After climbing in Wales and the Lakes, Young met Josef Knubel in 1905 and started his alpine career. In 1906 he climbed the South-West Face of the Täschhorn with Ryan. In 1907 he climbed the Breithorn Younggrat (D) and the Weisshorn Younggrat (D). He followed this in 1911 with the Brouillard Ridge of Mont Blanc (AD+), the West Ridge of the Grandes Jorasses (D) and the Mer de Glace Face of the Grépon (D), which he climbed with Ralph Todhunter, who had the strange affectation of climbing in white gloves, and Humphrey Jones. Jones became the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society the following year before dying with his wife and guide while climbing in the Alps on their honeymoon. Todhunter was killed in the Dolomites in 1925. Young’s last major route in the Alps was the Rote Zähn Ridge of the Gspaltenhorn (TD- with pitches of V), which he climbed with Siegfried Herford in the last summer before the outbreak of war in 1914.
Young hated the war hysteria that gripped Britain in 1914 and attended a peace demonstration in Trafalgar Square, ‘the last protest of those who had grown up in the age of civilised peace’.48 However, he felt unable to remain inactive when so many of his friends were volunteering and so acted as a war correspondent and subsequently helped to found the Friends Ambulance Unit, ‘work...for men who wished to die if need be with their contemporaries but not to fight with them’.49 A man of extraordinary personal courage, both in the mountains and on the battlefield, he received several decorations, including the Légion d’Honneur. He lost his left leg in Italy in 1917, but his commitment to climbing and love of the mountains remained undiminished:
I dream my feet upon the starry ways;
My heart rests in the hill.
I may not grudge the little left undone;
I hold the heights, I keep the dreams I won.50
THE LAKE DISTRICT
The inn at Wasdale Head was the first home of the British climbing community that began to form in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.51 Originally called the Huntsman’s Inn, later the Wastwater Hotel, it was started by Will Ritson, who added a wing to his farmhouse to accommodate visitors and obtained a licence in 1856. Ritson boasted that Wasdale had the highest mountain, the deepest lake, the smallest church and the biggest liar in England. He once won a lying contest outright by declaring that, like George Washington, he could not tell a lie. He was a sportsman, drinker and raconteur: ‘Landlord, waiter and customer by turns.’52 Although he retired in 1879, his spirit lived on in the hotel, which continues to attract fell walkers, climbers and other eccentrics to this day.
The hotel is located at the head of a valley, 12 miles’ walk from the nearest railway station. In the early years, women guests rarely, if ever, visited it, and it had a sense of remoteness that allowed a relaxed and convivial atmosphere far removed from the social conventions of Victorian domestic life. It was a place that appealed to those with ‘a taste for companionable chaos’53 where the atmosphere was pervaded by the smell of pipe tobacco and wet tweeds. The climbing world consisted of a small group of enthusiastic amateurs, who would regularly meet each other at Wasdale or in the Alps, but they were remarkably welcoming to newcomers; the cliquiness that characterised so many climbing clubs in later years was notably absent. A book in the hotel recorded the activities of the guests, which included long hard walks and, increasingly, scrambles and climbs.
The Alpine Journal first carried an article on fell walking in the Lakes in 1870, and established alpinists, including the Pilkington brothers, Norman Collie, Cecil Slingsby, Geoffrey Hastings, Horace Walker, the Pendlebury brothers and Frederick Gardiner, all visited the district. An increasing number of people also started their climbing in the British hills rather than the Alps. The Rev. James Jackson, self-proclaimed Patriarch of the Pillarites, was an early enthusiast who scrambled up Pillar Rock in 1876 at the age of 80 and died attempting to do the same thing at the age of 83. Walter Haskett Smith was a more conventional figure who also started his climbing career in Britain rather than the Alps. Educated at Eton and Oxford, Haskett Smith excelled at athletics, establishing an unofficial long jump world record of 25 feet in practice. While a student he went on a walking tour of the Pyrenees with Charles Packe, the botanist and pioneering mountain explorer, and visited Snowdonia but did not attempt any scrambling or climbing. In 1881 he was appointed by a group of friends to decide where they should gather for a summer reading party. After studying an Ordnance map of Cumberland he selected an inn in a ‘sombre region thronged with portentous shadows’54 and took rooms at Wasdale Head. His choice was probably influenced by Wordsworth’s description of the valley in his Guide to The Lakes: ‘Wastdale is well worth the notice of the Traveller who is not afraid of fatigue; no part of the country is more distinguished by sublimity.’ The group read Plato in the morning and tramped the hills in the afternoon. They also made the acquaintance of Herman Bowring, nearly 40 years their senior, who introduced them to the art of scrambling.
Haskett Smith was a man of private means. He qualified as a barrister but was appalled when a friend offered him a brief. Instead, he devoted his life to philology and climbing, returning to the Lakes each year and progressively moving from scrambling to true rock climbing. Early climbs included Deep Ghyll on Scafell in 1882. Four years later he made the first ascent of Napes Needle with ‘no ropes or illegitimate means’,55 often cited as the birth of British rock climbing. Graded HVD today, Napes Needle was a hard route for the mid-1880s but ironically, like the first routes on Pillar Rock and Scafell Pinnacle, it is truly a summit ascended by the easiest route and therefore, in some respects, more in the tradition of alpine climbing than British rock climbing, where reaching a summit is irrelevant. The real significance of Napes Needle was not so much that it was the ‘first British rock climb’ but rather that it is a very photogenic piece of rock and publicity surrounding subsequent ascents helped to establish rock climbing in Britain as a sport. Just as the Matterhorn became the symbol of alpine climbing, so Napes Needle became the symbol of British rock climbing (and remains the logo of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club to this day).
Haskett Smith was accompanied on many of his climbs by John Robinson, a successful estate manager born near Cockermouth. Robinson visited the Alps once, in 1898, climbing several mountains, including the Matterhorn, but was not impressed. His first love was always the Lake District. During a visit to the Lakes in about 1900 Geoffrey Winthrop Young recalled being hailed at Keswick station by a stranger, who turned out to be Robinson: ‘Hullo, young man, oughtn’t you and I to talk? Nailed boots go straight to my heart!’ As Young commented (in the 1920s): ‘Nails, I fear, are now too common a sight upon the fells to pass for an introduction; so much the mountains have gained in the number of their followers and lost of their one-time fellowship.’56
The ascent of Napes Needle by Haskett Smith prompted Cecil Slingsby, who first climbed in the Lakes in 1885 with Geoffrey Hastings, to write an article for the Alpine Journal exhorting members of the Club to visit the Lakes: ‘Do not let us be beaten on our own fells by outsiders, some of whom consider ice axes and ropes to be “illegitimate”. Let us not neglect the Lake District, Wales and Scotland whilst we are the conquerors abroad.’57 Five years later Godfrey Solly, a pious solicitor who became Mayor of Birkenhead and visited the Alps over 40 times, led Slingsby up Eagle’s Nest Ridge Direct, a climb that was well ahead of its time and is still graded mild VS today. As Solly recorded: ‘I went first and found it difficult enough to get to the little platform. When there, I sat down to recover my breath with my back to the ridge and a leg dangling on each side. The party below made some uncomplimentary remark as to what I looked like perched up there, and I suggested that I was more like an eagle on its nest. That is, I fear, the very unromantic but truthful origin of the name.’58