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- Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
The Evidence of Things Not Seen is the autobiography of remarkable mountaineer, writer and environmentalist W.H. Murray. After being introduced to climbing in his early twenties, Murray's relationship with the outdoors was shaped as much by his time on the mountains as away from them. His early Scottish climbs were brought to a halt by the Second World War, which saw him spend three years as a Nazi prisoner of war. These years were devoted to not only to philosophical study, but also to writing his classic Mountaineering in Scotland not once, but twice, on toilet paper. The time to write about mountains only fuelled Murray's enthusiasm to climb them. The regeneration in mountaineering that followed the war saw Murray complete three Himalayan expeditions, alongside other iconic figures such as Doug Scott, Tom MacKinnon and Tom Weir, and Eric Shipton. He not only explored Himalayan peaks never before attempted by westerners, but also established the crucial Khumbu Icefall route up Everest, which paved the way for the mountain's first ascent in 1953. Later life saw Murray return to Scotland and begin the fight to conserve the wild places that motivated him. From pioneering the John Muir Trust to fighting threats to forestry, Murray's writing is laced with a philosophical edge and a contagious appreciation for Scotland's wild places, capturing the essence of why Murray's work has been inspiring readers for decades. Written just before his death in 1996, and with a foreword by renowned Scottish mountaineer Hamish MacInnes, The Evidence of Things Not Seen is a must-read for anyone for which the mountains are still a source of wonder.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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W.H.MURRAY
The Evidence of Things Not Seen
A Mountaineer’s Tale
Foreword by Hamish MacInnes
Poetry by Anne B. Murray
www.v-publishing.co.uk
Contents
WINTER NIGHT – GLEN COE
The hills lie
White on the sky
Moon cold and still.
And I
Spraying frost
From the bound, gagged grass
Listen for life.
But sound is lost
Held
Fastened to ice.
Stars move
In themselves
In the sky
Throwing sparks
To fire smothered snow
Blazing below
While I
Ringing night
From the close barred earth
Search for keys
Listen for life.
Foreword
by Hamish MacInnes
I first met Bill Murray on an icy February night in 1947 in the car-park of the Royal Hotel, Tyndrum. I was with a group of climbers travelling back to Glasgow in a mountaineering club bus. Around, the snow-covered hills and moors were bathed in moonlight. A car drew up with a group of SMC types including George Roger whom I knew. He introduced me to Bill and we stood together gazing at the mountains. I was immediately struck by his presence which seemed to have a spiritual quality. Indeed, as I learned later, he had spent time in a Benedictine monastery. He seemed to me, as a young and impressionable climber, to convey the image of a frugal, contemplative eagle.
As an avid consumer of climbing literature I had already devoured Bill’s articles in the magazine Open Air in Scotland. Mountaineering in Scotland had just been published and this book captivated me, as it did thousands of climbers throughout the land. Bill had a magical gift of encapsulating a scene in a way we all felt, but could never express. Acknowledged as one of our greatest descriptive writers, he involves all who read him. For an ambitious climber it was his ability to get quickly to the centre of the action that I found particularly inspiring.
Bill was a free spirited adventurer, who could visualise sermons in stones and prose in the clarity of a mountain stream. I often wondered if his choice of Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s poem ‘Knight Errantry’ for the preface of Mountaineering in Scotland was inspired from within the confines of a prison camp:
‘There is a region of heart’s desire
free for the hand that wills’
It was during his prisoner-of-war years that he took up meditation, a practice which he continued all his life. This was reflected in his writings which often had a mystical quality.
‘May it not be possible, by some practical method to help one’s mind to grow in awareness of beauty, to develop that faculty of perception which we frustrate and stunt if we do not exercise? The answer is that growth may be given to the spiritual faculty as simply as growth and health are given to the body by awakening it from slumber, and providing nourishment and then by giving hard exercise. In this work there is no static position: one goes on, or one drops back. Therefore, and above all – persist.’
On the double traverse of the Aonach Eagach Ridge of Glen Coe with Donald McIntyre in February 1947 he describes the scene as they linger on the summit of Meall Dearg awaiting dawn’s first light:
‘We knew, as surely as men know anything on earth, that the implacable hunter had drawn close … One’s ear caught the ringing of his footstep: and one’s eye gleams like the flashing of a shield.’
In a strange way Bill’s earlier mountain life appears entwined in the theme of ‘Knight Errantry’ – the urge to search and appreciate, the need to proclaim through his writings. Tom Patey – also a gifted writer – took up the theme in his ‘Ballad of Bill Murray’:
‘In that Tournament on Ice, Death or Glory was the price
For those knights in shining armour long ago –
You must forage for yourself on that ghastly Garrick’s Shelf
With every handhold buried deep in snow.’
In the post-war years Himalayan exploration became one of Bill’s driving passions. With Douglas Scott, Tom Weir and Tom McKinnon he took part in the Scottish Himalayan Expedition in 1950, a small time venture, big in achievement, run on the ‘old pals’ principle pioneered by Longstaff, Shipton and Tilman, all of whom Bill admired. As well as bagging three virgin peaks and attempting several others, they succeeded in getting through the Girthi Gorge to connect two great trade routes across the Himalaya to Central Asia.
In 1951, having organised the expedition from Loch Goil, he was with Ward, Shipton, and others in what was to prove to be the crucial Everest reconnaissance prior to the first ascent. This was followed by fascinating explorations around Cho Oyu, Menlungtse and Gaurisankar. In 1953, with John Tyson, there was the circumnavigation and exploration of the Api/Nampa range which included a dangerous foray into Chinese-occupied Tibet.
Bill’s contribution to the conservation of the environment was vast. He was a latter-day John Muir; in fact he was a founding trustee of the John Muir Trust. He has influenced important allies who wield big sticks; Al Gore, when US Vice President, quoted Bill in his powerful conservation treatise Earth in the Balance. He is an admirer of Bill’s work. A large portion of Bill’s latter years was devoted to conservation. This inevitably had a price tag of endless debates sandwiched by tedious journeys to faceless meetings, as alien to his natural instincts as falling off a difficult pitch. We all owe him a debt of gratitude for this dedication to our environment.
