MOUNTAIN TRAINING
of adventure and exploration, and a few weeks later he ran into a former schoolmate called Alan Braddock. “He said: ‘I don’t bother with this place much anymore. I go rock climbing now.’ I begged him to take me out.” So began a long journey that led to a lifetime spent in the outdoors, much of it helping others to discover it for themselves. Alan Braddock took Don to Dovestones, where he led his second route, graded Severe. When Braddock joined the RAF, Don persuaded his pal Eric Price to come along.
Eric Langmuir Author of
Mountaincraft and Leadership. This sacred text for
mountain instructors has sold 150,000
copies and is still in print. After running White Hall he took over Glenmore Lodge in the
Cairngorms, Britain’s oldest outdoor centre.
“I bought the guidebook to Laddow for half a crown. Mum would have gone mad if she’d found out how much it cost. We found a road-mender’s rope, and fi gured it wasn’t doing much good where it was and used that.” On the bus to Greenfi eld one weekend, another climber approached Don and Eric to ask if he could join them. He explained his mate hadn’t turned up. The lad was Les Wright; his absent mate was Don Whillans. Starting climbing in the 1940s and 1950s was, in comparison to now, a risky proposition with few clues on how to proceed. “There was no formal instruction, and we learned by trial and error and watching other people. Rope work was rudimentary to say the least and kit was minimal. There was only one climbing shop in Manchester – Brigham’s little shop in Conran Street; in any case, as working-class lads just leaving school, we had little money.”
John Jackson
Langmuir’s opposite number at Plas y
Brenin. RAF veteran and a key member of Kangchenjunga
1955 expedition, he was appointed chief instructor at Plas y Brenin in 1958,
becoming director in 1960.
Such ingenuity and self-reliance are admirable qualities, and some have argued over the years that the growth in formal mountain training has undermined them, and consequently weakened the ethos of the sport. It’s not a view Don Roscoe shares. “I’d have welcomed some instruction. Anyone who did get instruction tended to be better off, often because his or her parents had done it. The parents of working- class kids hadn’t done that sort of thing. They were too knackered at the end of the week to do anything.” Don and other lads in the Rock and Ice weren’t quite
learning in a vacuum, but they were largely unaware of the sudden fl ourishing of the outdoors and adventure in education. That grew out of the meeting between Geoffrey Winthrop Young and Kurt Hahn at Hahn’s private school in Germany in 1926, a meeting that in retrospect looks profoundly infl uential, since Young helped bring the Jewish Hahn to Britain after Hitler took power. Out of that move came Gordonstoun, the Outward Bound and the Duke of Edinburgh Award. It would be hard to overestimate Geoffrey Winthrop
Don Roscoe Don (of Roscoe’s Wall fame at the Roaches) and his
future wife, Barbara Spark, were some of the original
instructors at Plas y Brenin. Barbara
would go on to set up the outdoor education department at Bangor University.
Young’s role in British climbing, both as a kind of driving intellectual force and a networker without equal. The author of the hugely infl uential instructional book Mountain Craft, he set the agenda for climbing instruction throughout the twentieth century. In 1944 he was the chief architect for British climbing’s new representative body, the British Mountaineering Council, identifying instruction as one of the organisation’s fundamental roles. (His chief lieutenant in the BMC’s construction was John Barford, author of Don Roscoe’s Laddow guide.)
The networking side of things, smoothed by Geoffrey
Winthrop Young’s genius for friendship, is most obvious in the near-mythical parties he held at Pen y Pass under Snowdon before and after the Great War. The stellar cast list of these gatherings – Robert Graves, George Trevelyan, John Maynard Keynes – included the young Jack Longland, a star athlete at Cambridge, where Winthrop Young was living in the 1920s, and a brilliant climber who went to Everest in 1933.
P Risk is part of the hills.
“WE’RE STILL FREE TO GO INTO THE HILLS ON OUR OWN TERMS. RISK IS STILL A FUNDAMENTAL PART OF CLIMBING’S ETHOS.”
Jack Longland may have had an elitist background, but as director of education in Derbyshire he supported comprehensive education. Why should access to the great outdoors be a function of class any more than it was to getting a decent education? In 1950 he opened White Hall, the fi rst local authority outdoor centre in Britain and a beacon for the growing mountain training effort. Joe Brown was the fi rst chief instructor and its director was a young Scot who had, like Longland, been president of the Cambridge University mountaineering club – Eric Langmuir. Few in mountain training can have had a similar impact to Langmuir. Almost every committee or structure put in place to improve safety in the mountains, from mountain rescue to avalanche awareness, drew on Langmuir’s experience. His book Mountaincraft and Leadership became a sacred text for mountain instructors selling 150,000 copies and is still in print. After running White Hall he took over Glenmore Lodge in the Cairngorms, Britain’s oldest outdoor centre. Langmuir realised that the Lodge’s usefulness could be exponentially greater if it specialised in training leaders to spread expertise more widely through schools and youth groups. Langmuir’s opposite number at Plas y Brenin was John Jackson, RAF veteran and a key member of Charles Evans’ exemplary expedition to Kangchenjunga in 1955.
74 | 70TH ANNIVERSARY | FOR BRITISH CLIMBING AND WALKING SINCE 1944
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