MOVING MOUNTAINS: THE FELL AND ROCK CLIMBING CLUB LIBRARY.

First meeting of the FRCC. Wastwater Hotel, Easter 1907. Photo courtesy of Archives of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club.

It all began with a single bookcase at the Wastwater Hotel. Today the private library of The Fell and Rock Climbing Club runs to over 2,000 volumes, ranging from the Bolivian Andes to the Lofoten Islands, the Southern Alps of New Zealand to the Himalaya, and all the mountainous regions in-between. As a mountaineering library it is considered to be second only in importance to that of the Alpine Club in London. However, it is at heart very much a local collection, rooted in the Lake District, its crags and mountains and three centuries of literary and physical endeavour.

In 2014 it was brought together with the Armitt Library in Ambleside in what seemed to be a perfect coalition, uniting two extensive and significant collections as well as two prominent Lakeland institutions. The roots of both have not only sprung from the same ground, but also from a shared concern for the landscape and cultural heritage of the Lake District. Sadly, at the request of the Trustees of the Armitt, the Fell and Rock Climbing Club Library has been removed and is once again in search of a permanent home.

The Fell and Rock Climbing Club was established in 1906, although the idea was originally mooted twenty years earlier by local farmer John Wilson Robinson, when the activity was still in its infancy. At its inaugural meeting at the Sun Inn in Coniston, its first president, the famous climber and mountain photographer Ashley Abraham, was elected with Robinson one of its two vice-presidents. From the beginning it was open to both men and women and remains an active club which ranks amongst its members some of the leading climbers and mountaineers of our time. Lord John Hunt of Everest fame was a member from 1935 until his death. Sir Chris Bonington CBE is a current member as is Alan Hinkes the first Briton to climb all 8000ft summits, and Martin Boysen one of the country’s leading mountaineers. Since 1923, through the voluntary work of members, the Club has published all the definitive rock-climbing guide books for the Lake District, and in 1924 the Club purchased twelve Lake District summits, fell land totalling 3,000 acres, as a war memorial to its members, passing this on to the National Trust to hold for the nation.

The provision of books and maps at different centres or ‘headquarters’ as they became known was one of the attractions offered by the newly formed Club. These ‘headquarters’ were the focal points of Club life before the acquisition of the present huts and included: the Wastwater Hotel, the Sun Hotel, Coniston, Middle Fell Farm, Langdale, the New Dungeon Ghyll Hotel and Thornythwaite Farm, Borrowdale. Times and circumstances have changed, and the library grew significantly during the post First World War years. For fifteen years it was housed in a room at the Conservative Club, Ambleside, and later found a generous home for half a century until 2014 in the Special Collections Department of the University of Lancaster. A few books still remained at Langdale in the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel until proprietors (and Club members) Sid and Jammy Cross retired in 1970.

The Fell and Rock Climbing Club Library is a remarkable testament to the work of previous Librarians as well as those many bibliophilic minded members who left their books to us; from George Seatree, Graham Sutton, W. G. Collingwood and William Heaton Cooper, to, more recently, Harry Griffin. The earliest accounts are those first forays into the Alps, with Windham’s 1744 Account of the Glaciers or Ice Alps of Savoy, Bourrit’s rare Des Alpes, published in 3 volumes in 1787 and William Coxes Travels in Switzerland published in 1791, all embellished with copious 19th century annotations. Then there are the first explorations of the Himalayan regions, the mountains of South America and the Southern Alps of New Zealand in the 19th century, and everything that followed from every mountainous corner of the globe. Many books were given by their authors or inscribed by expedition members. In our copy of the definitive Everest 1924 there is the inscription, ‘To the Fell and Rock Climbing Club in appreciation of their highly esteemed honour conferred, following the ‘Fight’ of 1924’ and signed ‘Noel E. Odell’. Odell was a member of the ill-fated 1924 Everest Expedition and will always be remembered as being the last person to see Mallory and Irvine alive, during a brief clearing of the mists as he approached Camp 6. A fine mountaineer himself he acted in support of the two climbers, going up twice on successive days, to over 27,000 feet in search of them. The ‘honour conferred’ on Odell was honorary membership of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club.

