thelifeandclimbsofabr itishlegend
Transcription
thelifeandclimbsofabr itishlegend
Joe T h e L i f e Brown a n d c l i m b s o f a B r i t i s h L e g e n d 28 w w w. c l i m b m ag a z i n e . c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 28 25/08/2010 13:57 As Britain’s greatest climber of the twentieth century turns 80, Ed Douglas talks to him about youth, age, and experience - and why today’s climbers have got it so much tougher than he did. t is mid afternoon when I drive round to Joe Brown’s house, but it feels later. Clouds are blanking out Snowdon and the drab light over Llanberis is failing. Joe answers the door of his modest terrace, rocking from side to side on stiff legs, looking a little perplexed. ‘You don’t know anything about routers, do you, Ed?’ He gestures at the plastic box sitting next to his computer, placed on a desk by the front window. The man the British press dubbed The Human Fly has lost his connection to the World Wide Web. He’s frustrated. Images flash through my mind of the young Brown, a grinning, sparky boy exploring bombsites around wartime Manchester with his gang, looking over every high wall. He may be turning 80, but the greedy curiosity that has shaped and driven the life of Britain’s greatest twentieth century climber seems undiminished. Joe’s position in the climbing world is almost unparalleled. It’s not just that he led the surge in rock climbing standards that followed the war, putting up some of the best and most famous lines in the country. Or that he contributed to a renaissance in British alpinism that made the Europeans take us seriously again. Or that he is one of only two Britons – both happily still alive – to make the first ascent of an 8000m peak. It’s the style of how he lived, always finding new directions to explore and keeping a sense of excitement and freshness in his life, decades after that initial discovery of what climbing could offer him. Joe Brown seems to me an essentially private man, loyal to his friends, equivocal about his fame, but fun and playfully inventive. In the 1950’s, gossip that climbing’s bright new star had ‘bandy legs, teeth like tombstones and hands like bunches of bananas’ prompted a typically self-deprecating photograph published in his autobiography The Hard Years. The self-mockery won him affection. Decades ago, Scottish climbing pioneer Tom Patey wrote one of his famous songs about ‘The Legend of Joe Brown’, with none of the satirical edge applied to ‘Onward Christian Bonington’. Thanks to his reluctance to lecture and an antipathy to journalists, his presence now is almost ethereal, as though he were some totemic but unlikely creature; a sort of people’s unicorn. While Joe settles in his chair, I glance around the room. There’s a Ginger Cain print, and a photograph of the Dru’s west face, which Joe climbed with Don Whillans in 1954, famously returning pride to British alpinism. Apart from that, the pictures are of family. Curled up on a cushion on a chair across the narrow living room is a Jack Russell called Lucy, who has spent her life burnishing her type’s reputation for pocketsized aggro. Last time we met, a few years back, she was straight at my ankles. I found myself hopping around the Dinorwig slate quarries, dignity in tatters. Now she merely raises her head and stretches cautiously. Time is overtaking Lucy, just as it is Joe Brown. That day, Joe had eased himself to the bottom of Skyline Buttress to show me some of his latest new routes, like an exhausted but proud older father introducing his sixth child. He was in his mid 70’s then, and despite suffering from arthritis, moved across difficult ground with a measure of fluency sufficient to offer a consoling glimpse of youth. He was still making his annual trip to Morocco with a group of old friends, panning the Anti-Atlas for new routes like a grizzled prospector still dreaming of the mother lode. That’s in the past now. ‘The last time I went to Morocco was in 2006, and then I was still capable of climbing hard routes. But coming down from the crag was so hard and it was getting painful. Friends like Claude [Davies] and Pete [Turnbull] were saying come for the crack. But if I went there’d be a group coming back and saying what fantastic days they’d had. And I’d be sat there drumming my fingers.’ At 75, he says, he was still leading E1, but now finds anything strenuous too much. ‘It’s just old age knackering all my joints. They’ve been poor for ages, but in the last four or five years my muscles have gone and I’ve found my energy levels are getting less.’ The end of life – that process of feeling your body fail – is a grim prospect. But for an adventurer, and one of such consummate ability? What’s that like? I can’t help but think of William Hazlitt’s conclusion to his essay On The Fear of Death. ‘A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.’ Joe would have his own view on that. As a young man, and in middle age too, he suffered his share of hard bivouacs, shifting his weight to ease the discomfort. Now he grimaces sitting in his chair as a nerve pinches his back. His own father died when Joe was just eight months old - horribly - from a gangrenous injury sustained while working as a merchant seaman. Like Joe and his brothers, his father had worked in the building trade but went to sea when times were tough, as they often were in the early 1930’s. Joe has no example to follow in the process of aging. And modern medical advances – almost beyond belief – can now delay nature’s timetable so that the mind wears out before the body. FACING PAGE: Joe Brown in action on his route Tensor (E2 6a) at Tremadog in April 1967; the first ascent of this route was made with two aid points in 1964 with Claude Davies. This classic photograph of Joe has not previously been published. joHN cLEARE/Mountain Camera Picture Library. THIS PAGE: Joe at Gogarth on January 3rd, 1967. Joe was one of the most prolific explorers of the greatest sea cliff in North Wales. His routes there include the dramatic roof of Spider’s Web, the Main Cliff classic Rat Race, and the wildly adventurous Mousetrap. JOHN CLEARE/MOUNTAIN CAMERA Picture Library 29 www.c li m b maga z i n e.c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 29 25/08/2010 13:57 I d o n ’ t wa n t t o li v e t o b e as o ld as Ricca r d o C assi n was w h e n h e di e d . For me, now, the difference between each year is now so pronounced that I can’t imagine what it would be like to live that long. To be a hundred? You’d be like a little walnut that can’t move. 30 w w w. c l i m b m ag a z i n e . c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 30 25/08/2010 13:57 The exigencies of old age, he says, left him depressed at first. ‘But you can’t be a miserable bugger all the time, just because you’re getting old. Everyone faces it sooner or later, and you can’t get away from the fact that you’re getting a lot closer to the front of the queue. It’s absolutely inevitable, isn’t it?’ And then he laughs, the sound flowing warmly out of the gathering gloom. I realise I can no longer see his face, but it seems wrong to turn a light on. ‘Unless you’re lucky and you’re one of these buggers who has an accident climbing – and you’re gone. But now I think you just have to keep going and have a couple of miserable years because you can’t climb.’ This is courage, I think to myself, and ask him if he means that. ‘I look back on people who died young climbing, and I think, well, if you died doing what you like doing then you’ve not had a lot of time being miserable because you can’t do it. Dying is a funny thing. A lot of people think they’d like to live to be really old. That doesn’t make sense when you’re old. Now I think I don’t want to live to be as old as Riccardo Cassin was when he died. For me, now, the difference between each year is now so pronounced that I can’t imagine what it would be like to live that long. To be a hundred? You’d be like a little walnut that can’t move.’ This is all said with such lightness, and punctuated at the end with more laughter. I once spent an evening with Anderl Heckmair [the leading climber among the first ascent team of the Eiger Nordwand in 1938] towards the end of his very long life, and watched him knock back a tumbler of Scotch and puff contentedly on a cheap cigar. He was laughing too. Lucy hops off her cushion and walks stiffly across to him in an act of geriatric solidarity, as Brown muses on the origins of his own physical decline. ‘Much more than the climbing it was the manual work I did. I’ve worked all my life in the building trade. Even when I had the shops I usually had building work. I was fantastically aggressive towards it. I always wanted to beat what I’d done before. So if I’d plastered half a room that day, I wanted to plaster more than half a room the next day. I loved working. I loved shovelling: any hard physical work. But using a lump hammer for hours a day, it’s shocking for your joints.’ By comparison, he suggests, climbing is quite a gentle activity compared to manual labour. ‘If you’re climbing well, you use a lot less energy that someone who isn’t climbing well.’ Having seen film of him rock climbing in his prime – something that should be made readily available – I have to agree. But then he was on Everest – twice – in his 50’s, and he reached over 7000m on Cho Oyu aged 60. Before that, in the 1980’s, he’d attempted technical routes on peaks like Thalay Sagar in the Garhwal with his great friend Mo Anthoine. All this followed his more celebrated mountaineering achievements in the 1950’s and 1960’s, such as his 1955 first ascent (with George Band) of Kanchenjunga, the world’s third highest mountain. There is something warmly sociable about Brown’s career, and the banter seems to have meant as much to him as the result. I had in mind before I met him a brief but intense portrait of a younger Brown at Mowing Word, written by Jim Perrin and published in 1981. The two goad each other on in a perilous situation, and at one point Perrin recalls how ‘his eyes narrowed, recognising the game.’ The moral logic is clear: give everything you’ve got, and then don’t care a damn about the outcome - as long as you’re still laughing. ‘People always said I was the most competitive person they’d ever met, but I don’t think I was. Competitive people don’t like losing and I didn’t mind losing. What I liked was playing well. It was only a game, and if I played well then I was happy. Okay, so I was happier if I won, but I didn’t think it was a disaster if I lost. Pete Crew was definitely the man to beat because he always took it badly. I loved climbing with Pete, he was terrific. And it was a big loss to the climbing world, especially to those of us who climbed with him, when he packed it in. I did talk to him and I can’t be certain, but I think like other friends who gave it up, he felt like he’d wasted a part of his life.’ The motivation to climb still fascinates Brown. Most of the kids in the bombed-out slums near his home in Manchester must have followed the rails laid down for them. How did it happen that this scruffy kid in his hand-me-downs ended up as Britain’s greatest climber of his era? The same thought occurred to me years before as we stood overlooking the slate quarries. When Brown first moved to Snowdonia in the mid 1960’s, after almost two decades of climbing there, men were still working the slate, hacking at the guts and sinews of the mountains around Llanberis. He pointed out favourite routes through the complex of levels and tunnels, among the broken rusting works, facing page: Joe Brown leads the first ascent of the Castle of Yesnaby (E2 5b), a sea-stack off the west coast of Mainland island., Orkney, in July 1967. Rusty Baillie first swum out to the stack and rigged a tyrolean traverse for Joe and Sidney Wilkinson, the third man, to reach the base of the stack dry-shod. JOHN.CLEARE/Mountain.Camera Picture Library. TOP left: Gear used by Joe Brown and Pete Crew after climbing a route on Gogarth in 1967. A primitive machine nut - predecessor to the modern wire - is clearly visible on the top left. JOHN CLEARE/Mountain Camera Picture Library. above: Joe Brown and Julie Collins descend from Craig y Castell, Snowdonia, in April 1967. JOHN CLEARE/Mountain Camera Picture Library. 31 www.c li m b maga z i n e.c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 31 25/08/2010 13:57 THIS PAGE: High above the boiling swell of Wen Zawn, Joe makes a 1970 repeat of his own 1968 route Spider’s Web at Gogarth. Joe used some aid on the first ascent and three ropes, hence the name. Crossing a huge ceiling, the climb was a visionary ascent for its time. It can be climbed either as Joe originally did it at E2 5b / A1, or free at E5 6b. It is regarded as one of the most spectacular and unusual routes at Gogarth. JOHN CLEARE/Mountain Camera Picture Library facing page: Casting adrift on the expanse of Gogarth’s awesome Main Cliff on January 3rd, 1967, Pete Crew belays Joe on an early ascent of Rat Race (E3 5c), the first climb to break into the central section of this imposing sea-cliff. Joe made the first ascent of the second, crux pitch of this highly significant climb the previous year, in July 1966. JOHN CLEARE/Mountain Camera Picture Library 32 w w w. c l i m b m ag a z i n e . c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 32 25/08/2010 13:57 33 www.c li m b maga z i