Whymper of the Matterhorn: A Victorian Tragedy

The Matterhorn accident on July 14th, 1865, was a great Victorian tragedy. As a party of seven climbers – the Reverend Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas, Douglas Hadow, Edward Whymper and their three guides, Michel Croz, Peter Taugwalder and his son – was descending after reaching a summit widely believed to be inaccessible, disaster struck high on the fearsome north face of the mountain. Hadow slipped, dislodged Croz who was below him, and the two falling bodies dragged Hudson and Lord Francis from their holds. All four plunged 3,000 feet to their deaths down the north face, their broken bodies ending up on the Tiefenmatten glacier. Whymper and the Taugwalders were only saved by the rope breaking between old Peter and Lord Francis. 'No accident in the history of mountaineering,' Arnold Lunn later wrote in Matterhorn Centenary 'has created such a sensation.' On July 27th, 1865, a leading article in The Times questioned 'why ... the best blood of England [was to] waste itself scaling hitherto inaccessible peaks'. Lord Francis was 'the heir apparent to one of our noblest titles [the Marquess of Queensberry]' and all the dead Englishmen were 'scholars and gentlemen ...