But we survived, and we learned a lot and, in a strange kind of way, thoroughly enjoyed our experience.
Thus the New Year of 1965 was launched, in a way symbolically; for out of depression and near-disaster had emerged great experience. And 1965 was to prove a turning-point in my own new-found career as a freelance climber, writer, photographer and lecturer.
– CHAPTER EIGHT –
TELE-CLIMBING AT CHEDDAR
There was no telephone at Woodland. If anyone wanted to contact me in a hurry they had to send a telegram and I would then go to the nearest phone, which was about half a mile away. One morning, shortly after getting back from our New Year in Scotland, a telegram arrived:
PLEASE PHONE BRISTOL 43112 ABOUT POSSIBLE TELEVISION PROGRAMME – KELLY.
Ned Kelly was a producer working for TWW – Television Wales and West.
‘We’re thinking of the possibilities of making a film of one of your climbs in the Avon Gorge. Would you be interested?’
‘Of course I would. What were you thinking of doing?’
‘Well, that would be very much up to you. We want something that will be easy to film, with good camera positions and which, at the same time, looks impressive.’
‘Could I think about the best climbs, and then come back to you?’
‘Okay. Give me a ring as soon as you’ve thought of something.’
I have made comparatively few first ascents in Britain – a small fraction of the number made by someone like Joe Brown – but the one place where I did help to make a breakthrough was in the Avon Gorge during the mid-fifties. I was at Sandhurst at the time, and the Avon Gorge gave the best climbing of any area within reasonable range. Set within a couple of miles of the centre of Bristol, immediately above the busy road to Avonmouth and the muddy waters of the River Avon, it had an atmosphere of its own. It can claim none of the magic of a high mountain crag, and yet it has a unique fascination.
The River Avon cuts its way through a line of hills: the Clifton Heights on one side and the Cleveland Hills on the other. It carves out a gorge dominated by quarried cliffs, which is spanned, in one splendid leap, by Brunei’s suspension bridge. Today, the river is a trail of muddy effluent, carrying the sewage and polluted waters of the city of Bristol. At high tide, small coasters nose their way up and down the river, drowning the steady roar of traffic with the occasional ear-splitting shriek of their klaxons. In 1956, only one cliff had been fully explored by climbers; this was a buttress of quarried limestone that swept at a comparatively gentle angle down towards the road, its flanks guarded by smooth clean slabs. Hugh Banner, Harry Griffin and Barrie Page, all at Bristol University, had put up most of the early routes on the crag, and these were the ones that we first tackled from Sandhurst. You parked your car at the foot of the cliff and at the top, as you poked your head over the brow of the climb, and scrambled over a barred railing, you found yourself on a footpath, often having disturbed a courting couple. From the top, a brisk five-minute walk took you to the Coronation Tap, where you could down a pint of scrumpy cider and eat homemade pies.
We had exhausted the possibilities of the existing routes after a few weekends. Inevitably, our eyes were drawn to the steep flanks of the Main Wall, a 200-foot bite out of the Clifton Downs, quarried without leaving any of the broad ledges that graced some of the other cliffs in the gorge. It looked blank, loose and frightening. We skirmished around its base for several weekends, making tentative half-hearted attempts to get off the ground before I, at last, committed myself to a frighteningly loose and steep wall in the centre of the cliff, pushing myself beyond the point of no return. We managed to reach the top and named the climb Macavity, after T. S. Eliot’s cat, who defied the laws of gravity. In some ways, this first route was the least obvious line on the entire wall. A few more routes followed, some put up by myself, and others by friends at Sandhurst, amongst them Mike Thompson, and Jim Ward, a wonderfully eccentric and very untidy officer cadet, destined for the Gurkhas.
At the beginning of 1965 the Main Wall still held its mystique. Mike Thompson and Barry Annette had made an exciting girdle traverse of the cliff, and Barry had put up several more hard routes up the Wall itself. One feature of the Avon Gorge climbs is that, being man-made, without the weathering of centuries, the rock structure has a characterless uniformity, with very few crack-lines. All the climbing is similar: balancing up on sloping holds, using small, incut ledges for hand-holds, and stepping delicately up little roof overhangs. It certainly would not provide drama for filming – it was difficult enough getting interesting still photographs on it.
