Irving Robert Lock Graham

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Biografie:
Robert Lock Graham Irving 1877-1969
R. L. G. Irving was born on 17 February 1877, the youngest son of a Liverpool clergyman, and died peacefully on 10 April 1969 at Winchester, where he had spent his life, at the age of ninety-two. For over fifty years he was a leading figure in British mountaineering and what the Alpine Club and Journal owe to his life-long devotion will be told by another pen. A modest man of outstanding gifts, he became a great schoolmaster and a great mountaineer. It was his nature to give himself continuously for others, particularly the young, one of whom wrote of him after his death as of 'someone whose narne always brings a blessing'.
Irving entered College at Winchester in 1890, went to New College with a mathematical scholarship in 1896, returned to Winchester as Assistant Master in 1900, was College Tutor from 1901 to 1909, when at the early age of thirtytwo he was appointed housemaster of Morsheads, where for twenty-eight years till 1937 his reign was longer than that of any other contemporary housemaster. Of his life's work there a member of his house has written: 'Graham was a shy and essentially humble man and it took him a little time to make his influence felt. But gradually and always unobtrusively he won our trust and confidence and indeed our devotion because he gave all these things to us, and quite apart from his genuine kindness and friendliness, his rare sense of humour and his ability to get the best out of people, particularly the young, he had in my view two outstanding qualities as housemaster-his complete impartiality in his dealings with members of the house and his wonderfully shrewd judgment of our characters, our weaknesses and our possibilities.'
Irving was a clear and encouraging teacher of Mathematics and French. Ncr is it surprising that he produced a little book entitled La Cime du Mont Blanc (O.V.P. 1933), being annnotated extracts from H.-B. de Saussure's Quatribne Voyage dans les Alpes. He was also a brilliant and forceful games player, and many lamented the loss to first-class cricket caused by his conversion to mountaineering.
'Conversion' is, however, the wrong word; it was love at first sight. Irving tells the story in his Romance of Mountaineering (Dent 1935) p 3. 'My very earliest recollections of a summer holiday centre round the ascent of a Welsh hill. It was a domesticated hill that rose a paltry six hundred feet above the shore, but it was enough; something that would always remain had appeared upon the background of my life. Another peculiarly vivid memory some ten years later is of Mont Blanc. The Bosses ridge was dazzingly bright under new snow; the blue sky had the unfathomable depth of night with all the radiant energy of day. The lesson of that day was unforgettable; absolutely alone with Mont Blanc, without a trace of any other soul upon it after three days and nights of bad weather which I had spent at the Tete Rousse. With that ascent the promise made to the very small boy in Wales, that happiness for him would be found in climbing mountains, seemed to find complete fulfilment. Since that day gratitude and praise have been more necessary accompaniments of all the best hours of life.'
'Love', as we know, 'will find a way', and Irving discovered a coaching job for his vacations with a young man whose mother thought it a good idea if he relaxed from cramming for the army by climbing with a Grindelwald guide. One cannot help wondering if Irving put the idea into her head. How Irving later brought Grindelwald to Snowdon is most amusingly told in Chapter One of Ten Great Mountains (Dent 1940).
Irving came back to Winchester a convinced mountaineer, and when Rendall chose him as College Tutor one year later, who should he find in College'but George Mallory, Guy Bullock and 'Hal' Tyndale. Mallory, the finest natural climber of his generation; Bullock, always the last man down with the longest reach; Tyndale, a fine long-distance runner until he was badly wounded in the leg in the 1914-18 War. They climbed together for several seasons and it is difficult to think of a better-found rope. Typical of their climbs were their Mont Maudit expedition (see Ten Great Mountains, p 104) or their unorthodox escapade on the Matterhorn (ditto, p 66).
On descending from the 1atterhorn 'it was very good', writes Irving, 'to be met by those who knew and shared the things they had enjoyed, a mother, a sister, perhaps one who was something of both and a great deal besides'. This was none other than Oriane Tyndale, 'Hal's' sister, whom Irving married in 1908. What Irving expected his fiancee to be able to achieve can be read on p 63 of A History of British Mountaineering (Batsford 1955): 'the very narrow arête leading from the Silbersattel to the Nord End and then up the 400 feet of steep rock, snow and ice to the Ostspitze'. Irving's married happiness meant everything to him, and a great deal to an his friends and pupils. Oriane was a gifted painter and keen musician. She was a wonderful mother to their four gifted children, one now a conductor of international repute. She entirely understood Irving's love of mountains and gave him complete freedom to pursue his bent. At Morsheads she mothered for twenty-eight years a most happy boys' house and arranged on the private side much-enjoyed dinners and musical parties.
1900 to 1914, when he was between twenty-three and thirty-seven, were Irving's great climbing years. He was back in the Alps in 1919, aged forty-two, and the following June I received a letter saying that he still dragged his limbs slowly over the Alps, and if it didn't sound too dull, would I care to join him. He was quite fast enough for me! In the two decades between the Wars he got more pleasure from introducing the young to the mountains than from tackling big peaks himself. Nevertheless, each season worked up to one or more of the following: Dent d'Herens, Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, Mont Blanc from the Dome hut - one of Irving's fifteen ascents - Dent Blanche, Aletschhorn, Finsteraarhorn, Piz Bernina. I still remember my own initiation, descending from the Col du Chardonnet onto the dry Argentiere glacier with its huge open crevasses. 'Do ask for the rope if you'd like it: I would rather have died! But in five minutes had won complete confidence in my crampons and sure-footedness. This was his way with novices (see British Mountaineering, bottom of p 153). He taught his followers very little verbally or technically, but his own example was eloquent. He moved beautifully on a mountain and it was a delight to watch him lead on rock or snow or ice. He was not without his loveable foibles. 'A careless reading of my watch' landed him in difficulties in Corsica; he smashed his compass when alone in the unmapped Pyrenees by putting it in the pocket with a hole in it; and his ways with the old-fashioned collapsible candle lantern suggest that he would not have been good at repairing oxygen apparatus on Everest. But once on the glacier he was supreme, with all the good guide's mastery of climbing skills, his sound experienced judgment of ice, snow and rock conditions, his route-finding flair. Though in a sense every climb was to him a first ascent, yet he had always studied it and thought it out carefully. And in an emergency he showed courage and resource. He had an uncanny knack of calculating when his party could catch the first warming sun; he brewed the most refreshing drinks on his aluminium cooker; he liked to linger on the summit, and not to leave the mountain till evening light had revealed its full beauty. A day with Irving was a day not on but with the mountain.
Irving was a practical idealist. His mathematics gave him his competence at arranging expeditions and at school organisation. But he brought the wisdom and inspiration of the hills back to class-room and house. For three decades he was a power in the inner counsels of Winchester College. A leading housemaster at a public school has been likened for busyness to a leading Q.C. How Irving found time in the 30S to write his climbing books is a mystery. But when he was not in the mountains - at Christmas at Pen-y-Gwryd, at Easter perhaps in Scotland or Corsica, in summer in the Alps - he must have spent every minute of his spare time reading and writing about them. And his writings gained from his own first-hand experience of the climbs he described. Though he never had time or money to climb outside Europe, he kept himself fully informed about what was happening in the other great ranges of the world. Besides books already mentioned there came The Alps (Batsford 1939) and The Mountain Way (Dent 1938). This anthology bears witness to Irving's wide reading in the classics of mountaineering literature.
In 1937 he and his wife retired to a beautiful little house of warm red brick which he built on the top of St Giles' Hill at Winchester, and called The Hospice. Here, looking out on the Downs, he continued to read and write about mountains and to work in his garden. Plunging down the steep slopes of St Giles' Hill kept his climbing muscles fit, he threw his energies into local government. For twenty years the practical idealist did invaluable work as Councillor and Alderman, for education and housing in particular. On his eightieth birthday all those who had ever climbed with him joined to give him a copy on parchment, with their signatures attached, of Henry Vaughan's poem 'Looking Back' which ends:
And days well spent like the glad east abide,
Whose morning glories cannot die.
This filled his cup of thankfulness to the brim. 'Gratitude', he wrote not long before his death, 'that is the priceless gift the hills have brought'.
Hugh Haworth

