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A review of A Man for All Mountains by Jon Barton
Jack Longland first came to my attention on early climbing trips to North Wales. His name was literally etched into the guidebooks. There was that extraordinary route on Cloggy, first climbed in 1928, still respected nearly a century later. Then he appeared again in Frank Smythe's Camp Six, one of my favourite mountaineering books. By the time Mark Lambert published A Man for All Mountains, I realised I'd spent years bumping into the man without ever really knowing him.
Here are a few snippets I enjoyed while reading it.
The action starts on Everest at Camp Six, the highest camp ever pitched at that time, the protagonist is Jack Longland, one of the greatest climbers Britain has ever produced. The year is 1933.
On the journey to reach the campsite.
‘Perched on the north face of Everest, it was also the most inhospitable, the most precarious and probably the most dangerous. The word ‘campsite’ had no meaning here – this was a tiny ledge to which a six-by-four-foot tent had been made to cling only after snow and ice had been hacked out and a stony platform of sorts scraped together at its outer edge. Even then the tent floor sloped crazily downwards and its outermost third overhung the edge, flapping over the face that fell 6,000 feet to the Rongbuk Glacier.’
‘The north face of Everest is made up of slabs overlapping like tiles on a roof pitched at about forty-five degrees. These slabs are devoid of holds or features so that ice or snow clings to them only here and there; progress depended upon the tenuous grip of boot nails and a steady balance. There were few if any anchor points, so if one man were to slip, he would pull with him any others to whom he was roped.
So they had climbed unroped.’
On Jack Longland’s apprenticeship as a Lake District Climber.
'Abraham’s guidebook describes fifty-six climbs graded ‘Difficult’ and twenty-three ‘Exceptionally Severe’ in the Lake District. Jack had led nine of the ‘Difficults’ and four of the ‘Exceptionally Severe’ courses. He could be proud of his summer’s climbing.'
Jack Longland in the Alps, a pioneer of guideless climbing in the 1930s.
High standard fast alpinism always set Jack Longland apart from other climbers of his generation. As Lambert writes… ‘they were revelling in the ease and the speed with which they cruised along the ridges of Monte Rosa up to the little Margherita hut on the summit of the Signalkuppe (at 4,554 metres, the highest refuge in the Western Alps).
There were eleven parties on the ridge that day…. Several we sidetracked by making no halt at either of the Lyskamm summits, one last pair we only caught finally in the dip between Castor and Pollux. A few sharp little cameos do persist…. the spectacle of my companion, Lawrence Wager, struggling up a little slab on Pollux against the drag of the twenty pounds of geological specimens which he had crammed into his pockets…. Never climb Pollux if you go about with a geologist.’
Clogwyn Dur Addru, Snowdonia’s greatest mountain crag, the guidebook summary at the time of Jack’s early visit.
'No breach seems either possible or desirable along the whole extent of the W. Buttress, though there is the faintest of faint hopes for a human fly rather towards its left side…. The East Buttress…. has never been climbed. The final wall is quite impossible but the lower 200 feet below a broad green gallery may yet be conquered by a bold and expert party.'
The reconnaissance of the Black Cliff.
‘We scrambled up the Eastern Terrace and scanned it for a connection with the easier rocks above, but our scanning revealed nothing save a traverse that was only possible to the eye of faith, and the eye of faith is not always the servant of cold reason.’
Fred Pigott talking about the first ascent on Cloggy.
‘Great unclimbed cliffs are rare, so rare that one is indeed to be counted among the fortunate if allowed to practise one’s craft upon them, to share with others the stimulation of defeat, the timeless, tense hours of struggle, and the elation of victory – elation, alas ! always tinged with the inevitable regret that the rocks which have filled our thoughts for so long, can never quite mean the same to us again.’
Climbing skyscraper’s isn’t new… Longland's exploits around his Cambridge College spires.