n e.c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 33 25/08/2010 13:57 the roofless huts, the luminous streaks of minerals oozing from cracks in the blue stone, the deep pools of cold green water. The nature of a great climber’s new routes surely reveals much about their own: Menlove Edwards’ compulsion for unstable ground; Don Whillans and his blunt, steep lines; the cool composure of Ron Fawcett’s masterpieces; and the ultra-calculated, wildly ambitious modern challenges set down by climbers like Steve McClure and Dave Macleod. Brown’s hallmark, I would suggest, is a kind of crafty elegance, with Vector being a clear example. It’s no surprise he was the first to embrace the Llanberis slate quarries when they became deserted. Such ruined marvels must resonate with his memories of the streets of Manchester where he grew up. With a grin, he recalls climbing over the ten-foot walls of Belle Vue Zoo and landing in the bison’s enclosure, squeezing through the bars to get away and then discovering a storeroom full of fireworks. Although his father’s death when Brown was an infant had left the family in desperate financial straits, his sisters and brothers kept each other going, and as the youngest, he was shielded a little from the harsh reality of their situation. The grotesque inequality and privations Brown experienced in working class Manchester in the 1930’s and 40’s – but perhaps did not comprehend as a boy – were exposed by an invitation to join the 1955 British expedition to Kangchenjunga. Brown can still recall the boat trip out to India. ‘You’d go for dinner and have as many courses as you wanted. You could eat all day. I didn’t know what to do. You’d have a big line of knives and forks and you’d worry about picking up the wrong one.’ I ask if he ever felt patronised but he says not. He recalls staying at the embassy on the way back from his successful first ascent of the mountain. ‘At dinner one evening they sat me down in front of an artichoke, and I thought, bloody hell, what do I do with this? I had to watch and learn. There was a butler and you took breakfast from the sideboard. It was an adventure of a different kind.’ Given that there were eight Browns living in a house with four small rooms when Joe was born, and the loo was very much outside – they sheltered in it when the house next door was destroyed by a German bomb – Brown might have cause for either resentment or self-satisfaction. His famous partner Don Whillans saw currency in the role of individualist northerner, which played well with his audience. Joe didn’t play that game, perhaps because he was unwilling to be categorised or to pander to someone else’s image of him. This may be part of the reason he dislikes the media. ‘I met a lot of journalists in the early part of my climbing career and they’d hardly ever told the truth. You’d tell them something and they’d always embellish it.’ It was the inclusive leadership style of Charles Evans on Kangchenjunga that clearly impressed him most. ‘It was like winning the lottery, getting invited on an expedition like that. Everybody who was on it was terrific to be with. Charles said the most important part of bringing together an expedition is having people who will get on with no hassle. And there wasn’t any. I didn’t know him before the trip, but I stayed friends with him up until the moment he died, and climbed with him when he was still able to climb.’ While Himalayan climbers in the 1920’s and 1930’s had been drawn from a narrow clique, the war’s galvanising social impact opened the door for Brown. As Vin Betts put it, Joe was ‘off with the toffs as the first of the working-class lads to go on a Himalayan expedition.’ But why him? ‘I think Charles had got a tip from Geoff Sutton. Alf Bridge would have been pushing for me to go.’ Whillans felt betrayed by Brown’s selection, and believed Joe had put in a bad word. Contemporaries felt that Whillans was the equal of Brown as a mountaineer and Nat Allen saw Joe as ‘close, hush-hush, so I can see how the suspicion came about.’ It’s daft of course. ‘There was no way Don would have been chosen for Kanchenjunga, because he was only 20,’ Brown says. He and Whillans had met at the Roaches after Joe’s second failed to follow the first pitch of what would become Matineé. Don stepped in instead and then led the second, harder pitch. ‘I didn’t have a mentor, but Don definitely had. He’d only been climbing a short time when he met me, and I’d been climbing three years and done a lot of new routes. He was a very intelligent lad, and you didn’t have to tell him twice.’ When I suggest Don was jealous of Brown, he says that’s not quite right. ‘He wasn’t jealous of me, but he was jealous of any friendship, any woman I was with, even Slim [Sorrell]. On one occasion he called Slim out for a punchup, but Slim just said simmer down.’ The names Brown and Whillans are linked in the new route lists, and they provide a useful trope for historians of northern working-class lads breaking through the sport’s class barriers. But they were fundamentally different people with different views of life and climbing. Whillans relished hierarchies and nurtured his reputation. Brown, I would guess, was less troubled by his own ego. He maintains some interest in the current climbing scene, but the constant clamouring for attention of our hyper-mediated world isn’t his style. He mentions James McHaffie. ‘To be able to do what he does, that takes a very special person I think. When I was doing it, I think the commitment was nothing like as severe.’ He was, he says, lucky to be around when he was. ‘Everyone’s used up the rock now. It’s not like there’s another Gogarth. Circumstance made it that I could keep my enthusiasm. Things kept happening.’ I want to suggest to him that it worked the other way round, but it’s evening now, and time to leave. There will never be anyone like Joe Brown in British climbing again. The unique combination of his nature and era can’t be replicated. But what he accomplished - and how he lived - will continue to shape our ideas about the climbing life far into the future. Immortality, of a sort. In the meantime, happy birthday, Mr Brown. n This page: Shortly before his 80th birthday, Joe stands under the most famous crag in Britain, Dinas Cromlech in Llanberis Pass. His first ascent in 1952 of Cenotaph Corner (E1 5c), the central line on the cliff, exemplifies his visionary talent as a climber. The fact it remains the most sought-after climb of its grade in Britain is proof of Joe’s tremendous legacy. The line of the route is clearly visible directly above Joe in the photograph. RAY WOOD 34 w w w. c l i m b m ag a z i n e . c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 34 25/08/2010 13:57 www.joe-brown.com the joe brown climbing shops Capel - Capel Curig: 01690 720205 NOW OPEN AT Pen y Pass 70500_JOE_BROWN_FPFP.indd 1 Corner Llanberis: 01286 872660 PHOTO: GRUFF OWEN Menai Hall - Llanberis: 01286 870327 18/08/2010 16:43 Joe uncut: r e c o ll e c t i o n s o f ‘ b a r o n b r o w n ’ I t was o n e o f th e m o st imp r e ssi v e l e ads I hav e e v e r s e e n : c o o l , c a l m , a n d t o ta lly i n c o n t r o l . - Ben Wintringham on Joe’s first ascent of Rapture of the Deep (E4 5b). ‘In the autumn of 1978, Joe, my wife Marion and myself had been exploring Gogarth’s Red Wall for new routes, and had spied a line of sandy grooves left of the established esoteric classic Red Wall Route. Knowing Red Wall quite well by this time we knew that grey sandy rock meant mega loose rock! Red rock meant better, but it was still pretty loose. As we could see some big loose blocks, I abseiled down to clean them off and have a look. Finding virtually no gear, and having knocked off the worst of the big stuff, I placed a couple of pegs, and jumared out a gibbering wreck. I remember saying that there ‘was no way I would lead that’. Joe then quizzed me, and I said that technically it ‘didn’t look too bad’, but there was no gear for the first half, and then it looked like it got hard, but with some gear and some better rock. ‘Right’, he said. ‘No problem, I’ll lead.’ So off we went, with me leading the first pitch of Red Haze and then Marion and myself cowering under the overhang covering the stance. As Joe calmly bridged his way up the tottering groove above with just a couple of desultory runners for reassurance. As he got to the better rock where the sandy groove finishes, the route steepened and started to overhang, becoming very strenuous. At this point I was amazed to see Joe fold his leg into a hole and promptly take both hands off. Then with a few grunts he was up and away onto easier ground. Finally he got to the top and then belays right on the edge so he could see us. Always a bad sign as he does like to watch you have a epic! Marion fought her way up with a certain amount of squealing, so I knew it was not exactly going to be a piece of cake. Starting