John Percy Farrar

Captain John Percy Farrar DSO (25 December 1857 – 18 February 1929), also known as Percy Farrar and as J. P. Farrar, was an English soldier and mountaineer. He was President of the Alpine Club from 1917 to 1919 and a member of the Mount Everest Committee.

Farrar was born in 1857, the eldest of the three sons of Charles Farrar MD, of Chatteris, Cambridgeshire. He was educated at Bedford Modern School. The second son became Sir George Farrar, Bt., and the third was Sidney Howard Farrar, member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and Fellow of the Geological Society of London. The two younger brothers were partners in the important South African mining company of Farrar Brothers.

Charles Farrar MD of Charteris married Helen, the daughter of John Howard, Esq., of Cauldwell House, Bedford, at Bedford on 5 July 1855. Helen Howard's brothers were Sir Frederick Howard, a Deputy Lieutenant of Bedfordshire, and James Howard MP, the partners in J. and F. Howard Ironfounders, a company which made agricultural machinery at the Britannia Works in Bedford.

Farrar started alpine climbing nearly twenty years after the so-called Golden age of alpinism had ended; there were few peaks of any stature left unclimbed, and so Farrar's record is of first or second ascents of particularly notable ridges or lines on mountains that had already been climbed.

First ascents

Other ascents

In 1924, along with the Japanese climber Yuko Maki and Frank Smythe, Farrar 'made a critical appraisal' of the unclimbed north face of the Fiescherhorn – the precipitous Fiescherwand – in the Bernese Alps, identifying the line that was later used in the first ascent of the north rib by the Swiss in 1926.

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