Elizabeth Alice Hawkins-Whitshed

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Elizabeth Alice Hawkins-Whitshed (as Mrs. F. Burnaby ), c. 1883, photo by an unknown photographer, print on album paper

Elizabeth Alice Frances Hawkins-Whitshed (* 1860 in Greystones or 1861 in London ; † July 27, 1934 in Llandrindod Wells ), widowed Burnaby , widowed Main , since 1900 Elizabeth Alice (Aubrey) Le Blond , was an Irish climber , photographer and writer Origin. She was one of the most famous alpinists of her time; her photographs have appeared in magazines and in her own books.

Origin and way of life

Elizabeth was the only child of Sir St Vincent Bentinck Hawkins-Whitshed, 3rd Baronet (1837–1871), and his wife Anne Alicia (nee Handcock, 1837–1908). The family home was Killincarrig House (Greystones, County Wicklow ), where Elizabeth spent most of her childhood. The underage girl inherited Irish property from her father at the age of ten and came under official guardianship. She lived with her mother in both Killincarrig and London. Since she was eight, she received incomplete lessons from a governess .

On June 25, 1879, soon after the eighteen-year-old girl was introduced into London society, she married Fred (erick Gustavus) Burnaby (1842–1885), a cavalry colonel and adventurer. She gave birth to a son, Harry (Arthur Gustavus St Vincent) Burnaby, on May 10, 1880. Her husband was killed in a military operation in 1885; Elizabeth had spent little more than a year of their married life with him. From 1883 to 1900 she lived mainly in the “ Engadiner Kulm ” in St. Moritz, where aristocratic Englishmen have been enthusiastic about winter stays since the 1870s.

In 1886 she married John Frederic Main (1854-1892), a university lecturer (Bristol, London) in engineering . A marriage agreement favored her husband with a payment of a thousand pounds sterling annually; from then on he lived in Denver , where he worked as an investment banker until his death .

In 1900 she married Francis Bernard Aubrey Le Blond (1869-1951), the eldest son of a businessman (family name Aubrey Le Blond ). With him she toured Egypt, Ceylon and the Far East in 1912 and returned via Russia in 1913.

During the First World War she worked in Dieppe as a volunteer in the medical service of the military, at the end of 1916 she was back in London. As a supporter of French colonial policy, she traveled to Morocco in 1920 and met Hubert Lyautey . From 1922, after her son moved to California, she undertook extensive rail journeys in the United States . In 1933 she became a Knight of the Legion of Honor . She did not recover from a serious medical procedure and died in Llandrindod Wells ( Denbighshire , now Clwyd ) in 1934 . She was buried in London on July 31, 1934 in Brompton Cemetery.

Mountaineer and socially committed lady

Mrs. Main (right) after the descent from Piz Morteratsch

During a recreational stay in Chamonix in 1881, she discovered the alpine mountains for herself. She came back in the summer of 1882 and, accompanied by a mountain guide , climbed the Grandes Jorasses and twice the Mont Blanc . She achieved two first ascents, La Vierge in 1883 (in the Glacier du Géant area ) and the eastern summit of the Bishorn in 1884 (4135 meters, since then called "Pointe Burnaby"). From 1883 she also undertook regular winter tours, including a number of first-time climbs (including Aiguille du Midi , both peaks of Piz Palü , Piz Scerscen , Monte Disgrazia , Crast 'Agüzza and other peaks of the Bernina group, Dufourspitze ). Their behavior was considered improper, especially since they repeatedly lived apart from their husbands. Income from the lands in Killincarrig enabled her to organize a wide variety of ventures at her own discretion.

She was the first woman to pass the men's ice skating test in St. Moritz , went on bike tours in the mountains and took part in early car races in the mountains. She received the gold clasp from the Ice Skating Association in St. Moritz. Soon she was the most famous mountaineer of her time and started tours exclusively with women, so in 1898 she crossed Piz Palü together with Evelyn McDonnell without a guide. Between 1897 and 1899, she traveled to Northern Norway with Josef Imboden and his son, where she made numerous summit ascents, mostly in the area around Lyngenford , including 38 first ascents, 29 of which were first ascents. She made her last mountain tours in the Alps in 1903.

Their social commitment went far beyond promoting winter sports events in the Engadine. She founded the Ladies' Alpine Club in London in 1907 (independently in 1909) , of which she chaired from 1907 to 1912 and from 1933 to 1934. She founded the Forum (a club for women) and the Anglo-French Luncheon Club . She was also successful in fundraising ; from 1916 to 1918 she had collected donations for the British Ambulance Committee . From 1920 to 1924 she supported the British Empire Fund in raising funds for the repair of Reims Cathedral (reopened in 1927). She successfully campaigned for the erection of a statue for the French Marshal Ferdinand Foch in London.

Photographer, film pioneer and writer

Aubrey Le Blond: water parterre of Villa Lante (around 1910)
Elizabeth Main: Ice skating on the black ice of Lake Sils

Her second passion was photography. She acquired knowledge self- taught and through experimentation. Her recordings from the high Alps were contemporary sensational and on par with those of a Vittorio Sella . They were honored by the Royal Photographic Society , of which she had been a member since 1886 and whose exhibitions she regularly supplied from 1889 to 1901. She mainly photographed snow and mountain motifs, but also ice figure skating, Spanish cities and Italian gardens. The recordings were committed to a documentary style of sensitive nature observation and appeared under changing names in magazines and illustrated her books. For fast-moving subjects, she used cameras with a modern focal plane shutter from Ottomar Anschütz . At the invitation of the British Army in 1918, she gave slide presentations to soldiers with her own pictures.

