I was elected to the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club almost automatically in 1941 at the age of nineteen, the youngest ever to be so, this by courtesy of Ernest Roberts. It is reported that he stood up in committee and said that if Spenceley was old enough to die for his country then he was old enough to be a member of the Yorkshire Ramblers’. I was still in flying training when I received the nomination papers requiring only my signature, and I did not attend a meet or pay a subscription for some years, my first contact with the club being the Jubilee Dinner in 1946. The principal guest was Poucher, the popular mountain photographer whose books I had started to collect. Apart from a social visit to Roberts this was at the time the only contact I had with members of a club that was to take an important part in my life.
Meanwhile, nearer to hand and offering new friends and facilities more conveniently placed, was another of the so-called senior clubs. This was the Fell and Rock Climbing Club to give it its full name, of the English Lake District. It was a mixed club with a much larger membership and already with two ‘huts’, Brackenclose at Wasdale Head and Raw Head in Langdale. It was inevitable that living in the Lakes and being active on the hills I should meet and associate with their members. It was some time in early July while still living in Elterwater, on a wet and windy day on Bowfell that I joined up with a Fell and Rock Langdale meet. Two of those attending I already knew. These were my old pre-war companions Stan Thompson and Phil, formerly Phyllis White, who had married Sidney Thompson, sadly lost in the war. She was now happily married to Edward Wormald and living in Carlisle. I was to later learn that Edward was fluent in Japanese and had spent much of the war working at Bletchley Park. It was Phil and Stan who in due course proposed me for membership of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club which was to provide a new group of friends.
I did not neglect the Y.R.C., although their meets were often less easy to attend. Petrol was still rationed and in any event I lacked a car and was to do so for many years; but I did own a bicycle. It was this that allowed me to attend my very first Y.R.C. meets and many others to follow. The first, in December 1947, was quite a ‘tour de force’ and my diary entry tells it all – cycled to Appleby, train to Garsdale, then more cycling to Hawes over Fleet Moss in mist and on wet snow and so to the Buck at Buckden in Wharfedale. It was almost 11 p.m. when I arrived and I was the only visitor but in spite of the late hour I was made welcome and well fed. The Y.R. meet members did not arrive until mid afternoon the next day, first two prospective members, Wilfred Booth and Dr. Dan Jones, the latter to be with me in the Himalayas ten years later.
On Sunday I joined a group to climb Buckden Pike before setting out at 3.30 p.m. to cycle back to Penruddock. It was a horrendous return journey with fog and snow and feeble lighting, not reaching my digs until 2.20 in the morning, thus ending my first meet of the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club. My prolonged and strenuous efforts were even rewarded by a special mention in the Y.R.C. Journal. Other Y.R. meets followed, which again I could only reach by cycling, in particular the annual January meet at the Hill Inn, Chapel-le-Dale.
The precise dates are now lost, but at some time in 1949 I left my digs in Penruddock and became a paying guest at Castlerigg Farm overlooking Keswick. My host and his wife were the Jacksons, real Cumberland farming folk, and rich and lavish was Mrs Jackson’s catering. After some weeks, Marjorie and young son Julian were to join me. Meanwhile my father, always something of an entrepreneur, was looking for some property in Penrith to serve both as an investment for him and a home for us. He bought an Edwardian three-storey house in the splendidly sounding Portland Place. This was converted into three self-contained flats of which Marjorie and I occupied the ground floor. It was here that my second son Adrian was born.
Most selfishly I continued to enjoy my mountain activities away from home most weekends and surprisingly Marjorie made little complaint. I did urge her to join in some of these activities, at least socially, mixing with the less active wives some of whom also had young families. She rarely did so. I much regretted this but selfishly I went my own way.
For a considerable time my mountain activities centred between three separate groups of friends. First was the Carlisle Mountaineering Club whose members were by no means limited to Carlisle. Many lived in Keswick, others on the coast. Charlie Wilson continued to be the leading light in these activities and, in due course, our friendship was to prove financially profitable. Professionally Charlie was adviser in outdoor pursuits for the Cumberland Education Authority and in this capacity he ran weekend courses on mountain walking and rock climbing, based on the youth centre in Keswick. I was soon to be enrolled as one of the instructors at what was then a very welcome fee of two guineas a day. Some of my fellow instructors were George Fisher, who later ran a mountain shop in Keswick, Vince Veevers, Gilpin Wood, Len Muncroft, Joe Williams and Bill Peascod, the latter a formidable climber, one of the best in the Lakes. It was with Bill as leader I was to follow up some very hard routes.
Bill was to become a B.M.C. Guide and later, when I was secretary of the Lake District sub committee, I was asked to judge his ability for that qualification: the outcome a foregone conclusion. There is some reference to that in his book Journey after Dawn. Bill spent much of his working life as a mining engineer in Australia, but on his return and retirement he bought a fine old farmhouse overlooking Bassenthwaite Lake. My last memory of him is having dinner there entertained by his Japanese wife Etsu. Bill did not live many more years; he had a heart condition. Some time later, he suffered a severe attack and died while making a TV film with Bonnington..
