Rusticated.

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.

Hopes.

Tyler Cowen interviews Katherine Rundell ...

COWEN: Should children be more mischievous?

RUNDELL: Yes, and I think we should have more patience with childhood mischief because children whose mischievousness is quashed become difficult, thwarted, and sometimes quite vile adults.

COWEN: What are the most important lessons of governance from what are called children’s novels?

RUNDELL: Children’s novels tend to teach the large, uncompromising truths that we hope exist. Things like love will matter, kindness will matter, equality is possible. I think that we express them as truths to children when what they really are are hopes.

I suppose the best politics of children’s fiction will be those that argue that, as Ursula Le Guin would say, all that we have made, we have made by man, and it can be undone by man. That often, the first way that we transform the world is through the art that she calls her art, the art of words. She would say it is the utopianism of children’s fiction that allows us to imagine something better. She might be right.

COWEN: Should the rest of fiction be more like what we call children’s fiction?

RUNDELL: I would say it would be more that more people should read children’s fiction, because the rest of fiction performs other urgently necessary tasks. I think the right to elongate and experiment are jobs more of adult fiction. I would argue, rather, that adults should occasionally read children’s fiction for pleasure, but also for the unabashed politics of idealism that they have.

Electricity.

Katherine Rundell on night-climbing ...

I began night climbing at Oxford, with a few friends, crawling out of windows and up drainpipes – the circular ones, never the more ornate square ones, which are likely to peel away from the wall – to see the city we were still in awe of from above. Oxford can be an uneasy place for teenagers not reared on self-belief and champagne, and it was emboldening to walk it from above; the closest you could get to conquering the city. But it was more than that; I have always loved to be up high, and I have always loved the electricity it puts in the blood.

Night climbing, when it goes well, works on the joy of quick and necessary decisions, on improvising in the two seconds in which your stomach and brain are in conflict. It is unmooring your sense of fear and self-preservation from your sense of hope and danger and adventure. There are moments that can’t be replicated anywhere else; nowhere at ground level offers the same pleasures as sitting with your back against chimney pots, or walking the apex of a rooftop, or looking down on the Tetris pattern of masters’ gardens and college quads. I discovered that All Souls has gargoyles with moss growing on their tongues. The former warden John Davis tells a story about the historian David Cox, who, as an undergraduate, climbed onto the Codrington Library and stole the weather vane from the Christopher Wren sundial. When he was elected a fellow, he climbed back up and replaced it. Nobody, as far as he could tell, had noticed its absence.

The world is huge up high. I’m not daring in most things – I cross roads at the green man and wear my seatbelt on a plane even when the captain has switched off the light – but heights offer a brick-dust puzzle-solving shot of joy that nothing else matches. Climbing walls make good rough drafts, and smell enticingly of chalk and human palms, but they’re not like the outside. Outside, the most real danger is from yourself.

Challenge.

Dear people of Oxford,

We are once again recruiting individuals with athletic and intellectual talent.  To join us, your peripheral awareness and ability to read your environment are paramount. Attached to this post is a secret message. Find it and you will be led to the next stage. A physical challenge will follow.

Mental vigour is the key, a capacity for heights a must.

Wonder.

From Whipplesnaith's The Night Climbers of Cambridge ...

Come, thick night, 

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, 

That heaven peep not through the blanket of the dark, 

To cry "Hold, hold"

Macbeth, slightly adapted

For a climber is as a man standing on the edge of an abyss. The chance of falling over or of the ground crumbling beneath his feet is negligible, yet his very closeness to the edge makes him think. He cannot but visualize what would happen if he stepped forward, and realizes with a shock of what very small significance it would be. The sun would still be shining, and the waterfall would still be roaring below. And suddenly he realizes, perhaps far the first ttme in his life, what a friendly fellow the sun is, what vividness there is in the green around him.

There is a kind of fear which is very closely akin to love, and this is the fear which the climber enjoys. It is, to use a contradictory term, a brave fear; a fear which announces its presence, perhaps very loudly, but raises no insuperable barrier to achievement. The climber enjoys being frightened, because he knows that fear is no impediment.

Lastly, we may ask ourselves whether the good effects resulting from climbing are permanent. From the pinnacle of our premature old age, we think we can say they are.

The immediate exaltation after a difficult climb only lasts two or three days at the outside, but there is a residual effect after the effervescence has died down. The imagination, through its violent and constant use in climbing, receives a permanent increase in strength. It becomes constructive instead of haphazard, so that instead of thinking what he might do a climber thinks more of what he could and may do. Each achievement makes the next one easier.

And so, sitting in our armchair by the fireside, we smile as our thoughts carry us back to Cambridge. It has been great fun. These last few weeks have been equal to the best of the old days in college, when to go out involved so little effort that we did so all too rarely. The trouble with the camera, the climbing, the excitement after each flash, the long car journey of over fifty miles up to Cambridge in the evening, night after night, and the return in the darkness before dawn, the hedgerows rushing past on the edge of vision, the feeling of control as the tyres gripped on each corner taken too fast, the moon shining her torch on a sleeping world, or the sense of the country around on a dark night; the memory of bad climbers forcing themselves to be brave on easy buildings, and good climbers arousing our admiration on the severe climbs; the feeling of knowing intimately all those with whom we have been out. Yes, it has been great fun.

Occasionally, as we pause in our reading to throw a log on the fire, we feel a vague unrest. It all seems too comfortable. The night is dark, and in its inscrutability tries to lead us on to action; or the moon laughs down, as though trying to tell us what she can see in other parts of the world. We stir in our chair, and wonder whether it is a sign of strength or weakness that makes us ignore the call. Cambridge is there, just over an hour from us, her roof-tops waiting.

Love.

At this very moment there may be a dozen climbers on the buildings of Cambridge. They do not know each other; they are unlikely to meet. And inadvertently they will find what we found, a love for the buildings and the climbs upon them, a love for the night and the thrill of darkness.

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Tomfoolery.

The magic and vertiginous tomfoolery of 1930s Cambridge undergraduates climbing the city’s buildings by night ...

"Some airy devil hovers in the sky," reads a delightful, hand-written note on the verso of an inserted photograph from Thomas Mailaender’s The Night Climbers of Cambridge, recently published by The Archive of Modern Conflict. "It was this quotation," it continues, "which gave me the idea of the climb."

Mailaender, a Parisian artist described as "Bernd and Hilla Becher under the influence of Pastis", recently acquired this curious collection of prints depicting Cambridge University undergraduates from the 1930s, who photographed themselves in action whilst climbing the city’s rooftops. At times, the students exhibit a reckless disregard for their own safety as we see them scaling 40ft high walls or hanging off window ledges and guttering.

Elsewhere, we watch them clambering up drainpipes and perched atop spires, all pictured under the glare of the moon, camera flashes and the watchful eye of the occasional policeman. Like escaping fugitives (yet wearing blazers and ties), these daredevils come alive in the shadows and fog, absorbing the energy of the night-time to test their limits and discover those passions that are suppressed all day.

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Frolics.

There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up, you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.

Whipplesnaith, from The Night Climbers of Cambridge

Excellent.

An excellent book ...

Before going on, it is rather fun to throw things down on passers-by in Trinity Lane. The missiles cannot be seen as they sail downwards, but a direct hit can usually be recognized. This pastime is not dignified, but we repeat, rather fun.

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Excellent.

An excellent book ...

There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up, you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil.

Whipplesnaith

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