Reviews
Bill Todd
Craven Pothole Club Record
No. 40. October 1995
Here is a bumper (54 page) issue. Lively accounts of caving adventure in the UK and abroad predominate but there is a timely and thoughtful article about conservation and, as usual, an account of a mountaineering meet. Abroad includes Sarawak and Transylvania and the climbing meet took place in Skye. I was delighted to learn that there is an easy (relatively) way to Sgurr Alastair from Sgumain.
The biggest news on the UK potholing side is the discovery of a new extension in Gaping Gill. The exact location is not given but the account coveys all the thrills of exploration.
Letters From the Lakes – W.R. Mitchell
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I’ll Walk Where I Will. An Anthology for Ramblers, compiled by Roy Allen.
Castleberg, 1995, pp. 172 £5.99
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The Rambler’s Association, 1995, pp. 58.
Available from: 18 Furness Avenue, Sheffield, S17 3QL.
Yorkshiremen will be familiar with Bill Mitchell’s name as long time editor of the “Dalesman”. Since his place there was taken by David Joy he has not been idle. In the forward by Hunter Davies we learn that this book was written after a serious operation from which Mr. Mitchell has happily completely recovered. He has been kind enough to present a copy to the Club.
It consists of a series of essays on various aspects of Lakeland. There are none about climbing as such but plenty about the countryside and about people. A gentle gossipy book this with no derring-do and no unpleasantness, a senior citizens’ book rather than a young tiger’s.
Mr. Mitchell’s encyclopeadic knowledge certainly filled in some gaps in mine, in particular the confusion I was in over two names, Heaton Cooper and Collingwood. A.Heaton Cooper was the artist father of the better known W.Heaton Cooper and W.G.Collingwood, secretary to John (“greasy pole”) Ruskin, was father of R.G. Collingwood, Oxford historian and joint author of “Roman Britain and the English Settlements” in the Oxford History of England. W.G. also wrote one of the best historical novels about Lakeland, “Thorstein of the Mere”.
We learn something about Mrs. Heelis (Beatrix Potter) and Harriet Martineau. In the chapter on photographers as well as the great Abraham brothers we hear about Joseph Hardman of Kendal who used to photograph the glamorous nurses of Westmorland County Hospital in a mountain setting. Funny enough after three weeks being looked after by them in 1953 I developed a desire to do something similar but didn’t get anywhere.
I am sorry that Mr. Mitchell has conformed to the current fashion of calling Mill Gill “Stickle Gill”. I see no reason for altering a name which has served for centuries and I resent the arrogance which assumes the right to do so. Another small carp is the reference to “Matthew Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby”. Surely Doctor Arnold of Rugby was father to Matthew Arnold, Poet, and incidentally grandfather to Malcolm Arnold, composer. A talented family, why weren’t they members?
This is a good book to have on your shelf and take down when you have half an hour to spare. It is full of interest and the black and white illustrations are surprisingly effective.
“I’ll Walk Where I Will” has only an indirect connection with Benny Rothman of mass trespass fame. The title is a quote from a verse by Ewen McColl which is printed in full on the title page. The book is divided into sections for particular districts and aspects of walking. The quotes are from a variety of authors from Shakespeare through Emily Bronte to Mike Harding. Most of them are to the point and the question of access is by no means overlooked. There is a copy in the YRC library and its well worth a look.
Wainwright. The Biography.
Hunter Davies.
Michael Joseph, London, pp.355, £16.99
I have long been fiercely resentful of the assumption that every red blooded English-man knows about football. We get no further than page six of this book before the author is expecting his readers to know what the 2-3-5 system is and how it differs from the 2-2-6 system. For heavens sake if you pick up a book about Wainwright you may expect a knowledge of Lakeland to be required not football.
The information that Wainwright ‘followed’ Blackburn Rovers all his life did not enhance my opinion of the man. I suppose people who know about football appreciate skill and dexterity displayed on the field but when good performance is only applauded from ‘our’ team I part company.
But persevere with the book even if you are not a football fan. In fact don’t start it if you want to be your own man for the next five or six hours because I found it very difficult to put down. My own view of Wainwright before reading this was of a man who let his love for the Lakeland Fells consume all his spare time either walking them or writing about them. This naturally caused his wife to feel like nothing but a neglected skivvy and cost him his marriage. Most of us have seen this happen.
