I am definitely a climber who writes. I’ve always written about what I’ve done and how I felt about myself and those I went with. I have come home from trips with battered books full of scribblings, half of it illegible, self-indulgent babble. At home I have mulled things over, added reflection to the gut reaction of my diaries, and somehow ended up with finished pieces. But the rock has always come first.
Illness on return from trips has allowed me the time to create and smashed bones have also been kind to me, holding me back from my normal unquestioning frenzy of activity and forcing me to sit and think. Indeed I would not have found the time to put these writings together had I not suffered a broken back in Scotland. I used to be so single-minded. Girlfriends and great things I could have done were left behind as I kept searching for the perfect climb. Then, after I fell at Gogarth and momentarily died, I had so many questions to ask the night. I couldn’t make any sense of it all and I began writing as an exorcism. At first I thought that moment of drowning felt too good and this terrified me but, as I wrote, I began to make some twisted sense of it all.
Most importantly, the trauma of the events which are documented in this book have helped me to grow and have taught me valuable, very personal lessons. Falling at Gogarth revealed to me my position within humankind; as unimportant as anyone else. That insight allows me to treat all others as equal to myself more readily. There I also learned that death can be painless, yes, but more than that, utterly sublime. This simple knowledge has helped me reconcile the sad thoughts of friends who have died in pain – Ed and Philip and Teo – though it also revealed to me that death really was the end and that there is no time to waste in this short term that we have.
Joe Tasker and Menlove Edwards are two people who have inspired me to put pen to paper, Tasker for his honesty and Edwards for his sensitivity. I will never forget being shocked, as I first read Savage Arena, at the vivid description of the arguments which Tasker and Boardman had on their ascents, arguments which many climbers would try to hide for fear of causing offence and embarrassment. And the admission of the fact that their motivations often came from the less admirable corners of their psyche. What can I say about Edwards? Only that, for me, he transforms his insight into nature and the society around him onto paper better than any climber I know of. Nothing or no one seemed able to disguise anything from him. I admit to wanting to emulate their traits but, I hope, I keep my own style.
This is not a simple autobiography. I have tried to give a whole image of the existence and psyche of a climber from my generation, for I do not see myself as so unique within it, though of course A Game One Climber Played and other moments in the book are very personal to me. This is why some of the chapters appear altered from what has been published in magazines. A magazine that readers dip into, not knowing what kind of excitement they are looking for, and so only happening across a piece of your life, is not the place for such intimate subjects. In a book, on the other hand, readers must go out and find, already knowing that they want to learn about you or read what you have to say.
The rock climber who learns his craft and then makes the transition to the mountains is less common now than in previous eras and so my stories of trips aren’t perhaps so typical of my genre. But there are a number of us who, even though we might not have experienced it first hand, have roots in the past, have a great respect for the old pioneers and the evolution of our climbing lives would seem to mirror theirs to some extent.
My generation of climbers, the ones who began making their impact in the eighties, had their own peculiarities that set them apart from other generations. These differences were a result of social circumstances in the UK at the time. We had time on our hands and an opportunity to forfeit the worker’s life and just go climbing. Some called us selfish. It was a world which produced a crop of British climbers in the early to mid-eighties who showed the world how it was done. I wouldn’t be so bold as to rank myself alongside eighties sport climbers – Myles, Moon, or others who were of that new ‘leisure class’ – but in my own way I feel I’ve given something to climbing in Britain. I have threaded lines up mountains and sea cliffs and shown others where to go. It wasn’t all selfish on my part; I have created steep, mind-testing challenges for climbers to stretch themselves out on. Asgard’s velvet smooth wall, Paine’s mile-long knife-blade crack, Meru’s Shark Fin I needed to try. They were only imaginable for me after a decade of living for the rock every day, blowing off everything else. My need to get stronger, to use all my time struggling towards my dreams, even though I had no private wealth, is what some found disagreeable.
There was a letter sent in to an American climbing magazine once deriding me for “lacking in character” because I indulged my passion “at the expense of the British tax-payer by claiming the munificent British Dole”. There are many of this opinion when it comes to judging the out of work. I would like a little room to explain the system I grew up in. I would like to give those people a portrait of the Lancashire of my youth.
In ’79, after Callaghan lost, it could be said that the blanket attitude of the young began to change. By ’83 there were 4,000,000 men and women unemployed, workers’ morale was sinking. Companies won contracts by paying their workers less money for longer hours. The dismantling of the heavy industries and the move toward communications and finance sucked the life out of the industrial areas. This led to a widespread loss of respect for the Conservatives in my home, a northern mill town, which still endures today. To the north of Manchester the miners’ strike brought communities to tears, as the collieries of Brackley, Ashtons Field and Hulton stood silent. But, for us youngsters, this was now the land of opportunity, the government told us anything could be ours. We were free to gamble, but if we failed, we would be at the bottom of the heap. When it came time to leave school most of my friends either signed on as unemployed or went on government job creation schemes. The ones that signed on had free time to develop sometimes obscure skills that seemed at first to have no use to the community. Later this would be seen not to be the case as, throughout the country, champion runners and cyclists and famous painters and writers emerged.
At Hulton some of our neighbours went through the picket lines to work because their families needed food. They compromised principles, though they agreed with the strikers’ cause. Moral decay had been forced. Nationally this went even further as armaments became one of the biggest industries of the UK, our most marketable product, and who the buyer was didn’t matter. How do climbers fit into this you may wonder? Out of the ashes of this social, economic and moral turmoil the full time climber rose like some scruffy, bedraggled phoenix to push the boundaries of what was possible on our crags, quarries and sea cliffs.
