His son Horace Walker climbed his first mountain, Mont Velan, at the age of 16 and his last, Pollux, 51 years later in 1905. He made numerous first ascents in the Alps, with Whymper and others, including reaching Pointe Walker in 1868, the highest point of the Grandes Jorasses, made famous by the magnificent rocky spur to the north. He also climbed Elbrus (5,642m/18,510ft) in the Caucasus in 1874 and was an enthusiastic British rock climber, making the second ascent of North Climb (S, 1892) on Pillar Rock in the Lakes.
Lucy Walker first visited the Alps in 1859 at the age of 28. She climbed only with her family, guided by the Anderegg cousins, but had many notable achievements including climbing the Balmhorn (3,698m/12,133ft) in 1864, the first time that a woman had taken part in the first ascent of a major peak. She was also the first woman to climb the Matterhorn, three days after ascending the Weisshorn. Punch celebrated her triumph in verse:
No glacier could baffle, no precipice balk her,
No peak rise above her, however sublime.
Give three times three cheers for intrepid Miss Walker,
I say, my boys, doesn’t she know how to climb!
Inclined to plumpness, whilst she was in the mountains she relied on a diet of sponge cake and champagne and, apart from climbing, her only other sporting interest was croquet. The entire Walker family enjoyed a particularly close relationship with their guide Melchior Anderegg, who called Frank Walker ‘Papa’ and was a life-long companion of Lucy, who never married. As she said, ‘I love mountains and Melchior, and Melchior already has a wife’.41 Lucy Walker became the second president of the Ladies’ Alpine Club in 1912 at the age of 76.
Adolphus Moore, who accompanied Frank and Horace Walker on the Brenva Route, was another great Victorian mountaineer with many alpine first ascents to his credit. He went on to visit the Caucasus in 1867 and 1869, climbing Kazbek (5,047m/16,558ft) and the East Summit of Elbrus. A senior official at the India Office and private secretary to Lord Randolph Churchill, Moore died from exhaustion brought on by overwork at the age of 46.
George Mathews, the final British member of the team, was one of three brothers who played a major role in the development of British climbing. William, Charles and George Mathews took part in many pioneering climbs during the Golden Age, including first ascents of Grande Casse (3,855m/12,648ft) and Monte Viso (3,841m/12,602ft). The decision to form the Alpine Club was taken at their uncle’s home, following a discussion during an ascent of the Finsteraarhorn (4,274m/14,022ft) in the summer of 1857. William subsequently became president in 1869–71 and Charles in 1878–80. Charles went on to play a particularly influential role in the development of Welsh climbing.
The ascent of the Brenva Spur was a great climbing achievement, but it was completely overshadowed by the Matterhorn accident. The news was greeted by the British public with a combination of rage and incomprehension. The Editor of The Times wrote: ‘What right has [the mountaineer] to throw away the gift of life and ten thousand golden opportunities in an emulation which he only shares with skylarks, apes and squirrels?’42 The reaction was very different from that which greeted the equally famous loss of Mallory and Irvine on Everest some 60 years later. During the intervening period, increasing coverage of the sport in books and the press had gradually created an understanding of both the risks and rewards of climbing, and Mallory and Irvine were treated as heroes. In 1865, however, the public was totally unprepared for the loss of four young lives, including a lord. The public outcry may at first seem surprising, given that the mid-Victorian generation was so accustomed to premature death. In the mid-1860s there were extremely high levels of child mortality, over six per cent of soldiers sent to imperial outposts died each year from disease alone and the charge of the Light Brigade had taken place just 10 years earlier. Even in sport, members of the middle and upper classes regularly killed or injured themselves in hunting accidents, but hunting was regarded as a worthy occupation because it was a good preparation for military service (even the Indian Civil Service entrance exam included a rigorous riding test). The thing that the public found so shocking about the Matterhorn accident was that three Englishmen should have died undertaking such a useless activity. In the decades that followed, the public gradually became accustomed to the idea that men might choose to take such risks, but 130 years after the Matterhorn accident, in 1995, some of the same shock and incomprehension resurfaced in the mass media when Alison Hargreaves, a talented climber who was also the mother of two young children, died on K2.
Since those first four fatalities in 1865, over 500 climbers have lost their lives on the Matterhorn, the majority quite recently as the popularity of climbing has soared. Climbing during the Golden Age was in fact remarkably accident-free, bearing in mind the primitive equipment being used and the almost total lack of understanding of ropework, snow and ice conditions, and avalanche risk. But the public vented its anger on the Alpine Club, and for a time it seemed as if the nascent sport of mountaineering might end almost before it had really begun. Alfred Wills, who started the Golden Age with his ascent of the Wetterhorn and was president of the Alpine Club at the time of the Matterhorn tragedy, wrote to Whymper encouraging him to break his self-imposed silence: ‘Give your own account, let it be truthful, manly and unflinching – wherever blame is due (if blame there be) let it rest – but do not let people go on conjecturing the worst, when you could silence the greater part of it by your utterance.’43 Whymper did not provide a thorough public account until Scrambles Amongst the Alps was published in 1871. Although climbing continued, it did so discreetly. ‘After that frightful catastrophe of July 14, 1865,’ Coolidge wrote, ‘[British climbers], so to speak, climbed on sufferance, enjoying themselves much, it is true, but keeping all expression of that joy to themselves in order not to excite derision.’44
The Golden Age had ended.
4
1865–1914:GENTLEMEN AND GYMNASTS
In climbing history, the period from 1865 to 1914 starts with the death of four climbers on the Matterhorn and ends with the destruction of a generation in the First World War. By the time that Whymper’s account of the Matterhorn accident in Scrambles Amongst the Alps appeared in 1871 public anger at the incident had already died down. A number of ‘penny dreadfuls’ involving cut ropes and climbing accidents followed the publication of Whymper’s book, presaging the huge popularity of the authentic rope-cutting drama of Joe Simpson’s book and film documentary, Touching the Void, over a century later. Public interest in the accident also gave a boost to alpine tourism. After the interruption of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Thomas Cook tours to Zermatt increased in popularity throughout the decade. Leslie Stephen’s elegant portrayal of alpine adventures in The Playground of Europe, also published in 1871, further smoothed away opposition to climbing. Slowly but surely the sport was rehabilitated, and climbers emerged from self-imposed obscurity.
At home, the period of peace and prosperity that had started with victory at Waterloo in 1815 continued until the outbreak of the First World War, but the British Empire reached the peak of its economic power and influence in the 1870s. The decades leading up to the outbreak of the war were a period of relative decline and increasing preoccupation with the threat posed by Germany and the United States to Britain’s economic and military supremacy. At the time of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, one-quarter of the earth’s surface and nearly a quarter of its population was subject to British rule, but while the Empire continued to expand, the British Isles were becoming increasingly industrialised, urbanised and overcrowded. As the population passed 40 million, and a better educated generation reached maturity, the more adventurous Britons were feeling cramped.
The Empire provided one outlet, with mass emigration to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and British South Africa, as well as to the United States, and opportunities for derring-do in small but frequent colonial wars, generally against rather poorly armed opposition, including Abyssinia (1867), the Ashanti War (1874), the Zulu War (1878), Afghanistan (1879), Egypt (1882) and the Sudan (1896). John Stuart Mill observed that the Empire represented ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes’,1 and even those that remained behind in Britain were obsessed by the idea of imperial adventure. Authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling catered to the public taste for tales of heroism,