Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff

Thomas Woodbine Hinchliff (5 December 1825 – 8 May 1882) was an English mountaineer, traveller, and author, from 1875 to 1877 the seventh President of the Alpine Club.

After qualifying as a barrister, Hinchliff abandoned the law and took to a life of travelling and writing. His books include Summer Months among the Alps (1857), South American Sketches (1863), and Over the Sea and Far Away (1876).

Born at Southwark, Hinchliffe was the son of Chamberlain Hinchliff (1780–1856), of Croom's Hill, Greenwich, and Lee, both then in Kent, by his marriage in 1824 to Sarah Parish, a daughter of Woodbine Parish of Bawburgh in Norfolk, the sister of Sir Woodbine Parish (1796–1882), a traveller and diplomat. Hinchliff was educated at the West Ham Grammar School, the Blackheath Proprietary School, and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating BA in 1849, when he became a member of Lincoln's Inn. Three years later he proceeded MA at Cambridge and was called to the bar, but did not pursue a career as a barrister.

In 1856, his father died.

Hinchliff was a minor figure of the golden age of alpinism, between Wills's ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Whymper's conquest of the Matterhorn in 1865. In 1857 he was a founding member of the Alpine Club, the club meeting in his Lincoln's Inn chambers before it leased rooms of its own at 8 St Martin's Place, Trafalgar Square in 1859.John Ball was elected the club's first President, with E. S. Kennedy as Vice-President and Hinchliff as Secretary. In 1857 Hinchliffe published Summer Months Among the Alps: With the Ascent of Monte Rosa, a work which some twenty years later Mark Twain referred to as "Hinchliffe's book". In his A Tramp Abroad (1880), Twain's narrator advises his friend Harris to read this book to learn about mountain climbing, and a description in it of a fall influences the course of Twain's story.

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