THE VILLAIN
Jim Perrin is one of Britain’s most highly regarded travel writers and was one of the best British rock-climbers – with many new routes, significant solo ascents and free ascents at the top standards of the day. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, Climber and TGO and he broadcasts regularly on radio. His biography, Menlove, was the first outright winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize, for which all of his subsequent books have been shortlisted. The Villain was joint winner of the 2005 Boardman Tasker Prize and winner of the Mountain History Award at the 2005 Banff Mountain Festival.
‘An extraordinarily rich and unsentimental vision . . . The genius of this exceptional biography is that it articulates both sides of Whillans’ character . . . It is by turns funny and tragic . . . This is a fine book. It was worth the wait.’ Climb
‘Captivating . . . For all the tales of great expeditions, there are as many of scandal and drunken debauchery, but that’s how he wanted it. It’s this mixture of natural ability and self-destructiveness which makes for such an entertaining read.’ Scotland on Sunday
‘Makes for gripping reading. Perrin has given Whillans the ultimate compliment of painting an honest portrait . . . His knowledge is simply unassailable . . . Perrin, in seeking to demolish the fictitious and construct a man out of the myth, has perversely, and wonderfully, created an enduring, breathtaking legend.’ Glasgow Herald
‘Detailed, definitive and finely written . . . A real life ripping yarn.’ Manchester Evening News
‘Probably the best biography written about a climber.’ Stevie Haston
‘A story worthy of the highest accolades a biographer can expect to receive. Ultimately, though, it’s the reader’s reward . . . Perrin’s masterwork.’ Mountain Gazette
Also by Jim Perrin
Menlove
Mirrors in the Cliffs
On and Off the Rocks
Yes, to Dance
Visions of Snowdonia
Spirits of Place
River Map
Travels with the Flea
The Life of Don Whillans
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Illustrations
Preface
The Villain
1. The Summit
2. Railings, Ramparts and a River Stack
3. Hang Around the Inkwell
4. Escapee
5. Work and Play
6. Young Climber
7. New Friends
8. Joe’s Halfpenny, Dennis’s Driver: an Interlude
9. The Rock & Ice
10. Mythical Heroes
11. Mighty Deeds
12. Climbing Bum
13. Unlucky For Some: a Digression on the Sweet Science of Gritstone Cracks
14. The Focus Shifts
15. Too Much of Nothing
16. Major League
17. Cult Hero
Envoi: Chew Piece, Autumn Twilight
Photographs
Select Bibliography
Index
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First published by Hutchinson in 2005
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For Will Perrin
1980–2004
As gracious in his life as he was graceful on the rock
First Section
Don Whillans (© Ken Wilson)
Don on a donkey
Father and son on Blackpool beach, 1935
Don in the garden at Stanton Avenue
In Don’s grandmother’s backyard on Earl Street
In Ashop Clough, Kinder Scout
The Rock & Ice in the Wall End Barn, early 1950s
Sunday family rambles to Marple
Camping beneath the crags of Stoney Middleton in 1951
Elder Crack, Curbar Edge, 1951
Second ascent of Arthur Dolphin’s Birdlime Traverse, 1951
Llyn Du’r Arddu, 1952
Don bathing
Early ascent of Suicide Wall, c. 1952
Brown’s Eliminate, Froggatt Edge, mid-1950s
First ascent of Crossover
First ascent of Centurion, 1956
Belshaw, Allen and Brown after the first ascent of The Corner, 1952
Allen, Chapman and Whillans at the Envers des Aiguilles, 1952
Don Whillans on Esso Extra at Stanage Edge
Capetown, 1957 – Downes, Whillans, Cunningham
Don and Audrey, Froggatt Edge, 1958
First ascent of Sentinel Crack, 1959
Second Section
Whillans and Bonington at the top of the Central Pillar of Freney, 1961 (© Chris Bonington Picture Library)
Whillans and Bonington alpine-bound, 1962 (© Chris Bonington Picture Library)
Brian Nally on the North Face of the Eiger (© Chris Bonington Picture Library)
Annapurna South Face, 1970 – Don belays Dougal Haston (© Chris Bonington Picture Library)
Don and Mike Thompson arrive at Camp Two on Annapurna (© F. Jack Jackson)
Torre Egger (© Leo Dickinson)
Mick Coffey on Torre Egger (© Leo Dickinson)
Making the headlines again, 1975 (© Daily Mail)
Don in the Red Sea (© F. Jack Jackson)
Gangotri 1981 – Don meets a yogi
Doug Scott’s 1983 Karakoram ensemble
Don and Bill Peascod – Great Slab, Clogwyn Du’r Arddu, May 1985 (© F. Jack Jackson)
Martin Crook and Ed Douglas on Matinée at the Roaches (© Ray Wood)
Unless otherwise attributed, all photos are from the Audrey Whillans collection.
