Albert F. Mummery

Albert Frederick Mummery (10 September 1855, Dover, Kent, England – 24 August 1895, Nanga Parbat), was an English mountaineer and author. Although most notable for his many and varied first ascents put up in the Alps, Mummery, along with J. Norman Collie, Geoffrey Hastings, and two Gurkhas are also the first men in recorded history to have attempted to summit one of the Himalayan eight-thousanders.

Their innovative, light-weight endeavour upon Nanga Parbat in 1895 proved ill-fated; Mummery and both Gurkhas died in an avalanche whilst reconnoitering the mountain's Rakhiot Face. The first man to summit on Nanga Parbat, the legendary Austrian mountaineer Hermann Buhl, described Mummery as "one of the greatest mountaineers of all time".¹

Life

Mummery's father was a tanner and mayor of Dover. The tanning business was prosperous enough for Mummery to devote most of his energies to climbing and economics. He became a friend of J. A. Hobson, and they collaborated on The Physiology of Industry (1889), which argued that because of economies' tendencies towards over-saving - and this being a cause of depressions – the economy required intervention to achieve stability.²

Mountaineer

Mummery is best remembered for his pioneering efforts in mountaineering. Initially, he climbed with mountain guides, but with his companions William Cecil Slingsby, Geoffrey Hastings and J. Norman Collie he was part of the movement which revolutionized alpinism by the practice of guideless climbing. He invented the Mummery tent, a type of tent used in the early days of .