Chapter Four - The Cambridge School of Friendship 1904-1910
Probably George would always have cared deeply for people and been cared for deeply by them in any case, but I think the peculiar importance that he attached to this matter of friends was partly due to his years at Cambridge. In the years from 1904 to 1910 there was growing up at Cambridge a group of young and older people, women as well as men, who between the, contrived to make a very remarkable contribution to the life of their generation. It is difficult for anyone who was not there in those years to give any account of it. Very little of it has got over in the outside world in any written or definite form. One or two short lives, one or two collections of letters, a biography in a magazine here and there, are so far all its memorials. From these materials however, it is possible to form some sort of picture of what one might almost call the ‘Cambridge School of Friendship’ – for the University in those years can hardly have produced any manifestations of human activity more ultimately valuable than this. But it is most clearly to be recognised in the persons and lives of its members, conscious or unconscious exponents of an art of life, not wholly new, but practised in a manner new to their time. By their fruits we have come to know them.
Well, George was in the middle of all this, and few men can have had more friends, or friends who welcomed his coming more eagerly, and enjoyed their actual presence with keener pleasure.
In October 1905 George went up to Cambridge to study History at Magdalene. He had briefly toyed with the idea of an army career the previous year, but had given that up, not being by nature one of the ‘hearties’ who would enjoy that sort of life. His plan, to the extent that he had one, was to write and to teach, and History seemed to him the most amenable way of accomplishing this, even though he had excelled at Maths at Winchester. He had won a scholarship in History, so that settled his fate.
He had even then very strong feelings about education, which were later to coalesce into a plan, with Geoffrey Young and others, for a radical school for boys. I call them feelings and not views, because he not only thought but felt about it. He saw education then chiefly as a freedom, and a source of the best kind of pleasure. He had a great hatred at all times of illiberality and smallness and the cramping narrowness of view which hinder the free activity of the mind and spirit. The chief function of education was in his eyes to set men free from those things. He minded intensely to the subjection of the human soul to moods and fits of irritation or gloom, and the promptings of selfishness in any shape. His great desire was for the spirit of Man to exercise itself as freely and fearlessly and joyously as a climber on a hill. Of course, he was then only feeling his way towards the practical application of all this, in the sphere of teaching, but the root of the matter was already there. He wanted life to be urbane, civilized, affectionate, and merry. This, he learnt at Cambridge.
Very early one morning before his first term began, George went to King’s Chapel for Matins and met Arthur Benson, his tutor, though he didn’t know at the time that it was he. How fresh and green George appeared! Certainly Benson was much taken with this callow undergraduate in the new gown, who so winsomely sat and stood and knelt at all the proper times when everyone else was languorously sitting about. A ‘fine-looking boy’, with a graceful demeanour, he called him and was desperate to get a look at his face. When he managed to do so, he stopped in awe of his beauty, as so many another before and since. But when he met George properly, later, when George turned up dutifully at his rooms, he was thoroughly taken with much more than his looks. They talked long of history and George’s desire to get writing – to which end he set George to weekly essays – and in the end Benson came away finding him ingenuous, unaffected, and full of admiration for all good things.
George did not at first like Cambridge very much, finding it shallow compared to Winchester, where the men were trained to examine an issue from all angles, and confessed as much to his Tutor. Benson, with all the good will of a man who went back to be Mater at his beloved prep school, said that he had felt the same of Cambridge as compared to Eton and that time would make room for Magdalene in his heart. George’s initial dismay might be understood in view of the waggish translation of Magdalene’s motto Garde ta foy as ‘Mind your Liver’, rather than ‘Keep your Faith’. He came to appreciate it later, but as a green Wykehamist, it was a little startling.
Benson was no stranger to difficult or strong feelings. He suffered from depression, despite every success in life, and was a lifelong bachelor, as we used to say, which surely contributed to his depression or feeling of frustration at least, for in those days no one knew or would have spoken the word homosexual – and if one did, the poor unfortunate was regarded as a subject for analysis. However tormented Benson might have been by his circumstances, he was undoubtedly brilliant in every sphere of life and undertaking.
Born 1862, his father was Edward White Benson, afterwards the Archbishop of Canterbury. Benson, while teaching at Eton after taking a First at King’s College, became a noted poet and essayist, biographer, diarist, and literary critic, writing acclaimed studies of Rossetti, Fitzgerald, Pater, Tennyson, and Ruskin. He also edited the letters of Queen Victoria, and wrote librettos. In 1902 Sir Edward Elgar commissioned him to write a libretto for ‘Coronation Ode’ at the request of the King. He also wrote a libretto to Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, which has been sung at the closing of the London Proms at the Royal Albert Hall ever since. We knew him also as a climber of some note in his day, and a friend of Geoffrey Young’s as student and fellow master at Eton; it was Benson who introduced Geoffrey to climbing.
He came from an illustrious family, for not only was his father Archbishop of Canterbury, but his brother Hugh, with whom George became good friends as well, first became a noted Anglican priest, then a convert to Roman Catholicism, a Jesuit, and a Monsignor. At the time that George knew Hugh he was the Catholic chaplain to undergraduates, but George knew him as a man of letters, for Hugh eventually published some fifteen novels, among other books, including Lord of the World, science fiction favourably compared to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
While George’s relationship with Arthur Benson was extremely fruitful, it was not without difficulty or incident. Benson could be waspish when he chose, although whether part of the character of his depression or the result of the world’s response to his open homosexuality is difficult to tell. He was simply horrid to Ruth Mallory when he met her after the wedding, through no fault of Ruth’s, as he didn’t appear to like women in general, and certainly not those who captured his beloved George. He criticised everything from her intellect to the décor, without quite realising I believe that George had a large part in choosing the décor at The Holt, and that his opinion of her intellect may have stemmed from his refusal to let her get a word in edgewise. Personally, Benson and I never saw eye to eye, literally or in any other way. He didn’t like outspoken women, and I was too headstrong to keep my mouth shut. ‘Miss Sanders!’ he would exclaim, at the limit of his tolerance of my goading. ‘You are the most trying of creatures!’ It was the worst epithet he could level. But I bore him for George’s sake, and eventually we settled into a sort of mutual truce.
