George Yeld (1845-1938)

Alpine climber, plant breeder and long-serving schoolmaster at York's St Peter’s School

Plaque put up on July 7, 2018, at St Peter’s

GEORGE Yeld was one of those Victorian polymaths who seemed able to turn his hand to anything: a poet, botanist, plant breeder, teacher, writer, editor and mountaineer who pioneered several new ascents in the western Alps.

Photographs show him perched on mountain tops, his full white beard - a beard worthy of Charles Darwin himself - blowing in the wind, a stick clutched in one hand, a hat perched on his head.

In York, despite his many other achievements, he is best known as a teacher. He taught at St Peter's School for an astonishing 52 years, not retiring until he was well into his seventies. When he died in 1938, at the venerable age of 93, an obituary in the school's magazine, The Peterite, said he never missed either chapel or a cricket match, and that he 'had the punctilious and iron-bound sense of duty of the old Victorian schoolmaster.'

Yeld was born in Herefordshire in 1845. He went to Hereford Cathedral School, then Brasenose College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry.

After graduating in 1867, the young Yeld came to St Peter's as a schoolmaster. His first wife, Frances, died in childbirth. But with his second wife, Emily, he had four sons who all went to St Peter's.

A noted mountaineer, he would spend most summers climbing in the Alps with his great friend, the vulcanologist Dr Tempest Anderson. With the help of local guides, he pioneered several new ascents in the western Alps, and became vice-president of the Alpine Society and the longest-serving editor of the Alpine Journal.

A keen botanist, he studied alpine flora and made lists of the pants he encountered on his climbs. He was also a well-known plant breeder, producing several new hybrids of the daylily (a plant so-called because its flower typically lasts no more than 24 hours). He won several awards from the Royal Horticultural Society, and became the first president of the Iris Society. Some of his original daylily hybrids still grow in the garden of his former house, which is now the music department at St Peter's.

He moved to Buckinghamshire when he retired, and died on April 2, 1938, at the age of 93.

Stephen Lewis

To read the stories behind other York Civic Trust plaques, visit yorkcivictrust.co.uk/