Katharine Chorley

[2] Katharine Chorley was born in Timperley but, apart from the period 1911-1914 when she attended school in Folkestone, she spent most of her childhood at the family home in Alderley Edge.

[b] During the last three decades of the 19th century her father and his brothers all climbed regularly in the Alps and they were involved in numerous significant first ascents, particularly in the Lake District.

[8] At the age of 14, when she visited Switzerland on a family holiday which took in Mürren and from Zermatt,[e] she had her first experience of crossing a glacier and she reached the Theodule Pass.

[f] These modest expeditions only whetted her appetite for more serious courses, she wrote "I longed to climb, but got no encouragement at home, though secretly I think father sympathised with my aspirations".

[g] At the age of 17 she was hoping that this would be changed by the family holiday plans to stay in Argentiere during the summer of 1914 and that "somehow or another father would get round the ban on alpine climbing and see to it that I got at least a taste of snow and ice"[h] - but Britain's entry into the Great War at the start of August prevented this.