But some of the difficulties lay with George, too. He was notoriously haphazard in this period in getting assignments in on time, chiefly due to getting carried away with the subject and writing at great length far into the night. After one too many such incidents, Benson buttonholed him in the courtyard, rather desperately demanding to know why he was always late.
‘Don’t you understand, my boy, that I want to read these essays of yours?’ He said in exasperation. ‘They’re fascinating, and it vexes me to have to rush through them and not be able to give them the attention they deserve.’
After this, George was never again late with an essay.
He already considered that the element of pleasure ought to be present in education from the outset, since one of its ends was pleasure. This was tremendously real to him. Never was there anyone who took a livelier delight in the things of the mind. His enjoyment of a piece of good writing was extraordinary. Authors to him were friends, more actual than many living men. His general attitude was Stevensonian, to find happiness despite outward circumstances, to live the dream, whether or not in circumstances one liked. not giving up even when defeated. He especially loved Stevenson for the measure of freedom to which he had attained in spite of bodily ailments and harassing cares; because he was so outstandingly urbane in the desired sense.
How much of this George owed to other people! To Benson for instance, or to Irving at Winchester. But he never made any attributions because he very seldom talked about himself, as himself, at all. His impersonality, his interest in ideas rather than in people, was then one of his great charms. If he hadn’t later modified it, this impersonality would have been a drawback, removing him from the sphere of human commerce into an entirely rarefied world. One can find clues to how he thought about himself, however, in some of his reading choices: when Forster’s A Room With a View came out, he was enchanted by the character of George Emerson, the strange, beautiful and melancholy Socialist lover of Lucy Honeychurch.
Some Cambridge friends, Rupert Brooke and James Strachey among them, found him ‘cold’ or ‘virginally pure’, but this was not for any want of liking people, rather simply his view of life. It was true enough to say of him at Cambridge that he saw life in terms of literature, or at least through the lens, so to speak, of literature and art. He thought and spoke of people and events in terms of literature; and scenes very often in terms of art. In the same way he saw religion first as mountaineering. I mean that mountaineering first brought out in him the religious sense in a spontaneous and personal way.
For his friends, one of the great interests and excitements of knowing him was to watch the gradual change and development which took place in him, the movement towards actuality, or what might be called actualisation, until he came at last, so ripely and so fully, to see Religion as the growth of the spirit, and common life as the necessary vehicle and instrument of that growth. Without some understanding of this process it would be impossible to fully to understand him, for it was just this realisation that made his life psychologically exciting. He typified, in a very clear and special way the human pilgrimage from the beauty of the mind to the beauty of the spirit; with natural beauty – and for him especially the beauty of mountains – accompanying him all the way.
In a practical sphere, he did very badly in his annual exams, taking only a Third. The subjects he chose to write on were interesting enough – he focused on comparing the policy of Charles the Bold in earlier and later parts of the reign of Louis XI and a summation of Louis’ services to France; and on the relation of the History of Art to General History – but I suspect the difficulty rather came in the early part, French translation that was required, for even when I met him his spoken French was still execrable, and in his tendency to long elaborate prose. Now, George was a very good writer, as any of his published work can attest, but his style then was somewhat more lyrical and discursive than the Board of Examiners would have wanted in expository essay writing. Benson blamed himself, in giving George too free a hand in his readings and essays, rather than keeping him to a schedule that was more aligned with the Examinations.
But how could he check himself, with that eager young mind taking everything in, arguing so keenly and passionately with him about subjects that he loved? It was Benson who introduced George to biography, to Macaulay and to Boswell. George was so taken with Boswell that at the end of his career at Cambridge when the subject of the Members Club Prize was Boswell, he submitted a detailed essay, which eventually won, and would eventually become his first published book, ‘Boswell the Biographer.’
George and Benson founded the Kingsley Club, an essay society named for Charles Kingsley, the professor of modern History whose novels dealt with contemporary social problems, using historical settings to communicate his ideas. Kingsley was also a member of the Magdalene Boat Club, of which George was a member all his four years. Kingsley was, additionally, a socialist, which I am sure had no little influence in George’s sway toward Fabianism. But, the Kingsley Club was the most urbane of societies. They spent a good deal of time debating the ideas in each other’s essays, in an incisive and brutally honest fashion, which was astonishing to watch if one weren’t used to it. It seemed so much like anger, and yet, at the end of the discussion, there was no lingering rancour; everyone was as good friends as ever.
This was typical of George’s manner at the time. One thing that sometimes disconcerted me about him was a certain rather elaborate bluntness in the matter of his criticisms. He was fastidious about people, and though he never gossiped and generally speaking hated ‘personalities’ in any shape and form, if he did feel called upon to give an adverse judgement, it was apt to be of a destructive kind. To be blunt was then almost a point of honour. He could be very scornful, even contemptuous if he thought the opposing point of view were stupid or simplistic or simply following along with traditional thinking without proper examination. It was this last that moved him, that people should examine ideas for themselves, look at them afresh from every angle. The whole Cambridge group were like this.
