Since 1815, a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity had created a sizeable professional class of ambitious young men who had been taught to regard gloomy forests and icy mountains as objects of glorious beauty. Their heroes were explorers who braved extreme hardships to chart the unknown, the wild and the savage. Their education emphasised the virtues of ‘muscular Christianity’ and mens sana in corpore sano and they had leisure: time in which to seek pleasure, purpose and a contrast to their crowded and complex working lives. They believed, as Blake did, that:
Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
Even Queen Victoria gave her stamp of approval to the nascent sport by making a somewhat sedate progress to the summit of Lochnagar near Balmoral Castle in 1848. All that was needed to set off the explosion of alpine climbing activity that started in 1854 was publicity. It was Albert Smith, the greatest mountaineering showman of all time, who lit the fuse.
Albert Smith was born in Chertsey in 1816 and studied medicine in Paris for a time before earning a living as a journalist writing for magazines including Punch. Since childhood he had harboured the ambition to climb Mont Blanc, and after several attempts he finally succeeded in 1851. He staggered up the mountain dressed in scarlet gaiters and Scotch plaid trousers, with three Oxford undergraduates wearing light boating attire, 16 guides and a score of porters laden with 93 bottles of wine, three bottles of cognac, loaves, cheeses, chocolates, legs of mutton and 46 fowls. Not surprisingly, he fell asleep on the summit.
One of the undergraduates was the nephew of Sir Robert Peel, a former Tory prime minister, who happened to be in Chamonix at the time and greeted their success with a huge party. By coincidence, John Ruskin was also in Chamonix, and it was probably Smith’s triumphant return that inspired him to write his famous condemnation of the vulgarisation of the Alps some 15 years later: ‘The Alps themselves, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a beer-garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again with “shrieks of delight”. When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction.’38
If Ruskin was the great prophet of mountain beauty, Smith was the great populariser. Returning to London, he made his ascent of Mont Blanc the subject of an ‘entertainment’ that ran for six years and featured two chamois, several St Bernard dogs and three pretty barmaids from Chamonix dressed in Bernese costumes. The show made Smith a wealthy man. He wrote The Story of Mont Blanc in 1853, and by the summer of 1855 Britain was gripped with ‘Mont Blanc mania’ according to The Times. Special music was composed, including the Chamonix Polka and the Mont Blanc Quadrille; both were hits.
Smith’s success was not greeted with unqualified enthusiasm. The Daily News wrote: ‘De Saussure’s observations and reflections on Mont Blanc live in his poetical philosophy; those of Mr. Albert Smith will be most appropriately recorded in a tissue of indifferent puns and stale fast witticisms, with an incessant straining after smartness. The aimless scramble of the four pedestrians to the top of Mont Blanc, with the accompaniment of Sir Robert Peel’s orgies at the bottom, will not go far to redeem the somewhat equivocal reputation of the herd of English tourists in Switzerland, for a mindless and rather vulgar redundance of animal spirits.’39 Another contemporary noted that his initials were only two-thirds of the truth. However, the show was a huge success with the public and Smith was summoned to Osborne for a command performance before Queen Victoria, who evidently enjoyed it because the following year Smith gave a repeat performance at Windsor Castle before the court and King Leopold I of Belgium. Smith went on to become an original member of the Alpine Club, an institution that later gained a well-deserved reputation for exclusive snobbery, but Smith was in fact the first member to have climbed Mont Blanc, and in its early years the Alpine Club welcomed enthusiasts almost regardless of their social background. The arch conservative Douglas Freshfield gave a fair assessment when he said that Smith ‘had a genuine passion for Mont Blanc, which fortune or rather his own enthusiasm enabled him to put to profit’.40
Smith was the first in a long line of climbers who tried to turn their pastime to profit, including Edward Whymper, Captain John Noel, Frank Smythe and Chris Bonington. All of these were far more competent climbers than Smith, but none of them earned as much as he did from the sport. Thanks in part to the extraordinary publicity generated by Albert Smith, the Golden Age of British climbing was about to begin.
3
1854–65: A CONSCIOUS DIVINITY
For more than 100 years prior to the battle of Waterloo, Britain had been almost continuously at war. The hundred years that followed from 1815 to 1914 was a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity, the Pax Britannica, interrupted by just one war involving other European powers: the costly, inconclusive, but distant Crimean War (1854–56). While much of Europe was convulsed by periodic wars and the revolutions of 1848, a mastery of metallurgy, steam and finance turned Britain into a superpower, with an apparently unassailable lead in trade, industry and military force. By the 1850s, Britain was the workshop of the world, London was the global financial capital and more than half the world’s shipping by tonnage was British. The Great Exhibition of 1851 was a celebration of British success, with a Crystal Palace assembled in Hyde Park to show off the science and technology that powered the Empire. It was an age of supreme optimism. After visiting the exhibition, Queen Victoria wrote in her diary: ‘We are capable of doing anything’, and this sense of unbounded possibilities gave individuals the self-confidence to contemplate things that would previously have been unthinkable.
The early mountaineers were more akin in spirit to the Hudson Bay fur trappers, the Indian nabobs and the other merchant adventurers who built the Empire than they were to the colonial administrators and army officers who later ran it. There was an unconventional, ambitious, romantic fearlessness about the pioneers. Trollope wrote his six ‘Barchester’ novels between 1855 and 1867, coinciding almost exactly with the Golden Age of mountaineering. The novels describe the lives of clerics, professionals and gentry – exactly the social class from which the early mountaineers emerged – and their popularity stemmed partly from the fact that the main characters were instantly recognisable ‘types’ to contemporary readers. Trollope describes a society preoccupied with money, property, marriage and status. The idea of climbing the highest peaks in the Alps for pleasure must have seemed far more unconventional to contemporaries of the pioneers than the most outrageous behaviour of modern climbers. The British mountaineering establishment, like the British Empire itself after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, may have become increasingly hidebound, conceited and arrogant, but during the Golden Age it had a spontaneous, joyous heedlessness that must have provided an extraordinary contrast to ‘civilised’ society and an almost Jekyll and Hyde existence for its adherents. More than any other, it was an age when climbers really did ‘escape’ from the strictures and conventions of contemporary society.
From the late eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century several remarkable ascents of alpine peaks were made by monks, priests, scientists and others living in the alpine countries, some of whom no doubt climbed purely for pleasure and enjoyment. Prior to 1854, nine major alpine peaks had been climbed: Mont Blanc (1786); the Grossglockner (1800); Monte Rosa (whose various peaks were climbed from 1801 onwards, although the highest point of this mountain range was not reached until 1855); the Ortler (1804); Jungfrau (1811); Finsteraarhorn (1829); Wetterhorn (1844); Mont Pelvoux (1848); and Piz Bernina (1850).1 The British played almost no part in these early developments, but the activities of these adventurous individuals did not coalesce into a recognisable sport, and alpine climbing failed to gain the momentum of a new movement. All of that changed with the arrival of the British in the mid-1850s. During the decade that followed, almost every major mountain in the Alps was climbed in an orgy of peak-bagging that gave birth to the sport of mountaineering. Of the 39 major peaks ascended for the first time during this period, 31 were climbed by British parties.
It was a remarkable achievement. There were no maps of the glacier regions, few paths above the alpine meadows and forests, no experienced guides and