THE HIGH LIFE!
Injured wives lashed to rocks, ‘fake’ heart attacks and too-expensive mushy peas are all part of historian BILL CAWLEY’S look back at his experiences hill walking and climbing
IHAVE always been a keen hill walker and mountain scrambler, and a chance conversation over a photograph of Buachaille Etive Mor, the Great Shepherd of the Glen, that guards the pass of Glencoe, which I climbed in 1974 reawakened that memory.
In the 70s I was a member of two walking groups in the Potteries, the Ramblers’ Association and the Old Hanlensians. Notices of the walks always appeared in The Sentinel on a Friday night with distances and severity of the walks.
There was a certain rivalry between the two groups. The Old Hanlensians were formed out of old boys of Hanley High Grammar School, who had formed a walking group before the Second World War when hiking achieved great popularity in the 1930s.
The need for overnight accommodation was met by the growing Youth Hostel movement, with some of the earliest hostels established at Rudyard and Ilam, of whom an early visitor to Rudyard was George Orwell, on his way to Wigan to research The Road to Wigan Pier.
The need to get into the countryside around the Potteries was aided by a very efficient public transport system, which continued after the war. Added to the walking groups in North Staffs was a thriving mountaineering group, which explored further afield after exhausting local climbing routes on the Roaches.
I was talking to an old climber, Pete, who lives in Leek and who told me of a climbing expedition in the 50s to Norway, when the climbing party from Stoke-on-trent partly worked their passage on the freighter that took them over the North Sea.
I was friendly with Ray Baddley, a former senior social worker, who would tell me of some of the characters who were members of the Potteries Mountaineering Club in the 50s and 60s.
One such character was Mouse, by all accounts a manic character. His wife fell off a crag at Stoney Middleton and broke her hip. Mouse lashed her to the rock and climbed down to spend the afternoon in the pub to await the emergency services. I gather the marriage did not last.
I did go serious mountaineering, once, climbing Tryfan in North Wales in the summer of 1980. It was a long climb and not helped by one of the party, Mike Sadula, insisting on carrying additional rocks in his backpack to increase the severity of the climb. A bit of a character was Mike, with his insistence on yelling ‘cock-a-doodle-do!’ at any young woman we drove past on the way back from Snowdonia, causing maximum embarrassment. He also refused to go in the chippy in Llangollen on the way back, because the mushy peas were 2p more expensive than the chippy on the Abbey Hulton estate.
The local walking groups were far more sedate and were led by retired teachers Laurie Landon and Bill Oakden. both long dead now, I guess.
In the early 70s, before the massive increase in petrol costs, the groups travelled far and wide into the Lakes, North Wales and as far as the Cotswolds.
The favourite stamping ground of the Hanlensians was Snowdonia, particularly the hair-raising ascent along the very narrow ridge Crib Goch. It is scary even for the most experienced rock scramblers, with falls of several hundred feet on one side.
We did the walk on a raw day in March 1974, when lashing rain and a cross wind made it almost suicidal folly and it left some of us, to quote the climberpoet Coleridge with ‘limbs a tremble’ at the end, stuffing chocolate in our mouths to raise the blood sugar. It was not a walk for the faint-hearted.
On other occasions walks in North Wales could lead to some wonderful experiences and I recall walking in the Berwyn Range, where freak weather led to us walking along a ridge above the cloud level, which gave us spectacular views down the coast.
I was once caught up in a mountain rescue, in September 1990, with one of the North Staffs walking groups as we climbed at speed from the Kirkstone Pass up to Red Screes in the Lake District. At about 1,000 feet and in mist, one of the party, a middle-aged man collapsed with a suspected heart attack.
I and one other scrambled down the mountain to alert the emergency services from the Kirkstone Pass Inn. This was long before mobile phones.
A helicopter landed in the pub car park and we guided the doctor and the mountain rescue party up the mountain, now in heavy fog, to where the stricken man lay. It turned out not to be a heart attack and one of his friends unkindly suggested it was a ruse to avoid going back into Wolstanton School where he worked as a teacher, and where the new term was to start the following day. He was taken down for a check-up and we later saw the helicopter take him off to Carlisle Hospital.
The most marvellous day on the hills, if I was to select one of the many, would have to be a gruelling 16-mile walk on Kinder Scout, in late January 1985, in very wintry weather. Ray Baddley, his son Greg, my brother Andy, Phil Deacon, of Leek, and I (not forgetting two dogs Corkie and Polly) faced the snow and the intense cold.
It was so bitterly cold that ice was forming in the pads of our ‘yard dog’ Corkie, a black labrador cross, who tried to gnaw it out. He was a dog that was seldom tired, but the hard journey exhausted him.
The view on top of the ridge, with the snow and ice blown into fantastic shapes by the keen wind, was memorable.
The mug of tea and the large slab of Victoria sponge cake afterwards, in the converted railway carriage cafe afterwards in Edale, was even better.
Recent years have caused me to lessen off my times on the peaks, mainly as a result of dodgy knees, but joint replacement performed by the admirable Mr Amit Patel in January and April 2016 soon had me yearning to return to the hills.
And I did return in October of that year, by walking a 12-mile section of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, which was followed a year later by a trudge through driving rain up Ingleborough Hill in Yorkshire, along with scores of naval officer cadets better equipped than we were.
At the foot of the hill I was tempted to repeat the line in the great John Huston film Treasure of the Sierra Madre, when the character played by his father Walter, urging his weakening fellow prospectors on, points to the mountain top and says: “Up there, up there’s where we’ve got to go. UP THERE!”