They held personal relationships as so important that they held only a few other things as being of any importance whatever. Conventional inessentials simply had no meaning for them. They were extraordinarily attached to one another; they stuck closer than brothers. There was, literally, nothing they wouldn’t do for one another. They enjoyed each other furiously; delightedly, they examined and explored every means of knowing people better and liking them more, from the simplest pleasures of food and exercise taken together to the final closeness of the common acceptance of some sorrow or truth. But three things in particular stamped them as living in a manner different, at that time, from the common run of people, and show them, in retrospect, as true forerunners of the twentieth century.
In the first place, they brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships. They wanted to know not only that they loved people but why they loved them, to understand the mechanisms of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion, to come to terms with themselves and one another, to know where they were going, and why.
This passion for understanding was new. It looked, even to me at first, cold-blooded. It shocked people in the poems of Rupert Brooke. And because of it, and through it, they developed a new technique, an outspokenness which was then extraordinary. There was nothing, whether simple or difficult or disquieting, that they would not express or try to express. They were right, for until a thing is expressed it cannot be understood, often not even by its creator. They ceased to be afraid of words, and in this turn carried their understanding further, since it helped to set them free from the fear of understanding what they might have been afraid to express.
To me, this was a shocking liberty. I had been brought up to a mealy-mouthedness happily forgotten by the young persons of this generation, and used often to protest, rather insincerely, that the party in question was probably good at heart, or something to that effect. George would brush this impatiently aside, saying his exterior anyhow was not good, that there were these defects, they were disagreeable, as I must perfectly see, and there was an end of it. Surely I did see? I couldn’t possibly approve? Then why these irrelevant defences? What he did make me see, in time, was the real importance of clear-headedness, and the folly of mixing up mental confusion with kindness.
So, this outspokenness was the second distinguishing mark on them, their complete directness, the unfettered freedom of mind and speech. And this in its turn led to the third, the most surprising, the most engaging quality of all. They were unafraid of expressing their affection. This has always been a characteristic feature of a really civilised community; one of the final and most difficult achievements of human intercourse. They did it, delightedly, wittily, skilfully, seriously, with the care and zest that went into all their doings. George was in the midst of all this, he was a feature of it, and an important contributor himself. And it left its mark on him, in the lifelong seriousness and conscientious care with which he dealt with his friends.
It was because of Benson and his brother Hugh that George met Charles Sayle, Geoffrey Keynes, Geoffrey Young, and the core of what was to be the Bloomsbury group. Early in February of 1907, George went to dinner with the Bensons, and Sayle was there along with Charles Darwin, grandson of the naturalist and subsequent brother in law of Geoffrey Keynes. So it was a very important evening.
Sayle was at that time the under-librarian at the University Library, a prodigiously erudite and prolific man. He was a climber of respectable ability, and a founder of the Climber’s Club, which was devoted to climbing in the Home Counties, Wales and Scotland, and as such the first of its kind. In 1899 Geoffrey Young had approached him about starting a branch of the CC at Cambridge, and this was inaugurated. Sayle knew simply everyone and his house in Trumpington Street was a very popular meeting place. He was very taken with George. It was he who convinced George to write an essay on Boswell for the Members Club prize, thus launching his writing career, and he who spread the gossip to James Strachey that George had ‘the head of Greek god’. Sayle was also a ‘Uranian’, that is, homosexual, and admired beauty in boyish-looking young men. Among Sayle’s great works of scholarship there are also nestled lesser works of fiction of a blue nature. Not having seen these myself, I am scarcely fit to comment on them, but, all but one having been written before the period when George was at Cambridge they were certainly well-known among Sayle’s ‘menagerie’ and the Cambridge Apostles, that semi-secret debating club, also known as the Cambridge Conversazione Society. Many friends who met at Sayle’s were also members or past members of this notorious group. It was nicknamed the Apostles because the original twelve members were supposed to have been the cleverest twelve men in the University.
Sayle was also a member of a group of three – the Triumvir – who pulled off one of the greatest high jinks in University history, which was harmless but astonishing. On New Year’s Eve of 1907, Sayle, Keynes – who was George’s great climbing friend – and the latter’s friend Theo Bartholomew, who worked at the University Library, were at Sayle’s house at 8 Trumpington Street, and decided, towards midnight, to each choose someone famous to whom they should like to send a New Year’s greeting. Sayle chose George Meredith, Geoffrey chose Eli Metchnikoff, the scientist, and Bartholomew chose Henry James. All of them signed all cards, and Henry James alone wrote back. They invited him to visit Cambridge (from his house in Sussex), but he declined. The next year, the game was repeated. Bartholomew chose James again, and once more repeated the invitation. To their astonishment, the great man – a famous recluse – agreed to come, and Geoffrey, thus emboldened, asked him to speak at his college. This was refused, graciously. James wrote that he could only ‘blush to be so unworthy’ of the invitation. ‘However,’ James continued, ‘don’t let that faith dwindle, by reaction, by the shock of my confessed inaptitude to anything, any doubt of my great desire to bask for a day or two in the light of our three-branched candlestick. Be a little patient with me and I shall come, thought I won’t even then inflict my continuous presence on either of you...’
Come he did, in June, writing a few days before to his friend Arthur Benson, ‘I go to Cambridge next Friday for almost the first time in my life – to see a party of three friends whom I am in the singular position of never having seen in my life.’
The visit was overall quite pleasant, but poor Sayle committed several gaffes which were unusual to him and painful, if telling, to note: James was staying at Sayle’s house and at the beginning of the first evening all were listening to a concert at the Guildhall – Parry, Stanford, Mendelssohn and Wagner, all heavy pieces, alas, and the novelist was quite bored. Later, in Sayle’s famous upstairs back parlour, Sayle, overcome by a spirit of helpfulness, kept repeatedly suggesting words in the midst of James’ well-known long pauses. Invariably it was the wrong word. The other members of the triumvirate were agonisingly aware of the mounting irritation suffered by their distinguished guest, but Sayle was unable to restrain himself. The coup de grace of this embarrassing catalogue came several days later when the party went boating on the Cam. With James settled comfortably on the cushions, hatless and completely at ease, they pushed off from the landing dock. Sayle, who was poling, dropped the pole with a crack on the large shiny yellowish dome of James’ bald head. Fortunately, no harm was done.
