David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley were household names. Young urban professionals in Britain sought out these tales of romance and adventure in part because their day-to-day lives were so unremittingly unromantic. For some, the mountains offered an escape.
The British may have invented the sport of climbing but they did not at first climb in Britain. The sport had been established in the Alps for more than two decades before any real climbing, as opposed to hill walking, took place in the British hills. During the Golden Age of alpine climbing from 1854 to 1865, the unquestioned objective of the sport was to reach the summit of a mountain by the easiest means. In Britain this might involve long, rough walks but, with one or two rare exceptions, it does not require the use of hands. Tyndall, who made the first ascent of the Weisshorn, wrote an account of walking up Helvellyn in a snow storm in the 1850s and climbed Snowdon in December 1860 using a rudimentary ice axe made by a blacksmith in Bethesda. He described the view from the summit as equal to the splendours of the Alps. Leslie Stephen visited the Lakes in the 1860s and spent several hours trying to find the scrambling route to the summit of Pillar Rock, but it was not until the late 1870s that climbers seriously started to examine the sporting potential of the British crags as a preparation for a summer visit to the Alps. Since most of the early alpine climbs were predominantly on snow and ice rather than rock, interest initially focused on the gullies of the highest mountains that tended to hold the greatest accumulations of snow and ice, at Christmas and Easter. Gradually attention shifted from the gullies to the rocky ridges, slabs and walls, and the sport of rock climbing was born. The first ascent of Napes Needle, traditionally taken as the ‘birth of British rock climbing’, took place in 1886, more than 30 years after the start of the Golden Age of alpine climbing and three years after the first climbing expedition to the Himalaya. The development of rock climbing in Britain coincided with the conquest of the last remaining unclimbed peaks in the Alps and the growing realisation that ‘the essence of the sport lies not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties’.2 Ironically, because of the continuing emphasis on alpine climbing, long after the exploratory phase had come to an end in France and Switzerland there were still many unclimbed mountains at home. The summit of the last major peak in Britain was finally reached in 1896.
Alpine climbing remained largely the preserve of wealthy professionals with long summer holidays until the start of the First World War, but from the outset British rock climbing assumed a more democratic character. Victorian society was obsessed by class, with very precise gradations of status. At the top, there was a tiny but powerful upper class consisting of aristocrats and landed gentry. Some 80 per cent of members of parliament in the 1860s were drawn from this elite group. Very few of them took an interest in climbing, preferring the traditional country pursuits of hunting, shooting and fishing. At the time of its formation, the Alpine Club was dominated by two of the three traditional professions: the church and the law. The third acceptable occupation for a gentleman who was obliged to earn a living was the military. Army officers were frequently posted overseas and played a limited part in the development of climbing in Britain and the Alps, but officers posted to India played a major role in Himalayan climbing. Naval officers with exploratory instincts tended to be drawn to the polar regions rather than the mountains. As the century progressed the newer professions, such as medicine, civil engineering and the civil service, and even people in ‘trade’ – bankers, merchants, manufacturers and others engaged in business – came to be represented in the membership of the Alpine Club. However, the lower middle class – clerks, commercial travellers, national and local government workers, teachers and other white-collar workers – were almost totally excluded. The pool from which the Alpine Club drew its membership was therefore largely restricted to a professional upper middle class, consisting of perhaps 70,000 people, less than one per cent of the male workforce in 1850.3 The achievements of the pioneers are even more remarkable, given the tiny segment of the population from which they were drawn.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the professional class grew slightly, but the numbers engaged in lower-middle-class occupations swelled dramatically. In 1850 there were perhaps 130,000 white-collar workers, representing about two per cent of the male workforce. By 1900 this had grown to 500,000 or five per cent. The growth of the middle class reflected the expansion of industry, trade and services and improvements in education. Many of the young people who entered middle-class occupations in the second half of the nineteenth century came from working-class backgrounds and were not necessarily materially 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