Barrington chose the Eiger (3,970m/13,025ft) because he could not be bothered to travel to Zermatt and duly completed the first ascent of the mountain, via the West Ridge (AD). As the party approached the summit, Barrington allegedly pulled a pistol from his jacket and informed his guides that if they attempted to reach the summit before him he would blow their brains out. His account of the climb simply noted that ‘the two guides kindly gave me the place of first man up’.5
Observing the growing popularity of the sport in 1857, the Rev. S. W. King wrote of ‘young Cantabs and Oxonians scampering over pass after pass, with often apparently no other object than trying who can venture in the most novel break-neck situations’.6 These young men were led in their scamperings by local mountain guides, a small minority of whom became outstanding climbers. Melchior Anderegg, born in 1828 near Meiringen in the Bernese Oberland, was one of the best. As a boy he tended cattle, hunted chamois and became an accomplished wood carver. A big, genial man, he made numerous climbs with the Walker family and was the favourite guide of Leslie Stephen and Charles Mathews. His first ascents included the Dent d’Hérens, Zinal Rothorn, the Grandes Jorasses and the Brenva Spur of Mont Blanc (where his cousin, Jakob, led the crucial ice arête). Despite this, it was Anderegg who confounded Leslie Stephen by finding the view of London finer than the view from Mont Blanc. Christian Almer, born two years earlier in 1826 near Grindelwald, had a similar background as a shepherd and cheese-maker and achieved a similar status as a guide. He climbed the Wetterhorn with Alfred Wills and went on to make many of the first ascents of the Golden Age, climbing with Adolphus Moore, Edward Whymper and others. Later he climbed with William Coolidge and lost several toes to frostbite after a winter ascent of the Jungfrau in 1884. He made a golden wedding anniversary ascent of the Wetterhorn with his wife in 1896 when he was 70 and she was 71.
The relationship between Herr and guide was a complex one. At the start of the Golden Age, both were equally inexperienced and incompetent. However, over time a small number of outstanding guides emerged, and they were in great demand with the leading climbers of the day. By the end of the Golden Age, the best guides were undoubtedly better climbers than the amateurs, not least because of their greater fitness and experience. ‘The guide’s skills cannot, in the nature of things, be attained by Englishmen living in England,’ pointed out Florence Grove in 1870, ‘any more than a Frenchman living in France can become a good cricketer.’7 The roles of the employer and of the guide were quite distinct. The employer selected the mountain to be climbed and played some role in deciding which route to follow. However, just as British explorers in the tropics used ‘natives’ to cut the trails and carry the stores, so in the Alps the guide generally cut all the steps on snow and ice and invariably led on rocks. At a slightly later date, Clinton Dent reviewed the respective roles of the gentleman amateur and the professional guide: ‘Any guide was immeasurably superior to an amateur in the knack of finding the way...in quickness on rocks the two could hardly be compared. But I had always thought that the amateur excelled in one great requisite – pluck.’8 In fact, as Dent acknowledged in his account of the first ascent of the Dru, the best guides were often superior in this respect as well. Leslie Stephen observed that ‘the true way...to describe all my ascents is that [my guide] succeeded in performing a feat requiring skill, strength and courage, the difficulty of which was much increased by the difficulty of taking with him his knapsack and his employer’.9 However, guides rarely climbed peaks by themselves and certainly did not make first ascents, since this would deprive them of the bonus that an English gentleman would pay for the conquest of a virgin peak.
Most guides probably regarded climbing as a pointless, hazardous, but well-remunerated job, but among the top guides there was also great professional pride and considerable competition. Stephen noted that his guide, Ulrich Lauener, held strong views on the superiority of guides of the Teutonic, rather than Latin, races which he endeavoured to communicate to some guides from Chamonix. ‘As...he could not speak a word of French...he was obliged to convey this sentiment in pantomime, which did not soften its vigour.’10 Some years later, Fred Mummery recalled an incident when he and his guide, the great Alexander Burgener from the Saas valley, met a party led by a famous Oberland guide who advised them to give up their attempt on the Grépon, because ‘I have tried it, and where I have failed no-one else need hope to succeed’. Mummery observed that ‘Burgener was greatly moved by this peroration, and I learnt from a torrent of unreportable patois that our fate was sealed and even if we spent the rest of our lives on the mountain (or falling off it) it would, in his opinion, be preferable to returning amid the jeers and taunts of this unbeliever’.11 On the mountain the relationship between client and guide was often friendly and informal but when they returned to the valley the social divide between gentleman and peasant reasserted itself. While the English gentleman headed to the table d’hôte to celebrate his triumph, his guide went to the servants’ quarters in the cellar or the attic.
Since the new breed of amateur mountaineer consisted almost exclusively of Englishmen of a certain class, it was inevitable that they should form a club, and the Alpine Club was duly inaugurated on 22 December 1857. It was initially conceived as a dining society at which members could exchange information on alpine climbing. As the first of its kind in the world, its members did not feel the need to attach a prefix, such as ‘English’. There were just 29 founding members, but by 1865 their number had grown to over 300. The membership was almost entirely composed of professional men – lawyers, clergymen, academics, civil servants and bankers – educated in English public schools and old universities, who were granted long summer holidays by their employers. Of the 281 members in 1863, just three belonged by birth to the old landed aristocracy.12 As time went on, they took to signing themselves ‘AC’ in hotel registers, and a ‘murmur of approval would greet their entrance into the dining room’.13 Anthony Trollope described the Alpine Club Man in his Travelling Sketches (1866): ‘He does not carry himself quite as another man, and has his nose a little in the air, even when he is not climbing...To be one of a class permitted to face dangers which to us would be suicidal, does give him a conscious divinity of which he is, in his modesty, not quite able to divest himself.’14 Within a few years of its formation, members of the Alpine Club had become a recognisable ‘type’ of rich, well-educated, assertive and slightly flippant young men. A quotation from Theocritus, ‘one must be doing something while the knee is green’, was once proposed as a motto for the Club. As the years went on, membership of the Alpine Club came to be regarded by some ambitious young men as a necessary ‘badge of honour’. Courage was a greatly admired virtue in Victorian society and alpinism provided a perfect peacetime means of demonstrating it. Ewart ‘Cape-to-Cairo’ Grogan, the first man to traverse Africa from south to north and one of the founding fathers of colonial Kenya, never climbed again after joining the Club at the age of 22. To have been elected was sufficient.
The object of the Alpine Club was ‘the promotion of good fellowship among mountaineers, of mountain climbing and mountain exploration throughout the world, and of better knowledge of the mountains through literature, science, and art’. The Club did admit a few members purely for their literary and artistic qualifications. Matthew Arnold (‘The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth’) was a member and so too was Ruskin which, given his hatred of climbers, seems odd. The Club’s aspiration to advance the knowledge of science was derided by Charles Dickens, who noted that ‘a society for the scaling of such heights as the Schreckhorn, the Eiger, and the Matterhorn contributed about as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weather-cocks of all the cathedral spires in the United Kingdom’.15 Nevertheless, the Alpine Journal to this day describes itself as a ‘record of mountain adventure and scientific observation’, and the Club’s early members included a number of distinguished scientists.
John Ball, the first president of the Club, was an Irish politician, who became Under Secretary for the Colonies in Palmerston’s administration but was also a respected amateur naturalist. Educated at Cambridge, he travelled widely and published papers on botany and glaciers. An enthusiastic and determined mountain explorer, he published the Guide to the Western Alps (1863), Guide to the Central Alps (1864) and Guide to the Eastern Alps (1868), which were the standard