But Cheddar Gorge – that could be very different. Cheddar Gorge is a true gorge in every sense – certainly the most dramatic in Britain – squeezed between a steep crag-dotted slope on one side, and sheer, vegetated walls on the other, winding from Cheddar Village into the Mendips in a series of sinuous curves. On a summer’s weekend the bottom of the gorge is crammed with cars and the Cheddar Village end is packed with crowds of tourists flocking to see the caves. This can present a real problem for the climber, for the cliffs overhang the road and any rock that is dislodged will inevitably hit it. The cliffs, for the most part, are festooned with ivy and every ledge is overgrown with vegetation. As a result, the climber has no choice but to tear down great swathes of ivy and unpeel the heavy moustaches of grass that cling to the smallest ledge; these, in turn, can dislodge rocks and all end up somewhere near the road.
The safest time for climbing in the gorge, therefore, is mid-week in the winter. Then, there is a lurking, exciting mystery about the place. The gorge, empty, has grown somehow in stature, and is as mysterious as any high mountain crag.
Surely there must be a route to be climbed in the Cheddar Gorge, which would have the attraction of being virgin and, at the same time, be very much more dramatic than anything in the Avon Gorge!
I suggested this to Ned Kelly, and we arranged to meet in the Cheddar Gorge the following weekend. My next problem was to decide on a climbing partner for our TV spectacular. I was anxious to keep it to someone who had been involved in the development of climbing in the region, rather than go for one of the great names, like Joe Brown or Don Whillans. Mike Thompson seemed the obvious choice; he was one of my oldest friends, had done as much as anyone to develop climbing in the Avon Gorge, and was a very pleasant companion. We also wanted a support team and someone to take still photographs, so I phoned John Cleare.
One weekend in late January, I drove down to the gorge with Tony Greenbank, having arranged to meet John Cleare there. Unfortunately, Mike was in bed with ’flu, and couldn’t make it. We were to find the perfect television route on the Saturday, prior to meeting Ned Kelly on the Sunday morning.
A light sprinkling of snow covered grass and vegetation, turning the gorge into a stark, black, grey and white study, skeletal black arms of the leafless trees reaching into the flat grey sky; grey rock etched with the black of cracks; and the white of snow on every ledge and slope.
The challenge was obvious. Near the lower end of the gorge, just above the commercial caves, is a huge, 400-foot wall, certainly the biggest in Southern England, and one of the largest stretches of continuously vertical rock in the country. It goes to the top of the gorge in a single leap from a newly-completed car park at its foot. Immediately above the car park, the rock is sheer, and seems unpleasantly friable, stretching up to a band of blank overhangs which, in turn, lead to a band of weakness which is guarded by an entanglement of brambles clinging to the near-vertical rock. To the right of the main wall is an ivy-filled groove that seemed to provide the only breach in the wall’s defences. This had been climbed some years before, by Hugh Banner, and had been named Sceptre, but it avoided the main challenge, making an escape to the right on to steep and heavily vegetated rocks. Graham West, a Derbyshire peg-climber, had made an attempt on the Main Wall, trying to peg his way straight up it but had been defeated after a hundred feet or so by the scarcity of cracks and the friability of the rock.
The previous year, Barry Annette had straightened out Sceptre, continuing directly up the groove system above the climb’s initial corner, but his route still skirted the High Rock.
We looked up at it – in awe – slightly appalled by its challenge.
‘There’s a line all right,’ I said. ‘Look, you’ve got a bit of a groove going out to the left of Sceptre. Peg over that overhang, up that overhanging corner, and then you could traverse left along that break into the centre of the face, and the big groove leading to the top.’
‘Looks great,’ agreed John. ‘But what if the rock’s bad? It’s bloody steep. Do you think you’re on good form?’