But there were fine moments. The Friday before the punting on the Cam the three had taken James to lunch at Geoffrey’s rooms in Pembroke, where he was introduced to and enchanted by Rupert Brooke. Then it was off to the Fitzwilliam Museum to gaze in admiration at the manuscripts of Tolstoy and Byron. They thus missed seeing George and the rest of the Magdalene boat win the May races, but two days later they had a chance to congratulate him at one of Sayle’s Sundays – this one in the garden. James was not completely in a swoon over Rupert – for he and George after some moments’ desultory conversation about the boat race, entirely polite on James’ part, sat for some little while discussing H.G. Wells and E.M. Forster. George found him much more graceful than his previous idea of Americans would have led him to expect, and for his part James admitted later to Sayle that he was impressed with George in all ways. ‘Lucid and beautiful’ if in a self-conscious way.
George rowed in the First Boat in all his years at Cambridge, the second year being made Secretary and the last serving as Captain. According to the annals of the Magdalene Boat Club, the May Boat of 1908 was 'universally recognised as the fastest boat on the river' at the time. This was achieved ‘under the supreme leadership of George Mallory’ who placed great stock in the coach acquired from Jesus College. George wrote an account for the annals of the Lent Term of 1907:
'What great things are now expected of this Jesus method of rowing! The style of the captain, the style of the secretary, the style of stroke, all imaginable styles except that peculiar to Mr Rogers, all are to be blended in an homogeneous, ergocosmic device, the ingenious and possibly ingenuous Quintessence of a Facile, Indefatigable Compendulum. We are to have a Jesus coach. Goldsmith has said: 'God will provide. But alas, how fickle, how selfish the Theocracy.' A fortnight has passed, and still no god to coach us. And so perforce we must go to the Hall, and get some sturdy unintelligent to 'bid him forward, breast and back as either should be', and teach us to shove it along by sweat and swearings, with all the horror of the ancient Swinck Misspent. And yet when he is secured he makes us row not a whit differently from the elegant, divine way, the way we rowed at Henley. He is none of your cursing, blustering, hell-for-leather, body-swing-overdone-at-all-costs, stupendous-recovery fellows at all. He is shy and rosy-checked, modest as any maiden, and makes a considerable effort to be sensible when sober and obscene when drunk... We become a very decent crew and go up three places...Selwyn who were behind us were such a boat that it would be unkind to tell the truth about them. ... on the second day we bumped Kings in 45 strokes.’
They were not angels. On the evening before the races A. P. Edgecumbe entered a room ‘in which several gentlemen were making money’ – gambling, probably playing piquet, which was illegal and a reason for being sent down – and somehow cut his head severely on a broken champagne glass. D. H. Thompson took his place. Later, in the 1908 season, they carried off the wooden panelling meant for the repair of the College Chapel for the traditional Boat bonfire.
Good-natured Geoffrey Keynes George met at his first Sunday night at Sayle’s. Geoffrey, who was to prove a lifelong friend and then some, for it was he who attended Ruth in her last illness. He found George a serious youth, more interested in ethics than religion, and behind the façade of beauty possessing an enquiring mind of an intellect not so far superior to his own as to prevent their arriving at a complete understanding. Modest words from one of the greatest surgeons and scholars of his generation. At their first meeting, George and Geoffrey were already talking of mountaineering, with which Geoffrey was familiar from his brother Maynard, who had been a student of Geoffrey Young’s at Eton, where he had been introduced to climbing. Geoffrey recognised it as already being the passion of George’s life, and called him a trained expert in the science and art of climbing, whether on rocks or ice slopes. They entered naturally into one another’s circles. It was by Geoffrey that George met Rupert, as the pair had gone to Rugby together and were intensely loyal and thick as thieves.
Geoffrey, who was a year younger than George, was the son of Neville Keynes, who was first an Economics lecturer at Pembroke and University College London and then Secretary to the Council of the University of Cambridge and finally Registrary. His mother was Florence Brown, the noted feminist, who was one of the first women to attend Cambridge, and afterwards the Mayor of Cambridge, also a first. His brother Maynard, the noted economist, afterward Sir Maynard, was four years older, and Geoffrey as a child was in thrall of the elder’s more forceful and intellectual character. Despite their illustrious brains, the Keyneses were not wealthy, and the house reflected conventional examples of period taste, with the possible exception of the Morris and Company wallpaper. The rest was all middle class comfort and security, with the parents reflecting an aura of ‘perfect integrity and goodness without stuffiness or pomposity... affection without sentimentality.’ This too was dear Geoffrey. Like George, he lapsed into a sort of natural state of agnosticism. Unlike George, he did not fill in the gap with the religion of mountains, but he understood them and loved them, and more importantly, loved George, as sincerely and truly as a brother, but being quite able, as a brother, to see his faults and was willing to speak of them.
