Going to Pot for Fine Port and Fat Cigars
W R Mitchell remembers the life and times of Ernest E Roberts, the last of the gentleman pot-holers…in an article first published in the Dalesman, Vol.59, No.10, January, 1998.
It was a grizzle-grey Ernest E Roberts who, some 40 years ago, officially opened the Lowstern Hut of the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club, within sight of Ingleborough. As a potholer, Roberts knew this mountain both outside and in. He was exploring our Yorkshire underground until his 82nd year.
Everyone called him Roberts. I like to think of him as being “the last of the gentleman potholers.” He was a survivor of the time when potholing had style, grace and that delicate quality we call charm. In the ranks of the YRC were men of means and leisure who took their time to plan an excursion. They would liaise with a Dales landowner and virtually take over a tract of land for the duration of their Meet.
Two other delightful Ramblers of what Roberts called the second phase of pothole exploration were Clifford Chubb and Fred Booth, who died in 1967 and 1972, respectively, and ended their potholing careers much earlier than Roberts. Another great Rambler, Stanley Marsden, is still to be found on the hills though he celebrated his 90th birthday in April last year.
Roberts, who died in the summer of 1960, aged 85, while on holiday with Hugh Slingsby in Scarborough, was born at Salford, educated at Manchester and Oxford, and became a schools inspector, most of his distinguished career being spent in Yorkshire. What proved to be a long, enchanting retirement began in 1935.
He was fond of recalling incidents from his early days of energetic outdoor sport, such as the climbs from Wasdale Head by Oppenheimer and the Abraham Brothers of Keswick. In 1908 Roberts became a member of the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club and also the Alpine Club, to which he was proposed by Geoffrey Winthrop Young (who married Eleanor, the young daughter of the celebrated Cecil Slingsby, a member of a textile family at Carleton, near Skipton. She gave to the club hut a copy of a famous photograph of her father in a Norwegian mountain hut).
The YRC, which became his “spiritual home,” had been founded by 13 fell-walkers in 1892. Roberts joined when potholing was interspersed with frenetic climbing in the Lake District and the Alps. Whymper had been an honorary member. Slingsby reigned for ten years until 1903.
In Yorkshire, the gentlemen potholers found there were so many open systems awaiting exploration that nobody had to dig a hole, much less use a charge of explosive. Also, crucially for their image, they were great notetakers and wrote well-balanced accounts of their expeditions. The Journals of the YRC are among the treasures of the outdoor movement. Roberts had clear memories of the days when potholers included a sprinkling of men who were fond of cigars and vintage port. They were inclined to have their own ladders. They took to the underworld trunks or hampers containing such food as salmon or half-chicken. Most looked middle- age even when they were young, sporting beards and bushy moustaches which became clogged with mud, so they emerged from comparatively clean caves looking filthy.
An idea of the gentlemanly way of life may be deduced from a story told of Stanley Marsden, who in 1933 for a Club Meet, walked from Clapham railway station to the village, where he proposed to lodge in a cottage. He carried a small paper bag. Calling at the New Inn, he found Alex Rule and A H Bellhouse, who were undoubtedly gentlemen, puffing on large cigars and imbibing good wine. They told the young member what time to arrive at the hotel the following morning, when it was expected he would help to carry their gear.
Clifford Chubb wore Savile Row clothes, complete with spats. He changed into tweedy clothes for potholing and when descending a pothole had his food stacked neatly in a picnic basket. Chubb was President of the YRC during the years of the Second World War. John Lovett, of Austwick, who began potholing in the 1950s when Roberts was still active, told me: “He out-potholed people who were two decades younger than himself.” Grey-haired and moustached, with a thin face and luminous eyes which stared through finerimmed spectacles, he became something of a sage in Yorkshire’s oldest outdoor club.
When the YRC held one of its first post- second world war meets, some of the old boys of the Club said it was about time a return was made to Mere Gill. Each had memories of how the pothole was laddered in their time. Consequently there were ladders going down the same relatively short pitch for five different gentlemen. A member had to get permission to use one of the private ladders.
It is related that Roberts was going down the pitch when a new member got on to the wrong ladder. Roberts, hearing the second man arrive, said: “Will whoever is on my ladder get off.” Which he did promptly, stepping on to a convenient ledge. He was then banished from the pothole.