‘Bloody sure I’m not; I haven’t done any proper climbing yet this year.’
We delayed the moment of commitment, and went down to the cafe at the caves to have tea and sandwiches.
‘It might be an idea if we did something else – just to warm up,’ I prevaricated.
‘It’s a bit late to start on the big wall, anyway,’ said Tony. ‘How about looking at the top of the gorge? I noticed a good line there on the way down.’
We all walked up to the head of the gorge with a comforting feeling of release from what was obviously going to be a serious and nerve-racking climb. Near the head of the gorge was a fine rib of rock, rising above a small, covered-in reservoir; it was only 150 feet high, and looked ideal as a training climb. It was just the right standard of difficulty – just hard enough to give us confidence for our effort the next day.
We met Ned Kelly on the Sunday morning. He had a perpetual boyish look, is of medium build, with a pleasant smile and a ready enthusiasm in his manner. He came from London originally, and had done a little climbing. Having started in television as a cameraman, he had progressed to directing. The programme had been his idea, and would be squeezed in amongst his run-of-the-mill work organising quiz programmes and beauty contests.
‘What I want to do is a form of live broadcast,’ he told us. ‘We’ll record the climb on videotape the day before it actually goes out on the air; to all intents and purposes, though, it’ll be a live broadcast, because we’ll have the cameras in position, and I’ll be mixing the pictures – we’ll be sending it out exactly as it happened.’
The difference between a film and this type of broadcast is that with a film probably only one camera is used, with the facility of switching to a dozen different positions. Thousands of feet of film can be shot, in any sequence, taking close-ups of hands on holds, and fingers curling round pitons which, of course, might be conveniently situated at ground level. The whole lot is then edited, and the resulting film is probably more perfect than a genuine, live broadcast. But the public, all too used to seeing stunts in films, view anything they see with a fair level of scepticism. In a live broadcast, on the other hand, there is no room for this type of cheating. The cameras are already set up, and only the action of the climbers at the time can be recorded. To the viewer the thrill, no doubt, is one of – will he fall off? This is the kind of emotion that dominates the watching of motor racing, though in either sport, there is the fascination of watching someone mastering a skill which the viewer knows he could never accomplish.
There had already been a few live climbing broadcasts put out by the BBC, but I had never been involved. The first was a joint Franco-British production in 1963, an ascent of the South Face of the Aiguille du Midi, above Chamonix. The only Briton to take part was Joe Brown. Though very dramatic, it must have been comparatively easy to put on. A telepherique goes to the top of the Aiguille du Midi, and another goes, in a single giant span, right across the Vallée Blanche, giving superb views of the South-West Face. The South-West Face itself is little more than a small rock buttress, under a thousand feet high, but its position, dominating one of the greatest glacier basins in the Alps, is unique.
The programme was such a success that the BBC decided to do a repeat of their own, this time bringing a single French climber, Robert Paragot, over to England, and using three British climbers. They chose Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, the finest crag in Britain south of the Scottish Border; Joe Brown, Don Whillans and Ian McNaught-Davis climbed with Paragot. This was a very logical choice since Joe and Don, in their early partnership, had made the great post-war breakthrough in high-standard climbing on ‘Cloggy’, and Mac was undoubtedly the best, and funniest, talker on the climbing scene. He had already become a climbing spokesman on radio, and combined a flamboyant personality with a strong sense of humour. He was also a very competent mountaineer having been with Joe Brown and Tom Patey on their four-man expedition to the Mustagh Tower in 1956; he had always succeeded in maintaining a fair climbing level, at the same time as following an exacting and successful career in the computer business. He is an interesting example of the amateur professional, since he has a career outside climbing and is essentially amateur in his attitude to climbing – that it should be great fun and an escape from day-to-day work – but makes a certain amount of money as a climbing commentator on radio and television.
