Matterhorn’s horrible revenge: British expedition led to horror

Looming over the Swiss mountain town of Zermatt with its forbidding peak twisting upwards like a collapsed witch’s hat, the Matterhorn was said to be home to evil spirits.

It was they whom locals blamed for the fates of the British climbers who were first to conquer the mountain.

On that historic summer’s day in July 1865, team leader Edward Whymper was so cock-a-hoop about reaching the summit and claiming this prize for Britain that he threw rocks down at the rival Italian team he had raced to the top.

After watching gleefully as they ‘turned and fled’, the fearless 25-year-old and his six companions celebrated by planting a tent pole in the snow and tying a shirt to it as an impromptu flag, before taking in the view.

‘Ten thousand feet beneath us were the green fields of Zermatt, dotted with chalets, from which blue smoke rose lazily,’ he later wrote.

‘There were black and gloomy forests, bright and cheerful meadows; bounding waterfalls and tranquil lakes; sunny plains and frigid plateaux. Every combination that the world can give, and every contrast that the heart could desire.’

Quoting a line from the 18th-century poet Thomas Mordaunt, Whymper described their time at the peak as ‘one crowded hour of glorious life’.

But for four men in his party, that glorious life was about to come to an abrupt end in what many people at the time believed was a horrifying accident – but others claimed was murder.

The events of that tragic afternoon were recalled in The Ascent Of The Matterhorn, which Whymper wrote five years after his triumph. Now an updated version of the book is being published, including unseen photographs taken by Whymper, which are testament to the artistic impulses that first took him to the Alps.

He arrived during what became known as the ‘Golden Age of Alpinism’, with rich young men from Britain climbing mountains for extra excitement during their Grand Tours of Europe.

Not for them the hi-tech clothing and equipment of today. Wearing nothing more protective than sturdy tweed suits and tying handkerchiefs around their shoes to give them extra grip, they exhibited great derring-do, as did Whymper.

But he was from a very different background. One of 11 children born into a family of engravers in south London in 1840, he dreamed that he would ‘one day turn out some great person; be the person of my day’ and his chance came when, aged 20, he was taken on as an artist by publisher William Longman.

In 1860, Longman dispatched Whymper to the Alps to gather illustrations to sate the growing appetite for mountain books among an increasingly literate Victorian public, keen to read anything they could about the unknown natural world.

As Whymper recalled, he had never even seen a mountain, much less climbed one, but after scaling Mont Pelvoux in the French Alps he was hooked and soon became obsessed with conquering the Matterhorn.

At 14,692 ft, it was not the highest mountain in the region – that was Mont Blanc, over 1,000ft higher – but its reputation was fearsome.

‘It attracted me simply by its grandeur,’ Whymper enthused. ‘It was the last great Alpine peak which remained unscaled – less on account of the difficulty than from the terror inspired by its invincible appearance.’

Increasingly wealthy thanks to the popularity of his engravings, Whymper funded trip after trip, determined to find a way up it or to prove it to be really inaccessible.

During one solo attempt on the Italian side of the Matterhorn, he fell 200 feet, coming to a halt just before a yawning precipice with an 800-ft drop. As he plunged downwards, he sustained more than 20 serious wounds to his head and tried in vain to close them with one hand whilst clinging to the rock with the other.

‘It was useless; the blood jerked out in blinding jets at each pulsation. At last, in a moment of inspiration, I kicked out a big lump of snow, and stuck it as a plaster on my head. The idea was a happy one, and the flow of blood diminished.

‘Then, scrambling up, I got, not a moment too soon, to a place of safety, and fainted away.’

On other attempts he was accompanied by Jean-Antoine Carrel, an Italian mountain guide whose life’s ambition was to vanquish the Matterhorn for the honour of his native valley.

Their collaboration ended in early July 1865 when Whymper, frustrated by their failures in tackling the mountain from the Italian village of Breuil, became convinced that it was best approached from the Swiss side – arguing that its seemingly precipitous appearance when viewed from Zermatt was an illusion.

Carrel pretended to agree with him and they arranged to travel together to Zermatt but on the morning they were due to depart he learned that Carrel had secretly set off up the mountain from Breuil with an Italian party instead.

‘I was greatly mortified,’ he wrote. ‘The Italians had clearly stolen a march upon me.’

Realising that a mist descending on the Matterhorn would hinder their progress, Whymper calculated that he might reach Zermatt in time to beat them to the summit.

But Carrel’s betrayal had left Whymper without the porters or guides he needed for the journey across to Zermatt and so he made the acquaintance of other climbers in Breuil including 18-year-old Lord Francis Douglas.

Although the young Scottish aristocrat had little mountaineering experience, he had a porter who could help carry their belongings to Zermatt and this was enough to convince Whymper that they should team up for his eighth attempt on the Matterhorn.

Together they travelled to Zermatt where just as little deliberation went into the recruitment of 37-year-old Charles Hudson – an English vicar whose good looks and fiery sermons had won him a popular following back home.

Whymper made Hudson’s acquaintance at an inn on the night before the scheduled ascent, and learned he was a veteran mountaineer planning his own attempt on the Matterhorn.

