In 1972, the Leeds University Climbing Club (LUCC) was going through a period of change. A new irreverent group was taking charge and I was one of them. We were mostly disorganised, disheveled and disrespectful and sometimes dishonest. Climbing was our shared passion. We couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t climb but were glad they didn’t. Mountain magazine was our bible. One copy would pass around the entire club. Apart from Mountain and climbing, lunch in the salad bar on the first floor of the student union and a string of pubs – the Pack Horse, the Eldon, the Swan with Two Necks and the Fenton – gave structure to our lives.
Mainly, we went climbing, managing to fit in just enough university work to keep our tutors satisfied. There were nearly daily sessions on the Leeds indoor climbing wall and many impromptu outings to the nearby gritstone crags. There were regular club meets every Wednesday afternoon, since there were no classes that day and most weekends we climbed regardless of the weather. The weekends away occasionally turned into a week, and weeks occasionally into an entire month. Doing course work was a low priority compared with climbing.
None of us who came together at Leeds University in the early 1970s could have foreseen the impact we would have on the climbing scene or the tragedies that fate had in store for us. The majority of us weren’t even serious climbers when we first met. A host of factors – group dynamics, adventures born from frustrations, nihilism, sexual and spiritual immaturity, mass hysteria, drug and drink-stimulated delusion, anarchy – coalesced to inspire something exceptional.
Yorkshire gritstone offered the nearest climbing and Almscliff was our favourite. It became a place of worship for the one world-class rock-climbing star in the club – John Syrett. There were others in the club nearly as good: Rob Wood, Alan Manson and Pete Kitson. And when I say ‘club’, some ‘members’ were just part of the scene and not studying at the university.
In the next year or two, more extremely talented rock-climbers arrived as Leeds students including Mike Hammill, John Allen, Steve Bancroft and Chris Addy. Between them they climbed lots of new routes, although Syrett, until he severed a tendon in his hand trying to open a tin of lobster with a knife, remained the best in the club. Another talented rock-climber and habitual student, Bernard Newman, was at Leeds throughout this period, from 1969 to 1975. He edited the famous Leeds Journal of 1973 and eventually became editor of both Mountain and Climber magazines.[1]
When Alex arrived at the university, some excellent alpinists were also emerging at Leeds. Brian Hall, Roger Baxter-Jones and John Stainforth had many hard routes reported in Mountain magazine, like the Bonatti Pillar on the Dru and many first British ascents. John Powell and Tim Rhodes arrived about the same time as Alex.
The notoriety and success of the Leeds University club resulted in an extended family of climbers from both Britain and the United States coming to visit, or to meet us in the mountains. In Britain, our closest club association was with the University of Cambridge, whose leading lights were Alan Rouse and Mick Geddes. The Americans were mainly New Englanders from my original home. When I went to Leeds to do post-graduate work in 1972, many friends came over to climb. Among them were Roger Martin, John Bouchard, Henry Barber, Steve Arsenault, Chuck Ziakowski and, later, Ed Webster, Andy Tuthill and Chris Elms.
Many of them had a real impact on both the British and European climbing scenes. In 1974 Roger Martin made the second solo ascents of Point Five and Zero Gully, a feat Alex repeated the same year. John Bouchard did a number of new routes in the Alps. Henry Barber was sent to the UK by ex-pat Raul Ross to wind up local climbers with his exceptional skills and clean ethics. The year before he came, he had been nicknamed ‘Hot Henry’ for his phenomenal solo ascents and on-sight leads in Yosemite.[2] He discovered a like-minded companion in John Syrett. John’s approach – climbing ground up and on sight – was a mirror image of his own. Some other excellent climbers of the day, Pete Livesey and Ron Fawcett among them, would occasionally inspect a new route from above and there were whispers of pre-placed slings to make routes easier to protect and even chipped holds.
None of us could match Syrett, Alan Manson or Pete Kitson on rock, but we adopted our ethical stance from them. Any route done with a rest, or with a fall, was not considered an ascent. Some credit could be gained by being lowered to the ground, then pulling the ropes through before trying again. But it was still considered a flawed ascent and duly noted as such in our hand-written journal. This arrived at the salad bar under Bernard’s arm at lunchtime for members to record their ascents and other antics.
