The council was still considering its response.However, some say the Spa controversy is just part of a bigger picture, in which the city is suffering from poor planning, bad traffic and parking management and problems with litter, graffiti and public drinking, which means it is failing to measure up to competitors such as Edinburgh and Oxford. And even some of the lustre is disappearing from its magnificent Bath stone buildings, after a cut in grants for restoration and repair.Martin Tracy, a member of the board of the Bath Festivals Trust and chairman of the Walcot Street Traders’ Association, a street of independent shops specialising in arts and crafts, said: “The city is suffering from a kind of malaise of which the Spa is the worst example. A team of four had died on the mountain in 1936, one of them, Toni Kurz, exhausted and frost bitten, suspended from a jammed rope within speaking distance of his rescuers. Yet as Heckmair recalled in his autobiography published five years ago: “By now I was so obsessed with climbing the face nothing would induce me to abandon the project.”That same single-mindedness was evident in Chris (now Sir Chris) Bonington’s approach to the Eiger, culminating in the first British ascent of the Eigerwand in 1962. Bonington shared the honours with Ian Clough, who died on Annapurna eight years later.

Bonington had been on the face a month earlier when he and Don Whillans shepherded another Brit to safety after witnessing his partner hurtle into the void. They were hailed in the press as Eiger heroes.Newspaper interest in the mountain was nothing new – it began with the first ill-fated attempts in 1935 – for the north face of the Eiger shares with Everest the distinction of being one of the few objectives in mountaineering that ring any bells with the public. The German press was quick to turn the name Nordwand into Mordwand – the killer wall. Some 60 people have died on the north face and although the rate of attrition has fallen markedly – many more climbers, relatively few deaths – it remains a daunting proposition.The Eiger, or “Ogre”, is one of a trio of peaks, along with the Monch and the Jungfrau, that form the backdrop to the resorts of Grindelwald and Wengen in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps.

Its summit, at 13,041ft (3,970m), was reached by Charles Barrington and guides Christian Almer and Peter “Glacier Wolf” Bohren in 1858 after twice being almost swept away by avalanches. Barrington, in a letter to the Alpine Journal 25 years later, noted: “Had I not been as fit as my old horse `Sir Robert Peel’ when I won the Irish Grand National with him, I would not have seen half the course.”But Barrington had definitely not climbed the Eiger by its defining feature, the great north wall that looms above the calm pastures of Alpiglen. It was not until the 1930s that climbers, having pushed the envelope of the possible elsewhere in the Alps, turned in a competitive fever to the Eigerwand. The face is a most public sporting arena – tourists can watch the climbers through telescopes on the hotel balconies of Kleine Scheidegg while the Jungfrau railway, built in 1912, tunnels within the mountain with two side-shafts giving an airy view of any action.The young Europeans competing to conquer the north face soon became pawns in the Nazi propaganda machine. Believing that only German climbers could succeed on the Eigerwand, Hitler had promised Olympic medals to the “conquerors”. It was the nationalistic fervour surrounding the Eiger as much as the loss of life and unsporting tactics that so appalled Col Strutt and the traditionalists in British and Swiss mountaineering. Strutt declared: “He who first succeeds may rest assured that he has accomplished the most imbecile variant since mountaineering first began.” The Swiss authorities tried to ban climbers approaching the face and Heckmair and his partner, Ludwig Vorg, tried to keep a low profile.The race for the face was essentially between German, Austrian and Italian climbers, the three nationalities now using metal pegs, or pitons, that could be hammered into the rock to help safeguard an ascent.