CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Golden Age of Mountaineering which had begun on the Wetterhorn in 1854 ended on the Matterhorn in 1865. The Alpine Club had achieved astonishing things during these years: of forty-three first ascents in 1864 and 1865, for example, only five had been made by continental climbers. But the disaster stripped their exploits of respectability. A rebellion which had been biding its time backstage now sprang out from the wings. ‘Why is the best blood of England to waste itself in scaling hitherto inacccessible peaks,’ asked The Times, ‘in staining the eternal snows and reaching the unfathomable abyss never to return?… Well, this is magnificent. But is it life? Is it duty? Is it common sense? Is it allowable? Is it not wrong?’1 The Illustrated London News was almost hysterical at the thought of a lord falling off a cliff, an event which threatened the very fabric of society: ‘When a nation is bitten with a peculiar passion, it seldom passes out of that without trouble and painful experiences, and though a dozen young men are knocked up for life each year by Alpine climbing, and this year half a dozen lives have been already sacrificed, it is by no means uncertain that a member of the Alpine Club - that pet of superfine reviewers - will not endeavour to surmount a “virgin peak” of some wondrous mountain in the year 1875 and render a family heirless and a mother unhappy for life.’² The Standard likened climbers to a chain of convicts and Punch ridiculed so harshly McCormick’s efforts to raise funds for a commemorative chapel in Zermatt that it was forced to apologise. Continental papers were similarly incensed. ‘Is it possible to believe,’ ran an article in France’s Journal Illustré, ‘there actually is in London an Alpine Club, the aim of which is to suggest and glorify dangerous attempts at climbing European mountains?’3

Ruskin, still alive and raving, added his bit too. ‘The real ground for reprehension of Alpine climbing,’ he stated, ‘is that with less cause, it excites more vanity than any other athletic skill.’⁴ This mountaineering nonsense had served only to soil the objects of his meditation and the Alpine Club were paramountly to blame. ‘You have despised nature, that is to say, all the deep and sacred sensations of natural scenery,’ he told its members. ‘You have made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. The Alps, which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in bear gardens, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down with shrieks of delight.’⁵ He spoke viciously of climbers returning from a conquest, ‘red with cutaneous eruption of conceit and voluble with convulsive hiccoughs of self-satisfaction’.⁶ Anthony Trollope joined the chorus, lampooning climbers in his Travelling Sketches. Dickens scorned them for ‘the scaling of such heights as the Schreckhorn, the Eiger, and Matterhorn [which] contributed as much to the advancement of science as would a club of young gentlemen who should undertake to bestride all the weathercocks of all the cathedral spires of the United Kingdom’.⁷ The reversion of attitude had all the flavour of medievalism then so popular thanks to the novels of Walter Scott. As in the Middle Ages, mountains were once again appalling.

From being the most exciting association in Europe, the Alpine Club became the most reviled. ‘We are, it seems, overgrown schoolboys, who, like other schoolboys, enjoy being in dirt, and danger and mischief,’⁸ Leslie Stephen wrote sadly. New admissions dropped abruptly, and stayed down for several years thereafter. According to one member, ‘there was a sort of palsy that fell on the good cause, particularly amongst English climbers. Few in numbers, all knowing each other personally, shunning the public as far as possible, they went about under a sort of dark shade, looked on with a scarcely disguised contempt by the world of ordinary travellers.’9 When Leslie Stephen visited a hotel in Berne he was distressed to find that ‘they think no more of an ex-president of the Alpine Club than of a crossing sweeper’.¹⁰

The odium persisted in 1871. In that year Whymper published his Scrambles amongst the Alps, a weighty, 432-page tome containing ninety of his own illustrations and relating the long stalk that had culminated in his slaying of the Matterhorn. He took immense care over it, refusing even to divulge the title lest others steal it for their own reminiscences.* The six years it had taken to write may have caused some to doubt its accuracy: it was a tiger’s skin, and Whymper had prepared it carefully before hanging it on the wall. But apart from a few flourishes - which Whymper himself admitted - it was an honest description of ten years’ exploration. It was received rapturously in some quarters: ‘You can almost hear the tinkle of the bells on the Alps and by the chalet,’ wrote The Times. ‘You breathe the fresh fragrance of the pine trees; and fancy listens for the sharp ring of the axe, as it makes the splinters fly.’¹¹ Leslie Stephen saw it as the ultimate expression of Alpinism: ‘Those who have lived through the period which is just now closing - the period, that is, in which inaccessibility has been finally abolished - will probably admit, on reflection, that Mr. Whymper’s book contains the most genuine utterance of the spirit in which victory has been won … it is the congenial record of the most determined, the most systematic, and, on the whole, the best planned series of assaults that were made upon the High Alps during the period of which he speaks.’¹² From that day to this it has been hailed as a classic of Alpine literature comparable to, but much more exciting than, Saussure’s Voyages, Forbes’s Travels and Wills’s Wanderings. In recognition of its value, the King of Italy awarded Whymper the Order of SS. Maurice and Lazarus. Appropriately, Quintino Sella, the Finance Minister who had funded Carrel’s rival ascent of the Matterhorn, was instructed to break the good news.

