Alice Cross; Mountaineer
Hyfler/Rosner
Alice Cross
Leading all-round female mountaineer of the inter-war years
04 March 2004
Alice Nelson, mountaineer and hotelier: born Kendal,
Westmorland 30 December 1911; married 1939 Sid Cross (died
1998; two sons); died Kendal, Cumbria 16 February 2004.
In the late 1990s, with all the technical paraphernalia of
the modern mountaineer, I found myself facing a defining
moment during a particularly taxing and serious climb. A
bulge of verglassed rock prodded me accusingly in the chest
while my ice axes were planted awkwardly on thin ice smears
coating sloping rock, with only a tooth and a half of each
pick biting. I had to hang out over the frightening drop and
trust. But trust what? My rope hung heavy and runnerless for
100 feet. There was nothing to stop a slip, which meant a
fall of well over 200ft, and no security beyond holding your
nerve and keeping your balance. I was, quite frankly,
petrified.
When I finally and thankfully reached a sanctuary belay I
marvelled at the courage and skill of the pioneers of this
route. Among them had been a young woman who had coolly led
up the route with vastly less sophisticated equipment than
mine, 60 years previously. Her name was Alice Nelson.
Nelson hailed from a working-class family in Kendal and was
introduced to the mountains via the Girl Guides. Unlike most
of her peers she was not, however, prepared to restrict her
activities merely to rambles and reef-knots. When she began
scaling cliffs her parents were horrified and tried to
discourage her.
This proved difficult with someone as independently minded
as Alice Nelson. (As a schoolgirl she acquired the nickname
"Jammy" - a corruption of the French jamais, thanks to her
reputation as a recalcitrant and wilful pupil who could
occasionally be stubborn.) Nevertheless, her family strictly
forbade her to rock-climb until she reached the age of
majority. Once she turned 21, however, there was no stopping
her.
Nelson had begun a job as a clerical worker at Kendal's "K"
Shoes factory and it was here she met Sid Cross, one of "K"
's cobblers and an enthusiastic young climber. From the
mid-1930s until the Second World War Cross and Nelson turned
themselves into a skilled and formidable climbing
partnership. It was a highly unusual combination in more
ways than one. For a start the pair were both working-class
climbers in a pre-war mountaineering milieu dominated by
male, middle-class professionals. But even more remarkable
was the existence of a woman climber who took a co-equal
role in leading hard, technically demanding climbs and in
pioneering new ones. Back in the pre-war era this was almost
unheard of.
And unlike many Lakeland-based climbers of this time, who
tended to restrict themselves to particular mountain ranges
or valleys, Nelson and Cross ranged widely over the
district, bicycling to Langdale and then hiking over
mountain passes to camp. The duo climbed most of the classic
winter gully lines in the mountains over the next few
winters - and then began breaking out to create new, hard
climbs of their own.
One of the most impressive of these occurred during the
winter of 1937/38 when they climbed Langdale's Bowfell
Buttress in full winter conditions. This climb, described in
the current climbers' guidebook as "a technical mixed climb,
probably the best of its grade south of the border", and
justifiably graded a VI (a rating rarely achieved before the
late 1950s), is characterised by tricky crack climbing and
delicate moves on sloping, thinly iced rock. Sid Cross
remembered tackling the crux pitch using Nelson's
long-handled ice axe as a foothold while torqueing his own
axe higher up in a crack. Later on in the climb he displayed
even more prescient technical skills when he used a Scout
knife, which he carried on climbs for splicing hemp rope, as
an ice-dagger.
It is obvious from the repertoire of improvised techniques
that Cross and Nelson must have found the climb taxing.
Despite this, Cross later recalled that, for him and Nelson,
the most memorable moment was "topping out under the most
perfect winter evening with a pure duck-egg blue sky". The
fun and beauty of climbing was the impetus behind these
ascents, rather than the competitive drive that was
galvanising Alpine climbing on the Continent at this time.
Nevertheless, the winter ascent of Bowfell Buttress is
especially significant in two ways. It was a futuristic
route that pushed the technical difficulty of British winter
climbing to extreme levels. Secondly, the co-equal role of a
woman is remarkable on a route of this difficulty during the
late 1930s; it seems likely that with the ascent of Bowfell
Buttress, Alice Nelson became the first woman in the world
to climb Grade VI.
Even today, women operating at this level are comparatively
few in number; this emphasises how far ahead of the times
Nelson was in terms of attitude and ability. Given that she
was just as adept on pure rock (she became the first woman
to lead Scafell's Central Buttress in 1939 - then regarded
as one of the hardest rock climbs in Britain), Nelson might
arguably be described as the best all-round British female
mountaineer of the inter-war years.
