Prominent Pinnaclers
Eleanor Winthrop Young (1895-1994)
Len, as everyone knew her, was the co-founder and first president of the Pinnacle Club, and a climber from a young age, scrambling up the rocks of Malham Cove in her native Yorkshire with her mountaineering father, William Cecil Slingsby. She made many ascents in Britain, the Alps and Norway, while also helping her mountaineering husband Geoffrey learn to climb again after he lost a leg in the First World War, and together they published the book In Praise of Mountains. Len also had a love for theatre, often dashing from the hills to rehearsal and practising her dance steps on the train in her climbing boots.
Lilian Bray (1876-1966)
Bray had a fierce reputation in the club – Len admitted she ‘was terrified of her in some ways’, before adding ‘I got to like her tremendously. Oh, she was very good – good value.’ A founder member, Bray was already an experienced climber, keen to share her expertise with novices and encourage women to be self-reliant – she was part of one of the first guideless Alpine trips, and had a particular fondness for Italy’s Dolomites. Her articles for the club journal are an absolute hoot and well worth looking up, and in her seventies she completed the Snowdon Horseshoe, commenting: ‘Look, my hands have not lost their cunning!’
Dorothy Pilley (1894-1986)
Founder member Pilley was ‘one of the most outstanding mountaineers of the interwar and post-war periods’, renowned for climbs including ‘the last great alpine problem’ of the north ridge of Dent Blanche, which she wrote about in her memoir Climbing Days (in 2016 her great-great-nephew Dan Richards wrote a book of the same name about following in her footholds). In 1917 she met literary critic Ivor Richardson scrambling on Tryfan and for nine years she resisted his proposals, convinced marriage would mean ‘lots of housework and twenty children’. They did eventually wed and continued to climb until Pilley was injured in a car accident in 1958, prompting her to write in the club journal: ‘A million other eventualities can have a similar result. Meanwhile, therefore, make the most of it.’
Gwen Moffat (1924-)
In 1953 Moffat blazed a trail to become the first British woman to qualify as a mountain guide. She started climbing as the Second World War ended, deserting the army to live a bohemian life in mid-Wales – initially odd-jobbing to support herself, later guiding, and writing. Her 1961 autobiography Space Below My Feet was published to stellar reviews, and she went on to write a series of detective novels about Miss Pink, magistrate and climber. Moffat has been in the Pinnacle Club for 72 years – longer than anyone in its history – and is a constant inspiration, as
shown in the award-winning 2015 film, Operation Moffat.