I have been fortunate enough to have repeated most of Bill’s Scottish climbs over the years, during a period in time when giant strides in mountaineering were made. Techniques in winter climbing allowed older routes, many of which Bill and his mates had pioneered, to be completed faster and in relative safety.
The ‘ice crowned castles’ of Bill’s career, such as the stubborn Garrick’s Shelf on Buachaille Etive Mor, stand the scrutiny of time. Not many mountaineers of this new millennium would relish scaling that glassy rampart wall of Crowberry Ridge with the bare trio of necessities – an antiquated ice axe, nailed boots and a hemp rope that resembled, when frozen, a steel hawser – though Bill had, on that climb, taken a slater’s hammer, an indicator of the technical developments that were to follow. ‘Those were the days my friends …’
My second encounter with Bill was just prior to his departure to Everest in 1951. I had just returned from National Service in the Austrian Tirol and was fired with irrepressible enthusiasm for steep rock and ice. I wanted to hear first-hand from Bill about this ambitious project. My motorcycle shuddered to a halt outside his house at Loch Goil and Bill came out to greet me. He was as always keener to listen and find out what you had been doing than talk of his own exploits, but bubbling underneath was his passion for the hills which was contagious … always urging one to get out and up there. I had a slight tinge of conscience over the visit and never mentioned it to my friends in the Creagh Dhu. They were the product of the Clydeside shipyards who lived hard and climbed hard and to whom the ‘toffs’ of the Scottish Mountaineering Club were aliens. My sense of adventure was obviously greater than my loyalty!
Bill’s tendency to play down his role in events is illustrated in an incident in the French Alps in 1948 when he was involved in a terrible accident with John Barford and Michael Ward when all three ended up in a bergschrund after a long fall. Bill, with his large rucksack still on his back, became jammed in the mouth of the ’schrund. Below in the murky depths he could see Barford, who was dead, and below again was Ward, still alive, wedged between the icy walls. With superhuman effort Bill managed to get down to the ice ledge on which Barford lay and eventually managed to extricate Michael, who had lost his memory and like Bill had fractured his skull. He was disorientated and weak and could contribute little to his extraction from the ’schrund.
I mention this incident, for in later years Bill was Patron of the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team and took an interest in new innovations and techniques. I used to look forward to his visits. After one protracted annual dinner, Bill voted to return to Loch Goil in his trusty Morris Traveller rather than take up my offer of a bed. Nosing his way up through the snow-covered Glen Coe gorge on his journey home he was stopped by the police. They asked him where he was going on such a night at such an ungodly hour. He told them, and added he had been with me at the rescue dinner and was hoping to get back home.
‘Well Mr Murray, any friend of Hamish is a friend of ours’ one replied, ‘you take care …’
Bill, who had an impish sense of humour, used to relate this story with glee.
We will all miss Bill yet he is still with us – his writing, as if carved from the living rock, will be remembered by mountaineers as long as there are mountains to climb. Both mystic and prophet, he saw things we didn’t and could scan the future to visualise a bigger horizon.
Bill met Anne when descending from the winter hills. It was a chance meeting between a writer and a poet, a match if not made in heaven, certainly on the mountain slope. It was inevitable that they should meet again and share their lives together. Anne, reserved, with the sharp focus of a poet and Bill embracing his philosophical concept of the Sadhu. Writing on the advent of spring her verse seems appropriate for Bill:
Belonging not to the dark
But to me
But at night
The tree has gone
And on the wrong side of the window
Tapping the brittle glass
It is I, now
Who have to seek that other side of night.
THE EVIDENCE OF THINGS NOT SEEN
‘In this book I write little of childhood days but much of manhood’s experience of mountains, war, and the art of writing. In selected incidents I have traced a long life to give one man’s impression of his world.’
W.H.M. 1995
‘We have to act as best we know and surrender the fruits: be not attached, but learn to accept the consequences of all acts serenely.’
W.H. Murray
After Bill’s death in 1996 I continued the editing of his book as he would have wished and as we discussed.
In consultation with the publisher it was agreed to expand sections dealing with pre-war Scottish ice-climbing and the 1950 Scottish Himalayan Expedition. Bill had dealt with these subjects only briefly as two of his books covered them thoroughly.
We felt that the reader of this book would want a fuller description and accordingly the highly evocative ‘Garrick’s Shelf’ chapter from Mountaineering in Scotland has been included plus six chapters abridged from his vivid and acclaimed 1950 expedition book.
Some of Bill’s interesting letters from army, prison camp and the Himalaya have been included adding immediacy and detail to descriptions ‘recollected in tranquillity’.
The poems chosen by the author for inclusion in the book are mine, and the amusing verse is from Tom Patey’s ‘Ballad of Bill Murray’.
Photo captions and some informative footnotes have been supplied by the publisher.
Anne B. Murray, 2002
EARLY YEARS
– CHAPTER 1 –
Twists of the Thread
The child by instinct can be wiser than the man. He picks up at birth the thread spun for him by the Fates, accepting without murmur its inter-twisted good and ill. I lacked a father, yet never felt short-changed. He had been killed at Gallipoli in the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915, when I was two. I never knew him. The realisation of loss came years later, but never did I feel wronged.
He and my mother were Scottish. I was born at Liverpool, where my father had been posted (from Broxburn, West Lothian) as HM Inspector of Mines for Lancashire and North Wales. My thread still had two good strands. My mother Helen, aged thirty-two at my birth, was a woman of resource. Unbounded courage and two children had made her ready to fight. In 1915, she took me and my sister back to Glasgow, where our paternal grandparents lived, and saw us properly schooled, civilly brought up, and launched on life not consciously impaired. The second strand was my sister Margaret; she was five years older than I – and that was later to bring me no small benefit.