Another local character was Gibby or John Hayton, a Keswick teacher. John was no climber, indeed he shunned the rocks since earlier having been involved in a tragedy, but he was a great walker with a profound knowledge of the Lakes. His great interest was photography. This was an interest we shared and John urged me to change to 35 mm colour slide photography and so being responsible indirectly for me embarking on a new part time occupation; but that was many years ahead.
It was about this time, early in 1948 that I was to be associated with a better known local character from a Cumberland family of some repute. We were all familiar with Westmorland Cairn on Great Gable. Well, this was the son of the original builder, Colonel H. Westmorland, otherwise known as Rusty. It is alleged that as a young officer in the Canadian Army, during some inspection rust was found on the harness of some of his pack animals., The C.O. at the next mess party called out ‘Rusty will pay’. True or false, Rusty was the name used by all who knew him. My own introduction to him was as the founder of the Keswick Mountain Rescue Team of which I became a member. The first practice of this team was on Great Gable where we lowered our volunteer casualty strapped to a stretcher down the face of Kern Knotts Buttress. After much sweating, toiling with loads up the hill and more standing around on a bitterly cold, windy raw day, we were soon all thoroughly chilled. On arrival at Kern Knotts Rusty gave a demonstration to us all of what in these circumstances was to be done. On arrival he stripped to the waist, towelled himself, and next to his skin put on a dry woollen sweater. A sensible practice I was often to follow.
That was the first of several practice days but a few weeks later there was a more serious call out. Summoned by telephone from my bed in the early hours, I joined a dozen others to sweep, for all the daylight hours, the bleak snow-covered slopes of Cross Fell in the Pennines. Our casualty, if indeed this was not a false alarm, we never found.
My days with Rusty Westmorland were not limited to the activities of the Mountain Rescue Team; we met by arrangement or accident several times. It was he who introduced me to two climbs that were to become part of my repertoire which I would repeat many times. First there was the fairly easy but exposed Black Crag, a wonderful climb to put fear into a novice, and the very severe Triccuni Rib on Great Gable. I wonder how many solved the secret of the difficult upward move at the crux, a jammed finger in a slim vertical crack. Unlike his younger fellow climbers garbed in W.D. anoraks and patched pants, Rusty always dressed with a degree of elegance in tailored breeches: quite the retired military gentleman you would say. This of course was long before the use of a climbing harness, but Rusty recognised the inadequacy of a knotted rope round the waist. He tied on to a specially made broad canvas belt. Rusty must have been 62 when I first climbed with him and he continued leading for many more years, dying at the considerable age of 98 years. I feel privileged to have known him.
It was about this time, mid-1948, that I met the man who more than any other was to have a great influence on my life and who was to be a dear friend and companion for the next forty years. I am writing of the Penrith solicitor Eric Arnison, one of the great characters of the Lakes and a person of note in the British mountaineering scene. Eric was to share travel, climbing and a wealth of experience with me for many years ahead. He was also my companion on my early climbs in the Alps, and even when well into his seventies, the Simian mountains of Ethiopia.
I already knew about Eric; everyone said you must meet him. But it was not until a Sunday evening when we were both in Langdale that an opportunity occurred. I walked over to Raw Head to beg a lift back to Penrith. It was a pleasant return and, typical of Eric, the journey was broken by a halt at some pub. He was no alcoholic but no day or journey was complete without a halt at some pub and, at whatever place it was, you could be certain that he would be a fairly familiar figure to landlord or landlady with whom he would be in friendly conversation, where appropriate in the local dialect of which he was a master. Eric was a man of enormous conviviality and with a profound interest in other people from all walks of life, equally at home in a top hotel or bedding down in the meanest of hovels. For all the years I lived in Penrith, we enjoyed an evening walk, along with Bob his black Labrador, always broken at some country pub with amiable conversation with the locals. Twenty years my senior he was a hard man and retained his fitness into old age. He climbed Mount Kenya when 68 and at 73 was with me on Ras Deshan in Ethiopia. My last memory of Eric was when I visited him in a Penrith nursing home just before his death at the age of 91. He sat, a sad and lonely man, with his back to the television screen which all the other inmates were facing. Typically I was urged to go to his room to find a drink. I still miss my old friend.