. . . your past . . . naturally has its share in all you are now meeting. But that part of the errors, desires and longings of your boyhood which is working in you is not what you remember and condemn. The unusual conditions of a lonely and helpless childhood are so difficult, so complicated, open to so many influences and at the same time so disengaged from all real connections with life that, where a vice enters into it, one may not without more ado simply call it vice. One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort. And the expenditure of energy seems to you so great only because you overvalue victory; it is not the victory that is the ‘great thing’ you think to have done . . . that great thing is that there was already something there which you could put in the place of that delusion, something true and real.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
What follows is an account of the life of Don Whillans, who was one of the greatest of British mountaineers, and one of the most characterful and controversial members of the British mountaineering community – in the words of Sid Cross, ‘the hardest man that was ever on the fells’. It is written from the perspective and understanding of one who has spent his own life within that community, and witnessed its changing nature. That Whillans, twenty years after his death, remains an enduring figure in climbing legendry is testimony both to the power of his personality and to his extraordinary ability. Both aspects here present problems. To bear witness to the ability has demanded that some of the writing in this book is of a technical nature, with which I hope any more general readers it may attract, who may not necessarily be interested in the detail of extreme rock-climbs, will have patience. The myths and legends that have come to surround the subject have been more difficult to contend with, and whilst recognising the value of storytelling in our lives, I have erred on the side of caution and a desire to establish their factual source in choosing from and relating them. I should make clear from the outset that this is no saint’s life, and that no part of my purpose has been hagiographical. Whillans the man, with all his flaws and shortcomings as well as his remarkable gifts, is what has interested me. This is a tale of squandered talent and a life that was to far too great an extent soured by resentment and circumscribed by the more negative values of his background. It is also one of exceptional accomplishment, and of a need and an occasional gift for friendship that were out of the ordinary. In order to body forth the context accurately, the language has needed at times to be strongly vernacular, and accounts of some events that took place, however neutrally related, can make disturbing reading. Again, I hope the reader will bear with me here and understand the necessity.
Don’s legacy of rock-climbs, in my own prime in that sport, I found impressive but not ultimately to my taste – their essential quality often centring more around affront than appeal. Many have asked me in the course of this book’s genesis how I rate the relative contributions to climbing of Don and of Joe Brown, with whom his name is indissociably connected. I think they were very differently gifted, and vastly different in character – which expresses itself singularly through a person’s climbs. Joe, to my mind, is the greatest of all British climbers. Don’s flawed genius rivals Joe’s in a couple of spheres of mountain activity – alpinism, and in a handful of British rock-climbs from his great pioneering days in the decade following 1951. What Don brought to his rocks and mountains, it seems to me, was an approach more narrow and constrained, focused more nearly on reward than delight, and in that lies his individual tragedy, if we wish to see it as such. It is inevitable in this book that Joe’s character and achievements cast a long shadow across the story of Don’s life – and one with which the latter, I believe, never truly came to terms.
