I began to suspect that I ought not to go on, but then unfortunately tho’ I could with ease drop down a smooth Rock 7 feet high, I could not climb it, so go on I must and on I went. The next 3 drops were not half a Foot, at least not a foot more than my own height, but every Drop increased the Palsy of my Limbs – I shook all over, Heaven knows without the least influence of Fear, and now I had only two more to drop down, to return was impossible – but of these two the first was tremendous, it was twice my own height, and the Ledge at the bottom was so exceedingly narrow, that if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself.
I was impressed by Coleridge’s boldness. The route descends over downward-sloping ledges that are separated by higher and higher rock walls, with a deadly drop-off onto the jagged scree below. It all feels rather intimidating. Halfway down an irreversible descent he got himself completely stuck above a big drop, unable to return upwards or progress downwards. This same predicament has since led to the deaths of climbers. He then experienced those feelings of terror that are only too familiar to us:
My Limbs were all in a tremble – I lay upon my Back to rest myself, and was beginning according to my Custom to laugh at myself for a Madman, when the sight of the Crags above me on each side, and the impetuous Clouds just over them, posting so luridly and so rapidly northward, overawed me. I lay in a state of almost prophetic Trance and Delight – and blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason and the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us!1
I lay in exactly the same spot and thought about Coleridge’s power of Reason. He was clearly not just an excitable Romantic. He had calmed himself down and thought about how to get out of his predicament. Just below and to the left of this final ledge there is a narrow chimney that is not immediately obvious. In the event he was able to explore sideways and slither down this chimney, which is now known as Fat Man’s Peril. If there had been no exit we may have lost one of our most interesting literary figures. This just goes to show the importance of careful reading. If only British climbers had stuck to Coleridge’s idea of rock-climbing downwards, modern mountaineering would be very different.
His wasn’t the first rock climb in Britain, though. There are modern routes that were first climbed long before the sport evolved, some by shepherds rescuing crag-fast sheep, some by birds-nesters, and some just by young dare-devils. In 1695 men were described using ropes for rock climbing on traditional fowling expeditions in the St Kilda archipelago. Slowly, rock climbing evolved into an activity in its own right, and as with many cultural movements it is hard to pin down a moment when rock climbing as a sport began. It started in at least three areas: the sandstone crags of the Elbsandsteingebirge, near Dresden; the Dolomites in Italy; and the Lake District in England, where a small group of climbers started rock climbing above the valley of Wasdale, beneath Scafell Pike.
Many were serious-minded, middle-class Victorian gentlemen who sought an escape from the industrial northern towns of Liverpool and Manchester. The father of English rock climbing was Walter Parry Haskett Smith, who, 84 years after Coleridge’s climb, made a solo first ascent (upwards instead of downwards) of Napes Needle, an obelisk-like pillar just across the Wasdale valley from Broad Stand. An early climb that is in touch with modern standards was O. G. Jones’s 1897 climb of Kern Knotts Crack, graded Very Severe, and significantly Jones was attracted by a photograph of Napes Needle that he saw in a shop on the Strand in London. Similarly, the television films that we make on Mount Everest draw new recruits to mountaineering. And if they learn about the fun of climbing, then why not?
The British are usually credited with inventing the sport of alpinism, and it was largely because of leisure. Britain was ‘an island of coal surrounded by a sea of fish’, and happened for many reasons to be the first nation to industrialise (it could so easily have been the Romans, who were close to steam power, or the Indians, who had even more resources). The Industrial Revolution provided many a wealthy man’s son with ample time and money while the average Swiss peasant was far too busy scraping a living off the mountainsides to waste time raising his eyes to the summits.
Sir Alfred Wills, who was Edward Norton’s grandfather, kicked off the Golden Age of Alpinism with his 1854 ascent of the Wetterhorn (although it wasn’t actually the first ascent, which had been made ten years earlier by Stanhope T. Speer with his Swiss guides). There then followed an explosion of climbing, with most of the major peaks being bagged within ten years. There was a similar period in the Himalayas a century later, when all the 14 peaks over 8,000m (26,247ft) were climbed within 11 years of each other.
The Alpine Club was founded in London in 1857. Simon Schama in his Landscape and Memory notes that the members of the Club were predominantly upper-middle-class rather than aristocratic, and that they thought of themselves as a caste apart, a Spartan phalanx, tough with muscular virtue, spare with speech, seeking the chill clarity of the mountains just because, as Leslie Stephen, who became the club’s president in 1865, put it, ‘There we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pairs of lungs.’2
It is curious that so many writers had brothers who became Himalayan climbers: Greene, Spender, Auden. It is interesting, too, that it seemed to be the left-wing intellectuals who wanted to place themselves above the masses. John Carey writes:
The cult of mountaineering and alpine holidays among English intellectuals … seems to have been encouraged by Nietzschean images of supremacy. Climbing a mountain gave, as it were, objective expression to the intellectual’s sense of superiority and high endeavour, which otherwise remained rather notional.3
There is a danger in this search for purity that surfaced later in the Nazi fascination with mountain climbing.
The pace of Alpine climbing accelerated, with Edward Whymper knocking off the Col de Triolet, the Aiguille de Tré-la-Tête and the Aiguille d’Argentière in one week in 1864 with guide Michel Croz. His 1865 book Scrambles in the Alps was a sensation, describing the first ascent of the Matterhorn and the ensuing accident that killed four of his companions. Suddenly, the new sport assumed a dangerous new edge in the public mind, and the short but golden age of Alpine climbing was over.
Back in England there was a disaster high on Scafell Pinnacle in 1903 that Somervell and Mallory would have been very well aware of, as it was much discussed at the time. The tradition then was that ‘the leader must not fall’, because the hemp ropes climbers used were not strong enough to take much of a shock, and modern protection devices such as Friends – camming devices that expand into cracks in the rock and to which a climbing rope can be attached – were as yet undreamt of. All that the climbers could do was to loop the rope over a spike of rock, if available, or jam a rock into a crack and pass the rope behind it. In the 1903 accident, there was no belay point available, and four men fell 200ft to their deaths.
As we shall see, George Mallory would have had the need for a belay very much in mind on 8 June 1924 as he scanned the cliffs above him for a route to the top of Mount Everest.
3
I was a bookish child, and rather shy. I didn’t quiz Uncle Hunch about his story, but when we got home from Aunt Dolly’s memorial service I found out more about him, Mount Everest and his friend Mallory in the memoir that he wrote titled After Everest. I have the book next to me, still wrapped in my grandmother’s sewn cover. His climbing life, including Mount Everest, takes up less than a third of the pages, and he makes it clear that his medical missionary work was far more important to him. So many Everesters keep going back and back to the mountain of their obsession, and it is entirely typical of him that he was able to develop himself away from it.
One of the problems of assessing multi-talented