English lawyer Alfred Wills and party had…

English lawyer Alfred Wills and party had set out for an ascent of the Wetterhorn in Switzerland on August 27, 1854.

The Wetterhorn summit was first reached on August 31, 1844, by the Grindelwald guides Hans Jaun and Melchior Bannholzer, three days after they had co-guided a large party organized by the geologist Édouard Desor to the first ascent of the Rosenhorn.

The Mittelhorn was first summited on July 9, 1845 by the same guides, this time accompanied by a third, Kaspar Abplanalp, and by British climber Stanhope Templeman Speer.

The son of a Scottish physician, Speer lives in Interlaken, Switzerland.

The September 1854 summit by the party that includes Alfred Wills, who apparently believes he's made the first ascent, will be much celebrated in Great Britain.

Wills' description of this trip in his book "Wanderings Among the High Alps" (published in 1856) will help make mountaineering fashionable in Britain and usher  in the so-called "golden age of alpinism", the systematic exploration of the Alps by British mountaineers.