A first sense of deprivation came to me on entering my teens; inevitably so, for too much had then to be learned alone – always the hard way, the long way. My mother told me of my father’s talents: how able in mathematics (at which I was inept); how skilled in music, for he could take up any instrument, play well, and sing with good voice (I seemed to be tone-deaf and sang out of tune); how gifted in the arts of drawing, painting and wood-carving, which I could see with my own eyes to be true (but no such arts were mine when I tried); how boldly strong he was in skating and climbing, for the great frosts of the late 1890s came in his teens, when he used to skate ten miles up Loch Lomond from Balloch to Rowardennan, weaving his way through the dozen islands, then climb Ben Lomond and skate back (whereas I could not skate at all, for the long frosts were no more). My admiration for my imaginary father was boundless, but he wasn’t there to give any practical lead. My lack of abilities left me adrift, as if rudderless on wide and windy seas.
Margaret and I owed everything to our mother’s fighting instinct. Her first act of battle on our behalf was fought against three government ministries: the Home Office, the War Office, and the newly formed Ministry of Pensions. She sought to extract funds for our schooling. Senior civil servants turned deaf ears. They had a war on their hands. Undeterred, she persisted vigorously. That she finally wrung this concession out of them has amazed me all my life. In accepting responsibility for her children’s schooling, they boiled down her choice for me to either Fettes in Edinburgh or Glasgow Academy. She chose the Glasgow school, feeling that if sent away from home I would feel deprived of her love.
Our mother had set up home on the west side of Glasgow, together with her mother and unmarried sister. For this family of five, she organised annually – as soon as the war had ended – the most splendid summer holidays. These always lasted, at least for the children, a full two months in remote, unspoiled country – the islands of Lismore and Arran or on the wildland coasts of Donegal, or Kintyre, or the Solway Firth. These idyllic places gave endless and diverse adventure to town-reared children, and certainly bred in me a love of wild land, if not yet high land.
We lived for these long holidays. A glamorous excitement invested the very preparations, when big hampers stood in the hall for some ten days of June, gradually packed before our 5 or 6 a.m. departures by horse-drawn cab to railway station or shipping dock. We regretted over the years the advent of unromantic taxis, but no disappointments ever marred our farther journeys. They stick in mind to this day: my first storm at sea, aged six, on a passage to Ireland when the ship began to pitch and roll and a seaman screwed down the portholes with a laconic ‘Dirty nicht the nicht,’ which quelled my rising fears of a capsize; followed by next day’s blue skies, when we trundled in pony and trap along the cliff tops of Donegal’s north coast to a white cottage on its brink; or two years later, in a gathering storm on Appin’s shore, my mother browbeating a ferryman into sailing his lugger across Loch Linnhe to Lismore. I met another boy there, and with him climbed high into an old oak to hide in its canopy, and to smoke our first cigarette from a two-penny packet of Woodbines. The smoke inflicted more than the storm – my life’s first dizzy head. Trivial events, being each child’s first experience, figure as long in memory as important later ones. I can hardly see a broad, sandy beach without reliving my first, dangerous racing games on the Solway Firth, when my sister and I aged twelve and seven would fly for our lives across mile-wide sands, the tide at our heels flowing ‘fast as a galloping horse’. If we miscalculated and failed to give ourselves a long enough start, we would find ourselves marooned on some low and tiny islet, faced with a wearisome wait or a wet self-rescue.
My sister was naturally more adventurous than I, a difference more heavily marked when she crossed the gulf of puberty. On holiday in Arran, she and her new-found boyfriends climbed their first mountain, Goat Fell. I was not a whit interested. It looked (from distance) a highly remote lump of land, not for me.
Glasgow Academy brought me a brief devotion to Rugby football. Its former pupils then supplied, year in year out, a quarter of Scotland’s national team. Wanting to be one of them, I felt mortified at my lack of a Scottish birthplace, which meant irrational debarment, irrelevant too as I soon found on reaching my teens. Although tall, I was and always would be far too light in weight for first-class rugby. Often asked what I wanted to be, I had no idea. I devoured books. By the time I was thirteen I had read twenty-five of Scott’s Waverley novels, admittedly skipping the first 100 pages to get at the action, and most of R.L.S. and Alexandre Dumas. My boyhood heroes were all fictional, especially D’Artagnan of The Three Musketeers or Buchan’s Richard Hannay, or Ewan Cameron of The Flight of the Heron. My school friends and I were divided by this difference, that they read as little as they could, and I as much as I could. They loathed writing essays. I enjoyed them. But writing as a career? Even I knew it impractical for a school-leaver.
My sister was meantime reading English Literature and Philosophy at Glasgow University. Her brain was quicker than mine and more subtly sensitive. I won endless benefit from her and her visiting boyfriends, since all were older than I. They unburdened their eagerly active minds at evening ceilidhs at our new home in Jordanhill. They came for music and talk. Principally talk. My sister had picked them well. Their talk was of ideas, no subject barred, ranging all over human life. I, fascinated, was thrown a line across the maturity gulf. Involuntarily, I had my reading lifted from Scott to Shakespeare and Shaw, from Dumas to D.H. Lawrence, from Broster to James Joyce (smuggled in from Paris), and so on across other aspects of literature. My more staple diet remained, of course, the common thriller.
Amid the growing multiplicity of books to which my attention was drawn, those discovered by myself in my late teens more effectively broadened my mind. They were not the latest from Paris, but the earlier from Greece – Plato’s Republic and Dialogues. His writings on the reality of abstract ideas – good, beauty, truth, unity and justice – at first stretched my mind as if on a rack, but by degrees of familiarity over the years became as heavily bracing as hill winds off the Cairngorm plateaux. They enlarged all concepts of life and purpose. I owed any such rewards, initially at least, to my sister’s example. Although good at games, she liked to think as well as play.