That first night, George gave Geoffrey a ‘persuasive account’ of rock-climbing in Wales, and agreed to go with him to Snowdonia, not without some trepidation, for Geoffrey had hardly been above the snowline, and if he had been to Switzerland or the Pyrenees, it was to an entirely different purpose. But he entered into George’s passion for climbing. They tried to induce Rupert to their climbing schemes, but he was not interested. George did manage to convince another friend of his, Hugh Wilson of King’s to accompany them, so in September of 1907 they set out on bicycles, with rucksacks, hobnailed boots, and ropes. They stayed at Gwern-y-gof Isaf, above Capel Curig. Every day they would cycle down to the Gorphwysfa, the famous inn at Pen-y-Pass, and then slog up to the rock faces. Bathing was always part of the climb, both before and after, in Llyn Llydaw. They relied only on bootnails and finger-grips for holds, never using pitons, although they were in use elsewhere at the time. George had never thought of carrying pitons; it was unsporting, violating the true spirit of the game. Rock climbing demands knowledge of technical rules to be obeyed for safety, but is also an art, depending on good balance, a level head, and no tendency to panic. At first, everything depends upon the leader who must command with absolute confidence those on the rope beneath him. The belays in those days were simply hitched or slung over knobs or outcroppings, and this demanded a keen eye, experience, and skill to know which belays were sound.
As they were novices, George took them first up Tryfan, the classic learner’s route. The next day, they were doing routes all over Llywedd, making two or three ascents per day afterward. Most climbs afforded at least one sensational episode, and the rest time some amusing fun. One night Hugh Wilson, having dreamt all night that he was in a gully, woke to find himself looking for footholds in the wrought iron at the end of the bed, to the good-natured jeers of his companions.
They started off up Glyder Fawr, on the slabs to the left of the Introductory Gully. They had their first difficulty on the traverse, where there was a hard rectangular corner. They worked their way up this by three ledges, first to the right, then another on the left which had some grass and heather handholds. The third was only reached by an overhanging, grass-covered cornice. Then there was a rock pillar to the left, but the handhold at the top couldn’t be reached without leaving the ledge and there were no footholds at all. After struggling and swearing for a bit, George used Geoffrey’s hand as a foothold, reached then with a long graceful swing of his left arm for the handhold above, and hung suspended for some moments by one hand seeking a handhold for the other above. He made do with a rough patch of rock, and lifted his right foot very high, toe of the boot barely at the top of the pillar, clinging by the nails, and vaulted himself up to the top of the pillar. There was still thirty feet of steep pitch above them, and George had to get Geoffrey up. Geoffrey left the ledge, but could not manage George’s prodigious gymnastic swing. Nor were his arms long enough to get a grip with both hands at the top of the pillar, and he hung there, scrabbling for purchase of hand and feet against the sheer wall.
‘George—’
‘I have you Geoff, you’re strong on the rope. You can walk up. Come on.’
There was a long pause and some struggle.
‘I can’t get any purchase.’
‘Don’t worry Geoff. Use the rope, use your bootnails. I’ve got you. You can walk up. Come on now.’ All uttered in perfect calm.
There was another try, with Geoff straining at the rope like a horse against the plough, until at last, at last, he got the knack of twisting his bootnails on the upward movement, and inched up until George caught his hand and pulled him up over the edge of the pillar.
‘Well done!’ George was smiling. ‘Well done.’ He clapped his friend on the shoulder. Geoffrey looked about in some astonishment, as the top of the pillar was only about eight inches wide. How George had managed to belay him without toppling them both off was a complete mystery. Having navigated this interesting pitch, they proceeded upwards, via a ‘sensational’ chimney which Geoffrey insisted later could have been avoided. George, lounging at lunch, simply smiled with bland and friendly curiosity.
‘Why would you avoid it, if we are here for rock-climbing?’
Again later in the day, on a difficult pitch on the Central Gully, up to the Cave Pitch, George led up, making his way by dint of very small footholds and underholds for the hands, by sheer gymnastics and surprisingly great strength – surprising because he did not look so very strong. George has sometimes been criticised for taking relatively unpractised climbers up such difficult ascents. But neither of his learners on that day felt the criticism justified, not many another after them. A good leader goes up first and can inspire confidence in those on the rope behind him. Confidence breeds skill, which cannot be acquired with out it. That is how George’s pupils escaped injury.
Geoffrey Young was a rather late acquisition of George’s in his Cambridge career, meeting at the Charles Lamb dinner in February of 1909. Sayle had invited both George and Rupert specifically to show them off to Geoffrey. That night, as with Geoffrey Keynes, they talked of climbing, of the Alps and of Wales, of art and poetry. Geoffrey asked George if he were any relation to Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur. It was a common enough question. But he was completely unprepared when George turned the full intensity of his gaze upon him, and smiled in his enigmatic, half-shy way and said,
‘It is supposed. What do you think?’
Geoffrey barked with laughter, then quietened, enthralled and disturbed. ‘Ah who,’ he asked scanning the impossibly young face before him, ‘would you be then of the company of knights of the Grail? I wonder... Percival, the pious and gallant? No. I think not.... No. You would be Galahad, the maiden knight of pure heart—’
He was delighted by George’s colouring up at this.
‘Oh yes, my friend! O'er the dark a glory spreads, and gilds the driving hail. I leave the plain, I climb the height; No branchy thicket shelter yields; But blessed forms in whistling storms. Yes yes, that is what you are! So Galahad you shall be to me. Yes yes! Ye who have climbed to the great white veil, heard ye the chant? Saw ye the Grail?’ He was smiling now. ‘What do you think of that?’
‘That’s not from Tennyson,’ said George mildly, with his little smile.
Geoffrey was beaming. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘That was one of mine.’
‘You’re much too flattering.’ George took out a cigarette, and Geoffrey hastened to light it.
‘Let me. No, no, not too kind, I think.’