Previously as curator of the Armitt, and presently as librarian and archivist for the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, I have immersed myself in this collection, safe behind a window hammered with rain. From the realms of ‘Rum Doodle’ to the accounts of the hard-living climbers of the 1950s and 1960s, I have ventured to Siberia and the mountains of Tartary, through Norway and the Lofoten Islands, starting in Tibet, a place I have at least some knowledge of, and beyond to regions whose names no longer survive on the map. But mostly I return to the Lakes and the Library’s significant collection of early Guides. To sit in comfort on dark days and read Thomas Budworth’s own copy of his Fortnight’s Ramble in the Lakes annotated in his own spidery hand, is the most delicious pleasure. For a military man who had lost an arm at the Siege of Gibraltar, Budworth displays the most admirable good humour during his perambulation of 1792. This 240-mile ramble included ascents of Helm Crag, Helvellyn via Fairfield and Dollywaggon Pike, Coniston Old Man and Skiddaw, echoing Wordsworth's excursion to the Alps two years earlier. It is in fact the first documented walking tour of the Lakes and Budworth enjoyed himself immensely. Written with warmth, self-deprecating humour and most evidently an intense curiosity, not just about the landscape, but also the people who inhabited it. On leaving Keswick he ends his account with the words ‘I declare, although I have been a tolerably great traveller, I never met so un¬assuming or obliging set of human beings before; and I congratulate my country on their belonging to it. … had we chosen, we might have got introductions to the first gentlemen in the counties; but we preferred a more humble walk, and were amply repaid for it.’

Boxing up the books for their move from the Armitt, we could not help but recall the celebration for the opening of the FRCC Library at the Armitt almost a decade earlier. Our guest speaker was Alan Hinkes OBE, and it was a moment of great optimism and opportunity. That moment has gone, and those opportunities lost, however I keep in mind our former Librarian Molly Fitzgibbon, author and authority on Lakeland, who maintained the Library for thirty years often in the face of great difficulty and dissent. Her purpose was to preserve the integrity of the collection, not only as the legacy of our Club, but in recognition of the fact that these are books were given, inscribed and annotated by some of the most important and influential figures in the climbing world. As individual books they are valuable, as a collection, they are invaluable.

Not long ago I came across one of Molly’s notebooks from the late 1930s in the archive of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. It was an account of conversations with Herbert Bell, a man of rare wisdom and knowledge, who was for decades custodian of the Armitt Library. These exchanges covered a range of local subjects, from packhorse bridges, peat-houses and Roman roads, to Mr. Bell’s fascinating and perceptive assessment of the notable inhabitants of the Ambleside area. When Molly died in 1971 her large and valuable library was bequeathed to be divided between the two institutions and though Herbert Bell had died some twenty-five years earlier, I feel certain that his influence remained with her. Both believed that those things which give real depth and meaning to life must be preserved against an uncertain future with all its short-term imperatives and indifference.

So when I am told that libraries are no longer relevant, I think about Thomas Budworth and his “Fortnight’s Ramble’; its grainy, veined paper, its spidery annotation in faded sepia ink, its immediacy. We know such books have historical and research value beyond their textual content, and recognising those values will in the future become increasingly important, but beyond this there is that increasingly rare sense of personal connection. Books are patient, they wait in their long queues to be noticed. Often, they wait for years for those singular, chance, and always unique encounters which stay in the mind for a lifetime. The Fell and Rock Climbing Club Library has been ‘put to bed’ for a while, and we will miss it, but I have little doubt that it will survive and indeed flourish again while there are still those who recognise the value of things almost impossible to quantify within the narrow constraints of our times.

First published in ‘Cumbria’ magazine January 2024.