Wainwright’s perfumed hero
Walter Poucher – perfumer, pianist, writer and photographer who wrote the guidebooks AW loved.
IF YOU’RE OLD enough to remember The Russell Harty Show of the 1980s then you’ll have seen Walter Poucher. You might not recall the 88-year old man clearly though, with his dapper suit and gold gloves, blusher and blue eyeshadow, for one of the other guests was singer Grace Jones and when Harty turned to talk to Poucher, she started slapping the host around the head.
Poucher was a familiar face to hundreds of thousands of hillwalkers, as the urbane gent whose pocket-sized books had guided them through the mountains of Lakeland, Wales, Scotland, and the Peak & Pennines. His four pictorial guides were packed with photographs of the hills, with – and this is what endeared him to so many – the routes marked directly on the image with a clear white line. The innovation meant no more puzzling over contours on a map or trying to decipher cryptic directions or sketches: Poucher showed you exactly what you would see and where you should go. It was all there, literally, in black and white.
His words mixed inspiration and practicality with similar alchemy. Driving instructions to the start were followed by flamboyant descriptions of beetling precipices, coigns of vantage, treasured playgrounds and engirdling hills. Some find it a bit florid; others, like me, relish the drama he saw and celebrated in the landscape.
Poucher took readers – or friends as he often called other walkers – along more than 320 routes in the mountains. From the ‘ghostly pinnacles’ of the Aonach Eagach above Glen Coe to Mam Tor on Derbyshire’s Great Ridge (a term first coined by Poucher), from the ‘precipitous red escarpment’ of Carmarthen Fan in the Brecon Beacons to the ‘immense panorama’ from Skiddaw in the Lake District, he sought out and invited us to the nation’s most spectacular scenery.
Today, though, I’m headed to a Cumbrian fell that never featured in his books. It’s the one where his ashes were scattered in 1988, with those of his second wife, Elsie. It’s little-known and, as its name suggests, not that high. It’s Low Fell near Loweswater in the quiet north-western reaches of the national park.
The world from the summit – 1388 feet above sealevel, a mile and a half from the start – is exquisite. Crummock Water ripples through a lowland plaid of field and farm, framed by the steep screes of Grasmoor and Mellbreak, with the high central fells crowding beyond. I immediately follow Poucher’s example when he reached such a coign of vantage: ‘As I usually do, I sat down here on a rock and contemplated the scene around.’
His walking guides were a logical step after decades of work as a mountain photographer. He was the most successful commercial snapper of
Not to be confused with the hand-drawn, seven-volume Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells of one Alfred Wainwright, four of which had been published when Poucher’s Lakeland Peaks came out in 1960. In fact, Poucher became known as ‘the photographic Wainwright’ but Alf didn’t seem to mind: he was a long-time fan of Walter’s, as you’ll see later.
his generation, building a library of over 20,000 images and publishing more than 30 coffee-table books. His first, Lakeland Through the Lens (1940), may have been printed 20 years before the first pocket guide, but walking was always core: ‘the pedestrian has better opportunities than the motorist.’ In fact, the book is subtitled A Ramble over Fell and Dale and traces a glorious route from Mardale in the east ( before a dam turned the vale into Haweswater) to Coniston, by way of Helvellyn, Blencathra, Great Gable and Scafell to name a few. It would be fun to backpack today, as would the trips described in subsequent books like Lakeland Holiday. Poucher even included a map for his spectacular 17-day walk in Over Lakeland Fells.
‘It may be necessary,’ he said, ‘to walk about in some spot for a few minutes before finding the ideal place at which to release the shutter.’ It’s a good lesson about exploring a viewpoint to find the perfect Goldilocks outlook, but in Poucher’s case it was laughable understatement. He stalked mountains with the focus of a wildlife cameraman after a snow leopard. It took 12 outings to Snowdonia’s Tryfan before ‘the lighting conditions were exactly right’. On another occasion he asked the Met Office to phone him in London when the hill conditions looked just so. His son John, who featured in many images, said he ‘would often have to wait… for what seemed like ages for the light to come exactly right for father’. Look closely and you can sometimes spot a dejected slump to John’s shoulders. CW photographer Tom and I soon sympathise. We spend three hours on a chilly Low Fell waiting for the sunshine at sea to come and push the clouds from the high summits.