I first took on this book nearly twenty years ago, shortly after Don’s death and at the urging of various of his close friends. Don himself was someone I had then known – and known of – for over twenty years. During his life I found him at times difficult, at times extraordinarily helpful and generous, but I had no wish either to be camp-follower or close associate of his. After his death, in the course of researching for this biography certain scruples led me to the conclusion that it should not be published during the lifetime of Audrey Whillans, Don’s widow, who was a good-natured, long-suffering woman of whom I became very fond. Her wish at the outset was that the story of Don’s life should be told ‘warts and all’, and I have tried to do that, with kindness. I have been helped in its writing by a very large number of people – in a sense, this book has been written not by me but by the community of British climbers.
The assistance given me by some has been outstanding, and I would like to give my particular thanks here to the following: the guidance and encouragement of Val Randall during the writing of the first half was astute and invaluable; after the production of a first draft, the commentary and amplification from three good old friends, Joe Brown, Chris Bonington and Derek Walker, have ensured that an inadequate account has become more rounded, judicious and complete. They have, on frequent occasions, saved me from myself, and I thank them for that and for their contributions. If this book possesses any merit, much of it is due to them. The factional nature of British climbing being as it is, this has been an extremely difficult book to write, one that I have often regretted taking on and viewed as a poisoned chalice. These last few months in particular have given me the sense of a book that did not want to be written. My son’s death has made its completion very painful and arduous, but this has been balanced by the brave support of my wife, and the warmth and generosity that have flowed from the community of climbing, to which I give my heartfelt thanks. I need to thank also two other people whose roles have been crucial in this time. Keith Robertson, an old climbing partner and friend of mine, has kept me sane and solved all technical problems as computer after computer bizarrely burnt out in the process of writing; and my editor at Random House, Tony Whittome – himself an ardent mountaineer – has been a model of forbearance, exemplary in his editorial skills, and a bringer of enthusiasm and wise perspectives when both were sorely needed.
To thank everyone else who has contributed to the book I can only do by a list, from which significant names will surely be absent as the result of my forgetfulness, for which I apologise in advance: the late Nat Allen; Sylvia Allison; Pat Ament; Jacky Anthoine; the late Giles Barker; John Barry; Malcolm Baxter; John Beatty; Martyn Berry; Vin Betts; Eddie Birch; Polly Biven; Maggie Body; Sir Chris Bonington for extracts from I Chose to Climb, The Next Horizon, The Everest Years and Annapurna South Face; Martin and Maggie Boysen; Derek and Julie Bromhall; Joe Brown for extracts from The Hard Years; Val Brown; Greg Child for correspondence and extracts from Thin Air; John Cleare; Frank Cochrane; ‘Tiger Mick’ Coffey; Jeff Connor for extracts from Creagh Dhu Climber and Dougal Haston: The Philosophy of Risk; the late Dave Cook; Ingrid Cranfield; Dave Crill; Ken Crocket for extracts from Ben Nevis; Leo Dickinson; Ed Douglas; the late Ronnie Dutton; the late Sir Charles Evans; Eric Flint; Bruce Goodwin; Dennis Gray for long years of friendship and stimulating company, for keeping us all amused with his tales, and for extracts from Rope Boy, Mountain Lover, Tight Rope and Slack!; Ray Greenall; Tony Greenbank; Pete Greenwood; Tony Howard; Roger Hubank; Jack and Babs Jackson; Hamish MacInnes for extracts from Climb to the Lost World; Robert Macfarlane; Colin Mortlock; Bernard Newman; Ian Parnell; Edna and Alan Parr; the late Sir Anthony Rawlinson; Steve Read; Royal Robbins; Don and Barbara Roscoe; Paul Ross; Doug Scott; Tony Shaw for the invaluable resource of Shaw Library Services; Morty and Sylvia Smith; the late John Streetly; the late Geoff Sutton; Ian Thompson; Mike Thompson; Walt Unsworth; Doug and Ann Verity; Tom Waghorn for extracts from ‘Confessions of a Yo-Yo’; Patsy Walsh; the late Ronnie Wathen for perpetual good humour and support, and a stanza from ‘Don’s Ode’; the late Audrey Whillans for support throughout and extracts from Portrait of a Mountaineer; Robert Wilkinson; Ken Wilson; Ben and Marion Wintringham; Eric Worthington.