John Lovett recalls that heavy duty equipment, of the type which became available after the 1914-18 war, was still being used more than 30 years later. At Mere Gill, young members had a ladder which they were manning for the sole purpose of lowering the veterans’ frame rucksacks, Primus stoves and lunch boxes. Down below, a fire was started, to roast some potatoes. The fire was a great mistake as choking smoke filled the pothole.
Roberts, one of the men who opened up the Dolomites, brought climbing techniques to potholing. Roberts knew the giants of this sporting-science – Booth and Calvert, Lowe and Parsons, Broderick and, last but not least, Blackburn Holden, the textile manufacturer who had cotton ladders made in his mill and shortly afterwards made an amazing solo descent of the 340ft shaft of Gaping Gill. On the return, he was hampered by their elasticity. He trod on about 20 rungs before he felt himself leaving the floor of Yorkshire’s most spacious underground chamber.
The subterranean career of Ernest E Roberts began in the company of Frank Payne and his wife, who in 1905 had “camped and hunted” caves in upper Edenvale and then “blundered” on Mere Gill Hole, Ingleborough. In the following Easter, they led Roberts “into the potholing and climbing game,” which was to occupy him for upwards of 60 years. He took part in the siege of Mere Gill and saw the narrower, lighter type of ladder replace the massive 12-incher with which the first potholing reputations had been made. It had been observed that a potholer never put two feet on one rung at the same time, so ladders of half the width went into production.
John Lovett and others, young Ramblers who in the 1950s infused new life into Club activities, found Roberts an inspiration. There were still traces of that old gentlemanly approach to potholing. In pre-war days, a Ramblers’ weekend on Ingleborough would start on Thursday and finish on Tuesday. The potholers hired workers on the Farrer estate to sledge material up to the chosen pothole.
They took with them commodious provisions, including half a sheep or half a pig, Stilton cheese and, in the case of one member, vintage port or claret. The cost to each member might be 17s.6d “and for that they had eaten like lords.”
Roberts insisted that the new members should perpetuate his type of potholing. A newcomer’s first experience of a YRC Meet might be when Roberts asked for volunteers for Sunset Hole, adding “you, you and you.”
Each volunteer shouldered whatever equipment was allocated to them and trooped, without a word, to “do” Sunset Hole, which is a relatively easy stream passage, situated a mile and a-half from the Hill Inn. The actual hole was a terminal 50ft pitch where the century-old YRC had their only accident. The victim had a leg broken in two places. It took days to get the injured man out, using as a stretcher a leaf taken from a table. Cliff Downham, a former president and long-time secretary of the YRC, played a great part in the rescue and became the first secretary of the Cave Rescue Organisation, with Roberts as chairman, in 1935.
Modern potholers saunter to their chosen pot in lightweight clothing and equipment. They have brought abseiling to a fine art, even in such a spectacular setting as the main shaft of Gaping Gill, where a man in descent looks to his waiting companions like a spider on a thread under the dome of St Paul’s. The year 1909 was one when Gaping Gill was observed in terrifying flood conditions.
Roberts was one of those who descended by bosun’s chair. He was to recall standing on the East Slope of the main chamber and seeing “a sight simply of spray.” While waiting for the effect of the storm to moderate, those still down the hole were miserable, unable to sleep, though Roberts found that if he sat on one of the Cornish miners’ bowler hats and leaned against the wall, he was able to doze off for a few minutes at a time.
It was to be the protracted siege of that great fissure, Mere Gill, which led Roberts and others to a great rethinking of potholing techniques and made it possible, 20 years later, for him and Frankland, with four ladders and four ropes, to descend Boggart’s Roaring Hole in an hour.
In the mid-1930s, still hale and hearty, Roberts would set off for the wilds of Scotland in an old car, following rough tracks, lacking detailed maps, climbing or caving alone. Years later, when the young lions of the YRC were talking of caving in Sutherland, Roberts could give them detailed information about where they could go.
Lowstern gave the Club a hut in the potholing country. Prior to that, all the administration and the equipment were kept at Fred Booth’s place in Leeds. When needed, it was railed to Clapham and then moved by various means to the head of the chosen pothole.
A few weeks before his death, Roberts was at a joint meet with the Fell and Rock Climbing Club at Clapham. The last of the gentleman potholers died peacefully. The old tradition of doing things in style did not immediately die with him. A young member of the YRC, on an expedition to Lost Johns’, observed: “I’ll show the beggars.” He went underground wearing evening dress.
[1] Originally recorded as Chubb, but corrected in Issue 10 by Albert Chapman.