I began to dream again of writing, but again dismissed the notion. I could not hope to emulate authors of the quality I read. I had to earn a living. Had my father been alive, he would certainly have packed me off to university, there to study for some profession. Instead, I left school for an office job in the Union Bank of Scotland, where after four years’ study of accountancy, law, economics, stocks and foreign exchange, I duly qualified as a member of The Institute of Bankers. Banking gives sterling service to the community; it can become an absorbing subject for anyone with a flair for its higher practice. But the flair was not mine. I had no vocation. The plain fact was that I wanted to write, and write I did, my short stories earning the customary flow of rejection slips.
Providence and the Fates share this endearing feature: intervention in all lives to bring the best out of bad situations. My own grandfather, for example, had been prospering as a young man in wool manufacture, when he lost all his money invested in the City of Glasgow Bank – an unlimited company. It crashed in 1878. Now ruined, he won fulfilment of his real talent, for music. Starting at the Anderson College, where he taught advanced music classes, he became Music Inspector for the Board of Education, then Conductor of The Glasgow Choral Union, from which he and Hugh Roberton took the leading part in founding Glasgow’s Orpheus Choir. His musical talent had passed to his eldest son, but not to his grandchildren. My own salvation was offered in ways quite different, each set up by ‘circumstance’, but the choice left always to me. The first turning point appeared in 1934.
– CHAPTER 2 –
Siren Song
It does seem strange that I, bred and schooled in Glasgow, had been unaware of mountains, except as a backdrop to a lowland foreground, until I was out of my teens. My change of focus came with all the suddenness of a conversion in faith. When nineteen and lodging at Maclay Hall (a Glasgow students’ residence) I overheard the Warden talk at table of his traverse of An Teallach in Wester Ross – clouds lifting off a high and rocky mountain ridge, sun-shafts lighting a glen deep below – and my attention was gripped. Here was a wildland of the skies, to me unknown and waiting for exploration, yet unlike the moon or Mount Everest, immediately accessible.
I made no move. I knew no one who climbed mountains. A year later in April 1934, I at last bestirred myself and went to the nearest I knew by name, the Cobbler at Arrochar. Approaching by train on the West Highland Line, I thought the cloudless day perfect for the job. The first sight of my first mountain across the blue waters of Loch Long jolted me wide awake. It rose from the shore in one abrupt swell of grassy hillside, uncluttered by so much as a tree, up to a snowfilled corrie crowned by three big tusks Their black rock sprang sheer out of a dazzling white hollow. I could see no good way on to the central summit, but felt hopeful of getting close by a wide snow gully to its left-hand side. I had no boots, but snow in my short life had been soft stuff, not icy. I was wearing walking shoes, and with these could probably stamp out a way. I had never even heard of an ice axe.
I stepped off the road on to the Cobbler and gaily went up. Soon I was delighting in the simple breathing of sharp and sunny mountain air, in the personal choice of my own way at every turn, in the new sense of freedom from all rules. In the very uncertainties of it all was fun. I reckoned that I could always turn back if I met real trouble. One thing I had not reckoned on, when I reached the snows of the upper corrie, was the ice-hard plating on its flanks. By dint of an hour’s agonised toe scraping, with its growing awareness of dire penalties to pay should I slip, and the still worse threat in any attempt at retreat, I learned the hard way of the need of proper tools for the real enjoyment of climbing. I shed my innocence, as always, with the suddenness of the fly caught in the web.
The Cobbler’s lesson, if salutary, was not the most important of the day. That came at the rocky summit. I looked across hill ranges, sparkling white or blue shadowed, receding to the distant rim of an arctic plateau. It looked as if it must stretch on forever. I had never dreamt that my own country held wild land so vast. I recognised on the instant that every peak had to be known. A man of twenty-one enjoys a god-like assumption of immortality. This day I saw with a pang of dismay that life is short and the hill ranges long. There was no time to be lost. First impressions being the lasting ones, it was my good fortune, when I ventured into the Cairngorms, to see them whole – in the sense that I walked the full breadth from Tay to Spey. I walked alone, so at once grasped two vital facts: that here were 2,000 square miles of mountains in which my whole being could revel, free of all the cares of the world; and second, that here no mistakes were allowed. The paradox holds the secret of the mountains’ call. Delight and danger. They impose a discipline: a need to stay alert, alert to weather, to one’s footing, to time of day, the shape of the hill and the right route. A need for self-possession. The Cairngorms won my respect without giving me a beating, for I walked in June. The sun smiled across the expanse of the Capel Mounth; rainstorms chased me off Lochnagar and north to the Don. My first top was Ben Avon.
The vastness of the Ben Avon plateau astonished my innocent eyes. It sprawled for miles, snow drifts lay deep, fantastic tors epitomised wilderness. In many a twelve-hour day thereafter, I found the long walks through the Rothiemurchus pines into Glen More (then impassable to cars), Glen Einich and the Lairig Ghru, so full of change and beauty that I never grudged the time they took. On the plateaux above them, those immense deserts of stone never wearied the eye as I thought they might. Spectacular corries carved their flanks, cliffed and rimmed white by cornices, or sunk so deep like Loch Avon, or cupped so high like that of Angel’s Peak, that always the great scale gave a lift to the spirits. Height too I felt in a purity of air unique to the Cairngorms – at 4,000 feet like nectar of the gods, to be drunk deep.
True as such words are, they can be sudden nonsense if it snows and blows. Next May, a friend and I were caught by blizzard on Cairn Toul. Arctic cold combined with hurricane to bring on the dreaded chill factor. Despite our windproof shells and layers of inner wool, the cold had bitten down to our bones before we gained Braeriach. The ‘white out’ of spindrift had long since lost us any sight of the ground, daylight was ebbing, and any mistake in our bearings would have finished us. Luck was ours. We glissaded into the Lairig Ghru as darkness fell. There had been no margin of safety. We had escaped only by getting our compass work right – always dicey in a white out.
Another day in May, another year, found another friend and me swimming in a lochan of deep sea green under the cliffs of Lochnagar. Warm air poured upwards in visible waves, streaming and shivering in sunlight against the grey face of the rocks. We lay in sparkling water and chose our line up the cliff. Cairngorm days bring endless surprise: fear, exhilaration, suspense, idyllic ease – one can never tell what next, save that here is flying.