Finally, a technical note: I have used footnoting extensively at times to contextualise without interrupting narrative flow. I hope this device does not annoy, and that on occasion it might amuse, the book’s readers.
Jim Perrin
Hiraethog, October 2004
The Summit
At five o’clock, with relief, Dougal realises that the thinning of darkness he’s been desiring and imagining for restless hours is now real, that grey dawn’s seeping into the tent. He carefully disengages two months’ growth of beard from the ice around the breathing space in his tightly closed sleeping bag and struggles into a sitting position. Ice-crystals which rime the tent’s interior shower down on him, and on Don, who’s cocooned in a corner, wilfully quiet, no doubt aware of every move being made. But there’s no sense in two of them stirring, and Dougal feels small resentment at his companion’s prolonged rest. He eases as little of himself out of the sleeping bag as is compatible with cramming a billy full of snow, lighting the Gaz stove and setting it on, then settles back into his bag to await its boiling.
After a few minutes he drops in another block of frozen snow; it dips below the surface, melts with agonising slowness. A little sally of wind jets a swirl of spindrift in through the gap at the top of the entrance zip, and it homes on Dougal’s face, making him blink. At last the water steams and bubbles, though it’s still barely warm. He takes the handle, pours it on to powder in the plastic mugs. It’s not tea, but it’s liquid, and that’s all that matters as they begin their ninth day at 24,000 feet. He directs a dry-throated grunt at Don, who, right on cue, rolls over, perfectly conscious of the stove’s position, and thrusts a huge forearm out of his sleeping bag for the proffered drink as Dougal goes back to packing the billy with snow.
The two of them are a team, and the front-runners of a much larger one which is now scattered among the other camps down the South Face of Annapurna. Their vaulting through to this position on top of the pile has aroused a degree of animosity among the other members of a highly motivated and ambitious group of climbers. Tom Frost, the only American on this prestigious expedition that’s ushering in a new era of British Himalayan climbing, acted as spokesman and voiced the objections of several of the other climbers when he argued against Chris Bonington’s plan to send Don and Dougal into the lead. In his view the team spirit and camaraderie of the expedition was diminished or even destroyed by choosing two from the team and sending them ahead out of turn for the summit bid. Nor was his criticism simply reserved for the choices Bonington, as leader, had made. The comments he directed against Don and Dougal were particularly sharp, and rooted in mutually supportive values that had traditionally held sway in mountaineering:
. . . is this teamwork? Up to now we’ve kept roughly in turn, though Don and Dougal have done less carrying than anyone else and have definitely nursed themselves for the summit. I’d rather risk failure and yet have everyone feeling that they had had a fair share of the leading.
Whatever the opinions of other members of the team, it was Bonington’s view, as leader of the expedition, that its best chance of success in the final stages of the climb, as the monsoon approached and time ran out, lay with putting Whillans and Haston in the lead. He sums it up thus in the expedition book:
Don and Dougal had a single-minded drive to get to the summit. They had done comparatively little load-carrying, but at the same time they seemed to have a greater corporate drive than any other pair. Dougal felt, and I think he was right, that he and Don made a very well-balanced team, that could not be replaced by any other pairing. Although very different in character, interests and outlook on life, in their single-minded determination to climb the mountain and their mutual respect for each other’s ability they had an extraordinary unity – almost like an old married couple.
Bonington’s language here – note that ‘corporate drive’ – reveals the hard-edged approach that can brush aside Frost’s romantic idealism. His team is here to succeed, and Haston’s view of Whillans reinforces the faith Bonington puts in their climbing partnership:
I’ve learnt a great deal from Don – simple things that I had never really thought of, but which are of vital importance in this kind of climbing. He sites a camp like a real craftsman: thinks very carefully of just where to put the box,1 taking every possible factor, of avalanche potential, drifting snow, exposure to wind, into consideration. When he digs the platform or erects the box, the same thoroughness goes into it.
