‘SPACES OF POWER AND LIGHT’ : The Fell and Rock Climbing Club ‘Great Gift’ of 1924.

The 1916 Fell and Rock Climbing Club Journal opens with an article by Lieut. C. T. (Charles) Holland entitled ‘Pictures in the Fire’. It is a striking piece of writing, a meditation on memory, and an expression of grief, culminating in a quiet resolution. Describing his return to Wasdale after two years active service on the Western Front, he is disconcerted that so little has changed, and the ‘endless fatigues and dangers’ of war are as ‘a day that is quickly passed’. But in truth, for Holland, everything has changed. Memories crowd in, memories of the ‘dear, dead days… days when the rock was dry and warm, and nothing seems too difficult’ and other days when ‘…. the rain lashes down unmercifully… bent on washing us away’. Finally, these ‘pictures in the fire’ fade into a single image ‘the face of one who will never again be seen on the rocks he loved so well’. The face was that of Siegfried Herford who had died in action a few months earlier.  A few pages on in the same Journal is John Laycock’s obituary of his friend Herford. It closes with the same sentiment, ‘however great the climbers that are yet to come, they cannot love the mountains more than Herford did. And that is the thing that matters.’

In concluding the 1916 Journal, the editor, William Palmer of Kendal, wrote an apology for its delayed publication and, reflecting on the fate of the nation and the sacrifices being made by club members, wrote, ‘Yet, in this hour of gloom and pain, one cannot but think again and again of the Eternal Fells ….’ From the rawness of that moment in 1916, emerged a visceral understanding that landscape itself is the most powerful place of memory, and these three pieces set the tone for all that was to follow.

In the years leading up to the First World War climbers had become familiar with the presence of death in the landscape. One of the most shocking events occurred in September 1903, when Richard Broadrick and three colleagues fell to their deaths from Scafell Pinnacle, the worst accident in British climbing until 1954. Broadrick was buried in Windermere, while the others were interred in the little churchyard of St. Olaf, Wasdale. This was not without precedent, but they were the first climbers who had died in Wasdale to be buried there, the birthplace of British rock climbing. Mountaineering has a strong sense of its own history and inevitably deaths on the fells leave a psychological residue, largely only recognised by those within the climbing sub-culture. The impact of the graves at Wasdale was not lost on the actress Nancy Price, visiting at night sometime before 1914:

Five graves rest in the little churchyard. Beneath one of them lie the bodies of three young men who perished together on Sca Fell...I looked up at the giant who had slain them. Proudly he lifted his head to the stars, stretching himself in the calm of that peace … This was his hour. He forgot the little tracks which have been worn on his sides; forgot that his majestic purity had been polluted at the hands of miserable creatures who scratched his sides, and then boasted of their prowess.

However, the burial of climbers in a valley bottom churchyard is one thing, memorials to them on the fells quite another. For British climbers the erection of summit crosses and memorials, like those which litter the Alpine regions, was considered entirely inappropriate in a landscape defined by Enlightenment and pre-Romantic ideas of the sublime. This attitude was reinforced in the years leading up to the First World War with concepts of stewardship and conservation beginning to take root, and leading almost inevitably to what then must have seemed like almost revolutionary forms of collective land ownership. The fledgeling National Trust and Canon Rawnsley’s honorary membership of the Club, had formed a link with other conservationist organisations and common cause was found over threats such as the proposed Sty Head motor road; indeed, the Manchester Guardian reports that opposition came largely from the rock-climbing fraternity.

Controversy had surrounded the proposed memorial to local climbing pioneer John Wilson Robinson, who died in 1907. It was eventually agreed that a bronze tablet be inscribed and affixed to the rock at the end of the High-Level route to Pillar Rock which Robinson had himself pioneered. Hostility to the scheme was overcome through Robinson’s exceptional significance, however this deep ambivalence was to resurface in the aftermath of the First World War.