Landscape can seem immutable, but Poucher showed us the transformative power of light, and that what you see at 10am is not what you see at 3pm. ‘ You get a one-inch map. Then you see that there’s one face which is likely to provide the best pictures... Then, with a compass, you work out the time of day when you’re going to get the right light on the right place.’ If that sounds complicated, his guidebooks help. In each he devoted a section to the finest views, divided into the best ones of the peaks, and the most striking from them, often with a recommended time of day and sometimes even month. Take Pillar, a grand chunk of rock currently playing peekaboo with me just behind Red Pike and High Stile. ‘Best pictorial view of it: from Green Gable, 11am, May or June.’ Then, ‘Most striking view from it: West face of the Pillar Rock, 4pm
“For those who love the Lakes as I do, I consider my friends.” LAKE LAND H O L IDAY
onwards, or East face of the Pillar Rock, 11am, or the Central Fells from just below the Great Doup, 5pm onwards.’ He later rued the decision on a professional level: ‘I have given away all my camera secrets... and from the voluminous correspondence I receive it is evident that amateur photographers continue to profit from my experiences.’
Poucher never showed any such chagrin towards walkers, though. From the first pages of The Lakeland Peaks you feel you’re with a kindred spirit, as he writes of the ambition kindled by a first climb of Scafell Pike. ‘ When these young people return home... They will doubtless unfold their maps frequently, and by following the routes thereon they will relive these happy experiences... the exhilaration of standing by the huge cairn on the roof of England with a whole kingdom spread out at their feet.’
‘A close inspection of the map will suggest to our friends many other routes to this lofty belvedere, and curiosity will induce them to ponder over their respective merits. Would the Corridor Route have been more interesting? Perhaps it would have been a greater thrill to have stayed in Wasdale? ...Then another line of thought will probably develop, for they had seen a grand array of peaks engirdling the horizon from the Pike and they will now speculate again upon the merits of the panoramas from their summits, to realise quite suddenly that a lifetime is not too long in which to become acquainted with them all.’
While he adored the big peaks, it was never about beelining to the top: ‘the summits of mountains are often disappointing... it is clear that artistic pictures can be more easily obtained from viewpoints anywhere up to about 2000 feet in the British Hills.’ As I turn from Low Fell and head for neighbouring Fellbarrow, I realise this entire walk flies well beneath that barrier, and the view expanding across the Solway Firth to the hills of southern Scotland is definitely not a disappointment.
In fact, Poucher hailed from England’s lowlands. He was born William Arthur – later becoming known as Walter – in Horncastle on 22nd November 1891, and attributed his long life to growing up in the ‘wide open spaces of Lincolnshire’. And for much of his life he lived down south in the gentle contours of the Surrey Hills, moving there in 1923 with his first wife Hilda and infant son John. She tragically died during childbirth the following year, and in 1937 he married his housekeeper Elsie Dorothy Wood, who also developed a fondness for the southern landscape: ‘ We soon grew to love its dainty silver birches, fine old Scots pines and the masses of rhododendrons… the windswept, heathery downs.’
And Poucher wasn’t only skilled with his eyes and Leica camera. His nose was described as ‘the greatest in the English speaking world’ and in 1934 he became chief perfumer at Yardley, working there for 30 years and creating fragrances like Freesia, Flair and Bond Street – advertised as ‘an accessory to your loveliness, when you’re preparing to greet your husband in the evening’. Imagine what such a sense of smell would find on a walk. It’s a nudge to those of us with less lauded noses to stop and sniff: ‘one recognises the characteristic odour of every
Poucher was devoted to the Leica brand and their lightweight, and very expensive, miniature cameras (35mm) which let him take 36 shots at a time – a far cry from the heavy glass plate models the famous Cumbrian photographers before him, the Abraham brothers, would have had to tote up the fells.
single thing in the gamut of beautiful smells. Not only blossoms, but roots, stems, leaves and seeds.’ I pause and inhale. A rush of earthiness, intensified by the first rain in weeks. A smidge of herbiness from the flowering heather. A top note of sour fruit, as the purple bilberries start to soften. The perfume of a Lakeland summer.
