Siegfried Herford

Herford was a British climber who was active in the years immediately before World War I. He and John Laycock and Stanley Jeffcoat initiated what is referred to as "gritstone climbing" in England, bouldering on large blocks at the base of the cliffs, and roping up to climb the edges and faces above.

As a child he may have been autistic, subject to long periods of silence punctuated by violent outbursts of physical energy—behaviour coupled with a natural proclivity to mathematical thought. Siegfried enrolled at the University of Manchester in 1909, in the School of Engineering, and dabbled at rock climbing for a year or so. By 1911 he had invented the "girdle traverse", practising at Castle Naze in the Derbyshire Peak District before applying his concept to the face of Scafell. Although Herford spent considerable time on the crags, the quality of his academic work was superior, and he was at the top of his class in mathematics and physics when he graduated in 1912. He then received a postgraduate scholarship which allowed him to do aeronautical research at the Royal Aircraft Factory at Farnborough.

In the spring of 1914, Herford, with three companions, climbed the Central Buttress of Scafell, negotiating the crux—the notorious Flake Pitch—after reconnoitering the difficulties from above, as well as below. (Herford was an advocate of downclimbing, and wrote an article—"The Doctrine of Descent"—published in the 1913 Fell & Rock Climbing Club Journal.) Although some "combined tactics" were employed, the climb was a substantial benchmark in British rock climbing, coming in at HVS (5.9).

Wikipedia

The 14th of April 2014 marked one hundred years of HVS with the anniversary of the infamous Central Buttress (C.B) route which takes a bold 5b line up the main face of Scafell. Thugging our way up classics, shoving sticky rubber in wet cracks, we might momentarily wish for big boots, but not much else from 1914. One of the first ascentionists, Siegfried Herford was twenty two that spring, spending one hundred days on the grit whilst studying for his finals at Manchester Uni, a sordid amount of time. Even a student climber would have cravenly waited for a one week holiday in a National Park or if posh, the Alps. Grit was too short to be considered worth bothering with by the Victorian summit baggers. But a new movement of 'climbing acrobats' explored the Yorkshire and Peak outcrops, practising balance rather than the jug hauling typical to mountain crags. Their elders considered this distasteful in the extreme, fearing the loss of their traditional aesthetic and bettering experience to the next generation of "indifferent mountaineers, with a somewhat limited way of regarding mountains", (R.L Irving.) The dreaded 'plastic pullers' of their day.

However, developing 'the doctrine of descent' (as he termed down-climbing in his article in the 1913 FRCC journal) on the grit meant Herford could attempt harder Lakeland lines with a greater margin of confidence, if not safety. He is one of an archetypal line of smart, challenging climbers who push the sport forwards by decades with a single route. In his case, C.B, thought of as the last climbable line in the Lakes, the area receiving the majority of action during that period. Finding a sympathetic partner in the quietly committed climber George Sansom, they 'worked' the Central Buttress route over two years, abseiling sections to practice cruxes. In a letter written to a friend in 1913 Siegfried described their efforts:

"I descended the overhanging crack, which is very bad for 25 feet. The rope got jammed while I was on this and I must have spent half an hour struggling with it, so that when at last I managed to move it, I was too tired to go up again, and had to descend. At any rate, the C.B problem is solved as much as it will ever be."

The image of a tweed-suited gent hanging from a jammed hemp rope, with no anchors, several hundred feet up a mountain crag is sketchy to say the least, so it seems reasonable that Herford decided the final crack crux wasn't worth it. However then as now, routes nag, and a team of four returned the following year. Siege style and with a smattering of 'combined tactics' - the odd limb where a dyno wouldn't do and the route was climbed, albeit in two parts. The impact of the ascent has no real modern equivalent, perhaps a 'Dawesian' style vision? The physical challenge of the route was huge, it still scalps climbers today, and a key psychological achievement for these young guns was releasing their climbing rat from social diktat. The 'two-fingers-up' audacity in undertaking what was seen by an austere older generation as an 'unjustifiable risk'.

Claire Carter

Sadly, Herford’s potential remained largely unfulfilled; he was killed at the cruelly early age of 24, by a German rifle-grenade in the trenches of Flanders on January 28, 1916..