The following morning, Whymper neutralised this potential competitor by persuading the athletic Reverend to climb with him.

It was to prove a fatal error. Hudson was travelling with 19-year-old Douglas Hadow, the Harrow-educated son of the chairman of the P&O shipping company.

Hadow had little knowledge of mountaineering but, after being reassured by the Reverend Hudson that his young companion was ‘good enough’, Whymper agreed he could come along too.

In Zermatt, he also managed to engage the services of experienced guides Michel Croz and Peter Taugwalder, 37 and 45, along with Taugwalder’s 18-year-old son Peter.

After setting off on July 13, ‘at half-past five, on a brilliant and cloudless morning,’ their first task was to traverse the Hoernli ridge – 3,280 feet of steep and narrow rock leading to the base of the Matterhorn. One modern-day climber has described it as ‘like walking on an ironing board with a 2,000 metre drop on each side. If you slip, your only choice is which side to fall: Switzerland or Italy.’

Surmounting this challenge without any problems they made excellent progress and by noon they had set up a base camp at the foot of the mountain.

After setting off at dawn the following day they discovered that Whymper had been correct in surmising that what had looked impracticable and impassable from Zermatt – and deterred others from making the attempt – was in fact a route ‘so easy that we could run about’.

Finally only 200 feet lay between them and their snowy prize and Whymper and Croz dashed onwards in a neck-and-neck race which ended in a dead heat.

‘The Matterhorn was ours,’ declared Whymper. His joy, however, was premature for they had yet to make the descent.

The seven of them were roped together and as they edged their way downwards the inexperienced Hadow slipped, knocking into Croz, Douglas and Hudson who were all ahead of him.

Feeling the sudden tug further up the rope, Whymper and the two Taugwalders managed to grab some nearby rocks to arrest their fall but the rope between Peter Taugwalder Senior and Hadow snapped and the four men plummeted downwards.

‘For two or three seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downward on their backs and spreading out their hands endeavouring to save themselves,’ recalled Whymper.

‘Then they disappeared one by one and fell from precipice to precipice into the Matterhorn glacier below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet in height.’

The three survivors were so traumatised that Whymper wondered how they managed to continue downwards.

‘For more than two hours afterwards I thought almost every moment that the next would be my last; for the Taugwalders, utterly unnerved, were not only incapable of giving assistance, but were in such a state that a slip might have been expected from them at any moment.’

The next day the broken bodies of Michel Croz, Charles Hudson and Douglas Hadow were recovered from the glacier. They were buried in the local churchyard. No traces of Lord Francis Douglas were ever found, save a boot, gloves and a belt.

The circumstances of his death shocked Britain’s ruling class. Climbers had fallen to their deaths before without causing much clamour but Douglas was from a very notable family. His older brother John, the Marquess of Queensberry, was later to become famous for his role in the downfall of Oscar Wilde, lover of his son Lord Alfred Douglas.

The title was one of the oldest in Britain and Queen Victoria in particular was outraged, believing that a distinguished member of her realm’s peerage had no business dangling at the end of a rope.

While she suggested that her government consider a ban on climbing, the publicity surrounding the accident and the subsequent inquiry in Zermatt only seemed to fan the craze for mountaineering.

At that inquiry, it was suggested that Peter Taugwalder Senior might have deliberately cut the rope to save his life and that of his son. But this was absurd because there would not have been time for him to do so, and anyway it was clear that the length connecting him to Hadow was old and worn.

Why such a rope would have been used was never explained. One explanation may be that Whymper’s team were so keen to beat the Italians that they overlooked basic equipment checks but we will probably never know.

What is certain is that the accident had attracted global attention and Whymper toured the world, giving slide-shows and talks which drew in many thousands of people. One such talk was at Harrow where it captivated an 18-year-old pupil named Winston Churchill.

He recalled being enthralled by ‘the great Mr Whymper’ and his ‘wonderful pictures of guides and tourists hanging on by their eyelids or standing with their backs to precipices which even in photographs made one squirm.’

Like many others, Churchill was inspired to visit the Alps himself, scaling the 15,200-feet Monte Rosa in 1894. But Whymper preferred to go elsewhere, providing an important contribution to Arctic exploration with the pioneering use of specially constructed sledges to visit the interior of Greenland and making the first ascent of Ecuador’s Chimborazo volcano in 1880.

For the rest of his life he was haunted by nightmares of his ‘comrades of the Matterhorn, slipping on their backs, one after the other’.

‘I shall always see them,’ he wrote to a friend but while he rarely returned to the region it was in the French resort of Chamonix that he spent his last days in 1911.

Always fond of a drink, he had enjoyed a last breakfast of a rum omelette, washed down with Chablis, champagne and Cognac, before returning to his hotel room. There he became ill and, refusing all medical treatment, died alone at the age of 71.

He was buried in the shadow of Mont Blanc, but it is for the Matterhorn that he will always be remembered.

As he once wrote, it had proved ‘a stubborn foe which resisted long and gave many a hard blow.

‘It was defeated at least with an ease that none could have anticipated, but, like a relentless enemy – conquered but not crushed – it took terrible vengeance.’