Lizzie le Blond, née Hawkin-Whitshed, was amongst the first women to practise ‘man-less climbing’, traversing the Piz Palü (AD, 3,905m/12,812ft) with Lady Evelyn McDonnell in 1900. As a young woman she was part of the social set that revolved around Queen Victoria’s playboy son Edward, the Prince of Wales. Sent to the Alps because of her weak health, she immediately took to climbing: ‘I owe a supreme debt of gratitude to the mountains for knocking me from the shackles of conventionality.’39 Her great aunt, Lady Bentinck, was so shocked by her behaviour that she wrote to her mother exhorting her to ‘stop her climbing mountains; she is scandalising all London and looks like a Red Indian’.40 Lizzie le Blond’s career is somewhat difficult to follow because she turns up successively as Mrs Burnaby, Mrs Main and Mrs Aubrey le Blond. Her first husband, a colonel in the Royal Horse Guards, was speared by Dervishes at the battle of Abu Klea in the Sudan while seeking to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. The second died after an adventurous trip to China. Lizzie wrote nine books under her various married names and became the first president of the Ladies’ Alpine Club, which was initially formed as a section of the Lyceum, an intellectual ladies’ club.
Margaret Jackson had 140 major climbs to her credit, including the first winter ascents of the Lauteraarhorn (4,042m/13,261ft), the Pfaffenstöckli (3,114m/10,217ft), the Gross Fiescherhorn (4,049m/13,284ft) and the first winter traverse of the Jungfrau, all in the space of 12 days in 1888. She lost several toes to frostbite after a bivouac on the Jungfrau. Katie Richardson’s record was perhaps even more impressive. Described by an admirer as ‘resembling a piece of carefully kept Dresden china’,41 her guides took a somewhat different view: ‘She does not eat and she walks like the devil.’42 She began climbing in 1871 and completed 116 major climbs of which six were first ascents and 14 first women’s ascents. She made the first traverse of Piz Palü in 1879, became the first woman to climb La Meije in 1885 and made the first traverses from the Bionnassay to the Dôme de Gôuter (AD) in 1888 and from the Petit to the Grand Dru (D-) in 1889.
Gertrude Bell was the first woman to be awarded a first class degree in modern history at Oxford. After leaving university she travelled throughout the Middle East, studying languages, archaeology and politics. During the First World War she joined the Arab Bureau and was appointed Oriental Secretary. After the war she settled in current-day Iraq, where she played a key role in the succession of the Hashemites to the throne. She held the most senior position of any woman in the British Empire in the 1920s and was therefore one of the most powerful women in the world:
From Trebizond to Tripoli
She rolls the Pashas flat
And tells them what to think of this
And what to think of that.
Her proudest achievement was the creation of the Baghdad Museum (‘like the British Museum only a little smaller’), now sadly looted of many of its treasures, but she was also an exceptional alpinist. With Ulrich Führer as her guide, she completed the first traverse of the Lauteraarhorn–Schreckhorn (AD, 1902) and made an epic attempt on the unclimbed North-East Face of the Finsteraarhorn (now graded ED1 with several pitches of V) lasting 57 hours with a retreat in a blizzard. This climb was well ahead of its time, more appropriate to the bitter Teutonic struggles of the 1930s than an English lady climbing at the turn of the century. Despite these very considerable achievements, women were not admitted to the Alpine Club for over a hundred years, and even then several male members (including Bill Tilman) resigned in protest.
The two leading male alpinists in the years leading up to the First World War were John Ryan, who almost always climbed with the guides Franz and Josef Lochmatter, and Geoffrey Winthrop Young, who often climbed with Josef Knubel. Ryan was an Anglo-Irish landowner. A difficult and charmless man who ‘seldom carried rucksack or ice axe, and...never cut a step’, he was blackballed by the Alpine Club for ‘incivility to some older members’.43 As Geoffrey Winthrop Young observed: ‘The gods who showered on him all worldly gifts, withheld the power of ever appearing happy.’44 He was, nevertheless, a very able climber. In 1905 he made 25 ascents including the North Face of the Charmoz (D+). In 1906 he climbed the North-West Ridge of the Blaitière (TD), the Ryan–Lochmatter Route on the Plan (D+) and the Cresta di Santa Caterina on Monte Rosa (TD). He also climbed the South-West Face of the Täschhorn with Young, Knubel and the Lochmatters, a huge, loose rock face almost 900m high that was not repeated for 37 years (and then using pitons) and still maintains a serious reputation with a grade of TD+. During the climb Ryan confided in Young that the year before he would not have cared a damn which way it went, live or die, but that year he had married. He did not climb at a similar standard again until 1914, when he put a new route up the Nantillons Face of the Grépon. He was badly injured in the First World War and did not climb again.
Geoffrey Winthrop Young was perhaps the best British alpinist in the early part of the twentieth century and had a profound influence on the development of the sport over the next 40 years. He was proposed for membership of the Alpine Club by Sir Alfred Wills, whose ascent of the Wetterhorn opened the Golden Age in the 1850s, and he knew Joe Brown who played a key role in re-establishing Britain as a leading climbing nation in the 1950s.
Born in 1876, the second son of Sir George Young, although he never exactly fitted the mould of an establishment figure, he was nevertheless part of the British ruling class and saw nothing wrong with using his extensive network of friends and relations to advance his career and various causes. When he was a boy, Sir Leslie Stephen and Lord Alfred Tennyson visited his family home on an island in the Thames near Cliveden. It was a prophetic meeting since in later life Young would gain recognition as both a climber and a poet. His father made the first ascent of the Jungfrau from Wengern Alp in 1865, but all mention of climbing was forbidden in the Young household following the death of Sir George’s brother while climbing Mont Blanc in 1866. Despite or perhaps because of this, Young was attracted to climbing while a student at Cambridge, where he wrote The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity in 1900, in a style parodying early alpine guides: ‘In these athletic days of rapid devolution to the Simian practices of our ancestors, climbing of all kinds is naturally assuming an ever more prominent position...’45
A climber, poet, educationalist and ‘athletic aesthete’, Young knew that climbing was just a sport, but was convinced that it had an intellectual and spiritual aspect lacking in other sports. He combined a mystical approach to climbing with practical organisational abilities which he put to use in his Pen-y-Pass meets, as president of the Alpine Club and in the formation of the British Mountaineering Council.
Young was sacked as a teacher at Eton in 1905 and as a school inspector in 1913, in both cases probably because of some homosexual impropriety. When he was not climbing he was drawn to the homosexual clubs and boxing booths of Soho, Paris and Berlin, where the thrill of illicit sex and danger of public exposure seems to have appealed to his risk-taking instincts. His writing combines romanticism with striking homo-erotic imagery, such as his description of a rail journey to the Lake District: ‘That first rough hug of the northern hills, where the arms of Shap Fell reached down in welcome about the line, and the eye, bored with the dull fleshiness of plains prostrate and flaccid under their litter of utility, can delight in the starting muscles and shapely bones of strong earth, stripped for a wrestle with the elements – or with the climber!’46 He also reveals something of his motivation for climbing, and perhaps his sense of guilt at his (then illegal) sexual orientation: ‘In return for my guardianship of their integrity [the mountains] offered me a sanctuary for all the higher impulses, all the less sordid hopes and imaginings which visited me anywhere through the years.’47
Since