‘I’d already climbed King’s College Chapel with Ivan Waller, a 95 feet high agonisingly shallow chimney with a copper lightning conductor as a kind of hand aid. St John’s Tower was notorious as having three successive and virtually unprotected overhangs. It had been ascended only once before. Bobby Chew, who later became headmaster of Gordonstoun, began our series of attempts.’
Like many climbers Jack enjoyed a good adventure, no matter how unconventional.
‘February 1929 was exceptionally cold. The Cam froze over and Jack joined Chew, Chapman and Peter Scott in an attempt to see how far up the river they could skate.’
The result… fifteen miles on the ice to Ely.
For 1920s and 30s British climbers there was just one thought in their mind when racing up hard Alpine routes.
‘Despite miserable weather, Jack had achieved a great deal. The first British lead of the Knubel crack and the fifth ascent of the Younggrat, both guideless, placed him firmly amongst the top ranks of British alpinists.
And in one corner of his mind was the realisation that, surely, he had established unassailable credentials for the greatest climb of all – Everest.’
Jack has always had the respect of climbing historians.
Tony Smythe would summarise the views of many subsequent generations of mountaineers: ‘In the whirling snow, coming suddenly upon the Camp 5 tents was not just superb route-finding, it was cheating almost certain death. His achievement has long been regarded as one of the finest in mountaineering history.’
A summary of the 1933 Everest Expedition in six words.
‘This extraordinary mountain finds people out.’
Frank Smythe writes to Jack which gives an idea why it took until 1975 and the accomplishments of a climbing maverick to get a British climber to the summit.
‘The teams chosen by the Everest Committee have always included people who had no right to be on Everest and were chosen because they were favourites of individual members of the EC.…
The folly to which the EC can go is exemplified in the choice of Geoffrey Bruce as leader when it is well known that he actually dislikes mountaineering and does not even spend his holidays climbing.’
Of Greenland and black and white photography.
‘In the clear northern light we could see the broad, unbroken line of the ice floes ahead, punctuated with big icebergs.’
‘The mountains faded as the coast bent away, a line of snow-marked peaks, with clean, white glaciers dropping to the fjords between. At once came a realisation of the drab inadequacy of most arctic photographs on seeing for the first time the glittering ice, the cold brilliance of the sky.’
‘The next day they woke to calmer seas. And soon they encountered their first Inuit, a pair hunting on the floes some four miles from the coast.’
‘The team spent an hour and a half on the summit. Fountaine was busy with his boiling-point thermometers, eventually producing similar results from all three to give a height of 12,250 feet (3,734 metres).’
‘Courtauld took theodolite readings to link in with his work at Camp VII, and Munck, rather sheepishly, produced a Danish flag.’
‘They had made the first ascent of the highest mountain in the Arctic, but as yet it had no name. Sometime later, the Place-name Committee in Copenhagen decided on Gunnbjørn Tinde. ‘Tinde’ means ‘summit’, and ‘Gunnbjørn’ recalled the tenth-century Viking Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, who was driven by a storm into the seas west of Iceland, saw glaciers to the west and was thus the first to discover Greenland.’
Jack’s famous (almost) last words.
‘I defeated my own as well as my father’s hopes.’
By the end of the book, I came away with a much greater appreciation of Jack Longland. Before reading it, he was simply a famous name attached to intimidating routes and classic expedition books. Afterwards he emerged as one of Britain's complete mountaineers: technically gifted, intellectually curious, adventurous, modest and seemingly happiest whenever there was unexplored ground ahead.
Mark Lambert has produced far more than a biography. He's recreated an era when great unclimbed cliffs still existed, Everest remained a mystery, Greenland's highest summit was unclimbed, and Britain's finest climbers simply got on with extraordinary adventures. It was however something else, something quite striking that captivated me about this book. Longland himself was clearly an excellent writer. Many climbing biographies rely on modern narrative around sparse historical sources, but here the subject's own words repeatedly become the highlights of the book. That, perhaps more than anything, explains why his voice has echoed through climbing literature for nearly a century.