off, I was not surprised to find the rotting groove horrendous, not helped by Joe’s cackling laughter from his safe perch at the top. By the time I got to the hard part I was finding it very strenuous, as I was freaked out after seventy feet of total grip, even seconding. I tried to work out what he had done with his leg, which wasn’t obvious at all, but when eventually I got in the position it was a great hands off rest. This was typical of Joe’s ability to read the rock almost instantaneously. It was one of the most impressive leads I have ever seen: cool, calm and totally in control. So afterwards it was quite revealing when he came up with the name Rapture Of The Deep [the route is now given the somewhat ominous grade of E4 5b]. When I asked him why he chose the name, Joe said: ‘You know that they say when divers start getting the bends, they get a happy feeling just before they die. Well, that’s how I felt on that! I kept looking down at the sea swirling around the bottom of the zawn. I was trying to work out where I would end up, knowing I was going to die somewhere down there if I fell off.’ - Ben Wintringham ‘I can’t actually claim to be one of Joe’s “oldest friends” and did not really climb with him till we starting going on exploratory trips to the Moroccan Anti-Atlas in the late 1990’s, a paradise for doing big new trad routes. Of course I knew him and, as a young lad, held him in the same awe as everyone else. I approached his climbs with great trepidation, and it was not until the first modern nuts arrived in the mid ‘60s that I regularly began to climb his great routes. Joe loved the Moroccan climbing scene and was happiest with his small group of friends (including me by now!) in the 12 years or so before the Guidebook came out (2004) after which more people began to arrive. Along with Pete Turnbull and others, Brown was continuing on a grander scale the kind of exploratory climbing he had been doing in the Costa Blanca through the 1980s without any fuss, publicity, bolts - just for the sheer enjoyment of climbing where no one else had been. When Chris [Bonington] joined us in 2001, after seeking the Master’s approval of course, Joe bided his time for a few days and then impressed Chris and I by leading us on the fierce first pitch of Hidden Crack (E2 5b). A couple of days later on one of the biggest crags he found yet another new route and led the first two sensationally exposed pitches of Space Walk (E1 5a) before offering us the lead on the upper pitches. Joe continued to find new routes till his last visit in 2006. Amazingly, that represents nearly sixty years of new route activity and mountain exploration.’ - Derek Walker ‘It is hard for me to be independent in writing about Joe. I was, after all, his ‘Rope Boy’ when I was young. He was the outstanding performer on British rock of his generation, and one of the reasons we identified with him was his workingclass background and his lack of any pretension. He always knew he was the best, but there was no side, no selling out on his friends or colleagues. And when I spent time with him when I was a teenager it was fun; we always had a laugh at the crag - climbing never became too serious. There are so many outstanding Brown routes, but the two which gave me the biggest buzz when I made early repeats of them were Great Slab on Froggatt, which I led in the summer of 1959 with Martin Boysen as my second man, and Vector in 1963, leading through with Robin Barley. The latter had a fantastic reputation for difficulty at that time.’ - DENNIS GRAY this page Joe and Lucy at home in Llanberis in spring 2010, a few months before his 80th birthday. ray wood Joe’s First ascents the top ten 1. Right Eliminate (E3 5c) Curbar Edge, Peak District, England (1951) 2. The Great Slab (E3 5b) Froggatt Edge, Peak District, England (1951) 3. Cenotaph Corner (E1 5c) Llanberis Pass, Snowdonia, Wales (1952) 4. The Thorn (HVS 5a) Beeston Tor, Peak District, England (1954) 5. The British Route (TD+ [UK 5c]) Aiguille de Blaitiere, Chamonix, France (1954) 6. Kanchenjunga (8,586m) Nepal - the world’s 3rd highest mountain (1955) 7. Bow Wall (E2 5b) Bosigran, Cornwall, England (1957) 8. Shrike (E2 5c) Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, Wales (1958) 9. Vector (E2 5c) Tremadog, Wales (1960) 10. Mousetrap (E2 5b) Mousetrap Zawn, Gogarth, Wales (1966) 36 w w w. c l i m b m ag a z i n e . c o m o cto b e r 2 0 1 0 71070_28-36_JOEBROWNp.indd 36 25/08/2010 13:57