Walk off with a Wainwright

becoming its director in 1966 at the invitation of its chairman Peter Scott.

When he asked her to form the Museum of Lakeland Life and Industry, she worked closely with Wainwright who, as Kendal borough treasurer, would meet her every Monday to discuss financing the project. She even persuaded him to donate the profits of his book “Wainwright in Lakeland” to Abbot Hall.

Wainwight’s ‘Lord’s Rake Scafell’ from her collection sold for £1,000. With the record now more than half as much again, have prices reached their peak? I suspect not.

Alfred was born into a poor family background in Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1907, the son of a stonemason and youngest of four.

He was educated at the local board school and was top of the class.

Good with figures, at the age of 13, he secured work as an office boy at Blackburn Town Hall, first in the borough engineer’s office, rising to Wainwright was also an architectural artist of great merit, but then he knew Kendal public library well. His friend, borough librarian Henry Marshall, was the publisher of the first five of his guidebooks. The drawing sold for £320 the position of clerk in the treasurer’s department three years later.

Determined to rise further, he took evening classes and correspondence courses in accountancy, qualifying as a municipal accountant in 1930, the same year that he paid his first visit to the Lakes. He described it in one of his books as “a moment of magic, a revelation so unexpected that I stood transfixed, unable to believe my eyes. Those few hours on Orrest Head cast a spell which changed my life.”

Thereafter all his leisure time was spent walking the fells and in 1941, he moved to Lakeland taking a job, and a drop of pay, in the borough treasurer’s office in Kendal. He became treasurer in 1948.

The first editions of his Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, The Eastern Fells, was self-published in 1955 with the help of his friend, Henry Marshall, chief librarian of Kendal and Westmoreland.

Henry, who took charge of publicity and admin, is named as publisher in the first five books, but subsequent editions were published by the Westmoreland Gazette.

Alfred had set himself the goal of walking every fell in Lakeland and recording his routes with pen and ink drawings. He divided the area into seven regions and climbed 214 fells over a 13-year period, travelling everywhere either by public transport or on foot.

His final book The Western Fells was published in 1966.

Collectively, Arthur’s beloved fells are now affectionately known by walkers as “the Wainwrights”.

Alfred retired in 1967 and turned to writing and walking throughout his spare time, publishing a total of 59 guides including those in Wales and Scotland, as well as The Pennine Way Companion, published in 1968, and A Coast to Coast Walk (1973).

Their unique charm derives from his insistence that they should be printed following his own page layouts, the often amusing words in his own handwriting and featuring only his maps and drawings, all done in Indian ink in impromptu moments en plein air, as the French would have it, perhaps whilst sitting on rock, sheltering from the weather.

Awarded the MBE in 1966, Alfred married twice, his first marriage to Ruth Holden, a cotton weaver, being dissolved in 1968.

He married again in 1970. His wife, Betty McNally, a state-enrolled nurse, became his walking companion.

With his eyesight failing and no longer able to draw, he died of a heart attack, aged 84.

Betty carried his ashes to be scattered on Haystacks, above Buttermere, one of his favourite fells.

In Fellwanderer (1966) he wrote: “If you dear readers should get a bit of grit in your boots as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.”

The guides have been in continuous publication since they were written and are preferred by many to those published subsequently by other authors.

Alfred and Betty were supporters of animal rights and helped set up Animal Rescue Cumbria to which he gave almost all of the royalties from his books.

The Wainwright Society was founded in 2002, with the aim of keeping Alfred’s fell walking traditions and ideas alive.