Two Remarkable London Schoolmasters
Part Two

Part One of the story, which can be accessed here, gave an account of the two passions that shaped the life of the young Welsh schoolmaster Owen Glynne Jones. By profession he was a teacher of physics and he was remembered by his pupils at City of London School with affection and admiration. Away from the classroom, though, he was a climber with a remarkable record of ascents to his credit. And much of his climbing was done in the company of Frederick William Hill, who was equally impressive, although for very different reasons.

Hill was in fact a companion in more than one sense, as he too was a master at City of London School, an outstanding mathematician with a first class honours degree from Cambridge who would rise in due course to become Second Master. Although blessed with a legendary coolness of manner, he was a kind man, respected by staff and boys as much for his love of music as for the acuity of his mind. He was a keen supporter of school sport, which is hardly surprising, and it was said of him that once, when judging a long jump event, he explained to a rather fussy colleague that measuring jumps to an eighth of an inch was a hopeless task given the curvature of the earth’s surface.

Hill may have cut a rather aloof figure in the staff room, but he had a deep connection with Jones, which may have had something to do with the fact that he too had Welsh blood in his veins — his father, a warehouseman, had been born in Castlemartin in Pembrokeshire — and had been brought up not in London or the south of England but in Hulme in the north west. Claire Eliane Engel described him in her 1952 book They Came to the Hills as ‘a tall, stooping, unathletic type of man’, and staff photographs in which he appears seem to bear this out. Engel also claimed that he was ‘certainly willed into becoming a mountaineer’ by the enthusiasm of his colleague, but he was no less devoted to the sport than Jones, as his membership of the Alpine Club suggests.

They uttered no sound 

Jones was also a member of that most prestigious club, and although he harboured ambitions of Himalayan climbing, it was in the Alps that his talent found its fullest expression. And so it was that on the afternoon of Monday 28 August 1899, in company with Frederick William Hill and three local guides, Elias Furrer, Clemenz Zurbriggen and Jean Vuignier, he found himself perched high on the west ridge of the Dent Blanche in the Swiss canton of Valais. The summit was 160 feet above him, but the town of Zermatt, from where the climbers had set off, was over 14,000 feet beneath him.

The outing began early in the morning. Progress was so good that by ten o’clock the climbers judged that the summit was no more than an hour away, but at that moment Furrer, who was in the lead, was confronted by the smooth face of a buttress, which was only ten feet high but with no reliable holds. By balancing on an ice-axe held steady by Zurbriggen and Jones, he was able to reach the top of the buttress, but as he was trying to haul himself up his fingers slipped from the cracks in the rock, and he fell, and in falling he crashed into the two men below. All three went hurtling down the rocky slope, and Vuignier, who was roped to them, was pulled off balance and tumbled into the void.

Miraculously, Hill did not go with them, and it is easy to imagine his dismay as his climbing companions fell on to the rocks far below, where, he later believed, they would have died instantly. ‘They uttered no sound,’ he would say of those terrible moments. ‘They made no apparent attempt to save themselves. With arms outspread they rolled helplessly down the awful face of the mountain.’ Then, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, and realising that his situation was perilous, he chose the safest route for a solitary climber, which was to get to the summit and then find a different way down.

Beneath a cold white mist

That descent would take over two days. The weather was appalling, and Hill had to contend with thick mist as well as a snowstorm and the biting wind. At one point, having dropped his ice-axe, he had to clamber down a rock face to retrieve it, which in those difficult conditions took him an hour. As he weakened he stumbled on the treacherous surfaces, and he became very confused, talking to ghostly climbing companions who were there at his side only in his imagination. His rations consisted of five raisins.

Hill finally reached Zermatt at eleven-thirty on the Wednesday morning, and at eleven that evening a search party of climbers and guides set off for the Dent Blanche, though this time the mood was one not of anticipation and excitement but of sadness. The streets were deserted, for a local guide, Josef Reinstadler, had died on another mountain on the same Monday, and there were no lights in the windows, only in the chapel where the body lay. Reinstadler had fallen into a crevasse and had been throttled by his rope.   

On the Thursday, at ten in the morning, a cold white mist lifted to reveal the four bodies, which lay terribly broken among the rocks. The guides had brought up eight large poles taken from the fences in the fields below, and over these they fastened sheets, making stretchers to carry the dead men down from the mountain. It was a difficult operation. The bodies had to be dragged along the grassy slopes before the guides found a path good enough to hoist them on to their shoulders, and by the time they reached the first village in the valley, Les Haudères, darkness had fallen.