Nevertheless, Scrambles resurrected the troublesome question of whether people should explore the Alps at all. A review in the Standard criticised Whymper for fostering ‘the depraved taste, which needs to be checked rather than cultivated, for doughty deeds in Alpine climbing’. The book was ‘morally deteriorating, ministering to an unhealthy craving for excitement’.13 Similarly, Blackwood’s Magazine felt that Whymper showed ignobility of purpose. Mountaineering, it stated, ‘is carried on at the continual risk of life -a risk undertaken with a light heart - but for no particular reason this is the weakness of all such adventures. They have no human meaning, are good for nothing, productive of nothing’.¹⁴ Leslie Stephen offered a lopsided variant on the theme: ‘There is perhaps some pleasure in being killed in trying to do what has never been done before; but there is no pleasure in being killed in simply following other people’s footsteps. It is high time for sacrificing a little of our enthusiasm to common sense, and for doing our best to encourage the growth of a healthy public spirit in regard to such matters.’¹⁵ Stephen had always been a stickler for safety and yet, when it suited him, he could poke fun at caution. ‘We must admit that Mr. Whymper has provided rather strong meat for the ordinary digestion. These pictures of travellers flying through mid-air across crevasses of boundless depth, exposed to a relentless fire of stones, or camping uncomfortably on the edge of ghastly precipices, are calculated to try the nerves of placid gentlemen who lay down the canons of criticism in the quiet of a London street.’¹⁶

Ruskin, of course, flamed with ire. In a revised edition of Sesame and Lilies, in which he had made his comments about bear gardens and soaped poles, he insisted that his earlier remarks stood uncorrected - ‘I … think it wrong to cancel what has once been thoughtfully said’¹⁷ - and compounded them with a message to the Alpine Club: ‘Believe me, gentlemen, your power of seeing mountains cannot be developed either by your vanity, your curiosity, or your love of muscular exercise … the best way to see mountains is to take a knapsack and a walking-stick, leave alpenstocks to be flourished between one another’s legs, by Cook’s tourists.’18 By this time Ruskin was beginning to suffer from psychotic attacks (he had also, belatedly, been elected to and had resigned from the Alpine Club). Whymper, Stephen, Tyndall and all the others whom he singled out for abuse were generously restrained in their rebuttals. They would probably have agreed with Huxley’s harsh advice to Tyndall: ‘Men don’t make war on either women or eunuchs and I hope you will let Ruskin have his squall all to himself.’¹⁹

The great sense of discovery which had pervaded the 1850s and early 1860s had evaporated, as Leslie Stephen was honest enough to admit. ‘How very commonplace sound the adventures which then excited so much interest!’ he wrote in the 1871 edition of the Alpine Journal. ‘How we used to exult over scrambles which are reckoned easy work for a beginner in his first season! And how energetically we proclaimed to the outside world the discovery of a new pleasure which has since become rather a threadbare topic of discussion.’²⁰ Climbs which had once seemed impossible were now ‘an easy day for a lady’,²¹ their problems having disappeared ‘like ghosts from a haunted house’.²² He looked back on the seminal first edition of the Alpine Club’s Peaks, Passes and Glaciers with amusement: ‘Look at the poor old chromolithographs which then professed to represent the mountains!’²³ Yet the Alps still held an allure, and Stephen was quick to point it out. Reviewing Whymper’s Scrambles, he wrote, mischievously, that ‘No advertisement of Alpine adventure is so attractive as a clear demonstration that it is totally unjustifiable.’²⁴

More than any other commentator, Stephen had his finger on the pulse. Whymper’s disaster may have aroused public disapproval but, in private, it became a cause célèbre. It had all the elements of a good Victorian romance: competition, betrayal, hardship, defeat at the moment of victory and, of course, the death of a nobleman. A new ‘Cut-Rope’ genre of penny dreadfuls emerged, with titles such as Greater Love Hath No Man and The Coward: A tale of the snows, depending on whether the rope had been cut by the man above or the man below. Having read the story people wanted to visit the scene. Thomas Cook, who had started his first conducted tours to Switzerland in 1863, soon had his books full and by the 1870s the Alps were as busy as ever. Most visitors were pro forma types for whom Switzerland was something to be ‘done’, just as the Grand Tourists of yesteryear had ticked off the Alps en route to Italy. They sat in their hotels, waiting for the next leg of their trip to begin, unwitting objects of more experienced travellers’ hostility. One year Leslie Stephen was immobilised by a leg wound and took the time to describe a typical Cook’s man.

