Pints, potions and glasses (1)

A three-part disquisition, in which we celebrate the Golden Age of drinking and mountaineering.

Nobody who reads Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, a collection of the earliest effusions "by Members of the Alpine Club", can fail to be impressed by their capacity. Not just for adventure – so much can be taken for granted in the protagonists of this heroic era – but for their consumption of alcoholic beverages. Yes, you read that right: drinking while climbing was more than merely acceptable; in those days, it was de rigueur.

For this was the true golden age of alcoholic alpinism. Strictly speaking, of course, the term “Golden Age” refers not to the potations but only to the pioneering climbs between Alfred Wills’s ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Edward Whymper’s conquest of the Matterhorn in 1865 – the phrase was coined by the controversial W A B Coolidge, an Oxford don-turned-mountaineer who doubtless enjoyed his port at High Table.

Yet alcohol stood at the very heart of this alpinistic enterprise. Paging through the inaugural volume of Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers (1859), for example, we find a “W. Mathews, Jun.” gearing up at a village in the Val de Bagnes for an attempt on the Graffeineire, or Grand Combin:

Our next step was to settle the commissariat for the three days’ march. We took six loaves of bread, a quantity of excellent cold chamois, a piece of cheese, chocolate, sugar, and ten bottles of sour white wine. Wine is always a heavy and troublesome thing to carry, but it is not easy to dispense with it, and I have always found a mixture of wine, snow, and sugar a very refreshing beverage at great altitudes. Simond was greatly dissatisfied that there was no vin rouge; “ Le vin blanc,” said he, “coupe toujours les jambes” – a result which happily we did not experience.

Now William Mathews (1828–1901) was not just any old toper. He too was at the very heart of the enterprise, having first proposed the formation of an Alpine Club in a letter to a climbing colleague in February 1857, the year after his bibulous investigations in the Val de Bagnes.

The Finsteraarhorn from the southeast
Illustration from Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

Matters moved along during an ascent of the “Finster Aarhorn” in August 1857 by William Mathews, his cousin St John Mathews, John Ellis, E S Kennedy and J F Hardy – who wrote up the trip for Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, not omitting details of the commissariat:

We woke on August 12th to find the clouds all swept away, and as brilliant a morning as we could desire. In the highest spirits we ate a hearty breakfast, and then descended to the kitchen to arrange about provisions. Wine in abundance, one bottle of brandy, afterwards rashly increased to two, roast mutton, roast veal, ham, sausage, cheese, bread, figs and raisins, were put together, one after the other, till the pile looked big enough to feed an army, and the corresponding arithmetic amounted to seventy-four francs. Later in the morning the guides expressed a desire for “noch ein wenig Brod und Fleisch,” and the result of our consenting to this request was that the bill was increased to 114 francs, whence I presume that the word “wenig” does not exactly correspond to our English “little”, nor do I think it would have been a difficult matter to prove, from the character of the additions which were actually made to our store, that the phrase “Brod und Fleisch” includes things potable as well as things edible.

The supernumerary bottle of spirits soon took the anticipated toll on the least reliable of the party’s guides:

He had already, in my opinion, had more cognac than was good for him, but being somewhat flustered by our objurgations, he now drew frequent and copious draughts from the dangerous flask.

Leaving two of the guides behind on a col, the party reached the summit at 11.53 – the first to do so for sixteen years – and celebrated their triumph appropriately:

A very small modicum of brandy tempered with snow was then administered to each (wine would have been better, but it would not have been possible to carry a sufficient quantity through the final climb), and we sat down to enjoy the magnificent scene around us.

In fact, they did more than enjoy the scenery, for it was during this same expedition that Mathews and his friends resolved to form what was to become the world’s first Alpine Club. And we may depend upon it that the fateful decision was adequately lubricated.

Ascent of the "Schwarze Glacier"
Illustration from Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

During the following autumn, ad hoc gatherings ensued at Mathews's house near Birmingham, leading to the founding of the Alpine Club itself on 22 December 1857 at a dinner meeting chaired by E S Kennedy. If only we still had the wine list from that illustrious occasion at Ashley’s Hotel in London….

Now steady on, I hear you objurgate, the Alpine Clubbists were by no means the first to bring beverages into the mountains. And this one must concede. And while we’re at it, let us dispel any inference that such drinking was just a guy thing: when Henriette d’Angeville (1794–1871) climbed Mont Blanc in 1838, one of the first women to do so, her commissariat included “18 bouteilles de vin de St. Jean, 1 bouteille d’eau-de-vie de Cognac, 1 bouteille de sirop de capillaire, 1 baril de vin ordinaire.”

A view of Mont Blanc from the Jardin
Illustration from Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

Then there was Albert Smith (1816–1860), the impresario who put on a show about Mont Blanc in London that ran for 2,000 performances over six years. The script was inspired by his ascent of the mountain in 1851 when, between them, his four guides and twenty porters had to carry sixty bottles of vin ordinaire, six of Bordeaux, ten of St George, fifteen of St Jean, three of cognac and two of champagne, to say nothing of other liquid refreshments supplied by the Hôtel de Londres at Chamonix.

After all, nobody in their right mind would drink the local water in those days. And, while we’d now buy our beers and wines at an alpine hut, those Golden Age pioneers had to carry up all their victuals to some high-mountain cowshed or bivouac à la belle étoile …

(Next: the risks attendant on alcoholic alpinism are acknowledged)