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 line of thought, and had not always the ear of a ready listener’5 and soon broke with tradition by focusing on rock climbs. Often guided by Alexander Burgener, who came from the Saas valley rather than the traditional and more complacent climbing centres of Zermatt or Chamonix, Dent made the first ascent of the Lenzspitz (PD, 4,294m/14,088ft) in 1870 and the Zinal Rothorn from Zermatt (AD) in 1872, but it is for his ascent of the Grand Dru (AD, 3,754m/12,316ft) in 1878, after 18 attempts over six seasons, that he is chiefly remembered. The Dru, which towers over the town of Chamonix, exemplifies the challenge posed by the slightly lower, but far steeper and rockier subsidiary peaks of the Mont Blanc massif. Its first ascent prompted major celebrations in Chamonix: ‘I believe there were fireworks; I rather think some cannon were let off. I am under the impression that a good many bottles were uncorked. Perhaps this last may be connected with a hazy recollection of all that actually took place.’6 One year earlier Lord Wentworth, the grandson of Lord Byron, succeeded in climbing the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey (AD, 3,772m/12,375ft), another imposing and rocky peak, with the Italian guide Emile Rey. Rey went on to climb the Aiguille Blanche de Peuterey (D, 4,112m/13,491ft), the last and hardest of the major peaks of the Mont Blanc massif to be climbed, with Sir Henry Seymour King, a respected banker and member of parliament, in 1885.
The new generation of climbers also explored the steep and sometimes narrow snow and ice couloirs that had previously been dismissed because of the risk of rock and icefall. The unclimbed ridges of the higher peaks presented an obvious challenge as well. Although relatively free from the objective risk of stone and icefall, they were often technically more difficult and far more exposed than the broad glaciers and snow fields that provided the traditional routes to most summits. As the Silver Age progressed, climbing without guides and winter mountaineering also gained a following, as climbers sought out new ways to maintain the novelty and challenge of the sport.
The end of the Silver Age is usually taken to be the ascent of the twin summits of the Dent du Géant (AD, 4,013m/13,166ft) in 1882. The first summit was ascended by the Sella brothers and their guides, the Macquignaz brothers, of Italy. The second, slightly higher summit was climbed two days later by William Graham, who went on to be the first person to climb in the Himalaya for sport rather than for science. The significance of the ascent of the Dent du Géant lay in the fact that it was the last peak to be climbed that was named and famous before it was climbed and the first to be climbed by ‘artificial’ means, using pitons and fixed ropes. For the British climbing establishment, committed to a ‘pure’ climbing ethic, the use of pitons signalled the end of the Silver Age and the start of the ‘Iron Age’.7 It was an avowedly romantic view of climbing history. While their contemporaries divided Mankind’s progress and development into the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, British mountain historians saw a regression from the Golden Age, to the Silver Age to the Iron Age. The prevailing mountaineering ethos was a rejection of modernity and a celebration of the primitive, the mysterious and the unknown. But while British views on ‘artificial aid’ were strongly held, they were never entirely logical or consistent. Cutting a step in ice was acceptable. Cutting a step in rock was unforgiveable. A ladder might be used to cross a crevasse, but to use one on rock was immoral. As Clinton Dent observed in 1878: ‘Grapnels, chains, and crampons are the invention of the fiend. Why this should be so is hard to see. Perhaps we should not consider too curiously.’8 It took a further 90 years before a widely accepted and reasonably consistent framework of climbing ethics was to emerge.
When the sport of climbing started in the Alps only the most prominent peaks had names and these tended to be monotonously descriptive (Mont Blanc, Weisshorn, Schwarzhorn, Aiguille Noire), geographic (Dent d’Hérens) or fearful (Mont Maudit, Schreckhorn). As the lesser peaks were climbed, it became necessary to name them too, and in the years before the First World War ‘personal’ nomenclature was adopted with a vengeance, including numerous Younggrats and Voies Ryan-Lochmatter, but there were also some humorous names. When Stafford Anderson and his companions reached the summit of the Dent Blanche by a new route along a crumbling ridge, their guide Ulrich Almer summed up the situation by saying, ‘Wir sind