Michael Cox on The Night Climbers Of Cambridge by Whipplesnaith
The Night Climbers Of Cambridge is a curio. Upon its first publication in October 1937 it became an instant hit, and a second edition appeared in November of the same year. It was reprinted in 1952, 1953 and most recently in 2007. But perhaps more than any other book in The Abbey’s drawing room library, it is deserving of ‘cult classic’ status.
Night Climbers was published under the pseudonym ‘Whipplesnaith’. For many years it was thought to have been the work of several contributors, but the 2007 Oleander Press edition appears to credit one man as sole author: Noel H. Symington, who wrote Night Climbers in the 1930s.
Symington’s book records the exploits of a group of Cambridge University students whose nocturnal predilection might (depending on your view) strike today’s undergraduates as peculiar. Rather than stay up all night drinking, taking drugs, having casual sex and doing whatever else The Daily Mail would have us believe is standard fare among contemporary students, Cambridge’s night climbers sought to climb the ancient buildings of the town and its venerable university. Their derring-do included scaling such heights as the Fitzwilliam Museum and the King’s College Chapel; most, if not all, of their ascents were recorded with prehistoric photographic paraphernalia carried aloft over battlements, up chimneys and down drain-pipes.
The book’s premise is thus interesting in its own right. To embark upon what is now known as ‘buildering’ or ‘stegophily’ by night is undoubtedly foolhardy; to seek conquests of Cambridge’s dreaming spires the height of British eccentricity. As such, Night Climbers belongs to another era. It captures a sense of innocence in pre-Second World War Britain, one delightfully denuded of the health and safety regulation so prevalent in today’s nanny state society.
Night Climbers is also intriguingly written. Take this, for example: “The chimney is too broad for comfort, and a very short man might find it impossible to reach the opposite wall, with his feet flapping disconsolately in space like an elephant’s uvula.” There are innumerable lovely lines and vignettes, and something quintessentially modernist, too, in Symington’s ambiguous embrace of the ideal that night climbers should leave no trace. Not only does he write a book, complete with photographs, documenting night climbing, the very act itself at times proves too tempting not to evoke by way of a literal memento. Describing the climb up St. John’s, Symington writes: “From the window ledge a climber in a playful mood may leave his gown or surplice on the statue in the middle. This would probably cause considerable surprise to the authorities.”
Ah, the authorities. They are ever-present in Night Climbers, lurking in the shadows, but more fearsome than the police or the dons are the college porters. As Symington puts it: “The dismay felt by a climber descending a drain-pipe outside a college, with a porter inside shouting ‘Police!’ at the top of his voice, is an emotion never to be forgotten.”
The Night Climbers Of Cambridge is a strange book, but an uplifting one. It makes us wonder what universities are for, it makes us lament the way in which the British spirit of adventure has been compromised, and, by virtue of its learned and allusive style, it makes us recall that, once upon a time, knowledge of the Classics was a sine qua non of the educated man.
But guests need not fear. Symington’s book doesn’t make me want to set off on nocturnal climbs of The Abbey Hotel. Not every night, anyway.