The winter of 1937/38 was an especially busy one for the
energetic Cross/Nelson partnership. Along with their good
friends Albert and Ruth Hargreaves, and Astley Cooper, they
completed the direct finish to Central Gully, on Gable Crag
(Grade IV). This involved delicate step-cutting up frozen
moss on steep wall and tenuous moves to reach the top.
Albert Hargreaves was due to address the Pinnacle Club's
annual dinner in the Sun Hotel at Coniston that evening and
Cross remembered him practising his speech all the way up
the climb - a fact which says much for the nonchalance and
confidence with which the group approached technically
difficult and serious first ascents. With the relatively
unsophisticated equipment of the time, one mistake could
have imperilled the entire party, such was the paucity of
good anchor points. Running belays could be regarded as
exotic luxuries. Climbs were undertaken wearing nailed boots
with every hold chipped from the ice and snow. Even more
remarkable, viewed from the perspective of today's cosseted
car-bound society, is the fact that Cross and Nelson
bicycled to and from most of their epic adventures, making
it back in time for work on Monday morning.
Another of their major achievements was the second ascent of
Steep Gill, on Scafell (Grade V) in the winter of 1938/39 -
the climb I later found so serious and frightening. Steep
Gill is today regarded as the most difficult and serious of
the traditional Lakeland gully climbs, with sparse
protection on the crux section and unthinkable consequences
in the event of a fall.
Nevertheless "Jammy" Nelson recalled the climb as "fun" and
in fact had more to say about the tricky descent, which
included an iced-up Broad Stand, the infamous Lakeland
scramblers' impasse between Scafell and Scafell Pike that
continues to claim many victims to this day. Nelson actually
jumped down the precipice, such was her confidence. The
reason for the hurry was the need to get down to Langdale
before the daylight disappeared completely, in order to be
able to cycle back to Kendal that evening to be ready for
work the next morning.
Walking 12 miles, ascending 3,000 feet, completing a Grade V
climb and cycling 20 miles would be a considerable test for
any modern triathlete. Doing it for "fun" and still being at
work at "K" Shoes the next day suggests astonishing levels
of fitness and enthusiasm. Neither could the performance of
the Lakeland climbers be said to result merely from
familiarity with their native fells.
On a visit to Ben Nevis in 1937 Cross and Nelson not only
completed the pre-war testpiece Tower Ridge after overtaking
a party of well-known Scottish climbers who later retreated,
but also climbed the crux Great Tower pitch direct, the
first time this was done in winter. A measure of the
difficulty of the conditions was that, after overcoming a
cornice in the dark, Nelson suffered frostbite to her toes.
(Their legacy in Scotland also included the rock climb
Shackle Route in Glencoe, a route named ironically after the
Edwardian Lakeland climber George Bower had advised Sid not
to climb with a woman, since he considered them "shackles".)
Undeterred, Sid Cross officially "shackled" himself to Jammy
Nelson in 1939.
The war, and the later arrival of children curtailed the
Crosses' climbing activities as they strove to make a
living. Entering into partnership with Albert and Ruth
Hargreaves, they first co-managed a hotel in Boot, Eskdale,
winning an entry in the very first Egon Ronay food guide. In
1949 the two couples acquired Langdale's famous Old Dungeon
Ghyll hotel and Sid and Jammy Cross moved over to manage it.
Not long after, Albert Hargreaves was killed in an avalanche
while the friends were all skiing in Austria, leaving Sid
and Jammy to carry on shaping the distinctive character of
the "ODG" alone.
They created the famous climbers' bar, which became one of
the key base camps from which the explosion of post-war
energy and talent was unleashed on the crags. The Crosses
became unofficial guardians to the gangs of unkempt and
impecunious climbers, among them such luminaries as the
young Don Whillans and Joe Brown, who dossed in Wall End
Barn next to the hotel. It was also during this period that
they became instrumental in setting up what was to become
the Langdale Mountain Rescue team and pioneering the use of
search dogs to locate casualties in the Lakeland mountains.
After retirement in the 1970s the couple spent many winters
in adventurous travel across the wilder reaches of Europe in
a converted Land Rover but their home near Ambleside
remained a haven to visitors. Thanks to their popular tenure
of the Old Dungeon Ghyll, their range of friends was
prodigious - any visit would invariably be interrupted by a
succession of friends dropping by for a chat, and telephone
calls from others too distant to call by in person.
Sid predeceased Jammy by six years and, with her death, one
of the last surviving links to a pioneering era in British
climbing has been broken.
Colin Wells