My instant reaction to mountains had proved constant – to know and explore. A second need, to climb rock and ice, grew naturally out of the first, a freedom to be won: but I felt scared of trying to join a club. I had been meeting walkers on the hills. They assured me that rock climbers, unlike us, were fearless, held danger in contempt, were physically close to gorillas, and with bulging biceps able to haul themselves up long ropes, and to grip with their toes a ledge at chin level and stand up. A reading of George Abraham’s British Mountain Climbs (1909) partially dispelled that nightmare, but climbers had still to hold on the rope their companions who fell off high above. I felt weak not only at arms and shoulders, but now at the knees too.
When courage was at last screwed up, I joined the Junior Mountaineering Club of Scotland (JMCS).
Before I had time to know any of its members, I found an unexpected companion in Archie MacAlpine. I had first met him when I was a boy of fourteen, and he an undergraduate at Dental College in Glasgow. His interest, therefore was not in me, but in my sister Margaret, whom in following years he wooed and won. At that first meeting in Kintyre, where my sister and I were on holiday, he arrived at Skipness by sea after rowing from the Clyde around the Kyles of Bute and Ardlamont Point – a distance of sixty miles – hands not even blistered. I was impressed. His thatch of fair hair, matched by eyes of Viking blue, seemed most appropriate for a university oarsman, shelves loaded with the silver cups he’d won. After he had set up practice at Ibrox and married my sister, he became concerned for her brother’s sanity. I had found mountains. This to him was a puzzlement. What on earth was the point of sweating up hills? Margaret, scorning the safety-first trends of the time, encouraged him to try. I persuaded him to think of Glen Coe,1 to which I had not yet found my way. I owned no car but he did – and a new road had been opened that very year across Rannoch Moor. The trumpet call of Glen Coe was sounding in my ears. One September morning of 1935, we rounded that last bend of the Rannoch road and for the first time saw the huge rock cone of Buachaille Etive Mor lift high out of the moor. Our breath was taken from us. We stopped the car. Every detail of the cliffs showed clear and sharp – to our eyes unclimbable.
We found the easy way up from Glen Etive. Archie, not yet fit, dubbed the trudge laborious, but his attitude changed on reaching the summit screes, where we could walk in delight to the cairn. He needed just one look over that wild, far scene to be hooked, just as I had been the previous year on the Cobbler. Spurred by curiosity, we climbed down to the top of the North Buttress, and chanced to see three rock climbers starting up the Crowberry Tower. They were members of the Scottish Mountaineering Club, to which we could not aspire. Their ease of movement made our impossible cliff look feasible, even for us if led. Now doubly hooked, Archie filled in his application form for the JMCS.
A few weeks later, its members took me in hand. On a drizzly November morning I was led up my first rock climb, the Spearhead Arête of Ben Narnain. I can remember that day as if I were still on the climb – the awareness of airiness, the high angle, the fingertip feel of coarse rock, then the lightness that comes of self-abandonment. Life, it seemed to me, had just begun.
The five years that followed, and many of their best mountain days, I later described at length in my first book, Mountaineering in Scotland. The particular advantage I now have in looking back on them is that great age comes like a hilltop in time from which early years appear in true perspective.
I and my fellow climbers of the 1930s had been too close to the First World War and its aftermath to realise our position, or to guess at our deprivations. These latter, I now know, were of two kinds. The first was our lack of inherited climbing standards. Since those days, each new generation has been given standards by their seniors, and received techniques by example, taken them for granted, and used them (even if unconsciously) as a springboard for higher achievement; each has had that boost and made good use of it. In the 1930s we did not have it. There was no springboard. For winter work we started from scratch; for summer rock, from a level set around 1900, the year of the Abrahams’ tour de force, the Crowberry Direct, since when little advance had been made.
Our cut-off had been caused by the huge depletion in the nation’s manpower relative to a small population. There was no young leadership left. This stemmed both from long casualty lists and from a sapping of psychic vigour by trench warfare. The few who had survived that ordeal had a bellyful of risk and rough living. They wanted no more of it. Mountains were there as always for enjoyment, not for battle, and certainly not for competition or any nerve testing beyond modest rock climbing. ‘An expert with strong arms’ might aspire to Severe routes after many years. Winter was for walking, varied by occasional snow gullies like the Central Gully of Beinn Laoigh.
My contemporaries and I had been war babies or born close before or after. We entered uncritically a social environment newly and strongly biased against more risk to life. Therefore the second brake on us was this all-pervading safety code. World wars do have a double effect on mountaineering. First they stop it and by drain of life delay resumption; but second, in compensation, they rouse in freed youth an urge to climb exploratively. When we came to mountains we had to find them for ourselves, and this had one great gain – our untold delight in such a vast field for adventure, untrammelled by company of elders and betters. The mountains were ours. We were free to do as we willed. It never occurred to us, distracted as we were by the heady joys of climbing, that our performance was handicapped by an unnatural generation gap – one so deep and wide that we could not imagine that some of our predecessors might have achieved standards beyond our own. In this youthful arrogance, our generation was at least no different from any other.
We had this excuse, that in the 1920s climbing in Scotland had to all appearance died. There had been no strong renewal like that in the Lakes or Wales. Nor was any great example set like the opening up of Clogwyn Du’r Arddu by Pigott and Longland, which seemed in effect to light a fuse, exploding the latent energies of England’s rock climbers. Nothing of that high order brought life up here. The best new rock climbs were by English summer migrants, birds of passage mostly alighting in Skye. We were grateful to them for routes on Sron na Ciche like Mallory’s Slab, Pye and Shadbolt’s Crack of Doom, and Holland’s Cioch West. A ‘Severe’ was the acme of climbing achievement.
