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 texts until they were rewritten and reissued by Coolidge at the end of the nineteenth century. He also edited the first volume of Peaks, Passes and Glaciers (1859), the forerunner of the Alpine Journal, which first appeared in 1863 and is the world’s oldest mountaineering periodical.
John Tyndall, another early member of the Club, was also a distinguished scientist. Amongst his many areas of research, he was one of the first to investigate the relationship between water vapour, carbon dioxide and climate change. The son of a sergeant in the newly formed constabulary in County Carlow, Ireland, Tyndall was living proof of the social mobility that could be achieved in Victorian society through a combination of hard work, great intellect and absolute determination. In addition to the Alpine Club, he became a member of the small but influential X Club, together with Thomas Huxley, Joseph Hooker, the botanist and pioneering Arctic and Himalayan explorer, and Herbert Spencer, the political philosopher. The purpose of the club was ‘devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogma’.16 Tyndall was a committed agnostic who argued fiercely and frequently and once offered to fight a man who disagreed with his high opinion of Thomas Carlyle. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1852, he became a close friend and colleague of Michael Faraday who, unlike Tyndall, never climbed but nevertheless walked from Leukerbad in the Valais over the Gemmi Pass to Thun in the Bernese Oberland, a distance of 70km/44 miles, in ten and a half hours.
As a young man, Tyndall obtained a doctorate at the University of Marburg and appears to have been imbued with some of the more grimly heroic aspects of Teutonic romanticism. He suffered from ill-health and insomnia all his life and focused his attention on the most difficult peaks: a solitary ascent of the Monte Rosa, in 10 hours from the Riffelberg, in 1858; the Weisshorn (AD, 4,506m/14,783m) in 1861; and the Matterhorn (AD, 4,478m/14,690ft), where he got to within a few hundred feet of the top in 1864, the year before Whymper’s success, and later made the first traverse from Breuil to Zermatt. Tyndall sought, in climbing, an escape from the stresses and pressures of city life: ‘I have returned to [the Alps] each year and found among them refuge and recovery from the work and the worry – which acts with far deadlier corrosion on the brain than real work – of London.’17 Over time, the beauty and solace that he found in the mountains became almost as important to him as his scientific work. In 1862 he wrote: ‘The glaciers and the mountains have an interest for me beyond their scientific ones. They have given me well-springs of life and joy.’18 He died in 1893 from an overdose of chloral administered by his wife to combat his insomnia.
When Leslie Stephen read a paper at the Alpine Club describing his first ascent of the Zinal Rothorn (AD, 4,221m/13,848ft) in 1862 he included the passage: ‘ “And what philosophical observations did you make?” will be enquired by one of those fanatics who, by a reasoning to me utterly inscrutable, have somehow irrevocably associated Alpine travel and science.’19 Tyndall was convinced that the word ‘fanatic’ was directed at him and stormed