I knew Irving, on and off, since 1918, when Winchester was my home, though I never climbed with him, to my loss. But during the past twenty years I got to know him better through work on the Alpine Journal, he being an ever-ready fount of information on all sorts of mountaineering topics.
Irving was elected to the A.C. in December 1902, and almost his first article in the Alpine Journal was, in a sense, his most famous: 'Five years with recruits' (A.J. 24 367). In this Irving described his activities in the Alps with senior boys then (or recently) at Winchester College-Mallory, Gibson, Bullock, Tyndale-and his address to the Club (December 1908) evoked criticism of his taking young men on the types of climb he had described. Some of the critics could almost be expected, such as Freshfield, Davidson or Sydney Spencer; but Longstaff's name is more surprising. Irving admitted in a rejoinder that mistakes had been made, mainly one thinks now, of embarking on too strenuous climbs before his young companions had got into training. But, as he pointed out, his critics were scarcely without blemish in matters of occasional indiscretion, and J. P. Farrar (who would not join the critics) wrote later to Geoffrey Young that it ill-became him, in particular, to rebuke Irving for rash climbing. There were, in fact, no mishaps, and as Farrar (who had a high opinion of Irving) was to say in later years, all the recruits turned out well.
Irving's contribution, whether by way of articles, reviews, or obituaries, to the Alpine Journal, was immense, and a large majority of the volumes, from 23 to 71, contain something from his pen. He served on the Committee of the Club from 1919 to 1921, was Vice-President from 1940 to 1941, and elected an Honorary Member in 1958, this giving him great pleasure. Earlier, he had been offered nomination for the Presidency of the Club, but felt obliged to decline. He was present at the Centenary Dinner on 6 November 1957 and was one of the 'Grand Old Men' whom Hunt felicitously picked out for special mention who had also been present fifty years before at the Jubilee Dinner. It pleased him immensely in 1965 to receive a postcard, signed by most of the A.C. members present in Zermatt, on the occasion of the Matterhorn Centenary.
For my own part, I can but record my gratitude to him for his constant help; his friendliness; his sense of humour; his wit - all those qualities that made him a delight to meet and which render one's awareness of loss the more acute.
T. S. Blakeney
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 75, 1970, Seite 333-337


Geboren am:
17.02.1877
Gestorben am:
10.04.1969