The slow advance in relation to what was happening in the Lakes and Wales had multiple reasons. Climbers were few. A novice to get company in the 1920s had to join a club. There were three: the Scottish Mountaineering Club, the Cairngorm Club, and the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club. Only a small minority of their members were still climbing rock, mainly in the SMC.
One would be lucky indeed ever to know them. Few of the new generation were able to qualify for the SMC. The deadlock was seen by a small group of its members. They founded the JMCS in 1925, open to all men of seventeen years, and left to themselves in the hope that self-responsible young would thrive and revitalise Scottish climbing. Ten years later the hope was justified.
Other clubs were forming in Glasgow: in 1929, the Ptarmigan Club; in 1930, the Creagh Dhu of Clydebank, which made little mark before the Second World War, but won fame after it; and in 1933, the Lomond Club. All three tended to localise their activities in the Southern Highlands.2
Services of real value were given by the SMC in this period: their building of the Charles Inglis Clark Memorial Hut close below the cliffs of Ben Nevis at 2,200 feet, and their publication of guidebooks to the Cairngorms, Skye, and Ben Nevis – the latter made possible by the hut’s presence.
Ben Nevis rises to 4,406 feet at the head of Loch Linnhe, which occupies the southern part of the Great Glen – a crystal fault that splits Scotland from the North Sea to the Atlantic. Those happy few who enjoy gales, rain and blizzard will enjoy the Ben: it lies full in the track of North Atlantic storms. In shape like a sperm whale, afloat on a sea of peaks spreading 14,000 square miles, it rewards persistent wooers with days that stay long in mind for one grim reason after another, alleviated by days so clear that the Antrim Hills can be seen from its summit 120 miles south-west. Its cliffs face north-east and are Britain’s biggest. They lift out of the glen of the Allt a’Mhuilinn in a two-mile arc 2,000 feet high. Unlike the pink granite mass of the mountain, the cliffs are lavas, mainly a grey andesite, formed 350 million years ago in a cauldron subsidence. The rock is hard-baked and sound. The CIC Hut, built out of the Ben’s granite was conceived in memory of the Club’s dead in the Great War, the money for the building was given by Dr William Inglis Clark and his wife Jane whose son Charles had been killed in action in 1918. Jane had been the founder and first President of the Ladies’ Scottish Climbing Club in 1908 and William, the Scottish Mountaineering Club’s President throughout the War. They gave the hut a splendid site under the great array of deeply carved ridges, buttresses, and pinnacles which tower overhead, above lingering snow fields. When the hut was officially opened by Jane Inglis Clark in 1929 it saved years in the cliffs’ exploration.
The SMC had within itself three other means of renewal: its biannual journal, and two top-class climbers in Dr J.H.B. Bell and Dr Graham Macphee, each placed where he could do most good: Bell as editor of the SMC Journal, and Macphee as editor of the Nevis guide.
Everyone’s activities were hampered by the state of Highland roads, which were bad and narrow. The old road to Glen Coe across Rannoch Moor, metalled in broken stone, went higher than now on the Black Mount, where every snowfall blocked it. A minority of the new climbers owned cars, and these mostly second-hand. They had no heaters and were refrigerators in winter. Travel was slow and fraught with West Highland troubles. Oil sumps cracked on the crown of the road, springs burst on the potholes, water froze in radiators. Having no money, I bought a motor bike for £8 – a 500cc Norton – which achieved 80 miles per hour across the new Rannoch road. One snowy winter cured me of that. Second-hand cars were cheap. I paid £30 for an oil-eating Austin Seven, which otherwise ran like a Rolls Royce until the door handles fell off. At such prices one could afford to climb farther afield than Arrochar.
Since the only hut was halfway up Ben Nevis, we made much use of hotels in winter. Clachaig Inn charged 5 shillings [25 pence] for supper, bed and breakfast, and the rats in the wainscot lent atmosphere, Kingshouse and Inverarnan, 7/6 pence [371⁄2 pence] rising to 9/6 pence [471⁄2 pence]. Inverarnan in Glen Falloch virtually became a winter base for the JMCS. When we ran out of money, as often happened, or were saving up, we camped, or literally hit the hay at Danny’s Barn at Altnafeadh in Glen Coe. On good weekends we camped in high corries or up on the mountain tops. A spin off from Everest expeditions had been the production of high-altitude tents (£6), eiderdown bags £2.10.0, [£2.50], and windproof anoraks and breeches. No one wore tweed jackets. A three weeks’ camping holiday in Glen Brittle cost £10 for two weeks all in. It was a golden age, and even felt like it at the time. Good snow years come in cycles. We had an unbroken run.
1 Climbers have tended to refer to Glencoe which is actually the title of the village at the end of Glen Coe – the glen itself. The latter title is invariably used henceforth. [Back]
2 With the notable exception of Raven’s Gully, on Buachaille Etive Mor, which was climbed by a Ptarmigan/Creagh Dhu party led by Jock Nimlin in 1937 and amongst the hardest climbs in the country at that time. Editor[Back]
PRE-WAR CLIMBING IN SCOTLAND
– CHAPTER 3 –
Rocks and Climbers
To Archie MacAlpine I now owed a new impetus to both our mountain careers: a chance to team up with two of the club’s leading rock men, Bill Mackenzie and Kenneth Dunn.
On summer rock, Mackenzie was one of the six best leaders in Scotland. On mixed winter rock and high-angle ice, he had no rival in Britain. His natural athletic talent extended to ball games; he played off scratch at golf, and football too at near professional standard. In May 1936, the JMCS held a meet in Glen Coe, from which I was absent (in the Cairngorms). Archie MacAlpine and Margaret pitched their big tent, which we called ‘the canvas palace’, at Coupall Bridge in Glen Etive. It proved so popular in heavy rain that a camp bed broke under the weight of parked bodies, two of them Dunn and Mackenzie.
Mackenzie blurted, ‘Archie, we’ll climb in the glen the week after next.’
‘Sorry,’ said Archie, ‘I can’t do that. I always climb with Bill Murray.’