Poucher took his cosmetic work so seriously he was often spotted walking the hills in make-up: tweed plus-twos, vibram-soled boots, foundation, eyeshadow, lipgloss, cologne. Some suggested he was testing products, but he was also clear that ‘every man has a duty to make the best of himself’. In an Observer interview he said: ‘...when I’m done up properly with my Panstick and eyeshadow I look absolutely marvellous. Women adore it. “Walter,” they used to say, “advise me on my makeup and I won’t lock my bedroom door tonight.”’ He also took to wearing gloves; white by day, gold lame by night. ‘ It’s no jolly good making one’s face youthful with make-up and letting the side down with the sight of gnarled, claw-like hands.’ When Elizabeth Taylor met an 88-year old Poucher in St Moritz she exclaimed: ‘Can we meet somewhere later and talk? I’ve never seen anyone look quite so marvellous in my life.’
As a child, his skill with Rachmaninoff and Chopin meant he considered a career as a concert pianist, but instead he opted to train in pharmacy. For three years he worked as a Field Pharmacist with the 41st Casualty Clearing Station on the First World War’s Western Front, writing of conditions near Amiens in 1918: ‘I shall never forget the horrors of the next seven days, because with only about forty marquees we treated no less than 21,000 odd cases. We worked day and night and it rained incessantly.’ On his return he – understandably – chose to dedicate his chemistry know-how to the pursuit of beauty. In 1923 he published the first of three volumes about Perfumes, Cosmetics and Soaps, a manual for the industry that is still in print today.
I linger until dusk on Fellbarrow, knowing I’ll be back to the office tomorrow. In a life-lesson we can all aspire to, Poucher forged a deal with Yardley where he worked six months in the lab and spent the other six roaming the hills. Half perfumer, half mountain-man, and always full of contradictions.
He adored wild places, but comfort too: luxury hotels, fast cars, frequent rounds of golf. He was a walker who wanted freedom to roam the hills but thought some ramblers’ hostility to landowners smelled ‘strongly of left-wing socialism which is always steeped in envy’. His son John described him as ‘a hard man’; his grandson Tony called him ‘quite ruthless’; and the perfectionist in Poucher made him prickly: ‘critics can sit in a comfortable chair by a warm fire at home and pull the photograph to pieces. They probably do not realise that the person taking the picture may have been wandering about knee-deep in a slimy bog.’
But to many who worked with him – national park wardens, magazine editors, mountain instructors – he was a ‘tremendous fellow’, ‘a remarkable man’ and an ‘absolute gentleman’. Legions of walkers in red socks admired him. Alfred Wainwright wrote to John after Poucher’s death: ‘He has been a hero of mine since his Lakeland Through the Lens (1940) was published. He was a perfectionist with the camera and I greatly admired all his work in the last 50 years… a future without a new Poucher is a bleak prospect for me and countless others.’
In 1967, aged 76, Poucher suffered a thrombosis on a descent of the Matterhorn and lost the sight in one eye. An obituary ran soon after in one magazine, but he lived another 21 years, the last in a nursing home just over the Whinlatter Pass from here, at Thornthwaite on the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake.
After full revision, three of his top-selling guides were republished (see panel on p39), although sadly they’re out of print again now. Second hand copies are straightforward to find though, and both a delight to pore over and an inspiring presence in a rucksack in the hills. I like to think not only of Poucher walking these routes, but those who owned his books before me. My copy of Lakeland Holiday is inscribed to ‘Dearest Peg, on her birthday, from Charles 4th October 1942’. I found a Poucher obituary from The Daily Telegraph in August 1988 tucked among the pages, which quotes Walter’s own words about his life – ‘a search for beauty in music, in cosmetics, and in mountains.’
Spot fellow fans of Poucher by their scarlet hosiery, inspired by this advice: ‘I have worn red ones because in case of accident this colour can be seen at a great distance, and in consequence would facilitate location and subsequent rescue.’ “We have walked in the dales and climbed these hills together. We have wandered along the shores of the tarns and lakes and enjoyed some of the finest Isles.” scenery of the British LAKE LAND TH ROUGH TH E LENS
Intrigued? Find out more about Walter Poucher’s extraordinary life and work in Roly Smith’s illustrated biography, A Camera in the Hills.