CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

By the turn of the century, memories of the old Alps were disappearing fast. Forbes had died in 1868 and his adversary Agassiz in 1873.* Tyndall died on 4 December 1893, his wife having accidentally given him an overdose of chloroform. Ruskin went in 1900 and Stephen four years later. The new generation who came in their place were of a different breed. Following Mummery’s example they plastered themselves to seamless faces, often taking no guides but relying on their own efforts to see them to the top. The decade from 1900 was a Silver Age of mountaineering that saw the conquest of areas beyond the reach of the Golden. For the old-timers it was a regrettable turn, involving too hectic an approach and too little appreciation. Conway, for example, quit his climbing career at the early age of 47, explaining that ‘For all of us there are many kinds of joy as yet unexperienced, many activities untried, many fields of knowledge unexplored. We must not spend too large a fraction of life over one or the next will escape us. It is life, after all, that is the greatest field of exploration.’¹

But there were some who preserved the flame. Whymper was one of them. Although he had effectively cut himself off from the high peaks, he visited the Alps every summer to revise his guidebooks, collect royalties from recalcitrant bookstores, put up advertising placards, take photographs and, now and then, walk across the odd pass. At home and in America he was renowned for his lectures, Winston Churchill being one of the many people who listened to, and was influenced by, his tale of the Matterhorn disaster. Like Sir John Franklin, whose death in the Arctic had won the admiration of thousands - among them Whymper himself - he had become one of the century’s icons. When the name Whymper appeared on a lecture bill, organisers could expect a full house. In 1894 he gave the same talk forty-eight times, addressing 50,000 people in England alone.

Grim and sonorous, Whymper cut an impressive figure at the podium, even when he dropped his aitches - something that worried him; he hired his nephew to snap his fingers every time it happened. Privately, he remained the same, tight-lipped person as always. His face now wore a permanent scowl, he smoked ceaselessly, grinding his pipe tobacco into a powder that left pinhole burns on his chairs, sofas, carpets and tablecloths. He smoked in bed, and his chest was covered in scars as a result. He feared fatness and became faddish about his food, sifting sugar so that only the finest grains found their way into his system. One relation was astounded by his way with meat pies; he would lift the pastry lid, spoon out the meat, replace the lid and move onto the next. He eschewed convention, appearing in the grandest restaurants without a tie or cravat, or even a shirt, only a singed sweater. He worried about his finances, technology having made the wood-engraving business moribund - ‘There is practically no engraving being done here,’ he told his father in March 1894. ‘The amount which has been done so far this year, and the little which is in hand, will not pay for coal and gas.’2 He also worried about Coolidge, whose chippy, ivory-tower intellect had fastened on the bible of Alpinism, Whymper’s Scrambles.

Conway wrote of Coolidge: ‘Some people called him cantankerous …’³ This did not even touch the surface. Rude, pedantic and touchy, Coolidge made enemies as simply and as naturally as he tied his shoelaces. Far from trying to reconcile differences he nourished them, ‘putting them down as other men put down bottles of wine, with the prospect that they would mature for use at some future date’.4 One of his longest-standing enmities was with Sir Edward Davidson, who became Secretary of the Alpine Club the year after Coolidge became editor of its Journal. There was something about Davidson that Coolidge could not stomach - probably his lofty, aristocratic manner, his climbing success and his disdain for words as opposed to action. When Mummery was blackballed from the Alpine Club, Coolidge suspected without a shred of proof that Davidson had been responsible. When Mummery informed him that ‘a well-known member of your club’⁵ had tried to bribe his guide to make his latest expedition a failure, Coolidge suspected, again without any proof, that it had been Davidson. In return he altered the minutes of the Alpine Journal and at the next election shifted the balls in the ballot box so that Mummery gained his membership. ‘Yes, I cheated Mummery into the Club,’⁶ he gloated. Davidson replied by drawing an illustration for a book on mountaineering, in which several porters were shown hauling luggage onto a lake steamer. Every trunk had the initials of a famous climber, and bringing up the rear was a parrot in a cage with the label W.A.B.C. On publication the W. was removed for fear of a lawsuit, but Coolidge noticed it all the same. In 1896, Davidson struck again. That year, two Alpine Club members published Christian Aimer’s führerbuch, or service record, and in it was a photograph of a page in which Coolidge had spelt Schreckhorn without its first ‘c’. To make the insult worse, an anonymous climber had pointed out the error, writing underneath that ‘The usual spelling among Germans is Schreckhorn.’⁷ The anonymous climber was none other than Davidson, to whom the book had also been dedicated. It was a typical establishment put-down and Coolidge recognised it as such. Unfortunately, Coolidge did not realise that the point of the insult lay in the predictability of his response. ‘I hunted and hunted,’ he wrote. ‘At last I found that Davidson had put his name to Jungfrau without ag.’⁸ He revealed this abominable error in the Alpine Journal and Davidson was duly censured amidst peals of muffled laughter. That year Coolidge left Britain and went to live in Grindelwald.

