Secretiveness.

John Bulmer, the great British photographer celebrated for his 1960s photos of the industrial north of England, is less well known for these early images of the secret night climbers at Cambridge University ...

John Bulmer was in his second year of an engineering degree at Cambridge University in the late 1950s when a recently graduated friend tipped him off about the night climbers, a secretive group of students who spent their nights scaling the tops of the college buildings. Though he wasn’t keen on heights, as a photographer who had already started to sell pictures to the national press, the opportunity was too good to pass up. So he started tracking their movements, enlisting a helper to fire off an old-fashioned flashbulb as he worked. “I wanted to photograph them in their environment, so quite often I used wide angle lenses and open flashes, because you can’t climb up a building with a tripod,” he explains.

There was a good reason for the secretiveness. Night climbing had been a thing in Cambridge for many decades – a pseudonymous book about it, now a collector’s item, was published in the 1930s – and punishment for anyone caught on the rooftops was instant expulsion. On one occasion, Bulmer and his helper narrowly escaped an encounter with some college staff by hiding behind a pillar: “We heard one saying to another: ‘That’s odd. Looks like lightning up there.’” On another, in his hurry to escape capture, he impaled himself on some ferocious spikes, leaving a permanent scar.