There is no doubt that a clean and free style of climbing influenced Alex’s approach, first in the Alps and then in the Himalaya. We were not the first to practise this clean tradition, merely the keepers of the purist flame. The influence of the group was perhaps best recorded in the pages of Mountain magazine throughout the 1970s, but individual tributes still appear, in the writing of Jim Perrin and others.
A formal structure and published programme of activities was required to get grants from the student union, but such things were anathema to most members of the LUCC. Still, we had to make the effort. Elected officers were often appointed because they were absent from the pub on the evening of the annual general meeting. Executive officers had the habit of never actually joining and paying their dues but there were plenty of new arrivals, not yet disillusioned, keen to join the club for fifty pence, or about $1.50.
New victims enrolled during the freshers’ fair at the student union building each year. The benefit of membership was dubious to say the least. First of all, having paid over your money, unless you were part of the inner circle you were not invited to join the club officials later that afternoon in the pub to drink away the club’s subscriptions for the year. Next day, the list of new and existing members was taken to union officials as proof of a vibrant and growing club.[3] A grant was then awarded on a per capita basis, which usually amounted to several hundred pounds.
This money was used in a variety of ways. On the first Saturday in the first term of each year we held an official meet and hired a bus to take us to Stanage or some other more distant crag. This gave the club some credibility among the paid-up new members. It was also evidence that we were doing what we said we were doing to impress the student union. The credentials of new members were carefully weighed: could they climb, did they have any money, did they have a car and were they female? That was more or less the order of priority. There were not many female ‘stayers’ in the club. A few became the anchor of sanity for some of the more dissolute and disillusioned members of the club – Syrett in particular. Some of the girls joined in with antics that on several occasions made national press headlines: ‘Vicar’s Daughter Arrested in Pub Theft’ was one; others included ‘Skylight Collapse Near Death Fall For Leeds Uni Fresher’.
On the whole, the male club members were men without women.
We were basically too interested in climbing and short-term kicks – in other words, too immature. There were some excellent women climbers in the club at the time: Cynthia Heap and Angela Fowler to name but two. Although they joined in on many trips, they found the conversation and pub antics of the leading lights in the club pretty inane. Angela Fowler once famously said of the climbers in the club: ‘I can’t really tell the difference between the drug addicts and queers.’ It is difficult to know these many years on if that is really how she saw us all – as far as I know the club had neither.
Alex joined the club during fresher enrolment. John Powell recalls seeing him in some of the classes they shared together. ‘He always sat on his own, but he had a Joe Brown rucksack, a leather jacket and, of course, his hair was out all over the place, so he didn’t quite fit. He was not quite the picture of your normal student at the time. So I thought he might be a climber and I went over to talk to him. But he was pretty stand-offish, wanted to play it cool.’
Alex was quite taciturn when he first arrived at Leeds. It was his nature to stand back and weigh things up, particularly with new people, before he opened up. For the first couple of months, he did not attend a club meet, or join in at the evening sessions at the Leeds Climbing Wall.[4] But that would change soon enough, mainly through his growing friendship with John Powell, who was reading the same course. Alex joined the fast track to develop his climbing and gain access to the inner clique.
‘Once I got hold of a van,’ John said, ‘the regular crew of John Syrett, Andy Wild, Alex and I were getting out every weekend, climbing and then gate-crashing parties in the evenings. Climbing and partying were joint-top in our list of priorities. In fact, we combined them the very first time I climbed with Alex, shimmying up a drainpipe behind the student union building to get into the freshers’ ball. We never paid for entrance to anything if there was another way in.’
Blue Ford vans were popular among climbers; they were cheap to run and easy to repair. There were at least three owned by club members: John Powell, Bernard Newman and Alex himself. I doubt if any of them would be legal today. Tax, insurance and MOTs were all seen as unnecessary and expensive accessories. Tyres were worn down until the metal cores showed through. All the vans were constantly in scrapes and prangs but no one ever had a serious crash. A new dent happened almost on a weekly basis. If another car was involved, it meant cash had to exchange hands pretty quickly, especially if the car was also without insurance. John Powell recalled having to swallow his panic when stopped by the police during a late night drive up to the Lake District after the pub.
