Martin Conway observed that Mummery was ‘intellectually rather than aesthetically well endowed’,27 but Mummery always defended himself against the accusation that adventure and aesthetic appreciation are incompatible. ‘To the (self-dubbed) mountaineers, the right way up a peak is the easiest way, and all other ways are wrong ways. Thus...if a man goes up the Matterhorn to enjoy the scenery, he will go up the Hörnli route; if he goes by the Zmutt ridge it is, they allege, merely the difficulties of the climb that attract him...To say that this route, with its continuously gorgeous scenery is, from the aesthetic point of view, the wrong way, while the Hörnli route, which is marred by...its paper-besprinkled slopes, is the right, involves total insensibility to the true mountain feeling.’28 From his writing it is clear that Mummery appreciated both the heroic and the aesthetic aspects of the sport: ‘Above, in the clear air and searching sunlight, we are afoot with the quiet gods, and men can know each other and themselves for what they are.’29
As well as playing a supporting role to Mummery, his companions Slingsby, Collie and Hastings were outstanding mountaineers in their own right. Cecil Slingsby was a textile manufacturer from an old landed family. Born in 1849, he was ‘a thorough Yorkshire dalesman, stalwart, broad-shouldered, full-bearded, with a classic profile, a fine complexion even in age, and shrewd, laughing grey eyes’,30 according to Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who married his daughter Eleanor. As well as climbing in the Alps, Slingsby made 15 visits to Norway from 1872 onwards and was known in both England and Norway as the father of Norwegian mountaineering. During the first ascent in 1876 of the impressive Skagastølstind (2,340m/7,677ft), the third highest mountain in the country, he climbed the final 150m/500ft alone after his companions refused to go any further. He was possibly the first Englishman to learn to ski, helped to establish the sport of ski-mountaineering, and was regarded as an incomparable route-finder across unmapped and difficult terrain. He was also passionate about British rock climbing and potholing and put up numerous new routes, including Slingsby’s Chimney on Scafell Pinnacle (VD, 1888), climbed with Hastings, Hopkinson and Haskett Smith, which involved a pitch of 33m/110ft – a very long run-out in the days when there was no protection for the leader.
Norman Collie was born in Alderley Edge in Cheshire. His family had been the largest cotton importers in Britain, but trade was disrupted by the American Civil War (1861–65) and the family firm went bankrupt while Collie was still at school. He therefore had to work for a living. After studying chemistry at Bristol University and Queen’s University, Belfast, he was awarded a doctorate at the University of Würzburg in Germany before taking up a teaching post at Cheltenham Ladies College. His niece recalled that ‘he was far from being a ladies’ man and probably found that schoolgirls in bulk were rather more than he could stomach’.31 Collie never married, and after four years at Cheltenham he moved to University College London, where he later became Professor of Organic Chemistry. Collie was involved in the discovery of the noble gases, invented the neon light and took the first x-ray photographs used for medical purposes. He is also credited with inventing the ‘Grey Man of Ben Macdui’, a ghostly apparition that walked with him to the summit in 1920 and has been seen several times since. An acknowledged aesthete and expert on oriental art, wine, food and cigars, Collie was a distinguished figure in many different fields. When he visited Norway, ‘crowds flocked to see him under the impression that he was Sherlock Holmes’,32 but many who knew him well found him cold and disdainful. Geoffrey Winthrop Young wrote: ‘When he became interested in a man, his penetrating eyes flashed suddenly into an observant personal sympathy; when he was not, he was incapable of pretence, even of awareness.’33
Collie was one of the first British alpinists not to serve an apprenticeship with alpine guides, moving directly to guideless climbing based on experience acquired in the British hills. He pioneered climbs in Scotland and the Lake District, including the first ascent of Moss Ghyll on Scafell (S, 1892) with Hastings and John Robinson, where he chipped the ‘Collie Step’ in the rock with an ice axe; the first ascent of Tower Ridge (Diff. in summer, grade IV in winter, 1894) on Ben Nevis with Hastings and others; and the first winter ascent of Steep Gill on Scafell which merits a grade V today, a standard of difficulty not widely achieved until the 1950s. Collie also climbed on the remote Isle of Skye with the local guide John Mackenzie, making the first ascent of Sgurr an Lochain (1,004m/3,294ft), the last major peak in Britain to be climbed, with Mackenzie and William Naismith in 1896.
From 1898 to 1911 Collie visited the Canadian Rockies five times, making 21 first ascents and naming more than 30 mountains. Mount Collie in Canada and Sgurr Thormaid (Norman’s Peak) on Skye are named after him, and he is buried within sight of his beloved Cuillin in Struan, Skye, next to his guide and life-long friend John Mackenzie. Just before his death in 1942 he was observed at the Sligachan Hotel on Skye by a young RAF officer who was on leave: ‘We were alone in the inn, save for an old man who must have returned there to die. His hair was white but his face and bearing were still those of a great mountaineer, though he must have been a great age. He never spoke, but appeared regularly at meals to take his place at the table, tight pressed against the windows, alone with his wine and his memories. We thought him rather fine.’34
Shortly before he died, Collie described the climbing companions of his youth: ‘Slingsby was a magnificent mountaineer, a perfectly safe man to climb with’, he wrote, ‘and Mummery was not.’35 The difference, perhaps, was that Mummery was a climber in the modern idiom, while Slingsby, like Collie, was a traditional mountaineer.
Geoffrey Hastings had a worsted spinning business in Bradford and started climbing with Slingsby in 1885, visiting Norway five times with him between 1889 and 1901. In Britain he put up numerous rock climbs including the first ascent of Needle Ridge on Great Gable (VD, 1887) and North Climb on Pillar Rock (S, 1891) with Slingsby and Haskett Smith. Always the strong man of the team, Hastings was renowned for producing unexpected luxuries from his rucksack at critical moments on a climb. Dorothy Pilley recalled seeing him at the foot of the Dent du Géant in 1920 when he was 60 years old: ‘There I spied Mr. Geoffrey Hastings and worshipped. Was he not the doughtiest hero remaining from the Mummery Epoch? He did not let my expectations down. An enormous sack jutted out from between his shoulders. When he lowered it the ground shook and he divulged that he made a practice of filling it with boulders to keep himself in training!’36
The standards of mountaineering established by Mummery, Slingsby, Collie and Hastings in the closing years of the nineteenth century were well ahead of other Britons climbing at the time and were at the forefront of amateur climbing worldwide. In the years that followed, leading up to the First World War, the sport continued to expand but, with one or two exceptions, did not advance appreciably. In some ways it even regressed, with a return to guided climbing.
One development that did take place in the closing decades of the nineteenth century was the growing number of women participating in the sport and the appearance of the first all-female climbing parties. Women climbers played a particularly significant role in the development of winter mountaineering, including the first winter ascent of Mont Blanc in 1876 by Isabella Straton, who later married her guide, Jean Charlet, the inventor of abseiling. While male alpinists’ participation in the sport helped to reinforce their masculinity and social status, women had to overcome significant prejudice. Climbing was incompatible with traditional concepts of femininity and therefore posed a direct threat to a male-dominated social order. Many of the female pioneers were financially independent and nearly all had a rebellious streak. When Isabella Straton married Jean Charlet she had an income of £4,000 a year, whereas her husband might have expected to earn £25 during the summer season. Mary Mummery, who was clearly a very proficient mountaineer, probably expressed the views of many female climbers when she observed that: ‘The masculine mind is, with rare exceptions, imbued with the idea that a woman is not a fit comrade for steep ice or precipitous rock and [believes that] she should be satisfied with watching through a telescope