Between 1899 and 1902 she tried her hand as a film pioneer with film recordings of racing sled and toboggan runs as well as ice skating. The ten strips from the Engadine valley, each about one to two minutes long, were also offered for sale.

In addition to those on mountaineering, her books include two travel guides, an entertainment novel, a historical account of the time of her ancestors and memories. Sports activity was presented positively in an unreflected manner.

Mountain guide monument

The mountain guide monument in St. Niklaus Dorf honors u. a. Aubrey Le Bond as a guest of the St. Niklaus mountain guides.

Works

Independent publications:

  • The high Alps in winter, or, Mountaineering in search of health (1883)
  • High life and towers of silence (1886)
  • My home in the Alps (1892)
  • Hints on snow photography (1894)
  • Cities and sights of Spain (1900, 1904)
  • True tales of mountain adventure, for non-climbers young and old (1902, 1915)
  • Adventures on the roof of the world (1904, 1907, 1916)
  • The story of an alpine winter (1907; novel)
  • Mountaineering in the land of the midnight sun (1908)
  • Charlotte Sophie Countess Bentinck , her life and times, 1715–1800 , 2 volumes (1912, 1926)
  • The old gardens of Italy, how to visit them (1912, 1926; 92 photographs)
  • Day in, day out (1928; memoirs)

More comments:

  • Le massif de la Bernina (1894; by August Lorria, 15 photographs)
  • The art of garden design in Italy (1906; by Henry Inigo Triggs , 28 photographs)
  • Winter sports in Switzerland (1913; by Edward Frederic Benson , 47 photographs)
  • The autobiography of Charlotte Amélie, Princess of Aldenburg ... 1652–1732 (1913; translation by Mémoires de Charlotte-Amélie de La Trémoîlle , based on a manuscript)
  • The Dunkelgraf mystery (1929; additions to Otto Viktor Maeckel, Das Rätsel von Hildburghausen )
  • Intimate letters from Tonquin (1932; translation by Hubert Lyautey, Lettres de Tonkin et de Madagascar )

In addition, she has written numerous articles in newspapers and magazines under changing names, including the English magazine Vanity Fair .

various

In London, Elizabeth Le Blond lived in Westminster , St Ermin's. Their son married in 1929 and moved to Washington. He died of pulmonary tuberculosis a few years after his mother's death. Killingcarrig was named Burnaby Estate and the property's garden became a golf course. Parts of the collection of Korean porcelain acquired by the Le Blondes in the Far East, also from robbery excavations, were given to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (catalog from 1918). The films are considered lost, 420 original prints of their pictures have been preserved.

literature

  • Caroline Fink: Fresh, cheeky and free: Elizabeth Burnaby-Main-Le Blond In: Caroline Fink, Karin Steinbach: First on the rope - pioneers in rock and ice , Tyrolia-Verlag, Innsbruck 2013, ISBN 978-3-7022-3252- 8 , pp. 27-35.
  • Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond. Mountaineering for women. In: The Times , No. 46818, July 28, 1934, p. 14 column 3.
  • Who what who. A companion to Who's who containing the biographies of those who died during the period 1929–1940. Adam & Charles Black, London 1947, p. 791, column 1.
  • Stephen Bottomore: Le Blond, Elizabeth Alice F. In: Who's who of Victorian cinema. A worldwide survey , ed. by Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan. British Film Institute, London 1996, ISBN 0-85170-539-1 , pp. 80-81.
  • Women in world history. A biographical encyclopedia , ed. by Anne Commire. Volume 9. Yorkin, Waterford 2001, ISBN 0-7876-4068-9 , p. 262.
  • Peter H. Hansen: Elizabeth Alice Frances Le Blond. In: HCG Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford dictionary of national biography. From the earliest times to the year 2000. Volume 33. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York 2004, ISBN 0-19-861383-0 , pp. 19-21.
  • Markus Britschgi, Doris Fässler (ed.): Elizabeth Main (1861–1934) alpinist, photographer, writer. An English lady discovers the Engadine Alps. Diopter, Luzern 2003. ISBN 3-905425-12-2 .
  • Cordula Seger: Grand Hotel. Theater of literature. Böhlau, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-412-13004-4 , pp. 76-81.
  • Frances Clarke: Le Blond Elizabeth Alice Frances. In: James McGuire, James Quinn (eds.): Dictionary of Irish biography from the earliest times to the year 2002. Volume 5. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009, ISBN 978-0-521-19979-7 , pp. 385– 386.

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Alice Hawkins-Whitshed  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. Elizabeth Le Blond. (No longer available online.) In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Archived from the original on October 4, 2012 ; accessed on February 14, 2013 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.oxforddnb.com
  2. a b Short Biography Elizabeth Main (1861-1934). (PDF; 27 kB) DIOPTER-Verlag für Kunst und Fotografie, Luzern, 2003, accessed on February 14, 2013 (English).
  3. Christian Imboden: Mountains: Profession, Vocation, Fate . Rotten Verlag, Visp 2013, ISBN 3-907624-48-3 . Pages 128 ff .: first ascents .
  4. Complete work