At work today I researched a wide range of subjects. From Fry’s chocolate to cable television, from Billingsgate Fish Market to an artist presently living in New England. It’s always such a fun day, especially now I have the use of both hands again.
Someone I didn’t have to research but just found in passing was the marvellous author of the book, the title of which I have used to head this post. Mountaineering in Search of Health written in 1883.
It would be fair to say that Elizabeth Alice Frances Le Blond [nee Hawkins-Whitshed] was a bit of a game girl. By all accounts (well the one I read today anyway) she feared nowt but fear itself. And, while she loved nothing more than scaling the dizzying heights of every peak known to mankind, she did it in a skirt that barely reached her knees. Her mother was totally shocked. What a scandal. London society was in an uproar. Liz just brushed this aside, saying “I owe a supreme debt of gratitude to the mountains for knocking from me the shackles of conventionality.”
She was engaged to and then married an adventurer called Colonel Frederick Gustavus Burnaby when she was just 19. While it sounds like the marriage was bending to the precepts of society, I reckon it was a marriage made in heaven. They just went adventuring together. She travelled “…on the borders of consumption…” which eventually took it’s toll on her. Ignoring the toughness of spirit, she ended up in Switzerland, convalescing in a clinic.
Among her various achievements was the moment when she put her own boots on. She’d never done it before and, eventually, it led to her realising she could do without a maid. I’m thinking her maid was probably quite happy about that, not wanting to climb mountains behind her, carrying the tea things.
In 1885, doing the crazy commando thing, Fred tried to rescue General Charles Gordon at Khartoum but was killed in the attempt. This didn’t phase Liz in the least. The next year she married a professor of engineering called Dr John Frederic Main. I really have no idea why because there was a strange marriage settlement where lots of her lands went to him and after their marriage, he became an investment banker and moved to Denver, Colorado, dying in 1892.
No-one could say our Liz wasn’t blessed with perseverance. In 1900 she married for a third time. Francis Bernard Aubrey Le Blond the son of a merchant.
Apparently she never spent a lot of time with any of her husbands, seeing as she spent a lot of time up mountains in Switzerland or skiing down them or engaging in some winter sport, like ice skating. In fact, she became the first woman to pass the men’s skating test effectively abolishing the separate tests in St Moritz at the time. She was one of the first to make bicycle tours of the Alps and raced cars up hills in competitions.
The magazines of the time loved her. She was the sort of celebrity the mags really go for. Unconventional, fiercely independent, defiant, twice widowed, able to tie her own boots. As a result, she was one of the best-known woman mountain climbers of her time. You see, she wasn’t the only one. There were others. Liz even went climbing a mountain without a male, choosing, instead, to go with Lady Evelyn McDonnell.
She did an awful lot more stuff, including plenty of voluntary work during WWI but I reckon that’s enough for this post. I may come back to the wonderful Liz.
What an amazing woman
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At lunchtime I popped out to the V&A and found a St Sebastien I didn’t know was there! I didn’t think it possible.
St Sebastien without his arrows
He’s a fine looking fellow, if you ask me. Mind you he was a officer in the Roman army so you’d think he’d be fit.
I also spotted this stained glass window of the Devil tempting Jesus with what looks like a basket of emu eggs. It annoys me that all the baddies are brightly coloured while Jesus tends to wear nothing but various shades of beige. What does that say about creation? Surely if Jesus believed in God then he believed that God created all the colourful things in the world. How come he didn’t go in for the fluorescent colours so readily available to the Devil, for instance. I’ve never understood the desire not to glorify God by wearing bright colours. Why don’t nuns wear yellow? Why can’t a vicar wear a harlequin jacket?
'Hey, Mister, you like egg?' 'No thank you, my good man, they are too bright. Unless you have something a bit more beige.'
It’s all about as crazy as a one-legged tap dancer with hiccoughs.
That was fun but I agree why can’t the church be more bright and have more colour it is very sad. it would brighten the world.
What a women good on Liz.
love mum