Walter Parry Haskett Smith

Walter Parry Haskett Smith (1859–1946) is often called the Father of Rock Climbing. Born in Bognor Regis, England, the son of a wealthy landowner, he attended Eton where he excelled at athletics, before enrolling in Trinity College, Oxford.

At Oxford he studied law and continued along a promising athletic path, reaching a long jump (unofficial) world record of 25 feet once in practice. On a university reading party at Aber, Wales in 1880, Haskett Smith became interested in exploring local cliffs, and in 1881 he journeyed to the Lake District and took a room at the inn at Wasdale Head, staying there for two months, meeting Frederick Herman Bowring, an enthusiastic fell-scrambler some forty years older, and, in essence, becoming Bowring's protégé. Bowring had also been an athlete in his university days, reaching 21 feet in the long jump in the 1840s.

By the following summer, Haskett Smith had begun to record his efforts – which were more akin to what we now think of as rock climbing than to the exposed scrambles of previous generations.

A lifelong devotee of etymologies, and possessing a gift for describing past acquaintances, Haskett Smith delighted in producing rambling and witty pieces about his athletic avocation. For instance, in his description of Bear Rock in "Climbing in the British Isles", the reader divines a subtle poke at the new pastime of bouldering: "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 a little difficult to find, especially in seasons when the grass is at all long."

Wikipedia

Although Haskett-Smith was not the first person to go rock-climbing, he is usually credited with inventing the modern concept of the sport. In essence, he had the radical idea of not bothering to go all the way to the top of a mountain after making a climb. Rather, he put the rock-climbing cart before the mountaineering horse of the day and decided it was much more fun simply to climb short English routes for their own sake, rather than merely as a bit of training before going on a European Alpine holiday. This paradigm-shift allowed gentlemen to start taking seriously British crags as sporting challenges in their own right. Conveniently, for the symbolic purposes beloved of historians, Haskett-Smith kicked off this era by climbing an iconic British landscape feature; Napes Needle, the 70ft rock spire which stands proud of the lower flanks of the Lakeland mountain, Great Gable. This momentous event in climbing history was undertaken solo in 1886. ‘I felt as small as a mouse climbing a milestone’, he said, after leaving his handkerchief fluttering from the ‘summit’ weighted by some stones to prove he’d done it. Haskett-Smith was also influential for writing the first climbing guide to British crags in 1894. In 1936, on the 50th anniversary of his historic ascent, he again climbed the Needle, aged 77. A large crowd of well wishers shouted up to him from the base of the climb, ‘Tell us a story’‘There is no other story’, he replied, ‘this is the top storey’.

Mountain Heritage Trust