In Praise Of Three Good Things

By Claud Schuster, A.C.

(As spoken by him in toasting the Club at its Annual Dinner, 12^th February, 1910).

The Horungtinder, From The Summit of Store Skagastölstind, Norway by Eric Greenwood

It is impossible to stand in the painful position which I occupy without remembering a story which is no doubt as familiar to you as it is to me.  It is therefore well suited for repetition after dinner when chestnuts and wine go well together.

Some star performer had failed to keep his appointment at a provincial music hall, and the Manager endeavoured to still the ensuing hubbub by the statement that the band would play a selection.  Amid the terrifying silence a shrill voice was heard to exclairn, “Oh, Sir, don’t let “the band play: we really will sit quite good and quiet!” I feel like the band intervening between you and this toast which you want to drink and the long feast of eloquence subsequently to be spread before you.

I have to ask indulgence also for another reason.  In another club, at whose yearly gathering some, at any rate, of you and myself are in the habit of meeting, we have a custom which differs from yours.  Conscious as we all are that our many and great merits are best known to all but ourselves, we entrust the toast of the, Club to one of our own members, confident that in thus keeping our own tame Balaam on the premises we can, if he reverses the process of history and gives us cursing instead of blessing, abuse him suitably in the ensuing months.  You, more greatly daring, give the task to the lips of the stranger, and, if you rely rather upon the merits of the toast than upon the learning or eloquence of the advocate, you do well :

Beneath the Tropics is your language spoke,
And part of Flanders hath received your yoke.

 Which being interpreted means that we have heard the kindly northern speech amid the babel of tongues in many a hut, and have met your members wherever the snow regeals beneath the sole of an English boot; while to whom, if not to your own Nestor, do the Norway peaks confess themselves subject ?

 Still, any stranger must be conscious that there may be many things in the life of the Club as a living and growing organism, to which he cannot do justice, and I must take refuge in those general observations which come to one naturally in meeting you and thinking of the foundation and objects of the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club.

That then is my text, which falls naturally into three qualities, connoted by its title.

First there is Yorkshire – and that is a subject on which I feel a certain delicacy.  I may as well admit at once that I was born in a neighbouring county in which we were in the habit of thinking a good deal of ourselves.  I am not saying that that differentiates it from this county.  You all know the story of how the Bury Volunteers went to the great Review before the late Queen and Prince Albert, and how the bugler, when he got home again, was pressed by his companions to tell them what Her Majesty’s opinion had been of the appearance of the Lancashire battalion.  After long pressing, what passed for modesty in a Lancashire man was prevailed upon, and he addressed himself thus:- “Well, I’ll tell thee what she said – ‘Sitha Albert !’ she said, “Ark ‘ow rarely yon young feller fra’ Bury do blow t’ bugle.’ “

Well, on the eastern edge of that county there rises a thick pall of smoke, and peering dimly through it one was led to believe that one might have seen the County of York.  You know the landscape of the border in winter:

A foreground, black with stones and slags,
Beyond, a line of heights; and higher,
All barr’d with long white cloud, the scornful crags;
And highest, snow and fire.

Beyond that range of heights we knew there lived a great people –  great in girth and great in their appetites, great horsemen, great men at a bargain, and great mountain climbers.  From my earliest childhood I can remember thinking of Yorkshire as a land of dales and pleasant upland places; and indeed the county has one of the finest rambles described in literature –  that of Tom in the “Water Babies.”

You will all remember how “he went on and on, he hardly knew why; but he liked the great wide strange place, and the cool fresh bracing air,” and how, like many of us, “he went more and more slowly as he got higher up the hill,” and how when he got to the top: “Behind him, far below, was Harthover, and the dark woods, and the shining salmon river; and on his left, far below, was the town, and the smoking chimneys of the collieries; and far, far away, the river widened to the shining sea; and little white specks, which were ships, lay on its bosom.  Before him lay, spread out like a map, great plains, and farms and villages, amid dark knots of trees.  And to his right rose moor after moor, hill after hill, till they faded away, blue into blue sky.” And how he went down the other side and found A quiet, silent, “rich, happy place; a narrow crack cut deep into the earth; so deep, and so out of the way that the bad bogies can hardly find it out.  The name of the place is Vendale; and if you want to see it for yourself, you must go up into the High Craven and search from Bolland Forest north by Ingleborough to the Nine Standards and Cross Fell; and if you have not found it, you must turn south and search the Lake Mountains down to Scawfell and the sea.  And then, if you have not found it, you must go northward again by merry Carlisle, and search the Cheviots all across from Annan Water to Berwick Law; and then whether you have found Vendale or not, you will have found such a country, and such a people, as ought to make you proud of being a British boy.”^[1]

Tom’s wanderings went beyond the ambit even of this great county, but not beyond the wanderings of this Club.  And when we drink to this County of York with you, you will drink with us to all the other of the great northern counties, in some of which –  as Westmorland or Cumberland – this Club has a pre-eminent interest, and in which, as we have all learnt to think from childhood, the heart of England beats steadiest and the life of England is most abundant.