Coolidge took with him an Alpine library that numbered 15,000 volumes plus several crates of correspondence from which he picked as his irritability took him. Almost immediately, he struck up an argument with Whymper. In 1899 he was asked by the Swiss Alpine Club to write an obituary of Christian Aimer who had died the previous year. In doing so, he stated that Aimer’s famous leap on the Écrins was pure fiction. The gap did not exist, he said, and when in 1871 he had shown Aimer the picture Whymper had drawn of it, Aimer had disavowed it: ‘[he] assured me, in all earnest, that he had never done such a thing and could never be able to do it’.9 Coolidge had climbed the Écrins in 1870 - of which he was very proud - and had seen no sign of the gap; nor had any other climber since. This did not mean that Whymper was wrong: the Alps eroded so rapidly that nobody could be sure that the obstacles they had encountered one year would be there five years hence. All the same, Coolidge was calling Whymper a liar.

The two bachelors had already exchanged words in the 1880s. The exact cause of their dispute is unknown. Possibly it was an unintentional slip on Whymper’s behalf, when he stated in Scrambles that Coolidge had climbed one of the highest peaks of the Ailéfroide instead of the highest peak. This was just the kind of petty error around which Coolidge’s life revolved and it upset him. At any rate, he seems to have complained about something, and Whymper had replied with an uncharacteristic apology. ‘My dear Coolidge,’ he wrote on 22 December 1883:

Many thanks for your frank and manly letter. It has grieved me much to think how greatly I must have been misunderstood by you whom I have always respected, and have since grown to look upon with a warm feeling of regard … I heartily rejoice that this mistake has been rectified and earnestly hope that ours may be a life of friendship. Now, my dear Coolidge, grant me two favours. 1) Will you tell those of your friends in College … that you think better of me than you did. 2) Sometime when we are alone tell me how I contrived to give you an impression of myself which we know was incorrect. I fear there must be something queer about me or some fault which sorely needs correction and which I will correct if you as a true and kind friend will point it out. I thank God that you were not the innocent means of depriving me of what has been the joy of my life … Excuse faults of style in this letter, not an easy one to write. When I give my hand I give my heart.10

This frank - and almost frantic - attempt at conciliation is mystifying. If it really did concern the perceived slight regarding the Ailéfroide, it would suggest that Whymper was trying to save a friendship of long standing. But although they had corresponded on occasions, Coolidge maintained they had only met once before this date. A more sinister interpretation is that Coolidge’s files contained information damaging to Whymper’s reputation and that Whymper was desperate for it not to come out. Coolidge did have something on Whymper and in later years he would release it. In 1883, however, he was sufficiently mollified to bide his time. As his biographer stated, the only certain implication to be drawn from Whymper’s letter was that ‘the men were on far more self-revelatory terms than either was willing publicly to admit’.¹¹

Regardless of what lay in Coolidge’s files, Whymper could not ignore the charge of lying. He gathered affidavits from all those involved in Aimer’s leap and presented them to the Alpine Club, at the same time threatening legal action. The veteran climber Horace Walker took Whymper’s side and wrote to Coolidge in an attempt to defuse the situation. Coolidge replied angrily, fuelling his arguments with the tedious subject of the Ailéfroide. ‘You mention Whymper’s “veracity.” May I therefore direct your attention to a falsehood relating to myself told by Mr. W. in the first edition of his book (1871) and repeated in the fourth edition, note on page 192?… Despite this misstatement of nearly 30 years standing I have never yet taken the trouble to notice it publicly. There are a great many other misstatements in his book and Mr. W. would do better to raise no public discussion as to his “veracity” or he will meet with some unpleasant surprises. His list of ascents of the Matterhorn is laughably wrong.’12 Coolidge then proceeded to accuse Whymper of having plagiarised, in one of his guidebooks to Zermatt, a similar book written several years earlier by himself and Conway. ‘I could write much more,’ he concluded, ‘but what I have said may show you that Mr. W. had better not try to raise any public controversy with me.’¹³