There had already been full-timers for a while then. Bancroft, a gritstone cult hero, was probably the original dole climber back in ’77, followed by such masters as Allen and Fawcett who gave so much to us younger climbers. When I stood at the bottom of Beau Geste or Master’s Edge I could see them moving just as I wanted to move. I wondered if I could ever be like them. Many then could still use university as an excuse to climb. Grants were good and it gave lots of free time, and a chance for MacIntyre and Rouse to become such great mountaineers. Later, as grants decreased, students even had to work their summer holidays (as they still do) and the university life became less appealing to the dedicated climber.
As the young athletes strove to ascend wilder and wilder rock climbs the endeavour became more time-consuming. They had to train long and hard to develop the power needed to create these masterpieces. These climbers paid little thought to the politicans in Westminster, who were inadvertently creating an environment most suitable for the serious climber – with so many unemployed it was easy to sign on. How could they prove you weren’t actively seeking work if there wasn’t any work to be found? And it became easy to justify too; you could go out to the sea cliffs self-righteous in the knowledge that another was working and feeding his family as a result of your sacrifice! We did look for work, me and my friends, but we were not going to go into a factory after the freedom we had tasted. That no jobs were ever offered to us by the job centre, as was the system, only reflected the economic circumstances of the country, especially in the rural areas of Wales. So why should I not use my time to go climbing? It now seems ironic that my passion contributed to the transformation of the gigantic Dinorwig slate quarries, the scar left after the community was near fatally wounded by its closure. Together we unemployed bums created, from what was once a thriving place of work, and then a vast, silent ugly space, a place of leisure for the weekend climber. And it was hard, dangerous graft, let me tell you, the clearing of loose rock and the drilling, just like the quarrymen had once done. Harder than any desk job I used to think.
But the dole handout or the government climbing grant, as we called it, paid very little. For my first two years as a full-timer, living in the Stoney Middleton wood shed or in caves around the Peak, I received eighteen pounds a week. I had to buy and sell, borrow and steal to get a rack and feed myself. We lived in the dust on a diet of cold beans and white bread. They banned us from the pub because we didn’t spend enough and they thought we would give the other customers our flu. It was a gamble climbing on the dole, to deprive yourself of all those potential luxuries for the sake of pushing up the grades. Most of my old school mates had cars and girlfriends by then. And what if you didn’t make it? What would you do in ten years time if you got injured and you had no education or trade to fall back on? I still wonder. But I don’t regret forfeiting the career and the consumer durables.
Some of the route names of those days celebrated the unprecedented situation in which climbing found itself, which couldn’t have come about in a more healthy economic state. Doleman, Dole Technician, Dolite, Long Live Rock and Dole. One of the ardent Stoney dossers, Dirty Derek, said he’d vote Tory again to ensure he’d get another four years of Giros! But the dossers have gone now. Their generation only really lasted a decade. A climber on the dole is scum in the eyes of many now. New rules have made it tough to stay signed on for any length of time and to be a traveller, like many US climbers, is not an accepted way to live. They put barriers up in Britain and signs, NO OVERNIGHT PARKING. Now many climbers aspire to wealth and sponsorship and a sporty car as an escape from the trap of conformism. They want to attain what their heros have attained. But neither type, not the doley nor the new professional, ever escapes. They both play the system.
It is acceptable to be a student, to study philosophy or art, and you can receive a meagre grant, but to filter out a little money to create great lines up cliffs is, in the eyes of some, morally wrong. It doesn’t quite adhere to the system which we manufactured. What does appear ironic now is that those unemployed, who appeared of no use to the community, having perfected their craft, were seen on the pages of magazines and in advertisements. They were transformed into heroes who helped to sell the equipment the manufacturers were producing and so, inadvertently, became an indispensable part of the system they thought they had dropped out of.
To live the life we chose we rode on the wealth of others, just like the explorers of old and these, surely, must command all our respect. Shipton, Tilman, even Darwin made their journeys of discovery using the riches of the empire – from exploitation of conquered lands. They were of the original leisure class which will always be with us. They have been around for ever, almost. The working-class climbers slowly came on the scene from the thirties to the fifties. They were hard men who gained fame on the outcrops near their city homes. After the war there were enough jobs for everyone and their ascents could be made in a day or two at the weekend. As the boom babies grew up job opportunities diminished and the seventies brought the new leisure class, rebels with a rock hard cause. And now, are we heading back to the beginning? You can climb Everest if you have enough cash. Or perhaps you would prefer Antarctica or Irian Jaya? It was said in the eighties that at either end of the economic spectrum there was a leisure class. Through unemployment the poor had the time to have their adventures, albeit on a smaller scale, on the rock outcrops close to their homes. Now, in the nineties, this may still be true but the opportunities open to the lower leisure class would seem to be restricted somewhat when compared to how it was a decade ago.
As the economy of our island grows again and more restrictions are put on our welfare state the unemployed climber is becoming a thing of the past. Now you’ll see less and less of our type. I knew some real characters dossing on that Peak District garage forecourt we called The Land of the Midnight Sun. They lived for the rock and material gain never really entered their heads. I think when we opened the door for the new professionals some of those characters slipped out the back.