Reviews
Bill Todd
Dennis Gray
Mountain Lover, Crowood Press $14.95, pp206, 1990 or
remaindered at £10, Jarvis Books, Matlock.
Tight Rope, The Fun of Climbing, Ernest Press £9.95,
pp183, 1993
I was stowing my cabin luggage in the aircraft when a voice
came from behind me. "Get your house in order Mr Todd." Before I
had time to wonder who it was, my wife, looking past me, told me "It’s
Dennis Gray." I was mildly surprised because the aeroplane was not bound
for Geneva, Berne or Delhi but for Agadir in Morocco. "Hello Dennis. Are
you going to the Atlas?" says I, "No, we’re going into the desert to
look for some rock climbing. We’re meeting Ron Fawcett." "We" was
Dennis and John Beatty, a photographer of some repute and a participant in the
1982 Rucksac Club crossing of Greenland.
As we de-planed in Agadir I wished Dennis and John a good
holiday. "It’s not a holiday, It’s work" Dennis assured me with a
completely straight face. As he was the General Secretary of the British
Mountaineering Council at the time I suppose he had some right to claim it as
work. Nice work if you can get it. How I was able to help with transport
after a ten hour flight delay on the return journey is another story.
So I have to declare an
interest. I must have known Dennis as one of the local climbing lads for
nearly forty years and while we have never been on the same rope we always got
on. And it’s nice to have stuff on your bookshelf written by someone you know.
Broadly speaking "Mountain Lover" is about
mountains while "Tight Rope" is about people. I have found then both
unputdownable and this review is taking far longer than it should to write
because I keep getting immersed in rereading one or both of them. While a
complete book in itself "Mountain Lover" is a continuation of the
autobiography started in "Rope Boy" published in 1970. The author
has certainly seen the world and climbed most of it. He doesn’t seem to have
been to Antarctica or Norway but perhaps Yorkshiremen don’t really need to with
Scotland within a day’s journey. You may rest assured that everywhere he has
been the climbing and social scene comes vividly to life under his pen. Both
American continents, Israel and Bulgaria are included but most interesting to
me, of course, was the section on Morocco. The venue for the climbing
rendezvous mentioned above was Tafroute, a village on the edge of the desert.
Joan and I also visited Tafroute, though not in climbing mode, but we did see
and admire the huge boulder known as "Chapeau Napoleon", one of those
climbed by the trio.
Job-wise we are told how Dennis and his wife, Leni, spent
some time running the John Ruskin Centre at Brantwood, Coniston Water but this
did not turn out as expected and his next venture was a post in the printing
trade in Kenya, training the native Kenyans to take the job over. He returned
to the UK for family reasons and shortly became the first ever professional
officer of the BMC. They would have been hard put to find anybody better.
Read the book for yourselves to find out why he left the BMC to go freelance as
a writer and lecturer. He still does his bit for the BMC however. He has
recently chaired two meetings of the Yorkshire and Humberside Committee in the absence
of Angela Soper.
"Tight Rope" on the other hand is more a
celebration of the fun of climbing and of the remarkable and mostly lovely
people you meet. Most interesting to senior mountaineers is possibly a
conversation with Menlove Edwards in the Pass when Dennis was fifteen. His
account of the start of the Austin, Evans, Verity, Fuller partnership was
absorbing to me as when I joined the YMC in 1956 they were just embarking on
the series of pioneering climbs in Yorkshire and Lakeland that went on into the
sixties. There are complete chapters on each of Joe Brown, Don Whillans and
Tom Patey. The vignettes of many less famous but just as interesting people
include Eric Beard, the Drasdo brothers and Mike Dixon of "Crack of
Dawn" fame. This book is even more profusely illustrated than
"Mountain Lover" with black and white photographs from the fifties
and sixties. There is a particularly good one of Neville Drasdo leading
Walewska at Hangingstones Quany, one of three contributed by that well known
mountaineer, writer and photographer yours truly
