better off than well-paid artisans. What distinguished the two was not so much money as the very Victorian concept of ‘respectability’, the maintenance of which by ‘keeping up appearances’ placed an additional financial burden on the aspiring middle classes. In the days before the mass production of consumer goods, one way that a young man could signal his membership of the middle classes was to travel. The increasingly fashionable and manly pursuit of mountain climbing provided the perfect status symbol.
In contrast to the alpinists, from the outset many British rock climbers were in ‘trade’ or lower-middle-class occupations. Especially in the Lake District, the sport came to be dominated by northern manufacturers, shopkeepers and teachers, some of whom came from working-class family backgrounds. As the social base from which climbers were drawn began to broaden, the numbers entering the sport expanded and standards inevitably began to rise. Similar developments were occurring in every other sport. Wherever it was possible to make money (by charging spectators or from gambling), a new form of employment – the professional, and typically working-class, sportsman – was born and standards increased dramatically. Football was the first to professionalise and became overwhelmingly a working-class sport after Blackburn Olympic defeated the Old Etonians in the FA Cup final of 1883. Cricket reached a halfway house with amateur ‘gentlemen’ and professional ‘players’ in the same side. Rugby fractured into the professional, and predominantly working-class, rugby league and the amateur, and predominantly middle-class, rugby union. Climbing, like other field sports, did not easily lend itself either to spectators or to gambling. As a result it remained overwhelmingly an amateur sport and participation was restricted to those with some money and leisure. But in Britain, unlike the Alps, it was never exclusively a rich man’s sport.
In keeping with the entrepreneurial spirit of the age, a few climbers tried to make money from the sport. Edward Whymper earned a reasonable living producing mountain illustrations and from lecturing and writing. Owen Glynne Jones and the Abraham brothers made money from writing and photography. But climbing remained a minority sport and income from these sources was sufficient to sustain only a small number of ‘professional’ climbers. Guiding, which played such a significant role in the development of the sport in the alpine countries, did not take off in Britain until the introduction of outdoor education in the 1950s, and it was only after the development of outdoor television broadcasting in the 1960s that climbing became a spectator sport and entered the mainstream.
Improvements in transport played a critical role in the growth of the sport in the second half of the nineteenth century. Often financed and built by the British, railways extended across every continent and shipping lines crossed every ocean. In Britain, as the cost of travel declined, Sunday excursion trains ran from the mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire into the surrounding countryside from the 1860s onwards, carrying both young professionals and factory workers, many of whom were first or second generation migrants to the cities and still felt strong ties to the countryside. The Snowdon Mountain Railway was completed in 1896 and a café built on the summit to refresh the tourists who paid to go there. The current Prince of Wales described a recent incarnation of the building as the highest slum in the country. In the Alps too, modern transport began to encroach upon the highest peaks. By 1880 nearly a million people, mainly from England, Germany, America and Russia, visited Switzerland each year, justifying increased investment in infrastructure. The railway reached Grindelwald in 1890, Zermatt in 1891 and Chamonix in 1901. In 1911 engineers tunnelled their way up through the Eiger to reach the Jungfraujoch (3,573m/11,722ft) and would have carried on to the summit of the Jungfrau had better sense, and a weaker economy, not prevailed. However, in both Britain and the Alps, once the railhead was reached, the pace of life returned to that of a man walking or a horse and cart, until the appearance of motor cars at the turn of the century.
Increasing prosperity and shorter working hours also played a significant role. By the 1870s, the most extreme labour abuses had largely been removed but working hours were still long by modern European standards. In the textile industry a ten and a half hour day and a 60 hour week, with Saturday afternoon and Sunday off, was typical. Statutory bank holidays were introduced in the late 1870s, and in the following decade some workers started to receive one week of unpaid leave in the summer. Religious observance remained strong, but gradually leisure activities increased even on the Sabbath. Since the price of food rose relatively slowly, industrial workers benefitted more than agricultural workers from rising wages and some were able to save modest amounts with the newly established Post Office Savings Bank. The union movement, which had 2 million members by 1900, campaigned for shorter hours and better wages, and there were numerous grassroots self-help organisations including the Co-operative Society and the Workers’ Educational Association. Industrialisation created a demand for a better educated work force and there was a significant expansion of both secondary and tertiary education, increasing the size of the young middle class that could afford some leisure activities and holidays. The early years of climbing were dominated by men educated at Oxford and Cambridge, but in later years graduates from Manchester University (founded in 1880), Liverpool (1903), Leeds (1904) and Sheffield (1905), all located close to the outcrops and mountains, played a very significant role in the development of the sport.
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, she was succeeded by Edward VII who, at the age of 57, was a polished sporting man of the world. Like the new king, Britain had come to feel somewhat stifled by the pious propriety of the Victorian age, and the style and manner of Edward VII was more in keeping with the emancipated tastes of the opening years of the twentieth century. But the individual flair, heroism and eccentricity that had built the Empire was progressively being replaced by a more ordered and conceited bureaucracy. Like the Empire, the British climbing establishment also became increasingly grandiloquent and chauvinistic, losing its ability to innovate and placing its faith in tradition. While members of the Alpine Club continued to dominate British climbing overseas, advances in Britain were increasingly led by climbers drawn from a broader social background and brought up outside the alpine tradition.
THE ALPS
At the conclusion of the Golden Age in 1865 most of the alpine peaks had been climbed by their easiest routes. During the ‘Silver Age’ that followed, from 1865 to 1882, the few remaining major peaks were climbed, and the younger members of the climbing community recognised that, with the end of the exploratory phase of alpine development, they were faced with two choices: to go in search of virgin peaks in other parts of the world; or to climb alpine peaks by new and harder routes involving greater risk.
In the Middle Ages several passes over the Alps that are today glaciated were free of snow and ice and were in regular use. The glaciers began to advance from the fifteenth century onwards and by the eighteenth century were far more extensive than they are today. The present retreat began in the nineteenth century and has accelerated in recent years due to the impact of global warming. As a consequence, the appearance and character of many alpine peaks has changed considerably since the pioneers first climbed them in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, the retreating glaciers have exposed extensive areas of moraine, the peaks are rockier in appearance, and many rock faces and ridges are looser because they are not bound together with ice. The pioneers of the Golden Age climbed nearly all the major peaks by following routes that were largely on glaciers and snow fields. Climbers and their guides rapidly developed relatively sophisticated snow and ice climbing techniques but tried, wherever possible, to avoid the rocks. As a result, at the end of the Golden Age in 1865, there were still numerous unclimbed rocky peaks in the Alps that demanded greater rock climbing skills than those possessed by the pioneers.
Clinton Dent elegantly summed up the situation in 1876: ‘The older members of the Club (I speak with the utmost veneration) have left us, the youthful aspirants, but little to do in the Alps...We follow them meekly, either by walking up their mountains by new routes, or by climbing some despised outstanding spur of the peaks that they first trod under foot...They have picked out the plums and left us the stones.’4 His reference to ‘walking’ delighted the young Turks and infuriated the senior members of the Alpine Club. Dent was an eminent surgeon and one of the leading members of the second generation of alpine pioneers. He was ‘inclined to pursue his own
