ROCK STARS
As climbers compete in the Olympics for the first time this year, Richard Else takes us back to the roots of an exhilarating sport, when brave pioneers first defied gravity to ascend rock faces on the fells and peaks of Britain
As climbers compete in the Olympics for the first time this year, we take a look at the pioneers who first scaled the rock faces of Britain’s peaks and fells.
Bloody hell! It’s not easy... You get your boot jammed in this crack, then you can’t get the damn thing out.”
Thirty years ago, I was on the granite rock high above Chamonix in the French Alps, mesmerised by Chris Bonington’s Herculean efforts as his nailed boots scrabbled for grip. Chris’s struggle was a result of his bid to emulate Albert Mummery’s first ascent of the Aiguille du Grépon in the French Alps in 1881 – while wearing the tweeds, woollen stockings and velour hat that were the uniform of gentleman climbers of the period.
Mummery was a merchant’s son from Kent, a shadowy figure, known today by his one book, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus. For Mummery, like Bonington, the hardest climb was always the best and he was, Sir Chris believes, “the man who, more than anyone, could be described as the father of modern climbing. No one else of that period had the technical ability on rock or vision that he enjoyed.”
Mummery was someone who sought out difficult ascents, not simply the easiest way to the summit. Yet, accepting the convention of the time, he initially climbed the Grépon with two outstanding Swiss guides.
Just five years later, Walter Parry Haskett Smith, Eton- and Oxfordeducated, made the first ascent of Napes Needle – a spectacular pinnacle on Great Gable in the Lake District. It was a groundbreaking solo effort. Afterwards, having completed a tricky reverse from the summit, he wryly commented, “it was an undoubted satisfaction to stand once more on solid ground”. Smith’s 1886 achievement is often seen as the birth of modern rock climbing in Britain, yet it builds on the adventures of a succession of daring individuals who saw the mountains not as somewhere to be avoided, but as immensely fertile ground to explore. So it’s difficult to pin down when climbing really began.
There’s a case to be made for Donald McDonald, a crofter from Lewis, who climbed the sea stack off Handa
Island, Sutherland in 1876, for the sheer joy of getting to the top. The romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge has a claim to be England’s first recorded rock climber when, in 1802, he descended from Lakeland’s second highest summit, Scafell, with “limbs all in a tremble” and with friction burns on his chest from sliding against the rock.
From those early beginnings, if you’ll excuse the pun, it’s all uphill. The sport became more egalitarian after the Second World War with a huge influx of working-class climbers. Typical of the breed was Joe Brown – one of the finest climbers to ever grace the sport – who started out using a stolen rope, and moved over vertical rock with the fluency of a ballet dancer. From the 1960s onwards, television was instrumental in allowing armchair adventurers to eavesdrop on people such as Brown and their games of vertical chess.
Significantly, mountaineering has never been an all-male preserve. Lucy
“Lucy Walker’s preferred mountain food was sponge cake and Champagne”
Walker made the first female ascent of the Matterhorn in 1871, having previously achieved the same feat on the Eiger in the Swiss Alps seven years earlier. As an inspiration to anyone contemplating the sport, Walker had only started climbing after a doctor advised being outdoors to help her rheumatism. In total, she undertook almost 100 expeditions and her preferred mountain food was reported to be sponge cake and Champagne.
Gwen Moffat’s trailblazing career on steep rock started in the Second World War. Unconventional in her life and climbing, she often ascended barefoot, saying: “You adhere better to the rock.” Gwen supported herself with a variety of jobs, from artists’ model to farm worker, before becoming Britain’s first certified female climbing guide in 1953. Today, at 96, her love of high places is undiminished. “I derive my security from mountains, it’s the confidence I get from being in them.”
The same could be said of Nea Morin. Climbers might know her through an eponymous route in North Wales, but she deserves wider recognition. Born almost two decades before Gwen Moffat, she was not only one of the great female inter-war climbers but an early advocate of all-female climbing teams. Her climbing career encompassed Wales, Cornwall and Scotland. She was an avid traveller and, by the age of 20, was tackling routes in the Alps and, later, the Himalaya. In 1928 she married French mountaineer Jean Morin, who was killed fighting with the Free French forces in 1943.
She later climbed successfully with her daughter Louise.
Since its beginnings, climbing has diversified in ways the early pioneers would barely recognise. In addition to the traditional or ‘trad’ climbing, where the protection is placed by the first person on the route, there are sports routes where anchors are pre-placed and drilled into the cliff face, enabling harder lines to be climbed in relative safety. Bouldering – as the name suggests – is undertaken on freestanding rocks where a sequence of moves requires excellent technique.
The past 25 years has seen a proliferation of indoor climbing walls everywhere, from big cities to remote communities. They attract all abilities and ages and, for many, are a sport in their own right. There’s a thriving competition circuit including speed climbing – a mesmerising spectacle in which athletes race up a route in seconds, with hands and feet barely touching the holds, where one slip spells disaster.
NEW FRONTIERS
While climbing jargon can be confusing, with different systems for grading routes, esoteric terminology, a plethora of equipment and techniques, the spectacle of someone defying gravity is always compelling.
Climbing has many distinct eras. In the 1980s and 90s, highly motivated individuals such as Ben Moon (who started climbing at the age of seven) and Jerry Moffatt relentlessly pushed sport-climbing standards at home and abroad. One landmark Ben Moon route, Hubble at Miller’s Dale in Derbyshire, was once considered the hardest sport climb in the world. And progress hasn’t stopped – even today standards are still being driven relentlessly forward. The prize for the most bizarre first ascent is former taxman Mick Fowler’s 20-metre climb of an ice streak on the west face of St Pancras station in 1987.
At the Tokyo Olympics, we’ll see climbing make its competitive debut with speed, bouldering and lead climbing. The charismatic Shauna Coxsey is representing Britain and it would take a brave person to predict the outcome, especially as each athlete will need to compete in all three disciplines. Whoever wins, athletes now little known will suddenly become big names. I recommend watching while firmly anchored to the sofa – it’s guaranteed to induce vertigo, just as Mummery’s epic ascent did 140 years ago.
“Speed climbing is a mesmerising spectacle, where one slip spells disaster”