His main specialities, as it seems to me from many observations, are, first and chiefly, a rooted aversion to mountain scenery; secondly, a total incapacity to live without the Times; and thirdly, a deeply-seated conviction that foreigners generally are members of a secret society intended to extort money on false pretences. The cause of his travelling is wrapped in mystery. Sometimes I have regarded him as a missionary intended to show by example the delights of a British Sunday. Never, at least, does he shine with such obvious complacency as when, armed with an assortment of hymn-books and bibles, he evicts all the inferior races from the dining-room of a hotel.25

At a slight remove from the hotel loungers were the newcomers who wanted to try a peak in search of that genuine Matterhorn experience. Too often, they found it. Until 1865 fatalities had been relatively rare, something for the exploring community to remark upon and deliberate; after that date they became commonplace. Between 1866 and 1876 there was never less than one death per annum and in 1870 an entire party of eleven got lost in a blizzard and perished on Mont Blanc. ‘Alpine Accidents’ became a standard feature of the Alpine Journal’s contents page and club members read with dismay the letters from France and Switzerland in which survivors recounted climbs that had ended in an avalanche, a crevasse, a slip of the foot or a fall without rope.

Most heart-rending of all was the fate of the 1870 party. Comprising a Scot, the Revd G. MacCorkendale, Dr J. Bean from Baltimore and his 50-year-old compatriot, a mountain enthusiast named Randall who only wanted to see Mont Blanc and had had no previous intention of climbing it, they left Chamonix on 5 September with three guides and five porters. They reached the summit on 6 September and were immediately wiped from sight by a snowstorm. When the weather cleared on 17 September, eleven days later, a rescue party found MacCorkendale and two porters sitting above the Mur de la Côte; they were unroped, their clothes were torn and they were dead. Also dead were Bean and another porter, whom they found in a disintegrated snow nest, slightly higher up and well off the usual route, surrounded by a pile of discarded equipment. They noted that the dead men were the heaviest and least fit of the group. Between 21 and 23 September the rescuers scoured the summit for Randall, the three guides and the remaining two porters. They never found them, but they picked up a trail of belongings on the steep southern face that led to the Brenva Glacier. The guides and Randall had obviously tried to save themselves but had become disorientated and gone down the wrong side. It was hard to tell whether MacCorkendale had also tried to escape or whether he had died with Bean and then tumbled down when the outer walls of the nest collapsed. Dr. Bean’s diary filled in the remaining details.

Tuesday, September 6 - Temperature, 34°C below zero at 2 o’clock in the morning. I have made the ascent of Mont Blanc with ten persons … We arrived at the summit at half-past 2 o’clock. Immediately after leaving it I was enveloped in clouds of snow. We passed the night in a grotto excavated out of the snow, affording very uncomfortable shelter, and I was ill all night. September 7 (morning) - Intense cold; much snow, which falls uninterruptedly; guides restless. [Possibly Randall and the others left at this point.] September 7 (evening) - If anybody finds this notebook please send it to Mrs. H. M. Bean, Jonesborough, Tennessee, United States of America. My dear Hessie, we have been trapped on Mont Blanc for two days in a terrible snow-storm; we have lost our way and are in a hole scooped out of the snow at a height of 15,000 ft. I have no hope of descending. Perhaps this book may be found and forwarded … We have no food; my feet are already frozen, and I am exhausted; I have only strength to write a few words. I die in the faith of Jesus Christ, with affectionate thoughts of my family; my remembrances to all.26

He had two bags with him, he concluded, and the rest of his belongings could be found at the Hôtel Mont Blanc. If whoever found him could forward his effects to the Hôtel Schweizerhof in Geneva and pay his bill he would be most grateful, ‘and heaven will reward your kindness’.²⁷ On 8 September, he wrote his last entry in blurred and indistinct handwriting: ‘Morning terribly cold again and much snow.’²⁸

