As awareness of the rock climbing potential in the Lakes began to spread, the sport started to attract climbers from the northern industrial cities of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The Hopkinson brothers typified the social background, ambitions and attitudes of many Lake District climbers in the late Victorian era. A distinguished Manchester family, related to the Slingsby family and close neighbours of the Pilkingtons in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, their father was a self-made man who rose through hard work and ability from mill mechanic to Lord Mayor of Manchester. There were five brothers: John became a Fellow at Cambridge and subsequently improved the management and equipment of lighthouses, designed a lighting system for Manchester, and tram systems for Leeds and Liverpool. Alfred read classics at Oxford and then went into the law, becoming Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University and a member of parliament. He was knighted in 1910. Charles was probably the best climber amongst them and was content to remain with the family firm, although he was active in local government. Edward went to Cambridge and became an electrical engineer, designing the engine for the first electrically driven underground train. He too became an MP. The youngest brother, Albert, studied medicine at Cambridge and became a surgeon in Manchester before returning to Cambridge to lecture in anatomy. As with Leslie Stephen, we gain an insight into the lives of the Hopkinsons because Edward’s daughter, Katherine Chorley, wrote a book about her childhood. In Manchester Made Them (1950) she portrays her father as a ‘vital, unresting man, radiating energy’, and his brothers as being ‘charged with ambition...they almost worshipped brains and too readily judged a successful life in terms of getting to the top of the tree’.60 She ascribed their ambition to a strict non-conformist upbringing, believing that they ‘tried to contract for the kingdom of heaven by means of the laborious days they lived on earth...Success was a yardstick of hard work and therefore all too easily a sign that you had lived well and frugally in the sight of God.’
The Hopkinson brothers climbed on the East Face of Tryfan in Wales in 1882, four years before Haskett Smith climbed Napes Needle. In 1892 they climbed the North-East Buttress of Ben Nevis (VD) and descended Tower Ridge (Diff.), two of the best known climbs in Britain today. In doing so, they demonstrated a willingness to exit the gullies and accept the increased exposure of climbing on ridges and open faces. Like many of their peers, the Hopkinsons considered ‘bragging’ to be the worst offence for a climber. They kept few records of their climbs and did not approve of others doing so. As Alfred wrote: ‘The labels – Cust’s Gully, Westmorland’s Climb, Botterill’s Slab – convey nothing to my mind. These proprietary brands...are sometimes a little trying to those who like to find out things for themselves.’61 In 1898 John Hopkinson and three of his children died while climbing near Arolla in Switzerland. The other brothers never climbed again. Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘Great Beast 666’ (who will re-appear later in this book), appears to have played some part in the accident. Crowley had succeeded in descending a route which the local guides had said was impossible. He recommended it to Hopkinson as being without difficulty or danger for a responsible party and it is possible that they were attempting to find it when they fell. By that time, Crowley had already left the valley. John Hopkinson’s two surviving sons were killed in the First World War.
As the popularity of hill walking and rock climbing increased, so too did media interest in the activity, which in turn contributed to the growth of the sport. In 1894 Haskett Smith published Climbing in the British Isles, which provided brief details of climbs to be found in Britain, including some outcrops and sea cliffs. Haskett Smith’s book suggests that the subsidiary sport of bouldering (climbing small but technically difficult rock faces, without ropes) also had its origins around this time. His description of Bear Rock notes that it is ‘a queerly-shaped rock on Great Napes, which in the middle of March, 1889 was gravely attacked by a large party comprising some five or six of the strongest climbers in England. It is difficult to find, especially in seasons when the grass is at all long.’62 The most influential book on British climbing during this period was undoubtedly Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District, a collaboration between Owen Glynne Jones and the Abraham brothers, published in 1897, which contained lively descriptions of climbs and superb photographs. The success of the book ensured that Jones became the most famous rock climber of his generation. Like all successful self-publicists, he also attracted much criticism from his climbing peers.
Jones, like Whymper, was firmly part of the heroic rather than aesthetic school of climbing. He wrote about the challenge and excitement of climbing and rarely referred to the beauty of the mountain landscape. Also like Whymper, he was from a lower social class than many climbers of the day; his father was a Welsh carpenter and builder who moved to London shortly before Jones was born. Members of the Alpine Club dubbed the new wave of British rock climbers ‘gymnasts’ or ‘chimney sweeps’, by which they intended to imply both the intellectual and social inferiority of the sport as compared with alpinism. Jones was unrepentant: ‘A line must be drawn somewhere to separate the possible from the impossible, and some try to draw it by their own experience. They constitute what is called the ultra-gymnastic school of climbing. Its members are generally young and irresponsible.’
Born in 1867, Jones showed early promise at school and won a series of prizes and scholarships culminating in a Clothworkers’ Scholarship to the Central Institution in Exhibition Road, South Kensington, where in 1890 he obtained a first in experimental physics. He subsequently became a teacher at the City of London School. While a young man he read accounts of the Golden Age of mountaineering, including those by Stephen and Whymper. As C. E. Benson noted at the turn of the century: ‘About this time, too, certain striking and somewhat sensational photographs of rock-climbing began to find their way into shop windows, and immediately attracted attention and comment, the latter generally criticizing the intellectual capacity of climbers.’63 Jones’ attention was attracted by just such a photograph in a shop on The Strand and he decided to become a climber. Had he been born just a few years earlier, it is doubtful whether he would ever have considered the sport, but having once discovered it, he was addicted. When unable to get to the mountains, he climbed whatever else was available, including several London church towers, Cleopatra’s Needle and a complete traverse of the Common Room at the City of London School.
For Jones, the mountains were simply a stage upon which the climber performed. As a contemporary reviewer of Rock-Climbing in the English Lake District (1897) observed: ‘The soul of mountaineering did not appeal to him so much as its physical charms.’64 He had an apparent disregard for height and exposure (allegedly because of his short-sightedness), and days out with Jones had a habit of turning into epics which many partners were loath to repeat. Jones climbed in the Alps, including a guideless traverse of the Zinal Rothorn and the Weisshorn with the Hopkinsons, but it is chiefly for his contribution to British rock climbing that he is remembered. When he died, in a climbing accident on the Dent Blanche, his landlady said: ‘I always knew that he must come to this end, and he knew it too. He used to say so and say it was the death he would choose.’65
An outstanding gymnast, ‘he studied his own physical powers as a chauffeur studies a car and for that reason he talked a great deal about himself’,66 according to Haskett Smith. Although a fearless leader – ‘strong, cool and resolute’67 – he sometimes pre-inspected difficult pitches using a top rope, a technique he adopted on Kern Knotts Crack (VS 4c, 1896). This practice started an ethical debate that has continued in various forms to the present day. In typically acerbic style, Aleister Crowley argued that Jones’ reputation ‘is founded principally on climbs he did not make at