Geoffrey was, thus, much more taken with George than with Rupert – a reversal of the usual case – and referred to Rupert rather scathingly as a ‘poet’. He found Rupert far less striking than George, and someone who gave the sense of using his charm to its limits, of a calculating attitude. Geoffrey himself was a poet, afterwards of some renown, and had just published a guidebook to the climbs on Lliwedd, as well as The Roof Climber’s Guide to Trinity, so perhaps his scorn of Rupert’s arrogance is understandable, for he was ten years older, much more worldly, and had worked very hard to get his poems into print. But George he called beautiful and a ‘brilliant’ climber, a man who seemed to do everything to prevent himself having to owe anything to the externals of his looks, grace, or charm.
When he went up to George’s rooms the next day to talk with him further about George’s coming to the Pen-y-Pass gathering at Easter, Rupert was there and they were cordial, but that is all. Geoffrey was much more interested in George, in getting him to Wales, and especially back to the Alps. But the ensuing conversation is interesting for what it reveals about all three. George had met Rupert two years before, with Geoffrey Keynes, and they were chummy, but not terribly close – certainly nowhere near as close as Geoff and Rupert were. They shared a love of art and poetry, and a fierce commitment to Fabianism. Both were members of the Apostles, both displayed the same shocking honesty, and possessed a sensitive spirit that lurked behind a somewhat distant veneer.
Geoffrey had already arrived and George, being primed by Charles Sayle before the Lamb dinner, had asked him about the progress of the next climbing guidebook for the Climber’s Club, on the Ogwen District, which was to be written by Archer Thomson, the great early rock climber. Geoffrey was about to launch enthusiastically into his account, for his was editing Archer’s manuscript, when in sailed Rupert.
‘Well, blow me, Mallory, guess what—’ he paused in surprise and put out one hand, ruffling that lion’s mane of golden hair with the other. ‘Hullo, Young! I didn’t know you’d be here!’
George greeted him indolently with a smile. ‘Hello Brooke, sit down. Geoffrey was just telling me about Thomson’s new book.’
‘Eh?’
‘Archer Thomson, the climber.’
‘Oh. I say! Mallory, I simply must tell you what’s just happened. Do you mind awfully, eh, Geoffrey? I won’t be a tick and then I’m off to Strachey’s for tea.’
George: ‘There’s tea here.’
‘No, eh. He’s expecting me. Thanks.’ Rupert flung himself into the armchair beside George on the sofa while Geoffrey eyed them with interest.
‘I’ve just just come from London from Scott and Beaumont’s office, giving them some lyrics of mine for their next number. And they were thrilled!’
It was no mean feat for an unknown poet to march into the offices of the London Magazine and dazzle the denizens, let alone the chief editors.
‘Did they take any?’ This from George, who was only slightly mocking.
‘Yes,’ Rupert said gravely. ‘Two – perhaps more later.’
‘Which? Have you read them me?’
‘No,’ Rupert’s mock sullenness vanished in a flashing grin. ‘I haven’t written them yet. But I shall have to begin thinking about it!’
After Rupert left, Geoffrey said, looking after him in wonder, ‘He’s very brazen.’
George frowned a little, considering, and ruffled his hair. ‘Yes. I suppose he is, but I suppose one must be, these days, don’t you think?’ He sat on the sofa again. ‘Oh, come now, Geoffrey and tell me about the book!’
George was delighted with Geoffrey. He wrote to him a couple of days later that he was looking forward to Easter, but that he couldn’t hope to fulfil Geoffrey’s sanguine expectations, and hoped that they might prove one or two places less terrifying than they looked. This was charming modesty, as their subsequent record will show. It certainly charmed Geoffrey.
There can be little doubt now that Geoffrey was in love with George from the first moment they met, in the same way that he had been in love with many others who gathered round the magic circle of his company at Pen-y-Pass. It was years before I allowed myself to see it, long after George was dead, but on reflection I saw that it had been there from the first; a deep affectionate intimacy that can only come between soulmates. And they were that. George so often said that besides myself Geoffrey was the only one who ever understood how he felt about mountains. George did truly love Geoffrey, but I don’t know that he was ever in love with him in the way he was with James Strachey, or Duncan Grant, or myself, or Ruth. It seems to me that George surely found Geoffrey attractive – we all did, for he was very dashing – but there was too much respect and mountain experience between them for the sort of romantic swoon that being in love with someone implies. Even Geoffrey’s habitual romantic view mellowed and deepened with time and experience. There were few people who could be said to know George very well by the end of his life, people who had seen everything, heard everything, knew every joy and fear, knew the real man and what he was about, but Geoffrey was one of these. With him, George was deeply vulnerable, allowed himself to be, felt safe in it. There was no holding back on either side. And the nickname – Galahad – which began as an amorous advance in the intensive atmosphere of Cambridge, became an affectionate cipher for a rich and complex relationship.
Geoffrey was born on Crispin’s Day, 1876, the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, a fact of which he was always proud and amused his friends, as he was a great pacifist. His father, Sir George, had studied maths and philosophy at Cambridge, but afterwards became a barrister and, briefly, a member of the Liberal Party under Gladstone’s leadership. This ended with the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Chief Secretary of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in the Phoenix Park in Dublin in 1882. Cavendish was Sir George’s good friend, and he had been meant to be there at that time as his secretary. The news arrival at the Youngs’ was the most vivid memory of Geoffrey’s childhood. Sir George had done some climbing as a young man, from the age of twenty-one years. In 1865 he was with the party that made the first ascent of the Jungfrau from the Wengen Alp, but the next year, when descending Mont Blanc with his brothers there was an accident, common enough to mountains: one of them slipped pulling the others off. They fell perhaps twenty feet, but the youngest, Bulkley, broke his neck and it put George off climbing for ever, even when Geoffrey was the most celebrated climber in Britain. When the subject of climbing was brought up he would leave the room.