‘You seem to have been driving all over the road, sir,’ the officer said, shining his torch on each of the faces of the occupants of the van.
‘Sorry, officer just a bit tired you know.’
‘Come far then?’
‘Oh yes, from Leeds.’ The officer was silent for a moment. Leeds was less than an hour’s drive away.
‘All students are we?’ he said, shining the light on Alex’s face and wild hair, and then around the rest of us sprawled in the back. ‘Best be on your way then. Mind how you go.’
Had he checked, as he would now, the officer could have got him for bald tyres, no tax and no insurance as well as being over the limit, but society was more tolerant of these things in the early 1970s.
Although the vans ultimately belonged to individuals, they were treated as communal property by the club and we all drove them. The fleet was occasionally augmented with a few cars borrowed from parents or those hired by visiting Americans. Rarely did these go back to their owners without a new dent or two.
When the moon was full, driving back from the crags without headlights seemed a normal thing to do. On a single lane hump-backed bridge near Malham, Alex and John Powell met a car also without headlights at the crest of the bridge. Fortunately they were in Powell’s father’s solid Morris Oxford and there was little damage to it. The other car was a near write-off. The other driver was a farmer on his way back from the pub, already banned for drink-driving. He had been driving without lights to avoid the attention of any police car in the area. They cleared the farmer’s wrecked car from the bridge and then took him home where enough cash to repair the Powell family vehicle was proffered.
Alex’s van became so badly dented that only the rear doors opened. Stopped by the police, the officer had a shock when he asked Alex to step out of the car. As he stood by the driver’s door, the back doors suddenly flew open and five scruffy lads jumped out before Alex himself climbed out the back. Having recovered from this shock and ascertained that we were all students, we got the usual ‘mind how you go’ speech and set off again.
In his first years in the club, Alex was not a particularly strong rock climber. He often drew irreverent comments when his name appeared in the Leeds ‘Book’ – the journal recording the climbs and the antics of the club, illustrated with pictures of particularly spectacular falls and car crashes. Exactly when Alex gained the nickname ‘Dirty’ Alex is not recorded in the Book, but it does appear halfway through his first year. Like most students, Alex was not often seen at the launderette. His face was usually unshaven and his unruly hair reached his shoulders. Alex was doing grunge well before anyone tried to build a fashion around not washing.
John Powell recalls that despite this, Alex drew attention. ‘There were a lot of really smart girls on our course and Alex was always in demand, but he never made any effort with any of them. I remember going on a weeklong fieldtrip to the Isle of Man and Alex had the same trousers and shirt on all week. And, of course, he had a leather jacket that lasted him through Leeds that was rarely off his back. He even climbed in it.’
It went with the motorbike he had brought to Leeds. Not many people dared climb on the back with Alex. Although he was naturally someone who tried to be safe, he was also very inconsistent. That also was true of his climbing.
Luck smiled on most of the Leeds club during those years. Long falls were commonplace and most of our equipment was basic. Few had more than half a dozen runners. Equipment had to be pooled for serious routes. Many of us still had a selection of real nuts with the threads filed out and threaded with slings. Equipment was now improving and we snapped up new gear as we could afford it. MOACs were the most prized, a two-size-only range of British nuts that were a precursor to Yvon Chouinard’s Stoppers.[5] Clog hexes and a few slings to thread chockstones or to hang over flakes made up the rest of our climbing rack. The placement of pegs was completely taboo except for Scottish winter climbing and the Alps. In the USA, the early 1970s was the transition period between the use of any pegs for protection and the widespread availability of a range of small wires. The arrival of a more sophisticated approach to protection was something American visitors like Steve Wunsch and Henry Barber brought to Leeds.
The club rarely missed a chance to go climbing, even after late night parties and through the damp and dull winter months, climbing was happening. Many cold wet days were spent on the gritstone and the high crags of Wales and the Lake District, excellent experience for the future in persevering.
