The Missing Librarian

Somewhere high in the Austrian Alps there may lie the body of a librarian, for that is where Robert Proctor was last seen, at the head of the Taschach valley, on the morning of Sunday, 6 September 1903.

Proctor’s final day at work at the British Museum before his intended three-week holiday in the Eastern Tyrol had been Friday, 28 August. He had been planning his expedition for some time, sending off to Innsbruck for maps of the Zillertal and Otzal Alps. The former, when it arrived, he had had cut up and mounted by a man at the museum. He had also ordered maps of the Vorarlberg at Dulau’s, the international booksellers on Soho Square, but these had still not come when he called for them that Friday. Nor had the ice axe he had requested from Fulpmes in the Tyrol. However, other last-minute tasks had kept him busy. He had brought his luggage up to Waterloo that morning and arranged for it to be sent on to Charing Cross. At lunchtime he had gone there himself to buy his ticket. He had also called at the Crédit Lyonnais and exchanged sterling for francs and Austrian crowns. Like most people before setting out on a journey he was restless. He closed his diary entry that evening with the question, ‘What shall I be when I open this book again three weeks hence?’ It was probably a relief to get away, at least temporarily, from the British Museum’s Department of Printed Books. He had worked there for a decade as an Assistant, but the last couple of weeks had been even more stressful than usual. His current grand project was to remove all the incunabula, those books printed before 1501, from their places scattered throughout the collections to shelves in the museum’s Arch Room. There he was arranging them in what came to be known as Proctor Order, first by country, then by place of publication, then by printer, finally by size. Often these details could only be determined after minute investigation of the typefaces used. Typography fascinated him and it was a field in which he was one of the world’s leading experts. He had in 1898 published a four-volume index to the incunabula in the British Museum. The Trustees had been much impressed and had asked for a full-scale catalogue but bibliographical descriptions as such bored him. Gathering together the books was a delaying tactic, a way of keeping the Trustees happy. Sadly, Proctor was not a man who could delegate. He would not even allow library assistants to wheel the barrows of books from the stacks to the Arch Room. Sometimes they would make off with what they saw as their barrows and then there would be rows. Proctor was a great man for rows and in the preceding weeks there had been some spectacular ones. The museum photographers were his particular bugbear. They disturbed him by occupying a table by the window in the Arch Room. Three weeks earlier he had actually gone on strike for a week until the authorities had given way and agreed to move them to a space in the Iron Library. No sooner had this been settled than he had had another row, this time with W. R. Wilson, one of the Assistant Keepers and a normally genial man. It was over the removal of incunabula from the presses in the Large Room. This had been so heated that even Proctor wondered if it was the end of the British Museum for him. In fact, at the time of his departure for the Continent, his friends were deeply concerned about his state of mind. Many years later Sydney Cockerell, subsequently Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, recalled that when Proctor had called on him just before he left for his holiday, he had said to him jokingly, ‘Don’t fall down a crevasse.’ Proctor had looked wistful, Cockerell thought, and asked ‘Why not?’ They might all have been even more worried had they known of a paper of instructions he was to write the day before he set out, detailing his wishes in the event that he predeceased his mother. It ended: ‘My body is to be burned, and the ashes to be cast into the sea or running water.’ In addition to affairs at the museum, there were other anxieties preying on his mind. In 1897 he had moved from Wimbledon to a house he had had built at Oxshott, then a small village near Esher. It was remote enough for Conan Doyle a few years later to choose its heathland as the location for the sinister events in ‘The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge’. Influenced both by William Morris’s political theories and by his love of Icelandic literature, Proctor had called his new home Midgarth, a safe haven and the realm of humans in Norse cosmology. However, the house was expensive to build; and the new Guildford line, opened via Effingham in 1885, which made possible his own move, had prepared the way for rapid development which increasingly threatened his rural idyll. As a socialist, Proctor loved mankind: he was less keen on his fellow men. More serious still were problems with his eyes. He had been seriously short-sighted all his life. At Corpus Christi, Oxford, he had hoped to cox the college eight but had had to give up the idea – he could not see where he was steering. The close work on typefaces which formed the heart of his work put a severe strain on his sight. He was now 35. He must have wondered how much longer his eyes would hold out. Then there was his mother. Proctor was the only child of elderly