‘Bring him along,’ said Mackenzie.
I had longed for such good chance, but as a novice felt most diffident when we camped in Glen Etive two weeks later. Mackenzie that evening took us to the short roadside chasm west of Altnafeadh. His frame was wiry, hair black, manner incisive, and speech brusque; yet he was a great bringer-on of the young and inexperienced, scorning their natural fears. He picked out a hard, near vertical rib and went up unroped, not without trouble. I managed to follow.
At the top he looked me in the eye and barked, ‘What else have you done?’
I hesitated, ‘Well, Curved Ridge and the Cobbler by –’
‘Done Crowberry Direct?’
‘No – maybe in twenty years if I keep at it …’
He withered me with a glance. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ he snapped.
With four words he snatched us out of the last century. As in summer, so in winter, he had me in no time leading hard rock fouled up with snow and ice, confidence boosted high by finding I could stay on the stuff. Thereafter, Mackenzie, Dunn, MacAlpine and I formed a team that held together for four years of unbroken climbing, winter and summer. We had the advantage – a great one in winter – of being the only team that consistently climbed together, met weekly, and planned in advance where and how we would strike.
One thing about mountaineers that first astonished me was their improbable appearance. The hard men took no trouble to act up. They stayed their natural selves. When Dr Graham Macphee came to give a talk to the JMCS, he was turned out resplendent in pinstripe trousers and creamy spats, whereas Dr Bell dressed in rags. Another was George Williams, who had newly made the first ascent of Rannoch Wall on Buachaille, yet was slightly built with beautifully wavy hair and spectacles. I had been expecting muscle men, and their rarity cheered me. An exception was Kenneth Dunn, our strong-arm man, whom I came to prize as a car companion, for I ran the tyres of my Austin Seven down to the canvas, and when punctures resulted he could lift the whole side of the car clear off the ground to save time jacking. Although he had passed from Fettes to law school, and from sailing to mountains – and now was a budding solicitor, he had high talent as car mechanic, learned from his own bitter experience of second-hand jobs. He once got my old Austin home from a remote glen by mending its rotor arm with a bit of elastic garter. Resourcefulness on the road was matched by the same on rock. With Dunn one could feel safe and relax. None of us, not even the blunt-spoken Mackenzie, were able to ruffle his built-in geniality.
One block to a quicker advance than we made was a happy one. Unexplored crags abounded. Even Ben Nevis, Glen Coe and Skye held them in plenty; still more so the Cairngorms and the North and West Highlands. There were no ‘exhausted’ cliffs demanding ever harder routes. With so much ground inviting exploration, easier routes were naturally taken first. We felt no pressures, no interest in the aid climbing starting in Germany, other than the natural urge shared by all to climb harder as skills are won. This need was felt much more emphatically in winter, because ice was such a variable quantity, and its presence fickle. Every chance had to be taken to master it. Otherwise we felt at leisure. The keynote was exploration, our climbing free of competition in the new sense of that word. We took the original sense, ‘to strive with’ others, not against. The rocks and the elements gave all the opposition wanted. The rule had one exception – the Macphee/Bell feud on Ben Nevis.
Our standards were not felt to be cramped by our gear. Boots with narrow welts had arrived early in the thirties, and tricouni and clinker edge-nails gave as good a grip as vibrams (moulded rubber soles from Italy, 1935), often better, and always better in winter. Nails more quickly taught a precise placing of the foot and neatness in movement. Our clothing was adequate. Tweeds, long gone, had been replaced by good wind-proofs, spin-offs from Arctic and Everest expeditions. Manilla ropes (hemp), although heavier than present day nylon, put us at no disadvantage, since we used no artificial techniques. Our first important act was to lengthen our ropes and use waist belays. (Before the first war, rope-belays had been given direct across rock, if given at all, and in the 1920s given over the shoulder.) When I first climbed rock and turned for advice to the SMC General Guide (1933), I found that Raeburn recommended eighty feet for a party of three, which after they had tied on allowed barely thirty-five feet between each man. His rule imposed such low standards of climbing that we at once doubled the length, and soon trebled it. Raeburn’s words still baffle me. At the time they gave me a wrong impression that Raeburn could not have climbed to high standards in winter, hence my neglect of his records and our omission to learn from them.
This simple lengthening of our ropes opened up the rocks in alluring ways. It fetched us out of the chimneys and gullies – the more obvious routes – testing power-to-weight-ratios rather than nerve control. It took us away from the ridges which, though airy and open, are narrowly defined, making little demand on judgement or route selection. Instead it compelled us to appraise the great walls, slabs and faces. Leaders were by now accustomed to accepting long run-outs of 120–150 feet at high angles without any protection, reinforcing the maxim ‘a leader does not fall’. An example is the Rannoch Wall of Buachaille Etive Mor. To everyone it seemed at first sight impossibly steep. We were intimidated. The first move was made in 1934 by George Williams of the SMC. He made a top-rope survey of Route One, then climbed it with Graham Macphee. The event gave a needed shake to the younger men. They promptly repeated the climb and followed that with Agag’s Groove in 1936, led by Hamish Hamilton of the JMCS. Had he been ten minutes later, he would have lost the climb to Bill Mackenzie, who made the second ascent with Dunn and MacAlpine. These were two bold leads. As seen from below, they were fly-on-a-wall routes, and the leaders did not know in advance that they were easier than they looked. Routes of the kind multiplied thereafter.
The acceptance of long run-outs on exposed faces had been one of the main contributions to English climbing made by Colin Kirkus and his friends between 1930 and 1934. It directly influenced Williams’ lead, but only indirectly those of the JMCS, who were at this stage out of touch with Welsh and Lakeland example.