Under the tutelage of John Syrett, Alex learned a lot about perseverance and determination. Syrett was a master of spotting unlikely routes and always approached them on sight, which almost inevitably meant falls and failures before success. Alex was a reliable and long-suffering ‘rope boy’, willing to put in many idle hours belaying Syrett to watch a master at work. What Alex lacked in skill, he repaid in interest with his unflappable manner. Whatever was going on inside, Alex rarely revealed his feelings even in extremis. Mostly, he came to the crag with a wisecracking and competitive spirit, which spurred the rest of us on.
During his first year at Leeds, Alex worked hard at all aspects of his climbing and improved dramatically. He progressed from climbing Severe (5.5) on rock to leading E1 (5.9 or 510a/b) in his second year. He never pretended he was a great leader and would always hand the lead to his partner if he were not feeling confident. He did have moments of inspiration.
I remember him romping up a number of mid grade Extremes in the Lakes in miserable conditions. As with many aspiring rock-climbers, his first Extreme was Brant Direct in the Llanberis Pass. Although not terribly difficult, it was a cold and wet November day. Alex knew what routes he wanted and needed to do and worked his way through them. Some were more painful than others. When abseiling down after an ascent of Cenotaph Corner on Dinas Cromlech, on his way to do Cemetery Gates, Alex got his hair caught in his figure of 8 abseil device forty feet off the ground. After cursing and swearing for a bit, there was nothing else he could do to free himself but pull all the offending hair from his head. He completed the descent and went on to the next climb. It was a mistake he made only once.
The club had drawn Alex to Leeds. His reasons for choosing geography and economics were less obvious. By the end of 1972, he had decided to switch and went to his tutor to ask if he could change to law. He applied and was accepted, but wouldn’t start until the following year. That gave him the chance to take a few months off, some of which he spent in Leeds climbing. The rest he spent on the beaches of North Africa not doing very much of anything, before returning to Leeds for the autumn term in 1973.
Only Bernard Newman and John Syrett had live-in girlfriends. The rest of us just got on with climbing. But when Alex returned to Leeds in 1973, he met the first love of his life – Gwyneth Rule. She had joined the club during freshers’ week and Alex just happened to be manning the club’s information point at the time. Gwyneth was a trim redhead from South Wales and a perfect foil for Alex. His taciturnity was matched by her extrovert manner and sense of fun. If the boys could do it, she would have a go. They shared a one-room bedsit just off Hyde Park Corner in Leeds for the next three years. The room was never tidy; the floor, the broken-down sofa and the few chairs were always strewn with dirty clothes, empty bottles and dirty mugs. It seemed a challenge between the two of them: who would crack first and clean up the mess? It rarely happened, but Alex did seem to shave more often and take more care generally in his appearance. In Gwyneth, Alex had been lucky to find someone who would draw out his own sense of fun and, to a degree, a greater self-awareness and confidence.
Perhaps he needed a better image in the law department, but he also changed from grunge to a more glam-rock look, essentially just showering a bit more often, washing his hair and buying a new leather jacket. His climbing improved enough for him to gain more deference in the Book. Entries about him changed from Dirty Alex or just Dirty to D. A. or even just Alex. There was certainly only one Alex in the club.
I first met him on my return to Leeds to work on an MPhil. Running a climbing school in New Hampshire was good fun but taking money for something I enjoyed as a sport was uncomfortable. The school was reasonably successful. In the summer there were as many as four instructors. On many days, I gave them the work and I climbed for fun or played golf. But the Alps and the raw hills of Britain were calling. I began to respond to letters from my professor encouraging me to return to academia. I had saved up enough while working in the States and crossed the pond once again. I was eight years Alex’s senior. He was nineteen and I was twenty-seven, but I now had a lot of alpine experience from time spent in the Rockies and winter climbing in New England to add to my earlier seasons in the Alps.
For the first year of my post-graduate work, I lived in Leeds, sharing a house with some non-climbing mature students near Hyde Park. The majority of the climbing fraternity was within easy walking distance and I soon fell in with them. When we weren’t out climbing or in the pub talking about climbing, we spent a lot of time poring over guidebooks and reading magazines in one house or another.
