Unjustifiable Risk?. Simon Thompson

by Crowley were the Abraham brothers, George and Ashley, who collaborated with Jones on Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District and who were amongst the leading rock climbers of their generation. Born in Keswick, they began climbing around 1890, but many of their most famous routes were climbed with Jones from 1896 onwards, including Jones’ Route Direct from Lord’s Rake (HS, 1898) on Scafell Pinnacle, a route that involved open climbing on steep slabs. After Jones died, the Abraham brothers continued climbing with other partners, completing Crowberry Ridge Direct on Buachaille Etive Mor (S 4a, 1900) with the gritstone specialists Jim Puttrell and Ernest Baker and the North East Climb on Pillar Rock (S, 1912). Ashley also put up numerous routes on Skye with H. Harland, including Cioch Direct (S 4a, 1907). As professional photographers and guide writers, the Abraham brothers were the first people to earn a living from rock climbing as opposed to mountaineering. Their British Mountain Climbs, published in 1908, was particularly successful, remaining in print for 40 years until 1948.

      Partly under Jones’ influence, rock climbing became more competitive and more rowdy than it had been in the early years. Until surprisingly recently British climbing circles have maintained the pretence that climbing, despite being a sport, is not competitive in the conventional sense of the word. However, the reality is that climbing has always been intensely competitive. Haskett Smith, the ‘father of British rock climbing’, made numerous gully climbs before and after his famous ascent of Napes Needle. He justified his choice of gullies as follows: ‘When A makes a climb, he wants B, C, and D to have the benefit of every single obstacle with which he himself met, while B, C, and D are equally anxious to say that they followed the exact line that Mr A found so difficult, and thought it perfectly easy...If you climb just to amuse yourself you can wander vaguely over a face of rock; but if you want to describe your climb to others, it saves a lot of time if you can say – “There, that is our gully! Stick to it all the way up!” ’⁶⁹ Despite his later protestations, what Haskett Smith was describing is competition. Jones simply took it one step further by introducing the concept of grading rock climbs according to their difficulty and by publicising his ascents. But for the climbing establishment, competition, grading and publicity were all anathema.

      The social atmosphere of the sport was also changing under the influence of the new generation of rock climbers. In the early days, a scholarly atmosphere pervaded meets at Wasdale Head. In many respects the ambience resembled that of an Oxbridge Senior Common Room. From the 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War, more boisterous behaviour became the norm, particularly amongst the younger climbers.⁷⁰ While the smoke room remained a place of discussion, where Haskett Smith, Collie and others held court, the younger men indulged in energetic games and disputes in the billiard room. Popular tests of strength and agility included leaping over the billiard table in a single vault and ‘the passage of the billiard table leg’, passing over and under the table without touching the floor. Inevitably the cloth was torn, and remained so, leading to the development of ‘billiard fives’ a strenuous and rowdy game that soon resulted in the room resembling a war zone, with pock-marked walls and wire netting to protect the windows. The final of a knock-out doubles competition in 1909 pitted Slingsby and Young, for the Alpine Club, against the Abraham brothers, for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. The Abrahams won. Billiard fives continued to be played until the 1930s, when the much-abused table was finally removed and the room converted into a lounge. Writing in 1935, Dorothy Pilley remembered: ‘Through a cloud of smoke, when the clamour of that extraordinary game, billiard fives (now alas! a thing of the past since the table was mistakenly banished), died down, strained figures could be seen – hands on the edge of the table, feet up on the wall – working their way round it.’⁷¹ The hotel was frequently so overcrowded that the billiard table also functioned as a bed.

      In the early years of the twentieth century, Norman Collie, the great late Victorian scientist, aesthete and mountaineer, bemoaned the arrival of the younger generation: ‘The glory of the mountains is departing. The progressive, democratical finger of the “New Mountaineer” is laid with...irreverence and mockery.’ George Abraham hinted at the coming social revolution, of which Jones was just the beginning, when he wrote: ‘[Jones’] favourite theory was that all men should climb and that they would be better for it. This was in contradistinction to the somewhat dog-in-a-manger idea which then prevailed, that the joys of the mountain were only for men of liberal education and of the higher walks of life.’⁷² Jones’ death in the Alps in 1899 did two things: it reduced the speed of development of climbing in Britain and increased the influence of those for whom the beauty and romance of climbing were more important than the standard of difficulty.

      By the early 1900s, the motor car was beginning to have an impact on climbing, extending the number of crags that could be reached during one holiday. In the Lakes, where many roads terminate at the ends of major valleys, only the crags in Langdale and Dow Crag, near Coniston, were readily accessible by car from the major towns. In Snowdonia, where the roads cut right across the district, it was possible to access all the major crags relatively easily by car. Partly for this reason, attention started to shift from the Lakes to Wales. The trend accelerated when four climbers fell to their death on Scafell Crag in September 1903.