Never to return

Jones’s body, lying in a black coffin unadorned save for a simple gilt cross, and with his name written on it in white chalk, was taken by carriage from Les Haudères to the village of Evolène. On the Saturday a funeral was held at the Chapelle Saint-Christophe, and the dead man was buried in the old cemetery by some English friends who had been there in the Alps with him. At the same time they buried Jean Vuignier, who was a son of the place. One of the Englishmen, William Montgomery Crook, described the scene, most movingly:

All the villagers, men and women, attended the funeral, clad in coarse white robes. The grief of the women, especially of Vuignier’s poor old mother, was heart-rending to witness. The little Roman Catholic chapel was crowded, the congregation all in white, save the acolytes, two village boys, who served the altar in their coarse brown, everyday clothes, and the choir, whose strong voices rang through the whitewashed, humble building. A little knot of Englishmen, sunbrowned, of another faith or of no faith at all, joined in the impressive and solemn service. It was a sight that no one present can ever forget.      

An Anglican clergyman read the English burial service over Jones’s grave, and Frederick William Hill, who was visibly emotional, arranged a wreath of edelweiss intertwined with Alpine rose leaves. Crook remembered the weather as particularly fine, and noted that   

the lovely warm sunshine and the bright blue sky, and the gleaming snows on the slopes of the Dent Blanche, formed a curious contrast to the mourning of the village in that Alpine valley.

Elsewhere, in Stalden and Saas-Fee, the other two guides, Elias Furrer and Clemenz Zurbriggen, were also laid to rest. A profound sorrow had settled over the villages nestling beneath the Dent Blache and the mighty peaks of the Pennine Alps. In St Peter’s, the English church in Zermatt, a memorial was set up for the schoolmaster who had come to the mountains from London, and now would never return.

A perfect gentleman

The newspapers gave full coverage to the tragedy. For the most part they concentrated on the untimely death of a young man who had established himself as one the most talented climbers of his generation. They also made much of Hill’s extraordinary story of survival. One, though, took a different approach by also writing about the impact of the tragedy on people outside the climbing world who had, as it were, been left behind.

The newspaper in question, the Morning Leader, printed a report by a correspondent who had visited the address in Denmark Hill where Jones had been living. This was on Friday 1 September, and it says a great deal about the sensation the tragedy caused, not to mention the dubious ethics of journalism, that the body of the unfortunate climber, lying hundreds of miles away in a small village in Switzerland, had not even been buried. Mrs Emma Edwards, his landlady, had known him for five years, and she could not sing his praises highly enough. Not only was he ‘a perfect gentleman’ but he had amused her as well. He obviously had a brilliant mind: he was a science teacher, he had books stacked ‘from floor to ceiling’ in his room, and ‘there was not a subject he could not talk about’.

The death he would choose

Mrs Edwards also told her visitor about Jones’s younger sister Margaret, who was there in the house too, prostrated with grief. She was lying on a sofa in the dining-room, and on the table was a basket of black grapes and pears, which she had hardly noticed and had left untouched. She composed herself sufficiently to answer questions about her brother’s exploits, but she had heard so many of his accounts of the mountains that she could not differentiate one from another. She knew that he had been a great climber — you had to be special to be elected to the exclusive Alpine Club — but she could not say what it was that had made him great.

As her visitor was leaving, Mrs Edwards said, sadly, that she had always known that Jones would die in the mountains. ‘And he knew it, too,’ she went on. ‘He used to say so, and say it was the death he would choose.’

Memorials

Others left behind by Owen Glynne Jones when he fell to his death on the Dent Blanche were his colleagues and pupils at the City of London School. They were fond and appreciative of the bright young Welshman who looked set to do great things for the teaching of science. And if their recollections are a memorial of sorts, there is another, made of marble, that has been fixed to a wall alongside tributes to other distinguished past members of the school’s community. A third commemorative tablet was placed at the door of the house in Barmouth in Gwynedd where Jones would stay with cousins on his mother’s side.

Frederick William Hill never spoke about the events of 1899. The loss of his friend and climbing partner, the deaths of three brave local guides, and his own ordeal on his descent from the Dent Blanche were not matters for causal conversation. He remained at the school until his retirement at the end of the summer term in 1928. Unlike Jones, he was a married man, and he lived with his wife, Kate Florence Botterill, until his death in 1935. He was seventy-one, and had been ill, and he died not in hostile mountainous terrain but in a safe and comfortable bed in a hospital in the heart of the English countryside.