parents. His father had died when the boy was 11, and he and his mother had lived together ever since. He usually took two walking holidays a year, and she almost invariably accompanied him. But it is clear from his diaries that she was finding this a strain. After all, in 1903 she was 77. That May they had been to Corsica and Florence, and it had proved too much for her. Now he was on his own. As England slipped away in the wake of the Channel ferry, it must have seemed strange to be travelling alone. As Proctor crossed France and approached the Alps, he may have reflected on his family history in general. Despite his political beliefs, he was proud of his antecedents. The new Greek type he had devised was called Otter Greek – a reference to the family crest – and the device he had had designed by the young Gertrude Sabey for the books to be printed in this new type included his description of the animal, ‘swift moving of deep-swirling rivers’. The otter device also incorporated his family arms, three black nails on a gold field. They might almost have been the instruments of his own private Passion. Proctor was not the first member of his family to have knowledge of mountain fastnesses. Eighty years earlier his Proctor grandfather, another Robert, had been the agent for the loan floated in London in 1822 to finance Peru’s War of Independence against Spain. On his return from South America, he had published an account of his travels across the Andes from Buenos Aires to Santiago and Valparaiso, and thence to Lima. In it he described the mountains, ‘grand and awful’ with narrow paths and precipitous abysses, and the casuchas, more primitive than the Alpine refuges, built to afford a little shelter to travellers. He also noted that the slopes were dotted with wooden crosses which marked the last resting places of poor wretches who had perished crossing the Cordillera. Even discounting these family antecedents, Proctor’s enthusiasm for the Alps was not unusual for the period. A taste for mountaineering had been growing in Western Europe for half a century. Clubs of German and Austrian enthusiasts had been building huts and refuges on the more popular routes and paying for them to be manned in summer. John Ball, the Irish politician and glaciologist and first President of the Alpine Club, had published a series of Alpine guides in English, and there were also the invaluable Baedekers, which Proctor certainly used. These gave details of routes, inns and even mountain guides. The recommended season for visiting the region was mid-July to mid-September, before the snows came, so Proctor was leaving his trip slightly late. A year before, he and his mother had travelled through Switzerland to Venice and the Po valley. On their return they had made their way into the Dolomites astride the border between Italy and the South Tyrol. On 21 June they had reached St Zyprian and Weisslahnbad with its fine view of the Rosengarten, nearly 10,000 feet high and so named for the pink hue its rocks take on at sunset. All around them jagged peaks jutted out of the snow like broken bone through flesh. The next day, setting out early in the morning and for once leaving his mother behind, Proctor made his way up to the Grasleiten hut and tried to traverse the steep snow below the towering Kesselkogel but he was frustrated by the lack of an ice axe. He then crossed the Santner pass, down to the Vajolet hut. It was an eventful few hours. Under the Rosengarten he found an icy couloir down which he thought he could descend if he kicked his heels into the snow, but he slipped on the way down and broke his stick. He then narrowly escaped being swept away by an avalanche of stones. What did overwhelm him, however, was the majesty of the scenery. ‘A memorable day,’ he confided to his diary. Such memories must still have been fresh when he reached Imst in the Tyrol early in September of the following year. The Arlberg railway along the Inn valley had been opened twenty years earlier and so he was able to send his luggage on east to Steinach, which lies south of Innsbruck on the route to the Brenner pass. He then began walking up the Pitztal, one of the many valleys down which the meltwaters from the mountains and glaciers to the south flow into the River Inn. On his way, Proctor’s path would have carried him past the picturesque Stuibenbach waterfall. At the village of St Leonard, halfway up the valley, he posted the last of the daily letters he had been writing to his mother. The cart track finally petered out at Mittelberg, almost 6,000 feet above sea level, at the foot of the Mittelberg glacier, whose icefall was thought by Ball to be the grandest in the Tyrol. He made his way south-west up the Taschachtal and spent the night at the Taschach hut. The next morning, 6 September, he set out from the refuge to make his way south-west along the edge of the Sexegerten glacier. He then had a choice of routes across the icy wilderness. He had told the attendant at the Taschach hut that he would make for the Rauhekopf hut. In this case, his path should have taken him further southwest over a spur of the Hintere Ölgrubenspitze to the head of the Kaunsertal, the next valley to the west. No one knows if he tried to take it. For Proctor the librarian was never seen again.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © C. J. Wright 2018