Whillans and Haston are very different characters, not men you can readily imagine socialising together. It’s hard on superficial impressions to discern much common ground between them. Haston, a 30-year-old former Edinburgh philosophy student, is intense, lean and wild-eyed. An apparently contradictory blend of ascetic and playboy, his life has been haunted by tragedy. A gaol sentence served for killing a pedestrian in a drink-driving incident in Glencoe has galvanised him into modelling his life on some Nietzschean ideal. Whillans is seven years older than Haston. His great days as a climber are receding fast, his last significant achievements almost a decade old. There are mutterings among the younger team members that he’s ‘past it’. But he’s a pragmatic pocket Hercules with a dismissive wit and a no-nonsense, get-the-job-done approach, behind which are concealed the skills of a master of his own craft. What matters is that the combination of characters works. They complement each other, the respect between them is palpable: ‘. . . we just untied our belays and carried on climbing,’ said Haston. ‘This is where mutual confidence in ability shows. I was leading but Don was only about ten feet behind. One bad move and I would have taken us both to oblivion.’ Don’s wryly respectful view of Dougal, expressed with typical economy and graphic Lancashire imagery to Martin Boysen, ran thus: ‘When we get up there, I’ll slip the leash and let the greyhound off!’
The intensity of expectation from both without and within that is operating on these two men is extraordinary. The status of the climb on which they have been engaged unremittingly for the last eight weeks is radical. It has been proclaimed throughout the outdoor and national press as the most difficult venture yet undertaken in the Himalaya: a two-mile-high face of a steepness never before attempted at this altitude, leading to the summit of one of the world’s highest mountains. All the great peaks of the high Himalaya have been climbed by this date. This is a new departure, and one that will usher in the next era of high-altitude mountaineering objectives. The fact, too, that expeditions to the Himalaya have only latterly become possible again after a hiatus of several years due to border tensions and skirmishings gives this climb added prominence and importance to British national pride. If Don and Dougal succeed in their ambition – and they have manoeuvred very carefully, or cynically, depending on your point of view, for the past few weeks to place themselves in the most advantageous position to do so – the effect on their careers will be incalculable. And they are both career mountaineers.
So what stages were those careers at?
Haston’s was still in the steep phase of the learning curves. There had been his apprenticeship of early climbs in Scotland with Jimmy Marshall and with Robin Smith, the great young Scottish climber who had died in a fall whilst roped to the accident-prone Wilfrid Noyce in the Pamirs in 1962. The North Wall of the Eiger in 1963 and the epic ascent of its direct route, the John Harlin Climb, in 1966 were all behind him. So too was his 1967/8 failure on Cerro Torre in Patagonia – reputedly the world’s most inaccessible summit – with Boysen, Mick Burke and Peter Crew. Annapurna South Face was his first Himalayan climb, Boysen and Burke were here with him. In terms of Himalayan experience, by contrast with Whillans, he was a beginner. He was also, in terms of human dynamics, a passive character who tended to sit back and allow situations to evolve to his advantage. He knew that Bonington was, in the words of another member of the expedition, ‘in love with him – Dougal was his blue-eyed boy and he could do no wrong’.2
But he also knew, having climbed with him on the crucial ice-ridge between Camps Four and Five on Annapurna South Face, that Chris Bonington, despite his wealth of previous successful experience in the Himalayas at the beginning of the 1960s, was simply not as strong as Don; and perhaps Haston sensed too that Bonington’s route-finding ability was less finely honed and instinctual than that of Whillans, the ‘Deputy Leader, Climbing Leader, and Designer of Specialised Equipment’. He recognised Don’s superior strength and mountain sense, realised that with him lay the best chance of success, and in consequence quietly positioned himself alongside him, colluded with him in tactical resting and retreats, and when the time came, had calculated himself into the right place with the right companion. It is pointless to take moral stances on this. The simple fact – as anyone who has witnessed them will vouchsafe – is that the personal manoeuvrings on Himalayan expeditions are seldom a pretty sight.