Tuckett, who was next to intervene, received a similar response. ‘I decline in the most absolute manner to “rectify” a statement made to me repeatedly by old Aimer,’¹⁴ Coolidge told him. Tuckett tried hard to put the affair in perspective. ‘Do leave historial accuracy to take care of itself for a bit,’ he advised, ‘and remember that none of us are such encyclopedias of Alpine knowledge as yourself, rarely have as complete a knowledge of what others have written or perhaps, may I venture to say, even care to know?’¹⁵ Coolidge had no intention of letting matters be. The very suggestion that accuracy was unimportant and that some people might not care about it made him more determined than ever to hold out. In this he was supported by Douglas Freshfield, another Alpine Club member, who met Whymper and, as reported by Coolidge, told him ‘to his face that he was an ass to take serious offence, and that Wh. submitted quite meekly to being told that every one knows that his illustrations are “subjective.”’¹⁶ Reviewing his files, Coolidge told a colleague at Magdalen College: ‘I am “unmuzzled” and if necessary shall speak out very plainly.’¹⁷

Coolidge was, however, very worried about the prospect of a libel case. ‘He hasn’t any money (wood engraving being dead) save from his books,’¹⁸ he encouraged himself. ‘It is very unlikely too that he can touch me in England for I am legally an American citizen and the thing appeared in Switzerland.’¹⁹ But he himself was afflicted by a poor income. ‘If he were to do as he says I have no money for defence and must be “sold up”, books and all,’ he admitted to Tuckett. ‘Don’t tell Whymper all this, of course.’²⁰ Neither of them could afford a law suit and in the end they settled it as inexpensively as honour allowed. Whymper issued a sixteen-page pamphlet - ‘the Anti-Coolidge Manifesto’,21 Davidson called it - containing a copy of the illustration, plus letters of support, to every member of the Alpine Club. He demanded an immediate sitting of the Alpine Club committee, pledging at the same time to have Coolidge drummed out of the club. Coolidge resigned before his hearing came up and the ridiculous controversy came to an end. Both parties later recanted. In 1900 Coolidge wrote to Freshfield that ‘perhaps it was not judicious to print the note’.²² And in 1907 Whymper recalled as many copies of his pamphlet as he could find and burned them, stating that he had taken things far too seriously. ‘I have no doubt,’ he wrote to the American alpinist H. F. Montagnier, ‘that it would have been better to have allowed the matter to pass unnoticed, or to have arranged it otherwise.’²³

Coolidge was the eventual winner. He had plenty of anti-Whymper material in his files. ‘Of course, I know far more about Moore’s views than I have yet revealed [Moore having been Whymper’s companion during the supposed leap],’ he told Freshfield, ‘while if I was to repeat Aimer’s stories of Wh. during that 1864 Dauphiné round, Wh. would become a raving lunatic.’²⁴ In 1905, when his friend Conway became President of the Alpine Club, Coolidge was re-elected as an Honorary Member. To a friend, he wrote complacently that he had received an ‘apology, which grovels, though a little defiantly, too much to prevent me from accepting it’.²⁵ Davidson was furious: ‘the present Committee of the A. C. are such asses,’ he complained to Whymper. ‘In its present state the Alpine Club is not a creditable body to which to belong.’²⁶ Surprisingly, Whymper made no objection to Coolidge’s reinstatement. Maybe he had a suspicion of what lay in the files. In that year, however, he had more immediate things to worry about.

