PHOTO: LUKASZ WARZECHA / THE NORTH FACE


I


n the history of adventure, there will always be a small footnote on the crucial role played by the Luftwaffe – and the RAF. It’s well known Joe Brown was bombed out of his house in Manchester in 1940, and that the bombsites that studded the city became playgrounds for him and his pals. But he wasn’t the only one. Kids all over Europe responded to these piles of rubble and dangerous structures in much the same way. One of the fi rst adventure playgrounds deliberately sited on waste ground was built in Copenhagen in 1943. Explorers, especially young ones, need their blanks on the map, and bombsites fulfi l that role; they are familiar places made strange, full of unknown risks and excitement.


Don Roscoe, like Joe Brown, was a child growing up in wartime Manchester and like Joe was an energetic, curious boy fascinated with bombsites and other abandoned landscapes where you were free to discover. A bomb had taken out the gymnasium of his school in Burnage, “so the only physical education we got was rolling around on mats.”


Don is sitting in his kitchen on Anglesey nursing a cup of tea. Through the window of the house he’s shared with his wife Barbara for several decades, I can see a


large black cloud settling over Snowdon. Now 79, he’s recalling the adventures and close shaves he had as a boy, exploring Manchester and the countryside beyond. “It wasn’t exactly Swallows and Amazons,” he says.


“The fi rst time I went camping, I took two pints of milk in bottles and a blanket. That was it. I was wearing a pair of city shoes because I didn’t have anything else. I caught the bus from Stevenson Square to Greenfi eld.” Climbing happened pretty much by chance. He’d found a copy of Edmund Whymper’s Scrambles in the Alps in the local library but he might as well have been reading about spacemen or cowboys. However much he wanted to have a go, climbers, like spacemen, were thin on the ground in Burnage.


His stepdad – his father had died of tuberculosis when Don was four months old – had fi xed up an old bike for him when he was ten. “He got me riding down the street holding the saddle and then I realised he wasn’t anymore, and I was still cycling.” As a teenager he’d do long rides into Cheshire and Derbyshire and one day, riding home, he stopped at the copper mines in Alderley Edge.


“They were hauling a bloke out with a broken leg tied to a plank of wood. I thought, this looks interesting.” The copper mines became, like the bombsites, a place


“THE FIRST TIME I WENT CAMPING, I TOOK TWO PINTS OF MILK IN BOTTLES AND A BLANKET. THAT WAS IT.”


MOUNTAIN PEOPLE


Who’s who in the history of Mountain Training?


Geoffrey


Winthrop Young Chief instigator of the BMC and author of the hugely


infl uential Mountain Craft, he set the agenda for climbing instruction


throughout the twentieth century.


John Barford


BMC’s fi rst secretary, author of Climbing in Britain (and author of Don Roscoe’s


Laddow guide). Died in the Alps in 1947.


R The modern way: a Glenmore Lodge instructor leads a group in winter.


Jack Longland President of the BMC and a tasty rock climber to boot: climbing Longland’s Climb (VS) on Cloggy and Javelin Blade (E1) at Idwal in 1930. Opened White Hall, the fi rst local authority outdoor centre in Britain with a certain Joe Brown as the fi rst chief instructor and Eric Langmuir as its director. Became a deputy-chair of the new Sports Council in 1972


SUMMIT#73 | SPRING 2014 | 73


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