Blue plaque commemorates Matterhorn climber Edward Whymper.
Plaque will mark the London house of mountaineer 'more at home in the inhospitable peaks than in the company of others'.
The first man to climb the Matterhorn, who was haunted by the death of his climbing companions during the attempt, will be commemorated with a blue plaque to be unveiled on Friday at his home in the London suburb of Teddington.
Edward Whymper, who first visited the Alps as an artist commissioned to produce picturesque mountain scenes, became gripped by the new sport of mountaineering. In 1865, after eight attempts, he beat an Italian team by three days to conquer the Matterhorn – but on the way down one of his less experienced climbing companions slipped, dragging his guide and two other members of the party to their deaths.
The disaster provoked a scandal, which included suggestions – passionately denied by the survivors – that a rope was cut to save Whymper and the two other climbers. The dead included an English aristocrat, Lord Francis Douglas; Douglas Hadow, son of the chairman of the P&O shipping company; and the Reverend Charles Hudson, an Anglican chaplain and famous climber, along with their French guide Michel Croz – as the Times put it, not "common men". Queen Victoria even suggested to the prime minister William Gladstone that the comparatively new sport should be outlawed.
In the book he wrote and illustrated in 1871, Scrambles Amongst the Alps, Whymper wrote that he was haunted every night by the calamity. "I see my comrades of the Matterhorn slipping on their backs, their arms outstretched, one after the other, in perfect order at equal distances."
He went on to explore and climb in Greenland, the Rockies and the Andes, studied the effects of altitude sickness, and became vice president of the Alpine Club, the oldest mountaineering club in the world.
Back in leafy west London, Whymper married late and disastrously to Edith Levin, the daughter of his landlady. She was 45 years younger than him, and it was perhaps ominous when he gave her an ice axe as a wedding gift: they had one daughter, Ethel, who also became a climber, but the marriage barely last four years and he later accused her of being a gold digger.
Howard Spencer, the English Heritage historian who has researched his life, says Whymper deserves to be remembered for conquering the Matterhorn, a mountain many regarded as unclimbable. However, he admits he was less suited to suburban domestic life: "A solitary man, he was more at home among the inhospitable peaks of the Alps than in the company of others, and the Matterhorn tragedy only exacerbated his tendency to morose introspection."
The plaque will be unveiled by Mick Fowler, the current Alpine Club president.