Geoffrey’s mother, Alice Kennedy, was Irish. As many great ladies of her day, she was of a formidable character, and spent much time in charitable work. The family went frequently to Ireland, and Geoffrey’s fondest childhood memories were of those days. To their house on the Thames at Cookham came many very famous visitors, including Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, Tennyson, Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, man of letters, and president of the Alpine Club), and, in later days, Sir Roger Casement, the Boer hero and Irish revolutionary. Like many another child, Geoffrey’s first loyalties were to a beloved nanny, also German as mine was, called simply Frau, but he was very close to his brothers: George (called Georis) and Hilton, and to his sister Eacy until she died at the age of fifteen.
He was a very athletic child and climbed early, but school, when it came, was a horrible and nasty surprise. He went to Wymondly, in Herefordshire, where games were overstressed, and where he was nicknamed ‘the Saint’, which he loathed. He was good at cricket, and a fair student, but he was tormented by the older boys, possibly because he was quite strikingly pretty, and not terribly outgoing. He spent his time reading – novels and climbing accounts, rather than making friends, until the advent of Hilt and a cousin. He then went to Marlborough, where things were better, but not ideal. His nickname there was ‘the cherub’. He became the object of affection of one of the older boys, whose swell friends referred to him as a ‘tart’, which the refined and sensitive Geoffrey found quite revolting. But this unpleasantness was mitigated by writing poetry and hill-walking in Wales with his father and brother Hilt. He remembered: On the gallant top of Tryfan we saw two men emerge from the cliffs, roped together, the first sight of the rope! I believe this was in truth the occasion of the first ascent of the North Gully of Tryfan, and the beginning of modern rock-climbing in Wales.
In the Sixth Form library, he discovered Whymper’s Scrambles amongst the Alps and the horizon shifted. Peaks and skies and great spaces of adventure rolled upward and outward, smashing the walls of a small, eager, self-centred world. How many boys owed a debt to that great boy’s book? In the school hymnal he wrote, Shall I ever go to the Alps? If only I could be a mountaineer.
He went to Trinity College Cambridge, as had his father, and studied Classics. Somewhat at a disadvantage, he had to work very hard at first. He’d have preferred History or English, but his father did not consider those proper university studies, and so he slogged on and took a Second in his year-end exams. He was very disappointed, and took himself off to the Lake District with his friend Vincent Braddeley from Marlborough and a couple of others, and, rope, nailed boots and a description of the climbs in hand, went up Scafell and the Pillar Rock, teaching himself as he went. With Sandy Mackay, he began roof-climbing, ever afterwards a tradition, if an illicit one, and later progressed to Snowdonia and the Alps. In 1898, he did his first season in the Alps with Mackay, making first ascents without a guide. Other climbing friends were Desmond MacCarthy, the literary critic, and George Trevelyan, son of his father’s best friend. He wrote to his mother of the ascent of Aconcagua, saying ‘there’ll soon only be Everest left for me.’ How many of us in after years said how different the Everest Expeditions would have been had Geoffrey been there and in good climbing form! He climbed extraordinarily with his peg-leg, after the war, but had Geoffrey been on the First and Second Expeditions, there would not have been a Third, and we would not have lost George and Sandy.
After Trinity, Geoffrey went to Europe for a brief time, studying French and German and climbing, and then began a career at Eton. He had refused a post as a Classics tutor, not feeling himself up to the job, and accepted one as a tutor in modern languages. A student described him ‘If only I had the key that could have unlocked the casket of that ardent and distinguished mind! With Renaissance good looks, reserved and patently dwelling in different world... he did not even let out to me that he was already a giant among mountaineers and the maker of many a famous first ascent. I never remember him speaking of himself... He was grave and courteous and impersonal.’ It was there that Geoffrey became friends with Arthur Benson, the housemaster, and the brightest of his students, Maynard Keynes, whom he taught to climb in the Alps. Unfortunately, in 1905, Geoffrey lost his post at Eton, due to the rough gossip of other tutors about his homosexuality. It wounded him deeply, this crude disapprobation by those who were no better themselves. Crudity and incivility always upset him. He was the most urbane and discreet of men. As solace, he went to the Alps with Will Slingsby, his future brother in law, and Maynard Keynes.
At Easter, 1909, George went to Geoffrey’s Pen-y-Pass gathering for the first time. By an arrangement Geoffrey made with the proprietors, they were alone for a week in the shanty outside the hotel before the others arrived. The weather was still pretty frightful. George and Geoffrey were driven off the Parson’s Nose in a blizzard, and it took them some five hours to get back to the hotel. They did stay in the hotel that night, for the shanty was unheated and quite pleasant in good weather, but a painful bivouac in bad. The next day they went up Craig-yr-Ysfa, and put up a couple of new routes, then they did George’s Slab Climb on the East Buttress – George had created this route when he found at the end of one day the year before that he had left his pipe on The Bowling Green Ledge where the party, including Traff Mallory, had stopped for lunch. The route back was long and darkness was falling, so instead of going round, George climbed solo straight up, without a rope, on a slab that was – on sight – if not holdless, at least not possessed of any worthy the name. When asked why he got back so fast, George said he had climbed the slab, to the astonishment of all. No one could repeat the climb the next day, even with the aid of a top-rope. Now, Geoffrey called it the hardest rocks he had done. He climbed well, he thought, but George was the better man on rock. Archer Thomson by sight alone rated the climb Very Severe, not to be attempted by any party without adequate preparation, which just goes to show what may be accomplished in moments of inspiration.
Geoffrey strained his back rather badly in that season, and was laid up in hospital in London for a few weeks afterward. George had found it difficult to get to see him, so sent him a note of apology, the result of which was that when Geoffrey was released he came straightaway to Cambridge for a visit. As Wales had been such a smashing success, would George come to the Alps with him in the summer?