But the truth seems so strange as to be bizarre. This was no white hot young love getting married without further thought. It seems that he married because she was the only girl who accepted his embraces. And I can appreciate that because I still remember the time when NO girl accepted mine. Another reason driving A.W. into early marriage was a drunken father at home. Plainly they could not afford to get married because their honeymoon was two shilling seats at the local cinema after which they moved into the house previously shared by Ruth and her sister.
Ruth’s motivation was perhaps more straightforward. Alf had a secure white-collar job in the Town Hall and was a “good catch” but when it transpires years later that “she would never have married him if she had known he had red hair” one wonders what sort of courtship they had. It seems that all their courting went on either in the dark or with A.W. wearing his cap, or both.
So instead of a man getting obsessed with the Fells and ruining his marriage we have a man climbing the Fells to get out of the house. No wonder he never got a car; he was happier trundling home on a slow bus than getting home in good time.
Having claimed that his famous guide books (thank goodness I was finding my own way round Lakeland before they came out) arose purely out of his love for the Fells and that he desired no personal gain or publicity we arrive at the 1980’s when for a period you could not turn on the TV or open a colour supplement without seeing Wainwright. But all the money went to animal charities so I suppose that made it all right. I saw one of these programmes myself; “Animals cannot speak up for themselves” said Wainwright. Certainly they cannot speak but the other side of the coin is that they do not have consciences and need not worry about over population, the third world or the next ice age. No, I cannot agree with a man who puts the animal kingdom, in his will, before his own son.
But read the book. I think it gives a fair assessment of a man who used his considerable talents to make his mark and did his best to play fair according to his lights. Largely because he realised how lucky he had been I cannot dislike him. I used to be envious of the considerable time he must have spent on the hills but he missed out on a lot of the other good things of life.
The Last Hero. Bill Tilman. A Biography of the Explorer.
Tim Madge
Hodder & Stoughton, 1995, pp. 288, £18.99
What do you think of a man who, after falling off Dow Crag, finding himself the only member of the party able to move, crawls down to Coniston to get help? His action saved the life of one of his two companions and he had to be physically restrained from going back with the rescue team.
You might think he was a bit of a hero, you might also wonder how all three climbers managed to fall off. Did none of them have an adequate anchor? Fair dos, Tilman wasn’t leading, but a mountaineer of his experience ought to have been tied on.
This seems to have been the pattern of a lot of Bill Tilman’s life. Tough, careless of danger, and sometimes careless in his approach to hazardous enterprises, for example getting ‘Mischief’ out of Las Palmas harbour (p.212).
Mr. Madge tells a good story about this man who was born in 1898 and left school to join up for the Kaiser’s war. After the war, having been wounded and decorated, he went to East Africa to grow coffee. It was here that the successful partnership with Eric Shipton was started. They climbed Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and the Mountains of the Moon. When Shipton decided that the 1933 Everest expedition had been too cumbersome he and Tilman set up a series of lightweight trips which achieved among other things the first penetration of the Nanda Devi Sanctuary. Tilman took part in the first ascent of the mountain a year later.
World War II found Tilman in khaki again. After active service in Iraq and Africa he found his metier leading guerrilla operations behind enemy lines in Albania and Italy.
Mr. Tilman senior’s death before the war had left Bill with a private income so he was able to resume his mountain explorations without the worry of having to earn a living. His books must have helped of course, I think “Two Mountains and a River” describing his 1947 adventures is one of his best. Even the preface is a little gem.
In his mid fifties Bill found he could no longer perform at high altitudes so he took up sailing. He bought an old Bristol pilot cutter, christened her ‘Mischief’, and embarked on a twenty year career of sailing round such places as Greenland, Spitzbergen and the Antarctic. As he got well into his seventies he experienced increasing difficulty handling his crews.
By this time there was more than one generation gap between this first war veteran and the sort of footloose young men who would be at liberty to take six months off to go sailing. The footloose young men of the seventies were not inclined to kow tow to this silly old buffer who kept making a mess of things and thought he was doing them a big favour.
In fact, of course, they were doing him a favour because the boats he used needed a crew of four or five. One wonders why he didn’t get a good one man craft and do a Chay Blyth.
Mr. Madge writes well and has had a lot of help from Bill’s niece, Pam Davis. He has done a good job in putting all the information together though I found his layout by activity rather than chronology a bit confusing.
