Geoffrey Winthrop Young

Geoffrey Winthrop Young about 1898

Geoffrey Winthrop Young (born October 25, 1876 in London , † September 6, 1958 ) was an English mountaineer, writer and educator.

Life

Youth and Studies

As the son of the liberal jurist and politician Sir George Young Geoffrey Winthrop Young grew up in Cookham in the county of Berkshire on. He studied classical languages at Trinity College , Cambridge. While at college he began writing and climbing in Wales and the Lake District . He won the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse poetry and published The Roof Climber's Guide to Trinity . He continued his studies in Jena . He spoke fluent German, but also French and Italian. During his studies he made his first homoerotic experiences. Presumably because of his homosexuality, he was dismissed as a language teacher at Eton College in Berkshire in 1905 , and as a state school inspector in 1914.

alpinist

His first big tour was the Jungfrau in the Bernese Oberland, in memory of his father who, with the guides Christian Almer and Peter Baumann, made the first ascent over the Guggigletscher in 1865. His first significant first ascent was on the Weisshorn : on September 7, 1900, with the guides Louis and Benoît Theytaz, he climbed a ridge that descended from the north ridge to the west, later known as the Young ridge. In 1904 Young stood on the Matterhorn for the first time . As a result, he succeeded in major first ascents in the Alps, mostly with the Valais mountain guide Josef Knubel from St. Niklaus . Among other things, the southeast face of the Weisshorn (August 28, 1905), the southwest face of the Täschhorn (August 11, 1906), the east face of the Zinalrothorn (August 21, 1907), the northeast face of the Weisshorn (August 31, 1909), the first descent over the Hirondellesgrat on the Grandes Jorasses (August 11, 1911), the east face of the Aiguille du Grépon (August 19, 1911), the south-west face of the Gspaltenhorn (July 14, 1914). In addition to the Weisshorn, there is a Younggrat on the Zermatt Breithorn , and a summit of the Grandes Jorasses is called Pointe Young .

From 1890 he was a member of the Alpine Club , which he presided over during the Second World War. In 1913 he became president of the British Climber's Club , which promoted rock climbing and published the first climbing guides. In 1945 Young was a promoter of the British Mountaineering Council , the umbrella organization for all British mountaineering and mountaineering organizations. Between 1907 and 1947, interrupted by the world wars, he organized meetings of British climbers at Pen-y Pass in Snowdonia , North Wales. In addition to the British mountaineering elite, the guests also included the physicist Ernest Rutherford , the economist John Maynard Keynes , the writer Aldous Huxley and the Everest pioneer George Mallory , an intimate friend and protégé of Young.

First World War and consequences

As a war reporter, Young covered the Western Front for the Daily News . In the destroyed Belgian city of Ypres , he organized ambulances for volunteers, the Friend's Ambulance Units . From 1915 to 1917 he was with this unit, which consisted of conscientious objectors, in action on the Isonzo front in northern Italy. On August 31, 1917, a grenade on Monte San Gabriele injured his left leg so badly that it had to be amputated above the knee. On April 25, 1918, in London, he married Eleanor Slingsby, 20 years his junior, daughter of William Cecil Slingsby , a pioneer of Norwegian alpinism and ski mountaineering. The marriage resulted in the son Jocelin and the daughter Marcia. Young continued to have homoerotic affairs. In 1919 he started hiking and climbing again with a special prosthetic leg, and from 1927 on again in the Alps. He managed again great tours like the Weisshorn, the Grépon and the Zinalrothorn. On the descent from the Zinalrothorn with Josef Knubel, he had a serious fall on July 24, 1935 and gave up mountaineering.

Writer and publicist

Young published poems, articles, and in 1920 Mountain Craft , a 600-page textbook on all aspects and techniques of mountaineering. At times he worked as a consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation , which was involved in projects for the development of science and culture in war-torn Europe. In 1927 On High Hills was published , a book with memories of his mountain tours in England and in the Alps. In 1951 he published his experiences as an alpinist with a prosthetic leg under the title Mountains with a Difference . Some chapters from this book as well as from On High Hills appeared in German under the title Meinewege in den Alpen . Young also wrote an autobiography, The Grace of Forgetting .

Educator and anti-fascist

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Young traveled with a delegation through Germany and visited, among other things, the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. During the Nazi era, he kept in contact with befriended anti-fascists in Germany, many of whom were victims of the regime. He succeeded in bringing Kurt Hahn , a progressive Jewish educator and director of the elite school Schloss Salem in Baden-Württemberg , to England. With him he founded the Gordonstoun School in Scotland, a progressive boarding school that Prince Charles and his father attended , among others .

Young was a staunch critic of the British school system. With George Mallory, who was a teacher, he had sketched the project of an ideal school of the future in the early 1920s . Activities in nature, hiking, climbing, handicrafts and agriculture played an important role. Also more cooperation between parents and teaching staff. At an advanced age, Young promoted the education of young people in nature, including the establishment of outdoor education centers , of which there are now large numbers in the UK.

Retirement

Young was rather skeptical about new developments in mountaineering; he saw his romantic notion of mountaineering more and more being displaced by soulless sport . He criticized the first ascent of Annapurna by a French expedition in 1950, the summit team returned with severe frostbite. From 1954, Young suffered from stomach cancer. The couple have lived in Grovehurst , Kent , in a medieval farmhouse for the past few years . On September 6, 1958, he died in a nursing home in London of complications from cancer. His wife and son scattered his ashes in the hills around Pen-y Pass.

Mountain guide monument

The mountain guide monument in St. Niklaus Dorf honors u. a. Geoffrey Winthrop Young as a guest of the St. Niklaus mountain guides.

Works

• My ways in the Alps , Hallwag Verlag, Bern 1955
• The Roof Climber's Guide to Trinity , 1899
• On high hills. Memories of the Alps , Methuen & Co. Ltd., London 1927
• Mountain Craft , 1920
• Mountains with a Difference , Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1951
• The Grace of Forgetting , Country Life, London 1953

literature

• Alan Hankinson: Geoffrey Winthrop Young. Poet, Mountaineer, Educator , Hodder & Stoughton, London 1995

Web links

• Literature by and about Geoffrey Winthrop Young in the catalog of the German National Library