‘O Galahad, you must come,’ Geoffrey entreated. ‘You said yourself it has been years – what, four now? – since you were there. You must!’
George threw back his hair. ‘I wish I could. I sincerely do! .... But, and I’m ashamed to admit this, I really can’t afford it. And I need to finish the Boswell essay – how shall I ever do that? And I need to find a job. And there are other reasons... But I WANT to go.’
‘Money is no trouble,’ Geoffrey insisted, leaning forward. ‘I can sponsor you.’ It was a radical offer as Geoffrey made only a modest income as an inspector of schools since leaving Eton. George knew this, and coloured.
‘I couldn’t let you.’
‘Nonsense! How many times have you taken boys to Wales? You think nothing of it. Let me do the same. It is a privilege to be climbing with you, and I enjoy your company.’
George blushed further at this. ‘Thank you... I—’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Thank you. I shall work out the rest, I suppose.’
‘You shall,’ Geoffrey said cheerily. ‘Things always work out.’ Then he caught the undercurrent of the words. ‘What’s wrong, what other reasons would keep you here?’
The direct question stirred the candid debater in George, and he looked keenly at Geoffrey.
‘I should tell you straight, and not vacillate about it, especially since Gorphwysfa: there’s someone I’m in love with and it’s going very badly. I don’t know how to resolve it. So you see, it feels dishonest to accept your offer and not tell you so.’ He tossed his hair back from his eyes again.
Geoffrey went very quiet and thoughtful for a moment. Then: ‘Who is it?’
‘James Strachey.’
‘Lytton’s brother?’ There was scorn in the word.
George nodded. ‘Yes. But... he’s mad in love with Rupert who strings him along like a puppy.’
‘Brooke again!’ Geoffrey exclaimed. ‘Young reprobate!’
‘Oh Rupert’s not so bad,’ George murmured, ‘just a bit full of himself.’ He looked up, pleadingly. ‘Geoffrey, what am I to do?’
Geoffrey smiled. ‘Galahad, it is selfish of me to give you my opinion, but I will do it anyway: give Strachey his head. He’ll make up his mind one way or another much better if you play him a little. Come to the Alps with me! Let us enjoy ourselves together, as we did in Wales. We’ll have good days, a whole season of them, and when you return everything will have sorted itself out, with the essay, with work. I know it.’ He paused, and the atmosphere grew charged. ‘I want you to understand one thing, Galahad.’
George regarded him breathlessly. ‘What is that?’
‘However much I love someone, I cannot ever bring myself to entire fidelity. I’ve tried and it is not in me. Nor then should I expect it from others. So be easy.’
George breathed in relief, and clasped the hand that covered his own. ‘Thank you Geoffrey!’
There was a knock at the door just then, and Maynard Keynes appeared.
‘Keynes!’ Geoffrey jumped up, with a broad smile. ‘Wonderful to see you! Did you know I was coming?’
‘George told me.’ Maynard said, coming into the room.
‘Thank you,’ Geoffrey said to them both. ‘Then you know,’ he looked at George, ‘that Maynard was one of my best students.’
‘At Eton also,’ Maynard smiled. ‘Hello Geoffrey, hello George.’
‘Hello, Maynard,’ George said. ‘Is Geoffrey coming?’
‘He said he was.’
‘Then we shall have quite a party.’
A friendship less fraught with nuances was that with David Pye. They met in 1906, when David was at Trinity, where he took a First-Class degree in Mechanical Science. It was almost two years before George ever let on that he climbed, though David was at the time keen to learn. David was afterwards a special officer in the Royal Flying Corps, and after the war made an analysis of fuels to find one that did not freeze, and could thus be substituted when regular supplies ran low. During the second war he was the director of scientific research at the Air Ministry. He was the dearest of friends, to both me and George, a climber of fine ability, and an extremely modest man.
He was a little shy, on first getting to know him. Not quite as tall as George, he was likewise dark, but an intellectual and not a romantic. His lean face was attractive and sympathetic, despite the dry Cambridge precision of his expression and manner. David was fastidious and had the charm of the man of taste and intelligence who can explain his preferences, but prefers not assert himself. He was not unconventional, as most of George’s friends at Cambridge, but there was something aristocratic in his nature, an independence and a set of rules and values which were not to be distorted by the fashions of the moment.
As a climber, he was not as daring as George, rather more on the scale of Geoffrey, who was known to abjure wet rocks and slight holds on a bad day, and if a pitch wouldn’t go he would find his way round it rather than fight up it. His physique was not exceptional. Of a medium build, he was rather compact, with neat movements. He climbed very deliberately, with no untidy struggles of display of brute force, relying on balance and skill, without much seeming effort. But he made some very good first ascents, including Faith and Charity on the Idwal in Wales. He began climbing in 1911, at Pen-y Pass, and was admitted to the Alpine Club in 1922, sponsored by George and Geoffrey. By 1927 he was a member of the Committee, and by 1956 was Vice President of the Alpine Club. This was the same year he was knighted. Despite his caution, in emergencies on mountains David was perfectly calm and fearless. On the Breithorn in the Interlaken, when they were on the challenging traverse of the West Ridge, he got himself and three companions down in a sudden and violent thunderstorm that killed two members of another party. David was, throughout, a steadfast friend, and we both had reason to be grateful to him in after years.
George’s performance in his exams was better than it had been, but it was still not an Honours degree: he took a Second rather than an Ordinary degree, which was a disappointment, and he blamed himself, but it did not diminish the great usefulness what Cambridge was to him. There he had created himself, as an educator and as a personality, expanded his world and his view, and made the connections and friends which would last him his life long. He would come back to Cambridge, as a lecturer – to him a profound joy – in the months before the last Everest expedition, very much at home.
@ 2006 Kelly Joyce Neff
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