Whymper’s health was deteriorating. Since 1903 he had been prone to unexpected collapses that left him in a state of semi-consciousness; in 1905 a fall on a mountain path damaged several of his ribs; and then he received a severe blow to the head in a railway accident. ‘My present condition is deplorable,’ he wrote on 29 October 1905. ‘My memory has gone! … [I am] a Wreck without Brains.’²⁷ He tried to make light of it: ‘I shall devote what time as remains to me to Love and Luxury and to digging (or supervising the digging) of Potatoes, and to such other pursuits as are suitable to a male animal who is entering his second childhood.’28 His memory returned but he was obviously concerned about his condition. He was losing the physical fitness on which he had always prided himself and, when he visited Zermatt a few weeks after the crash, it appeared that he was losing his fame as well. It was freezing, nobody was there to greet him, the hotels were full; he drew together two station benches and slept on them under a rug. When he found space in a pension the next day his circumstances improved marginally. ‘The meat was horrid,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I could hardly stomach it, and the place was very cold. Walked from one end of Zermatt to the other and noted a few changes. The place does not increase in beauty, and the street, as usual, was dirty.’²⁹

In 1906 Whymper married. His relations with women had not always been successful. In 1899, however, he had fallen in love with Charlotte Hanbury, one of the few women climbers who were active in the Alps. She was ten years his senior and died unexpectedly on 23 October 1900. The news reached him just as he was starting a lecture in America. ‘My beloved friend gone!’ he wrote to his sister. ‘I hardly know how to carry on!’³⁰ But he did carry on and on 25 April 1906 he married Miss Edith Mary Lewin of Forest Gate, London. She was forty-five years younger than him. His nephew Robert - whom he had previously tried to buy from his parents - was the only member of his family invited to the ceremony. It was a grisly occasion, conducted in great secrecy. At the wedding breakfast it took half an hour’s persuasion before Whymper could be dragged out of his bedroom. McCormick, the presiding vicar, gave a leery address about the difference in their ages which went down badly with Whymper’s nephew: ‘[It] rather revolted me. On meeting the Reverend Canon in later years, I found myself still repelled.’³¹ When it was over, Whymper told him to search the guests in case they had stolen the silver.

The union did not last. They had a daughter and then divorced in 1910. The separation was bitter and although Whymper wrote at the time that he was ‘only too glad to get rid of her’,32 he was feeling the loss only months later: ‘I am distracted by the desertion of my wife,’ he told Montagnier. ‘All day long I am annoyed, bored and made miserable.’³³ Any feelings of remorse were quashed when the alimony demands came in. ‘Her sole aim is money,’ he wrote to his youngest sister Annette. ‘I have already lost £2000 over her, and if I am forced to leave the country to escape her I shall lose as much more … It will go very much against the grain to do it, but I am contemplating being forced into it.’³⁴ In the end he stayed at home, selling his house, his books and even his climbing equipment in order to stay financially afloat. To make life worse, his eyes began to fail - occasioned, he diagnosed, by his railway accident - and he conducted his correspondence with the aid of spectacles and a large magnifiying glass. ‘I am now unable to read anything, and can only guess at what I am writing,’ he told Montagnier. ‘I write seriously in saying that… I frequently think of suicide.’³⁵

He tried, repeatedly, to heal the breach between himself and Coolidge. In 1908, a year after he had recalled his pamphlets, Coolidge had a heart attack. Whymper ‘took the opportunity of his illness to send a few sympathetic words, and they seem to have been appreciated’.³⁶ With them he enclosed a drawing of a hatchet and a tombstone on which was written ‘Buried 1908.’ It did no good. Three years later when Coolidge was again seriously ill Whymper tried once more. ‘From what the alphabetical gentleman says of himself he appears to be in a bad way. I am going out of my usual beat to pay him a visit, to attempt to show that friction is over.’³⁷ He warned Coolidge of his intentions: ‘When I come, I shall come in the old style, shall walk up, not order rooms in advance, and take my chance as to finding a room. If none can be had I shall camp out.’³⁸

On 11 August 1911 they spent a whole day closeted in Coolidge’s Chalet Montana in Grindelwald and although neither party divulged what passed between them - Whymper did gave a vague hint that he thought Coolidge was mad - the meeting was less stormy than it might have been. That evening Whymper walked over to Zermatt, from where he went to Geneva and then up to Chamonix. It was to be his last Alpine scramble, and perhaps he knew it. At Chamonix he checked into a hotel where the staff were accustomed to his preference for being left alone. He visited a few bookshops, made arrangements to find the corpses from the 1870 Mont Blanc disaster which were expected soon to emerge from the glacier and then, suddenly, went back to his hotel and locked himself in his room. For the next two days, while chambermaids busied themselves in the corridor, Whymper died. On 20 September, two guides went round Chamonix, knocking on every door with the message, ‘Edward Whymper will be buried here today, and you are asked to attend his funeral at 2.30 this afternoon.’39 The whole village turned out to watch him being lowered into the silt.

