Robert Lock Graham Irving

Robert Lock Graham Irving (17 February 1877 – 10 April 1969), was an English schoolmaster, writer and mountaineer. As an author, he used the name R. L. G. Irving, while to his friends he was Graham Irving.

Irving was the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He returned to Winchester as a master, teaching French and mathematics and becoming 'Master in College', in charge of the ancient house for the holders of foundation scholarships, and founded a climbing group known as the Winchester Ice Club.

He married Oriane Sophy Tyndale in 1908 and had two sons, Francis Graham Irving (1910–87) and Robert Irving (1913–91), and two daughters, Mary Oriane and Clare. Robert became a distinguished conductor and was musical director of the New York City Ballet, 1958 to 1989, as well as following in his father's footsteps as an amateur mountaineer. In 1991, his daughter's name was Clare Peters.

Irving died on 10 April 1969, a few months into his ninety-third year.

In The Romance of Mountaineering, Irving writes that he was introduced to mountains at an early age: "My earliest recollections of a summer holiday centre round the ascent of a Welsh hill." Several years later he began exploring the hills on his own:

One early lesson in the Lake District, when I was about fifteen, impressed itself vividly on my memory. The mist was thick and night was closing in as I came cautiously and wonderingly down the steep southern face of Great Gable, while my parents in the vale of Newlands were sending out a man to blow a horn upon the hills, in the hope that the missing son was near enough to hear. It was my first taste of the awful thrill which the close presence of steep mountains can inspire.

Irving became a member of the Alpine Club in 1902 and was an advocate of climbing without a mountain guide, which in those days was thought by some to be reckless, but which Irving undertook "on account of boredom [of being guided] and expense". His climbing partner – a fellow Winchester schoolmaster – having been killed in a fall early in 1904, Irving went on a solitary climbing trip to the Sierra Nevada in the Easter vacation of that year. Finding the experience unsatisfactory – "If you climb for novelty and excitement solitary climbing is the kind to satisfy you; but if you climb for recreation of mind and body it is a failure" – he was left looking for new people with whom to climb during the summer of 1904. He took to finding companions – he called them "recruits" – for his alpine trips from within the ranks of seventeen- and eighteen-year-old boys at Winchester College, the enlistment of the first of whom (Harry Gibson)

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