A model English young lady, you might say. As was expected of a young Victorian woman, she looked after the family home and helped prepare the parties held for her father's business partners. She did embroidery and learnt languages – French, German and Italian. Only now and then did she play a game of croquet, which was still socially acceptable for a lady, but otherwise she knew her place. That sport was the privilege of gentlemen, and that women belonged at home. And yet there was something unusual about Lucy Walker. Something downright extraordinary in nineteenth-century England: she never married.
Perhaps partly because, by the start of summer at the latest, her suitors discovered that Lucy wasn't quite the proper lady she was taken for back home in Liverpool.
In 1858, during their annual summer stay in the Swiss Alps, her father Frank and brother Horace, both already well-known English mountaineers by then, took her on a hike over the Theodul and Monte Moro passes – and 22-year-old Lucy forgot all about proper Victorian manners. She promptly asked her father if she could join him the following year on the 3,629-metre granite pyramid of the Altels, whose upper third looked as if someone had dusted it with icing sugar. Seen from the pastures above Kandersteg, the mountain certainly had its charm. And perhaps here in Switzerland, out of sight of strict English society, they could allow themselves such an eccentricity. Still, for the climb her father needed to find a capable guide.
Chamois hunting sometimes drives a man into terrain where solid ground vanishes beneath his feet. Where you have to keep every sense on high alert, because the slightest hesitation could be your last. That's how Melchior Anderegg, a native of the Grimsel area, got his first taste of climbing mountains. And according to Frank Walker, this child of nature was to become the ideal guide for the Altels.
In the summer of 1859 Melchior duly showed the Walker family that he could not only chase chamois nimbly but also lead those who relied on his skills with total certainty. So in his footsteps Lucy Walker climbed a real Alpine peak for the first time. In the years that followed, she, Melchior and her father gazed out from the summits of the Dufourspitze, Rimpfischhorn, Eiger and the great white jewel of Mont Blanc. They were even the very first people to stand on the 3,698-metre Balmhorn in the Bernese Alps. And with all that experience under her belt, Lucy Walker then took on the steep faces of the Jungfrau, the Dom, the Mönch and the Aiguille Verte.
It was crazy. Climbing mountains. And climbing mountains as a woman? Downright outrageous. A woman should behave like a woman. She should know her place. And that was certainly not in a mountain hut, crammed onto bunks with complete strangers between flimsy wooden walls, drying her soaked clothes on a line.
That's one reason why Lucy Walker preferred to keep quiet about her climbing.
And to preserve at least some of her femininity up there, she made all those difficult ascents – crossing treacherous crevasses on flimsy hemp ropes and balancing on sharp ridges and steep walls of Alpine granite – in a heavy, voluminous skirt, with hobnailed leather boots peeking out from under its hem.
There were still several hours to go before sunrise when Lucy Walker woke up in the hut on the north-eastern flank of the Matterhorn on Friday 21 July 1871. Once again surrounded by men, among them her father and her faithful guide Melchior Anderegg, all getting ready for the climb. A candle flickered in the metal cage of a lantern, and in its wavering light Lucy Walker stepped onto the slopes where the great tragedy had taken place six years earlier. Four men had fallen from the rope on their way back from the first successful ascent of the mountain of mountains. They plunged into the depths, and their bodies still lay somewhere on the Matterhorn's precipices.
What's more, just as Edward Whymper had raced Jean-Antoine Carrel for the first ascent in 1865, Lucy Walker also had a rival beneath the mountain. American Meta Brevoort was determined to become the first woman to press the soles of her boots into the snow on the summit of the Matterhorn. But Melchior Anderegg learnt of her intentions in time, and together with Lucy Walker he secretly changed plans and brought forward their departure from Zermatt.
Then, as dawn began to break on that Friday in July and deep in the valleys the world was only just stirring, Lucy Walker's heart was already pounding at full tilt. Any careless step could send her and the other members of the party, all tied into one shared rope, into the bottomless void. Yet after years in the mountains, both her mind and her body knew how to cope with such strain. And the sun shone from a blue sky, lighting the way to the heights.
That same evening a telegram reached the offices of the Journal de Genève: "Englishwoman Lucy Walker has become the first woman to reach the summit of the Matterhorn." Meanwhile the defeated Meta Brevoort waited in Zermatt to congratulate her rival in person once she came down from the mountain.
And perhaps because Lucy Walker didn't brazenly challenge the social norms of the time – she always climbed in a crinoline and only in the company of her father or brother – her ascent earned not only a certain amount of criticism, which she was able to shrug off, but also due attention and recognition. International newspapers wrote about the first female ascent of the Matterhorn, and the English magazine Punch even published a poem in Lucy Walker's honour. For once, a woman didn't belong only at home. She belonged on the highest mountains too.
No glacier can baffle, no precipice balk her,
No peak rise above her, however sublime.
Give three times three cheers for intrepid Miss Walker.
I say, my boys, doesn't she know how to climb!
And Melchior Anderegg? The friendship spun by the mountains themselves lasted long after doctors advised Lucy Walker, at forty, to give up Alpine climbing for good. Whenever she spent the summer in Mürren or Zermatt, the locals would see the two of them talking together on long walks. And when people later asked her why she had never married, she answered straight out, as was her habit: "I love the mountains and Melchior. Only Melchior already has a wife."
Lucy Walker was one of the first and also most active women mountaineers of the 19th century. During a 21-year Alpine career that began in 1858, she undertook 98 expeditions. She made 28 successful ascents of 4,000-metre peaks, 16 first female ascents (e.g. of Monte Rosa, the Strahlhorn and the Grand Combin) and the outright first ascent of the Balmhorn (regardless of gender).
Although Lucy Walker was an exceptionally capable mountaineer, she was never allowed to join London's Alpine Club, which was for men only. It remained closed to women until 1974.
In 1907 Lucy Walker helped found the Ladies' Alpine Club and served as its second president until her death in September 1917. She lived to the age of 81.
Meta Brevoort climbed the Matterhorn in the same year as Lucy Walker. On 5 September 1871 she also became the first woman to traverse the summit from Zermatt to Cervinia. Unlike Lucy Walker, she made a point of climbing without a skirt – in trousers only. And she still nurtured her great dream of climbing Everest, whose summit was finally reached a long 82 years later.