These then are a few of the Lakeland climbers with whom I associated in my early years in the area, each in turn introducing me to others in what at that time was a fairly close knit community. Climbing was still a minority sport and the few regulars quickly got to know each other. I was highly active among this group but I had not neglected my first love, the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club. Whenever possible I attended their meets and always their Annual Dinner at that time held in the Hotel Metropole, Leeds. At each dinner we were graced by a Principal Guest, invariably a person of some distinction in the mountaineering world, whose duty it was to propose a toast to the club. At the 33rd Annual Dinner of the Y.R.C. in 1947 our guest was Freddie Spencer Chapman whose books I had absorbed as a teenager and which had done much to influence my life. Over more than sixty years at dinners of the Y.R.C. and other clubs I was to meet and listen to many speeches from prominent figures in the field of exploration and mountaineering. In some circles it provides an opportunity for some pretty impressive name dropping.
Many Club members attended the Annual Dinner but little else, and I was anxious to be among the more active. The annual Hill Inn meet was a regular. I also did some pot-holing and this included a week of real underground exploration in Northern Ireland. And then there were the Joint Meets. These I attended well into old age. The Joint Meet is a gathering of members from the three senior clubs of the north: the Wayfarers of Liverpool, the Rucksack Club of Manchester and the Y.R.C. They were always held at the Wayfarers’ hut in Langdale, the Robertson Lamb named after a former prominent member. The Joint Meets were presided over by another of the great personalities of British mountaineering, Harry Spilsbury, loved by many, feared by a few. R.L.H. was his baby. As warden he was something of a martinet and to those who left the hut in a mess fearful was his anger. I too suffered when I once burned a pan
As a mountaineer, Harry’s chief claim to fame was as the first pioneer of the steep rock faces of Norway’s Lofoten Islands which he began to explore from 1934 onwards becoming the first to write a guide book of them. Many years later, while staying in Svolvaer with my second wife Sylvie, we were entertained by a local Norwegian climber who spoke with great respect of Harry with whom he had often climbed. After the First World War, Harry returned to the Civil Service becoming, until his retirement in 1959, Senior Inspector of Taxes for Liverpool. In this he became of some service to me in connection with my lecturing accounts, advising me on what expenses I could legally offset against profit. Sadly, we lost Harry too soon and while still highly active on the hills. With many mountaineers, the reduced abilities of increasing age can creep up on one with little awareness, loss of that most vital of talents, balance, being the most crucial. At the age of 73, while descending from the summit of Ben Alligan, Harry fell. His head struck a rock and he was killed instantly, a great loss to British mountaineering whose interests he had served so well. I think his ghost still haunts the Robertson Lamb Hut. A new wing has been developed in his memory and our Joint Club Meets are now named the Harry Spilsbury Memorial Meet.
If by then I was a member of the Fell and Rock, I rarely stayed in their hut in Langdale, preferring the more familiar Wayfarers hut, the Robertson Lamb, and this became the venue for privately organised gatherings for a handful of Y.R.C. members. The names that recur with some regularity in my diary are Bob Holmes, then a medical student in Leeds, Bill Kelsey, a pilot in the R.A.F., Peter Burton from a titled family in Leeds, much later to become the proprietor of the Buck in Buckden, and Don McKelvie. Don I got to know better than the others for we shared a week of climbing in the Borrowdale area, and a year later rather longer at the Midland Association of Mountaineers hut in Wales. I recorded some days on Lliwedd, amongst other routes climbing Avalanche and Red Wall, and with increased confidence, I led the very severe Bellvue Bastion on Tryfan These then were some of my companions for that period 1947-48, all dedicated climbers. Where are they all now, I wonder!
But apart from the Y.R.C. contacts I made further friends with the more local Lake District climbers and, among the most prominent and longest lasting of them was A. Harry Griffin. Perhaps we had met earlier at some mountain rescue exercise but his name does not appear in my diary until 7th November 1948 when it seems we met by accident in Borrowdale. I had been climbing with some others but Harry was among them and somehow we got split off from the party and became involved in serious conversation about many matters. You may say we hit it off from the first. This was the beginning of a climbing partnership that was to last throughout my years living in the Lakes, and a friendship that lasted until his death.
Harry Griffin was a journalist by profession and at our very first meeting our conversation led to the generally ill reporting of mountain accidents. He held a senior position on a Lancashire paper but his life long interest was in the Lake District where his familiarity with every mountain, crag, viewpoint, valley, footpath, even sheep track, was prodigious. This knowledge together with his practised literary skills led to his authorship of eleven books, thus becoming the most prolific writer ever on the Lake District. For this and other works he was to be awarded an O.B.E. In addition Harry had a long association with the Manchester Guardian (subsequently The Guardian), contributing the Country Diary on alternate Mondays for 53 years. He even left his hospital bed to write his last entry, which appeared two days after his death. You could say he died in harness.
Soon after that first meeting I climbed with Harry with some regularity. I was in Penrith, he lived in Kendal, and it became my habit to take a Friday evening bus to Patterdale from which I would walk over the Scandale Pass to Ambleside to stay at the Youth Hostel. Harry would pick me up on the Saturday morning for a day’s climbing, most frequently to Dow Crag. I recall some minor epics in the crossing to Ambleside in all weather and often in darkness.
georgespenceley4 