Whymper’s death deprived Coolidge of one of his few remaining links to the Alps of his youth. Old, lonely and sick, he retired into obscurity sustained only by his researches and by what embers of enmity he could blow into a flame - as, for example, when his old foe Davidson was elected President of the Alpine Club. Coolidge immediately resigned his Honorary Membership and, to further express his outrage, demanded that his name never again be mentioned in the Alpine Journal. His resignation was accepted but his latter request was declined politely. Meaning well, the assistant editor added a barbed postscript: ‘Not 10% of the A.C. Members have realised that you are no longer a member or an Hon. Member of the A.C.’⁴⁰

The ‘Nestor of the Alps’, as the Daily Mail called him, became ever more reclusive. He was rarely seen in the village of Grindelwald and, indeed, only now and then went into his own garden. For company he relied on a male nurse called Albert Hurzeler and a succession of dogs which were chosen deliberately to be as unlike Tschingel as possible. ‘Quite incapable of making climbs,’⁴¹ he wrote of Nero, his black Newfoundland. If questioned about the company he kept he would point, wordlessly, to Tschingel’s collar which hung near the front door.

When war broke out in 1914, Coolidge became more isolated. His health deteriorated, his steadily diminishing income could not cope with wartime inflation and he began to dislike ‘these rascally Swiss’.42 He could not have failed to be depressed by the destruction occurring in the eastern Alps as the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies fought themselves into a Flanders-like stalemate, squabbling with high explosive over each crag and, when their patience ran out, eradicating whole peaks with tons of carefully sapped dynamite. ‘I live rather a lonely life nowadays,’⁴³ he wrote during a low point in 1916. Two years later he was in despair: ‘I do wish I had never come out to live. Very few compensations … how old I am getting!’⁴⁴ The death in 1919 of Frederick Gardiner, the last of his contemporaries, added to his depression. As Coolidge noted, Gardiner had been only six days older than him. But he received an unexpected fillip when the Alpine Club asked him to write Gardiner’s obituary for their journal. ‘I am, of course, well qualified to do this,’ he told a colleague. ‘But as the ruling authorities of the A.C. drove me out of that society in 1910, and have since been attacking me violently and personally in each no. of that periodical, I am steadily resisting.’⁴⁵

Gardiner’s obituary was too meagre a controversy to revive Coolidge fully.* What he needed was something big, and in 1921 he delivered it. Writing to a friend, Charles Gos, regarding some minutiae on an eighteenth-century map, he threw in a casual aside: ‘Strictly in confidence, I learned yesterday from a very reliable source that the rope on the Matterhorn in 1865 had been effectively cut. But it is better not to insist on this certain fact!!!’⁴⁶ The news came from Conway who had it in turn from one Dr G. F. Browne, late Bishop of Bristol, to whom Whymper had reportedly gone for advice after the disaster. Browne told Conway that ‘he was the only living man who knew the truth about the accident and that that knowledge would perish with him’.⁴⁷ It did perish with him, but maybe he divulged some of it because Conway later suggested that ‘two or three strands of the rope might have been severed beforehand without anyone knowing. The end of the rope would have retained some sign of the cutting. The end engraved in “Scrambles” is not the one where the breakage occurred. It is the right rope but not the broken end.’48 Was this what Coolidge had been threatening Whymper with as far back as 1883? Had he by that time got a whiff of the scandal that Conway elaborated upon in 1921? No more was said on the subject and the truth - if there was any truth to it - died with both men.

By the 1920s Coolidge was in poor shape. He suffered from palpitations and dropsy, and hated the injections which were necessary to keep him alive. Nero had died and his one comfort was now a terrier named Max. ‘I dread to think of losing him!’ he wrote. ‘How old do such small dogs live on average?’⁴⁹ Max was then seven and a half. He outlived his master. Coolidge died of a heart attack on Saturday, 8 May 1926 and, as his headstone recorded, ‘at his own request he was buried among the mountains he loved so well’. An imp of perversity was loose in Grindelwald that season - either that or the Swiss possessed a keener sense of humour than they were normally credited with - for the great pedant was given an exquisitely apt send-off. The Echo von Grindelwald misspelled his name in its official notice, the authorities put the wrong age on his headstone and the carver missed out the ‘u’ in ‘mountains’.