The new generation of Scots now fell out with the old. A pillar of the pre-war school came to berate us, urging with passion in his voice that we abandon slab-and-wall climbs. They were ‘unjustifiable’ (a much-used term of abuse in the 1930s), implying an irresponsible disregard for human life-values. Worse, they were Germanic (the early attempts on the Eigerwand were in progress, exciting the strictures of the Alpine Journal). Our reaction was outspoken on-the-spot revolt. ‘Our’ means here, the several leading climbers and their teams. The main body of Scottish climbers held to the past. Theirs was a most frustrating influence – frustrating because we spoke different tongues. They had not had our new experience of the rocks, and we had not yet found a way to express ours to them.
On high-angle walls and slabs, as on hard ice climbs, the exposure and the move were problems that gave us a peculiar sense of elation – a kind of abandonment to Providence. We did not think of it in these terms – we felt only a sense of release. The elation imparted to our climbing the very skills needed: balance, lightness of touch, hands held low when possible, faith placed in the friction of the foot and the carriage of head and body, all giving certainty of movement. No tuition required. Thus all was made safer than it looked. Reliance on balance, not muscle, might seem to an onlooker to impose greater strain on the nerves, frightening to anyone not accustomed to self-mastery, when in truth it was only a matter of building up confidence by practice. Since we failed to communicate, our elders watched in dismay or moral disapproval. We were giving the sport a bad name.
During these early years I had rapidly learned that the human race is composed of just two distinct species, those who climb mountains and those who don’t. All light and wisdom lay with the former. The latter dwelt in darkness. I am astonished how long this conviction lasted in face of the mountain climate and the company I kept. Having become a ‘fanatic’ (of winter rock and ice), I tended to have friends of eccentric character (minds not running in orthodox grooves). I have already mentioned three. I found a fourth one April day in 1937 at the CIC Hut on Nevis. The scenes that spring to mind there, are those that give a lift to the spirits on black nights: the first sight of the hut’s beckoning light far up the glen of the Allt a’Mhuilinn: the warm, welcoming fug when the door swings open; the steaming mugs of rum punch, the brewing of which was always the first move on arrival; and the coal fire in the big iron stove. And such was the scene when Mackenzie, MacAlpine and I arrived that night to be welcomed by a short, stocky man with a bald head and wicked grin. This turned out to be Dr J.H.B. Bell. He had with him three English climbers, Henson, Dick Morsley, and Percy Small. They were up to make the first ascent of Green Gully.1 They banished our night’s cold with mugs of hot soup before a blazing fire. I then had my first lesson on the follies of volunteering when Bell sent me out to the burn to fetch a bucket of water for the rum punch. After digging through feet of interminable snow, I found the burn frozen solid. My principal lesson came the following morning, when I watched Bell make his party’s breakfast.
Oatmeal, sausages, kippers, tomato soup, peas and beans all went into the porridge pot. As a practical chemist, he was imbued with the truth that a meal was a fuel intake, therefore its separation into courses was an auld wife’s nicety, and not for climbers. He later persuaded me to share his burnt toast, on the grounds that charcoal was a bodily need. He expounded equations of chemical change to show how charcoal absorbed the troublesome gases of stomach and gut to our mutual benefit. Bell, when cook, could talk one into eating almost anything. But not even that toughest of characters, Dick Morsley, had a palate tough enough for Bell’s porridge. After one spoonful, he strode to the door and flung his plateful out on the snow. The fuel mix certainly worked for the others.
They not only climbed Green Gully, but next year the English members2 returned and climbed its neighbour, Comb Gully, the best ice climb on the Ben up to the war.
The hut for me was a school of further education. Its eight bunks were the best sprung and most comfortable on which I have ever slept. One could lie there on a winter’s night and watch the iron stove glow red hot in the dark. Especially was this true if Archie MacAlpine were present. As fire stoker, he had the genius of Satan himself. Perhaps inspired by the latter after a heady brew, he once stoked the stove to an unprecedented redness, forgetting that he had put his blankets into the oven to warm. When this was shortly discovered, Mackenzie and I basked in a glow of moral righteousness, the more keenly enjoyed for its rarity, while MacAlpine pondered whether to confess the blankets’ incineration to the hut’s custodian, or to claim more plausibly that Bell had eaten them for breakfast.
Bell and I having met, we corresponded much and began to climb together from 1938 onward. I appreciated his manner of dealing with hard rock. Needless to say, he had a quick eye for a new route, and at close quarters a keen nose for the best line. His climbing style did not have the smoothly flowing grace of the textbook ideal. Apart from his expertise in every kind of hard move, which he made with an India-rubber-like suppleness, he had two notable styles of attack at the crux of a climb. He never dilly-dallied, or spent time on hesitant, tentative moves. He stood back, took quick stock, and then if the rocks were near vertical, took his holds decisively and went up with a vigour that positively emanated out of him. If the rock was slabby and holdless, and always when wet, he took to his stocking soles and went on to the rock with delicate tread, catlike in its implication ‘I know where I’m going’. He could make his chosen line on severe or unknown rock look like a foregone conclusion. His strong point was this decisiveness: vigour of mind pairing with vigour of body. He was fallible like us all, but never came off his holds.
In our more adventurous climbing we were given much encouragement by Bell, who was at the same game himself. He had recently climbed the 1,000-foot Basin Route on Ben Nevis, the first of his Very Severe series on the Orion Face of North-East Buttress. Editors of climbing journals are more influential than they generally realise, for they move learners rather than pundits, and a man’s best climbs are done when he is young and relatively inexperienced, not when old and wise. Bell was (to us) an exception to that rule. Being over thirty, he should to our eyes have seemed ancient, his life done. Instead, we found him ageless, superior to us all on summer rock, though not on winter. His company was stimulating, for he was always a learner himself, seeking new ways. He never opposed the use of pitons, and sent Sandy Wedderburn with two Jugoslav aidmen to Slav Route near Zero Gully. Their first nailing of the Nevis cliffs in 1934 pleased Bell, who hoped it might infuriate Macphee. Bell wanted to put Macphee’s guidebook out of date, and climbers arriving at the hut always had the immediate excitement of opening the Climbs Book to read what new thing had been done, tried, or repeated.
His editorship of the SMC Journal