Then the next heading is that to which your Club devotes itself –  the art or science of the Rambler.  My own rambling, and that of many members of your Club, whose feats I cannot hope to emulate, has been for the most part in the great central mountain range of Europe.  I know that many of you mingle with your delight in heights delight also in depths, and I can well believe that in this latter pursuit the joys of the Rambler may find an equal satisfaction.  All the charms of wonder and mystery which we find above ground are, no doubt, lurking in the depths of those great pot-holes which you love.  Indeed, if we make our fairy tales for ourselves out of the dwellings of the wide spirit of the stream, I have no doubt that many dark ghinns and bogies lurk for you in mysterious caverns in this county.  But it is out of the fulness of the heart that the mouth speaketh; and those of us who have not known your subterranean joys have also pleasures of our own.  I know that there are ardent mountaineers who find no pleasure in Rambling for its own sake.  My friend Mr. Geoffrey Young, for instance, well known to you all, has no pleasure except in the peril of a new route or the technical delight of overcoming some tough piece of perpendicular rock, while his enjoyment seems to be enhanced by the probability of some imminent crag or some unstable pinnacle discharging itself upon his head.  It is not to be denied that if there were no necessity to brace yourself against the possibility of incurring danger a charm would be lost.  But Rambling among the mountains has a charm of its own quite apart from the conquest of difficulties, or the risk (which is to me abhorrent) of dangers beyond one’s own control.

There are feelings impossible to analyse, and incommunicable by description, which grow up with us in our wanderings until they become a passion.  You all know as well as I what we experience.  The overcrowded and noisy hut, or the stuffy chalet, rich with aboriginal dirt; the enforced jocularity with which we contemplate our task in the morning; the painful efforts with our boots; the sallying out into the undefiled peace and serenity of the night; and then, as time goes on and the night grows into the morning and the freshness of the morning turns into the heat of the day, at some time when the town dwellers are still turning in their beds –  our own high noon –  reaching the ridge, we look out suddenly upon the Great Plain of Italy or the crumbled borderland of France, with a thousand peaks unnamed by us, a thousand unknown streams:

And fountain heads of all the watered world.

Then we go down to the valley, stumbling, sometimes tumbling and rolling, and quite uncertain as to what kind of dinner awaits us – into an unknown world.  And coming into the main valley road we find – as I found last summer –  your Editor and his brother, to remind us of the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club, going home to tea at their inn and promising us the best of refreshments.

These are the great days of life.  You have striven and attained and been tired:

You have spoken as brethren together,
The sun, and the mountains and
You.

So much – though very inadequately – for Rambling.  And then of the Club.  Athletic clubs for the most part exist that they may make up necessary sides together and bind themselves and other people with rules controlling their artificial games.  Mountaineering clubs and their members differ in that they have in their essence no utilitarian purpose – they are merely persons knit together by a common enthusiasm.  But of all the good that comes from Rambling – whether among the mountains or in the depths – I am sure that this great good of comradeship is the greatest.  If we were asked to surrender all the other memories which we have acquired among the hills – as some day we shall be forced by the inevitable march of time to surrender the practice of what we have learnt – we would still retain those friends whom we have made among them, as we can retain them even when our strength lessens.  Nor is that all.  It is quite impossible to have visited Central Europe for many years continuously without observing the great change which, almost under one’s eyes, has taken place in the peoples whose lands abut upon the Alpine region.  In the course of twenty years many of us have seen the middle classes of the Lombard Plain, and the middle classes of Switzerland and Germany, and, to a lesser extent, the middle classes of France, take on a different spirit as they have slowly realised the great training ground for soul and body which has been set in their midst.  And in England, in the course of that time it has begun to be realised how great a national asset there resides in our own mountainous districts of Lakeland and Wales.  Now, that to us, who have come to look upon the Alps as reserved specially for ourselves, has its disadvantages.  The influx of much larger classes into the sport brings with it all kinds of oddities and dangers.  Rules easy to be made and observed when a few climbers all knew one another and were easily amenable to ordinary discipline tend to be forgotten amid the mass who now pursue the sport.  Disregard for the comfort and convenience of other climbing parties, emulation and record breaking and a delight in sensational exploits for sensation’s sake, become more prominent.  For all this, we would not if we could shut off the great urban populations from what, as I have already said, is working a change in the spirit of the Continental nations, and may prove for Englishmen one of the most health-giving and character-building of exercises.  But it is just at such a moment as this that bodies like the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club and our own Alpine Club, considered in their corporate capacity, can work their greatest good.  By recognising the new spirit of adventure and daring, even when it pushes itself to the extreme to which young men are wont to push – and I hope always will be wont to push – that spirit; by sternly discouraging sensation for its own sake; above all by laying stress on the most permanent element in the love of mountaineering – the love of Nature as communicated to man under the stress of physical exertion, the love of the lover who must fight hard to win the beloved – this Club and that other club of which I have spoken will always find their truest justification and their supreme work.