If the Fell and Rock Climbing Club were unanimous in the principle of linking of the memory of fallen club members with the place that they loved, they were less harmonious on the exact form that it should take. The 1917-18 issue of the F.R.C.C. Journal contained a letter from ten club members suggesting that the Central Buttress route on Scafell should be renamed after one of its first ascensionists, Siegfried Herford. Another proposal was put forward for the erection of shelters at the foot of each of the principal crags and led to heated letters being published in the Manchester Guardian, where it was described as the ‘intrusion of the work of the plumber and the bricklayer upon those solitary places.’

A number of other proposals included the purchase of a building for a clubhouse in Coniston, a permanent club room at Wasdale, and for the carving of members’ names on a suitable crag. However, the most ambitious and prescient suggestion came from the Club’s Librarian, H. P. Cain, for the purchase of a crag, to be placed in the care of the National Trust, as ‘a memorial to last as long as the everlasting hills.’

In the Autumn of 1919 it was announced in the press that Lord Leconfield had created a memorial to the fallen of the Lake District by declaring commoners’ rights on all land over 3,000 ft on Scafell Pike, the symbolic summit of England, and donating it to the National Trust. The idea had unsurprisingly been instigated by Canon Rawnsley. A slate memorial was eventually erected on Scafell Pike, set into the summit cairn, with a dedication ceremony on 24 August 1921.

By 1921 the F.R.C.C. was actively pursuing a land purchase option despite objections from eminent member George Seatree, who viewed the whole project as potentially financially ruinous. Failing to purchase Pillar Rock from Lord Lonsdale, and subsequently Napes Needle, an attempt was made to acquire Row Head Farm in Wasdale, which included Great Gable, but the club was out-bid at auction. Refusing to give up, they approached the new owner, Mr. Herbert Walker, of Seascale, a former member, with a proposal to purchase all the land on the estate over 1,500 ft. The price eventually agreed was £400 and the call went out on the 19th of May 1923 to club members for donations.

In October, 1923, at The Sun Hotel, Coniston, Arthur Wakefield, the newly elected president, handed over the title-deeds of 3,000 acres of high mountain fellside to the National Trust. In his speech he said, ‘It is impossible to realise that these fells and mountains are ours and our children’s forever… these title deeds represent the lives of those of our members who died for their country. The cost is great indeed.’ Considering this in the light of the battles that had rumbled on in the Lakes since the 1870s to maintain and enshrine rights of access to the countryside, it marks a fundamental turning point. Not only were these land donations by far the largest in terms of acreage, but they also contained some of the most significant crags in the history of the development of rock climbing in Britain. It was a hugely symbolic moment.

This sentiment was echoed by the Barrow News which reported on the 14th of June 1924, ‘by this purchase of 3,000 acres of highest Cumberland, the Fell and Rock Climbing Club has made history’. At the unveiling of the bronze tablet on the summit of Great Gable on the 8th of June 1924 it reported that practically every mountaineering club in the world was represented. ‘There were climbers famous for high work in the Himalayas, in the Alps, the Rockies and Norway’. The significance was not lost on them.

Arthur Wakefield, the club president referred in his address to the land as a 'National Park'  twenty-seven years before its eventual foundation, and the anonymous author of the article ‘The War Memorial’, in the 1923 Journal,  developed the conservationist message still further: ‘…they have found an eternal monument among the everlasting hills ...They gave their lives to save a heritage, and in their deaths, they have secured that something of that heritage shall remain inviolate from vandalism’.

In the aftermath of the First World War remembrance and memorialisation became part of a collective landscape, but for The Fell and Rock Climbing Club the hills themselves would be left to speak for the dead; memory is the landscape, ingrained into the bare bones of the earth and wrapped in sky. As Geoffrey Winthrop Young, in his address at the unveiling of the memorial put it, ‘this rock stands, a witness, perishable also in the onset of time, that this realm of mountain earth is, in their honour, free.’ Perhaps what is most important, and indeed implicit in this now century old gift, is that with memory and recognition comes responsibility, the responsibility to protect what is closest to our hearts, and to the hearts of those who died over a century ago on the battlefields of Europe. To love the mountains, ‘these spaces of power and light’, as Herford did.First published in ‘Cumbria and Lakeland Walker’ June 2024 and the Journal of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club 2024.