In early March 1973, Alex had his first experience of ice climbing; it was almost a disaster. A strong team from the LUCC travelled up to Craig Meagaidh in the central Highlands, and took along two beginners – John Powell and Alex. For whatever reason, these two were left to their own devices while the rest of us charged off to do other routes. They decided to try Centre Post, a Grade III low down on the main face. As it turned out, the route was too low down; it was a mild day and the ice was soft and collapsing.
It was Alex’s first time wearing crampons and plodding up the snow slope towards the bottom of the climb, he managed to shred his brand new over-trousers. He took them off and threw them down the face from the bottom of the first ice pitch. With only one ice axe each, they failed to make any impression on the ice above despite several attempts. The rest of us made a number of ascents of much harder routes and this annoyed Alex further. The next day could have been much worse. It snowed heavily overnight and was still snowing hard in the morning. Most of the club headed home, but Alex persuaded John Eames and John Powell to return to Craig Meagaidh. Despite the fact it was still snowing after the two-hour walk-in, they started up South Post – at Grade V a much harder proposition.
John Powell traversed across Centre Post towards the bottom of their intended route but had only just clipped into a peg when a massive avalanche roared down the gully, nearly plucking him from his stance. When it stopped, the rope was running straight down the gully. With visibility at zero in the white-out around him, John immediately assumed that Alex and John Eames had been swept away. But his shouts were answered and he realised they were still attached to the crag on the other side of the gully. The rope had been cut by falling ice. They beat a hasty retreat.
In the summer of 1973, we headed out to the Alps. Well supplied with tinned food from Leeds, there was so much weight that the vans kept overheating and as a consequence the journey took three days.[6] This was an annual club event and although we habitually based ourselves in Snell’s Field outside Chamonix, members would travel to many other areas over the summer, usually in search of better weather and better conditions. Despite this, the Mont Blanc range drew us back year after year and it was there that we did most of our most notable ascents and suffered our many epics.[7]
That year was my third season in the Alps. I had climbed in Chamonix in 1967, doing a hard rock route with the rising Scottish star, Jimmy MacCartney, on the Pointe Albert and some moderate snow climbs on higher peaks. (MacCartney, who Tom Patey described ‘as large as life and radiating enthusiasm like an open furnace’, was tragically killed in an avalanche on Italian Climb on the Ben in 1968.) I returned to Chamonix in 1969, completing a number of routes with various partners I met at the old Biolay campsite up in the woods above the Montenvers railway station.
I suffered several forced bivouacs, including one very serious one in the Peigne couloir after climbing the north ridge. Getting back to camp, I discovered the gendarmes had finally cleared the Brits off the unlicensed and unhealthy but free Biolay site. With unexpected compassion, the well-known owner of Snell’s Sports – the climbing shop in town – acted swiftly to allowed the Brits and the Eastern Europeans to move to a field he owned a mile or so up the road at Les Praz. That’s where my tent had been taken. It was the start of the era that made Snell’s Field a legendary hive of British Alpine activity for decades.
Climbing conditions in 1973 were not good. After a first week of good weather in early July it began to rain with snow reaching right down to the valley bottom. We doggedly stuck it out, walking several times up to the Plan de l’Aiguille to stay in a woodcutters’ hut in hopes of improving weather. We also climbed on the valley crags, practised ice-climbing technique on the Bossons glacier and spent afternoons in the Bar Nash or the hotel in Les Praz, drinking wine and playing cards. We were typical, easy-to-please students with few cares in the world and a penchant for jokes in bad taste.
In late July, a morning visit to the metéo office revealed a period of beau temps lasting at least three days. I was in the Alps with John Bouchard and at the beginning of the season in the short periods of good weather we had managed a couple of ED rock climbs. But he had promised to do a route with Steve Arsenault, another old friend on a flying visit, and everyone else was fixed up. That left Alex and I to make arrangements.
I had climbed with Alex a few times in the UK and we got on fine, although I knew both his limitations on rock and his lack of experience on ice, although the heavy new snow meant ice faces were not in the equation anyway. I fancied the south face of the Fou, a route that Al Rouse had soloed earlier in the summer, but the couloir approach could be dangerous. We opted instead for the continuous and classic line of the adjacent east face of the Pointe Lépiney. Alex had arrived halfway through the season and said he was happy with anything since it would be his first route in the Alps.
