The Night Climbers
It's one of the few things that are universally true for all of us, that there are things out there that we love: we just don't know that they exist yet. Case in point, a few weeks ago I was checking out the news items posted on The Museum of Hoaxes when I noticed a piece about a group of Cambridge pranksters who placed (Son of ) Santa hats atop some spires that had previously been perceived to be un-scalable.
The story included a link to the online version of The Night Climbers of Cambridge written in 1937 by the pseudonymous "Whipplesnaith". I followed the link and fell in love.
The Night Climbers were a group of fearless students who would sneak out of their dormitories late at night and scramble up Cambridge's medieval edifices. The Night Climbers of Cambridge was written as a How To guide for scaling different buildings and serves as a fascinating insight into the minds of England's pre-WWII upper class - and I mean that in good way: the books is filled with wonderful droll humor like this:
"As you pass round each pillar, the whole of your body except your hands and feet are over black emptiness. Your feet are on slabs of stone sloping downwards and outwards at an angle of about thirty-five degrees to the horizontal, your fingers and elbows making the most of a friction-hold against a vertical pillar, and the ground is precisely one hundred feet directly below you.If you slip, you will still have three seconds to live."
I can't explain why, maybe I'm being nostalgic for my college days, but I love the idea of shimmying up an old building - and I'm scared shitless of heights. The other day I was passing by the Henry Charles Lea Library and I thought to myself "I bet I could climb that mutha".
So awesome is the em>The Night Climbers of Cambridge that it not only inspired a sequel, written in the Sixties, titled Cambridge Night Climbing, but - as we've seen from the Santa hats, it still serves as a handbook for lunatics around the world.
By the way, Nares Craig, pictured above standing atop St. John's College, is still going strong at 91.
Bonus links:
To get an idea of what these building look like in the daytime, click here.
To find out about the current state of Night Climbing, click here