The Night Climbers of Cambridge

Whipplesnaith

This is a transcription of the 1953 edition of "The Night Climbers of Cambridge" by "Whipplesnaith", a.k.a. Noel Howard Symington. The transcription was performed by photographing a copy of the book and re-organising it as Docbook XML via a mixture of OCR and manual labour. In particular, I enlisted the generous help of many people in correcting the OCR output from page 68 onwards: a thousand thank-yous to Alex Cowan, Richard Shaw, Callum Durnford, Ali Macdonald, Alex Gaastra, Ronan Kavanagh, Ben Weaver and Rachel Coleman-Finch.

So much for the technicalities; I shall now briefly mention the copyright situation. This is dubious as the author is dead, the book is long out of print and the publisher is defunct, or has been subsumed into one of the modern behemoths. The spirit of this transcription is not to steal but to make the content, which would otherwise languish in the obscurity of rare book shops, available to the modern night-climbers of Cambridge and beyond. I think Whipplesnaith would approve.


Table of Contents
1. Multum In Parvo
2. Chiefly Padding
3. On Climbing In
4. For Beginners Only
5. Drain-Pipes
6. On Chimneys
7. The Old Library
8. Here and There
9. St. John's'
10. St. John's Chapel
11. Pembroke
12. Trinity
13. King's and Clare
14. The Chapel
15. The Chapel Again
16. Saying Good-bye
List of Figures
1-1. New Tower at dawn.
3-1. Spikes. All three rows revolve.
3-2. Over the Railings to the Old Library.
5-1. Drain pipe technique. / On the engineering labs.
5-2. St. John's, Drain-pipe Chimney
7-1. On the Old Library. Up to the Saintless Niche.
7-2. Old Library Chimney from below.
7-3. Old Library Chimney: the headless man.
7-4. Sunken Drain-pipe. Upper half.
7-5. Sunken Drain-pipe. Lower half.
7-6. The O'Hara Pinnacle or Tottering Tower.
8-1. The O'Hara Drain-pipe.
8-2. Friend or foe?
8-3. South Face of Caius
8-4. Falling across from Caius to the Senate House
8-5. Diagram of the escape from Marks and Spencers.
8-6. Fountain in the Market Place.
8-7. Double Drain-pipe work
8-8. Drain-pipe in Downing Street.
8-9. The Fitzwilliam Museum: Lion Chimney
8-10. The Fitzwilliam Museum: Lion Chimney
8-11. The Fitzwilliam Chimney at back.
13-1. Central Archway, Gibbs.
13-2. King's Porter's Lodge
13-3. King's Chapel
13-4. St John's Chapel
13-5. Clare, the Ladder Climb.
13-6. South-east corner of Clare.
13-7. South-east corner of Clare.
13-8. Porter's Lodge. The clock face.
13-9. King's Porter's Lodge. Ground to roof.
13-10. King's, Chetwynd Crack.
14-1. Traverse round base of pinnacle.
14-2. Standing on the first overhang.
15-1. Two-thirds of the way up.
15-2. Chimney from below.
15-3. Nearing the top.
15-4. King's Chapel, North-east Pinnacle.
15-5. Chapel Spire.
15-6. First overhang again.
15-7. The last thirty feet.
15-8. Rustication notice.
16-1. Flashlight, bulbs, rucksack, camera, ropes and men.
16-2. The Photographers' Farewell.