Before we packed up, he went into town to hire some boots. He had somehow managed to lose one boot in transit. And so we boarded a train for Montenvers that afternoon with Alex wearing boots of two sizes; on his right foot, one of his original boots, on his left, the nearest fit he could hire. Fortunately, he remained blister-free on the two-hour walk up to the Envers Hut. It was a beautiful evening and our planned route looked appealing.
1. In 2013 Bernard was appointed honorary editor of the Alpine Journal.[back]
2. Just as Henry left to go back to the States, in 1974, there was a gathering at the Padarn Lake Hotel for a couple of farewell drinks. Don Whillans was heard to comment, loud enough for Henry to hear: ‘Henry’s just a flash in the pan, and anyway he can’t drink.’ After a season of training, Henry returned the following year not to climb but to drink all the British hard men under the table, which he pretty well succeeded in doing.[back]
3. The Leeds club was definitely trumped by the clever approach taken by Rouse and Geddes at Cambridge. They didn’t bother with sitting around enrolling people. They put up a large flip-chart-like poster with these words at the top: ‘Anyone wanting to come to a party with free beer and drink on Saturday put your name, college and contact details below.’ At the end of the day, they then collected the sheets and carefully peeled off the stuck-on ‘free drinks’ announcement to reveal the wording actually written on the sheets was: ‘The following are paid-up members of the Cambridge University Climbing Club.’ The proceeds from the Student Union Grant funded Rouse and Geddes’s travels and alpine trips for an entire year.[back]
4. The Leeds Climbing Wall was built in 1964, the brainchild of a sports trainer and climber called Don Robinson. It was the first indoor climbing wall in the world. It ran along two sides of the outside of a squash court and the sounds of squeaking court shoes and the ‘ka-twack-kathump’ of the ball accompanied sessions on the wall. Given the standards of today’s climbing walls, the Leeds wall was primitive. It consisted of natural rocks of various sizes cemented into a normal brick wall of about fifteen feet in height. Mortar had been dug out between some of the bricks to provide small edges. There were also short, vertical jamming-cracks placed one above the other, cut out of the bricks and then lined with cement. It was a great place to work out, although shredded fingers and twisted ankles were commonplace. There were no mats on the cement floor and a drop from the top was guaranteed to leave the feet stinging. The wall explains a lot about the success the club had on the crags – we had a secret training regime, which was unheard of at the time. Everyone tended to go at least twice a week – Tuesday and Thursday evenings and, occasionally, classes were skipped for an extra session during the day. I remember one day in 1969 during my final undergraduate year at Leeds having a dark-haired Adonis-like figure pointed out to me by Bernard with the phrase: ‘Watch this kid, it’s his first day on the wall.’ To our astonishment, he jammed up the notorious sequence of cracks almost with grace. This was John Syrett.[back]
5. When twelve sizes of Stoppers, based on the original MOAC design, were manufactured by Chouinard in 1972 as part of his ‘clean climbing’ revolution, not only did the folk at MOAC realise the missed opportunity, but there was some mild outrage that the Yanks were claiming the invention of ‘clean climbing’ when for the Brits it was their rock-climbing tradition.[back]
6. Many club members had part-time jobs to help pay their way through university; some were in positions that helped support their climbing. This included a petrol station attendant where the odd gallon of fuel was pumped for free, and overnight supermarket shelf-stackers who placed tins stamped with new low prices at the back of rows to be collected and paid for next morning by accomplices.[back]
7. Over the many years that the Leeds club climbed in Chamonix and the Alps, there were very few serious accidents or deaths. The most notable was Roger Baxter-Jones, who died when seracs on the north face of the Triolet collapsed when he was guiding a client in 1985. RBJ was arguably the fittest of all the UK’s Himalayan climbers at the time and his death was pure bad luck. Georges Bettembourg, a member of the extended circle of friends, was killed in a rockfall while crystal hunting in the Chamonix Aiguilles.[back]