all the major centres of population in Britain were connected by rail, and the ability to travel significant distances in relative comfort combined with the growth of the middle class and increasing leisure to create a sports boom. During the 1850s, 62 new race meetings were added to the calendar; the rules of boxing were established in 1857, those of football in 1859 and rugby union in 1871. The first county cricket matches were played in 1873 and the first Wimbledon lawn tennis championship took place in 1877.34 Soon the railways were advancing beyond the towns and cities into the mountains, opening up once remote parts of the country to visitors from the cities. In 1844, at the age of 74, Wordsworth was indignant at a proposal to extend the railway from Manchester beyond Kendal to Windermere, fearing that the Lakes would be inundated with ‘the whole of Lancashire, and no small part of Yorkshire’.35
In the Alps, the great passes became accessible to wheeled transport from 1800, initially as a result of Napoleon’s military road-building programme. Railways followed from 1847 onwards and contributed to the dramatic growth of tourism. A thousand new inns and hotels were built between 1845 and 1880, many of them above 1,000m. Thomas Cook conducted his first alpine tour to Geneva and Mont Blanc in 1863. The tour in 1864 was extended to include Interlaken and Kandersteg. John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland in 1838 indicated a journey time by coach from London to Geneva or Basle of 14 days, including two days in Paris, at a cost of £20. By 1852, using railways, the journey time had reduced to three days and the cost to just £2.36
Many of the mountain pioneers were aware that the sacred beauty they so admired was under threat from these developments. They saw the damage that was being done to the English countryside and feared that the Alps would go the same way. As the inhabitants of Grindelwald hacked away at their glaciers and exported the ice to Parisian restaurants, and railways headed up once remote and silent valleys, Ruskin thundered: ‘You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.’37 But ironically, Ruskin’s own writing, painting and photography simply attracted more tourists to the mountains.
By 1850 the stage was set for the development of climbing as a sport. Since 1815, a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity had created a sizeable professional class of ambitious young men who had been taught to regard gloomy forests and icy mountains as objects of glorious beauty. Their heroes were explorers who braved extreme hardships to chart the unknown, the wild and the savage. Their education emphasised the virtues of ‘muscular Christianity’ and mens sana in corpore sano and they had leisure: time in which to seek pleasure, purpose and a contrast to their crowded and complex working lives. They believed, as Blake did, that:
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
Even Queen Victoria gave her stamp of approval to the nascent sport by making a somewhat sedate progress to the summit of Lochnagar near Balmoral Castle in 1848. All that was needed to set off the explosion of alpine climbing activity that started in 1854 was publicity. It was Albert Smith, the greatest mountaineering showman of all time, who lit the fuse.
Albert Smith was born in Chertsey in 1816 and studied medicine in Paris for a time before earning a living as a journalist writing for magazines including Punch. Since childhood he had harboured the ambition to climb Mont Blanc, and after several attempts he finally succeeded in 1851. He staggered up the mountain dressed in scarlet gaiters and Scotch plaid trousers, with three Oxford undergraduates wearing light boating attire, 16 guides and a score of porters laden with 93 bottles of wine, three bottles of cognac, loaves, cheeses, chocolates, legs of mutton and 46 fowls. Not surprisingly, he fell asleep on the summit.
One of the undergraduates was the nephew of Sir Robert Peel, a former Tory prime minister, who happened to be in Chamonix at the time and greeted their success with a huge party. By coincidence, John Ruskin was also in Chamonix, and it was probably Smith’s triumphant return that inspired him to write his famous condemnation of the vulgarisation of the Alps some 15 years later: ‘The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a beer-garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again with “shrieks of delight”. When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction.’38
If Ruskin was the great prophet of mountain beauty, Smith was the great populariser. Returning to London, he made his ascent of Mont Blanc the subject of an ‘entertainment’ that ran for six years and featured two chamois, several St Bernard dogs and three pretty barmaids from Chamonix dressed in Bernese costumes. The show made Smith a wealthy man. He wrote The Story of Mont Blanc in 1853, and by the summer of 1855 Britain was gripped with ‘Mont Blanc mania’ according to The Times. Special music was composed, including the Chamonix Polka and the Mont Blanc Quadrille; both were hits.
Smith’s success was not greeted with unqualified enthusiasm. The Daily News wrote: ‘De Saussure’s observations and reflections on Mont Blanc live in his poetical philosophy; those of Mr. Albert Smith will be most appropriately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns and stale fast witticisms, with an incessant straining after smartness. The aimless scramble of the four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc, with the accompaniment of Sir Robert Peel’s orgies at the bottom, will not go far to redeem the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd of English tourists in Switzerland, for a mindless and rather vulgar redundance of animal spirits.’39 Another contemporary noted that his initials were only two-thirds of the truth. However, the show was a huge success with the public and Smith was summoned to Osborne for a command performance before Queen Victoria, who evidently enjoyed it because the following year Smith gave a repeat performance at Windsor Castle before the court and King Leopold I of Belgium. Smith went on to become an original member of the Alpine Club, an institution that later gained a well-deserved reputation for exclusive snobbery, but Smith was in fact the first member to have climbed Mont Blanc, and in its early years the Alpine Club welcomed enthusiasts almost regardless of their social background. The arch conservative Douglas Freshfield gave a fair assessment when he said that Smith ‘had a genuine passion for Mont Blanc, which fortune or rather his own enthusiasm enabled him to put to profit’.40
Smith was the first in a long line of climbers who tried to turn their pastime to profit, including Edward Whymper, Captain John Noel, Frank Smythe and Chris Bonington. All of these were far more competent climbers than Smith, but none of them earned as much as he did from the sport. Thanks in part to the extraordinary publicity generated by Albert Smith, the Golden Age of British climbing was about to begin.
3
1854–65: A CONSCIOUS DIVINITY
For more than 100 years prior to the battle of Waterloo, Britain had been almost continuously at war. The hundred years that followed from 1815 to 1914 was a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity, the Pax Britannica, interrupted by just one war involving other European powers: the costly, inconclusive, but distant Crimean War (1854–56). While much of Europe was convulsed by periodic wars and the revolutions of 1848, a mastery of metallurgy, steam and finance turned Britain into a superpower, with an apparently unassailable lead in trade, industry and military force. By the 1850s, Britain was the workshop of the world, London was the global financial capital and more than half the world’s shipping by tonnage was British. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a celebration of British success, with a Crystal Palace assembled in Hyde Park to show off the science and technology that powered the Empire. It was an age of supreme optimism. After visiting the exhibition, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary: ‘We are capable of doing anything’, and this sense
