of the 1970s, as climbing standards continued to rise inexorably while my own energies and enthusiasms were increasingly directed elsewhere, I concluded that I was probably an average sort of climber. By the mid-1980s it was obvious that even this was an exaggeration. With the benefit of 34 years of experience it is now clear that, in terms of technical difficulty, my rock climbing achievements reached their zenith about 30 years ago while my equally modest mountaineering achievements peaked about 15 years ago. Over the past 34 years many things have changed in my life, but the mountains have remained a constant. I have had good days and bad days at work, but I am hard pressed to think of a single climbing day that I have regretted, at least in retrospect. When I reached the age of 49, mindful of Don Whillans’ admonition that ‘by the time you’re 50, you’re completely fucked’, I decided to write this book before it was too late. The decision reflects my continuing fascination with this strange sport.
Given my lack of accomplishment as a climber, some readers may question whether I am qualified to write a history of the sport. I would contend that the best climbers do not necessarily make the best historians, since so many of them appear to agree with Winston Churchill that ‘history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’. Donald Robertson, who died in a climbing accident in 1910, observed that a truly honest account of a climbing day has yet to be written, and it remains a truth almost universally acknowledged that there are only two approaches to writing about climbing: exaggeration or understatement. Since the activity necessarily takes place in inaccessible places with few impartial witnesses, the boundary between fact and fiction is often blurred, and climbing history is full of larger-than-life characters around whom myths have grown up that are certainly not literally true, but which may nevertheless provide a true insight into the nature of the climber, their deeds and the times in which they lived.
Gustave Flaubert compared writing history to drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful, and there can be few other sports that have given rise to a body of literature as rich, varied and, above all, extensive as climbing. Having drunk at least part of the ocean, the challenge is to decide what should go into the cup. Inevitably, this particular version of climbing history reflects my own interests and prejudices, and no doubt contains both omissions and inaccuracies. But I hope that it also reflects the true spirit and tradition of the sport which is, first and foremost, about the pure joy of climbing.
2
BEFORE 1854: IN SEARCH OF THE SUBLIME
Until 1854 the British hardly concerned themselves with climbing except as a means of exploiting the animal and mineral resources of sea cliffs and mountains, or gaining a military advantage. In the 11 years that followed, they climbed almost every major peak in the Alps.
During the ‘Golden Age’ of alpinism, between 1854 and 1865, 39 major alpine peaks were climbed for the first time, all but eight of them by British parties. During this intense period of activity the British can legitimately claim to have invented the sport of climbing, and for the rest of the nineteenth century they remained at the forefront of developments, undertaking ever more difficult routes in the Alps and expanding their exploratory activities throughout the world to Norway, the Caucasus, the Rockies, the Andes and the Himalaya.
What caused this sudden explosion of climbing activity in the second half of the nineteenth century? Developments in science and technology, industrialisation, urbanisation and changing attitudes to the natural world all contributed to the birth of the sport, and Britain led the world in each of these fields. Climbing was both a result of, and a reaction against, a period of unprecedented peace, increasing wealth and leisure, and the ever more complex, artificial and ordered existence of the emerging urban middle class. Just like climbers today, the pioneers were attracted to the sport primarily as an escape from the crowded complexity of life in the city to the vigorous simplicity, beauty and adventure of the mountains.
FROM GLOOM TO GLORY
For most of British history the idea of climbing for pleasure and enjoyment, in other words for sport, was unimaginable. Life for the overwhelming majority of people was a struggle for survival, and man’s attitude to the natural world was essentially utilitarian and exploitative. Animals, plants and rocks provided food and shelter, and most people suffered enough hardship meeting these basic needs without undertaking unnecessary activities that might add to their discomfort. The wilderness, and mountains in particular, were literally seen as ‘waste land’: unproductive and potentially dangerous. In keeping with the classical ideal, beauty was associated with fertility. Fields, orchards, vegetable gardens and fish ponds were beautiful; mountains were not.
Whereas many religions see a natural world inhabited by gods and goddesses, spirits and sprites, the Judeao-Christian tradition