The disaster received less publicity than it deserved, thanks to the Franco-Prussian War: Bean’s private tragedy was nothing compared to the thousands who died at Sedan in the same year. Nevertheless, it was one of many reminders that something had to be done. In 1882 Leslie Stephen decided that ‘I am beginning to think all this mountaineering indefensible. We have paid & may expect to pay too high a price for any advantages gained.’²⁹ Following a spectacularly destructive season in which three separate parties were wiped out, Queen Victoria’s private secretary wrote on 24 August 1884 to Prime Minister Gladstone: ‘The Queen commands me to ask you if you think she can say anything to mark her disapproval of the dangerous Alpine excursions which this year have occasioned so much loss of life.’ Gladstone’s response was negative: ‘I doubt the possibility of any interference, even by Her Majesty, with a prospect of advantage.’³⁰ The casualties were so continuous that even the creaking bureaucracy of Austria-Hungary took notice. In August 1887 the Police Department of the Imperial Ministry of the Interior issued a circular to Tyrolean clubs asking what they intended to do about ‘the repeated fatal accidents to tourists making high ascents’.31 Regulations were needed, it said sternly. No regulations were forthcoming and so people carried on falling off. But they fell off with some style, as continental writers grudgingly conceded.

Strolling through Zermatt one evening, the French writer and artist Théophile Gautier saw a British party returning from the hill. It impressed him immensely:

A tall young man, strong and thin, dressed in brown corduroy, with gaiters up to the knees, a soft felt hat pulled down over his eyes, looking a perfect gentleman in spite of the unavoidable carelessness of his clothes. He was a member of the Alpine Club and had just successfully ascended the Matterhorn … His guides were walking behind him with their ropes coiled round their shoulders, holding their axes, their iron-spiked poles and all that was required to attack so wild a peak. These three resolute sunburnt faces were resplendent with the joy of their triumph over great difficulties … The guides entered the hotel and the Englishman remained for a few moments on its threshold, leaning against the wall with complete unconcern, looking perfectly carefree, just as if he were coming from his club in Pall Mall… While watching this handsome youth, probably rich and certainly used to comfort and refinement, who had just been risking his life with complete indifference in a useless and dangerous enterprise, we thought of the resistless passion which drives a few men to undertake terrific scrambles. No example can deter them. When going up towards the Matterhorn, this young man had certainly seen the graves of his three countrymen in the Zermatt churchyard.³²

The young man in question was one Revd J. M. Elliott. He fell 1,000 feet to his death on the Schreckhorn the following year. Three years later his guide, J. M. Lochmatter, was killed on the Dent Blanche. Gautier supplied an epitaph for Elliott, Lochmatter and every other Alpine climber. ‘A peak,’ he wrote, ‘can exercise the same irresistible power of attraction as an abyss.’33

Separate from the tourists and the joy-climbers was a small band of people who genuinely wanted to explore the Alps. The Matterhorn, the grandest redoubt of all, had fallen but many other peaks and passes remained inviolate, especially in the Dauphiné. Forbes had gone through the region in the 1840s, Whymper had trampled over it twenty years later and several other climbers had picked at it. But it was still too primitive to attract the majority. Accommodation was verminous, the food was vile - if it was available - and the inhabitants were surly, dirty and backward. Guides from neighbouring areas spoke of it with revulsion. Everyone who had emerged from its depths agreed that apart from the mountains it was an awful place. It was common for British travellers to joke about living rough, the poor food they received and the fleas that infested them, but even T. G. Bonney, a sober-minded scientist, was aghast at the state of the Dauphiné. ‘A good digestion and an insect-proof skin are indispensable requisites,’ he wrote in 1865. ‘On the great high road from Grenoble to Briançon there is fair accommodation at one or two places. Off this, everything is of the poorest kind; fresh meat can only be obtained at rare intervals, the bread and wine are equally sour, the auberges filthy, and the beds entomological vivaria. It is hardly possible to conceive the squalid misery in which the people live; their dark, dismal huts swarming with flies, fleas and other vermin; the broom, the mop, and the scrubbing-brush are unknown luxuries; the bones and refuse of a meal are flung upon the floor to be gnawed at by dogs … The people in many parts are stunted, cowardly, and feeble, and appear to be stupid and almost cretins.’³⁴ Even in the best ‘hotels’ the dining-room floorboards were invisible beneath inches of dirt and refuse. Upstairs, guests had to kick aside dogs gnawing on old bones before they could get into their rooms.

The Dauphiné did, however, contain the last great mountain in the Alps. The Meije lacked the Matterhorn’s stature but, at 13,067 feet, it was far from being a molehill and the closest anyone had come to conquering it was when Whymper had crossed its shoulder, the Brèche, in 1864. In twos and threes, mountaineers began to explore the region and very soon the Meije became the object of fierce competition. Leading the field was an American team comprising William Coolidge, his aunt Miss Meta Brevoort and their dog Tschingel.