I had happened to be climbing in North Wales that weekend, and must confess I was envious of the climbing actors cavorting across the mist-enshrouded walls of Cloggy. And now I had my chance. Ours was not to be a full-blown live broadcast, but a cut-price substitute. In some ways it was the more satisfying for that, being on a small, informal and friendly scale, and we were just dealing with Ned Kelly who, rather like myself in my role of a professional climber, was getting himself established in the world of television. We were doing something different, for we were looking for a new route to present as an outdoor broadcast – a line which, as we gazed up at it that morning, looked feasible – but only just. The whole concept was immensely exciting, for up to this point, outdoor broadcasts of climbing had been made on established routes. I suppose the truest film of all would have been a live presentation of our efforts to make the first ascent, though the trouble here is that climbing tends to be a very slow process, especially when pioneering new ground. We had to show the public how we climbed, but at the same time we had to make it visually interesting, and to do that, we had to be able to climb quickly, to a set schedule.
Climbing broadcasting has evolved rapidly over the last eight years, and in 1965 we were still in the very early stages of live, or semi-live, presentations of climbs. Our first problem was to make our new route. Once made, we would then be in a position to climb it for television. It was bitterly cold, certainly not the weather for high-standard rock-climbing, but our audience, in the shape of Ned Kelly and his girlfriend, were waiting, and we had to show him that the wall could be climbed. John Cleare was going to act as my second, and we got our gear together for our first winter ascent.
The groove of Sceptre which led up to the point where we hoped to break into the steep, unclimbed wall of High Rock, was smothered in snow. I was hoping that this part of the climb would prove quite straightforward, while the upper, unclimbed part was so steep that it held no snow and so, except for the cold, would be no harder than it would have been in summer. P.A.s on, draped with slings, pitons and nuts, I started up the bottom rocks, clearing snow from every hold, and soon my hands had lost all feeling. The smooth soles of my P.A.s skidded on snow-dusted rocks.
‘It’s too bloody cold,’ I shouted down. ‘We’ll never get up it today.’
‘Course you will,’ shouted John. ‘Just keep going, and it’ll work out.’
I kept on going, grumbling and muttering to myself, as I tend to do when I am climbing. Once I’d got used to numb fingers there was even a strange enjoyment in picking my way up the groove. I avoided the snow where I possibly could – a little like those games you played as a child, avoiding every other paving stone on the pavement, the only difference here being that it was a game in the vertical. The route had originally been tunnelled through a barrier of ivy and the strands, now weighed down by a clinging layer of snow, were on either side of the groove, ever pressing in, in a hopeless battle with the invading climbers.
The slow
progress I made upwards seemed quick to me, because time races by for the leader on a climb. But the others, down below, were stamping in the snow. I reached a small ledge, about a hundred feet up the groove, just below the point where it bifurcates. The original Sceptre route went up to the right, our new line to the left, up an improbable corner to a square-cut, smooth, triangular roof, that looked as impregnable as a ceiling at home. There weren’t even any cracks in it.
I brought John up to me, left him belayed to a piton and started gingerly towards the roof. I was weighed down with about twenty pounds of ballast, a wide assortment of pitons and nut runners, for we fully expected our route to be high-standard peg-climbing the whole way. I bridged across the groove, prepared to find it near impossible, but somehow, all the holds fitted into place. They weren’t obvious – a side hold here, a bridging movement, a pull on an invisible little jug, and I was below the overhang. I leaned out and felt over it – I couldn’t find a hold, but there was a crack. Time to put in my first peg: I got out a small one, nudged the tip of it into the crack, gave it a tap and it bounced straight out, tinkling down to the ground, 150 feet below. Have another try; arms now tiring, legs aching and beginning to tremble from my bridged-out position. This time the peg held, another half-dozen whams of the hammer, and it was in to the hilt. I clipped in a karabiner, pulled gently on it, just to get a bit of height, to see what was over the lip of the overhang. I could straddle out still higher; the angle above dropped back just enough to allow me to pull over the overhang without using an étrier. I pulled up, balanced on to the slab, and let out a victory yell. We’d cracked the first problem.
The Next Horizon Page 13