The Simond brothers were blacksmiths in the town of Chamonix in the French Alps and they made tools for crystal hunters, cowbells and also agricultural tools in the early 1800s.

They diversified a little when the Golden Age of mountaineering arrived in the 1860s by adapting their skills of amalgamating metal and wood into the production of ice axes.

It seems that there were several brothers involved in the business and the ice axe we have here in the collection has the initial ‘A’Simond which we think stands for ‘Adolphus’ who we think was one of the first brothers to make axes in the 1860s. Claudius and Francois produced later versions, examples of which we have elsewhere in the collection.

Simond axes were very popular in the mid 1900s; Edmund Hilary took one to the top of Mount Everest in 1953 and far more importantly, Scotland’s greatest ever ice climber, Jimmy Marshall, used a Simond throughout his illustrious career, finally using it to weed his garden when he retired!

Charlet were the other great ice axe manufacturers in Chamonix back then and it seems they were fierce rivals; an apocryphal Chamonix story suggests that they had a Simond pavement on one side of the street in Chamonix and a Charlet on the other so the two never met!