I get the impression, nevertheless, of a certain lack of ‘empathy ?’ between biographer and subject. Mr. Madge is at pains to point out that Bill’s ‘sense of deference’ to members of the Royal Family for instance was not ‘odd’. Tim, everybody except the bolshies had it in the 30s and 40s too. It is still there now in a perverted way otherwise the antics of some of its younger members wouldn’t sell so many papers.
Another sign of those times is that people didn’t use first names outside family. It is sometimes remarked on that the two boon companions Shipton and Tilman addressed each other as just that. The story goes that when Shipton asked Tilman to call him ‘Eric’ Tilman’s reply was ‘It’s such a silly name’.
I don’t buy this. Firstly because Bill was too much of a gentleman to poke fun at a friend’s name and secondly because I am convinced that to Bill the use of first names belonged to the nursery, ‘Play nicely with Eric, Billy’. I suggest that what Bill meant to convey, whatever he said was ‘It’s such a silly childish habit’.
But read this book. It will tell you a lot about the man that is worth knowing. High jinks in Africa, groping for bullets on the tent floor to shoot a buffalo at dead of night. By the time they found them the buffalo had gone.
Thoughts on the war, Bill went and fought, of course, but he had this to say about some of those who stayed behind, ‘I dislike those people who go to the country (to escape the bombing) and stay there; it will not do the monied people any good after the war.’ He knew what he was on about there, Clement Attlee and Co. saw to that.
Every reviewer must find a hole to pick, even a minor one. An author with Mr. Madge’s impressive list of qualifications, yachtmaster, pilot, climber etc., ought to know that Stornoway is not in the Shetlands. It was on Lewis in the outer Hebrides last time I was there.
On a more important issue I do not agree that H.W.T. was the last hero’. He did well in two wars; so did millions of others. He climbed and explored; so would have hundreds of others if they hadn’t had to earn a living. In fact when Bill was starting his sailing working class mountaineers such as Don Whillans were taking up mountain exploration where Bill had left off.
No, Bill Tilman would never have described himself as any kind of hero. If you don’t believe this read his own books as well as this one.
The Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal 1995.
Volume XXXV, No. 186.
There is something for everybody in the 225 pages of the S.M.C. Journal. We have reports of accidents, new routes, club activities and of course orbituaries. On the lighter side there is a new Sherlock Holmes adventure (how many of you knew that Norman Collie was Sherlock Holmes’ cousin?), and a funny about the Mad Monk of Dundonnell. The Letterewe Accord is reported fully and might yet show the way forward in reconciling the interests of various land users.
The ten colour photographs are all first class and represent mountaineering all over the world.
This is the first S.M.C. Journal I have studied in detail and I am impressed by the way clubs and mountaineering have been organised in Scotland. We all know the S.M.C. was founded just before the Y.R.C., but the Junior Mountaineering Club of Scotland was formed in 1925 specifically to accept and train novices, and retains a sort of filial relationship with S.M.C., in that its activities are reported in this journal, now in the Club Library for your enjoyment.
Lakeland Rocky Rambles.Geology beneath your feet.
Bryan Lyan.
Sigma Leisure, pp. 282, £9.95.
Until I got this book I thought I knew something about geology. It is truly said, however, that humility is the beginning of wisdom and after doing the first one of the ‘rocky rambles’, Haystacks, with the book in hand I am certainly humble. Juliet and I chose a clear March day to do the walk which goes through Warnscale Bottom taking in the waterfalls of Warnscale Beck to Dubs Quarry. Here we lunched and completed the walk by Little Round How, Blackbeck Tarn and Haystacks, to Scarth Gap. The book takes twenty-two pages including drawings to describe the walk and the things you can see and is a mine of information. We had it cushy, we didn’t have to worry about the botany (Mr. Lynas is not narrow minded) because it was winter. Nevertheless by the time we got to Little Round Row with clag coming in the the West in the middle of a winter afternoon we felt it best to close the book and finish the walk. We will certainly have to go again to see the things we missed.
There are ten rambles described including Coniston Fells, Langdale Pikes, Helvellyn and Blencathra. Appendices include a glossary and a timescale. I wish I had had this book fifty years ago and I will certainly not go back to Lakeland without it. The style is racy and amusing, it is a good armchair read as well.
If you are the least bit interested in how the hills we love were formed get this book it is well worth the modest price of £9.95.
A special issue of the ‘The Bulletin’ of the South African Spelaeological Association, number 34, 1994, pp136 is to be placed at Lowstern. The issue is given over to a comprehensive study of the Management Problems at Cango Caves