As for Don, this climb for him had an element about it of all-or-nothing. His previous Himalayan trips had been a catalogue of illness, tragedy and failure. His great days in the Alps and on British rock were dimming down into history. Some of his most memorable achievements – the Freney Pillar, the Central Tower of Paine – had been accomplished in company with the slightly younger, and less obviously and naturally talented Bonington, who had beaten him to the first British ascent of the Eiger North Wall; who had surpassed him in the perception of the newspaper-reading masses; and to whom he was now deputy. Putting aside the need for a result to reward the teamwork and effort of the entire expedition, for Don himself the psychological situation was acute, the necessity for success over-riding.
But now, it is dawn on 27 May. Whatever criticism may be levelled at their tactics, Don and Dougal’s acclimatisation programme has been well-nigh perfect. Bouts of activity and ascent have been interspersed with rest at altitude, with descents to base camp to recover. Bonington’s ruthlessly unsentimental judgement is absolutely sound. In the right place at the right time, they are the right men for the job. For the last week their diary has run thus:
May 20: Rest day at Camp 6 (24,000 feet).
May 21: Climbed halfway up 1000-foot gully leading to top of rock-band, returned to camp.
May 22: Climbed to top of gully, returned to camp.
May 23: Rest day at Camp 6.
May 24: Climbed to top of gully and down again.
May 25: Rest day.
May 26: Rest day.
As a training schedule for a summit bid on an 8000-metre peak, that could not have been more perfectly devised. Now the time has come to put it to the test. Dougal, fully clothed even down to his overboots against the corrosive cold, sloughs off his sleeping bag and peers out of the tent-flap: ‘The weather was by no means perfect. Spindrift and cloud were still making their presence felt. But compared to the other days in the gully it seemed relatively mild.’
The understatement in that should be acknowledged. Haston is not talking about the mere confusion of mist on a Cumbrian fell, or the discomfort of hissing powder-snow rivulets as you hack up the final stages of a Ben Nevis gully. His words conceal more than they admit. They disguise the bite of each frozen crystal at that altitude, the searing numbness it inflicts on exposed flesh. They own nothing of the cloud’s disorientations, the shelving treacheries of its blank perspectives. Up there, success and failure hang in the wind’s whim.
Already, below them, the monsoon has arrived, is pasting a uniform featurelessness of snow across the cloud-obscured face. Below the cloud, and invisible to them, their fellow team-members are anxious, concerned for them, aware that things have become critical and that the strength of most of the team has slipped away. Time is running out as surely as the incessant avalanches of powder-snow down the hour glass gully up which lies the first stage of their climb today. Five days before, Dougal had described the conditions thus: ‘Going round into the gully was like entering a special kind of refrigerated hell. Don had never felt it so cold in the Himalayas and I had never experienced anything like it in the hardest Alpine winters.’
There is no question but that today is the last chance they will have. Ostensibly, as they leave the tent at seven o’clock, they are setting out to establish Camp Seven. In practice, both men share the unstated knowledge that this is the summit bid, that they are going out to balance along the fine thread tensioned between conditions, ambition and survival. ‘Don said, “I think we should press on and find a campsite as close to the final wall as possible.” I was in complete agreement but we were both obviously thinking of greater things.’
The 1000-foot gully takes them four hours – in itself a good Himalayan day. Above, there are 1500 feet to go to the summit – an ice-field, a sharp snow-ridge, a steeper, broken face of rock and ice. They are already at 25,000 feet, do not have rope to fix, carry only a single 150-foot length. This is soloing, finding the route as they go, on new and difficult ground that leads into the 8000-metre realm where life is only briefly sustainable. If the weather closes around them, if cloud and storm from below wipe every recognisable feature from the face of the mountain, then lost and without stoves, sleeping bags, food, oxygen, at this altitude their situation would be desperate.
They press on, Don leading, Dougal weighed down with tent and rope. Don pieces together an intricate line towards the summit ridge. Then he disappears over the crest, is hidden from Dougal’s view, leaves the latter briefly alone. Dougal follows. The last 50 feet to the ridge are surprisingly difficult. Dougal moves carefully, brushing the snow from flat, loose holds. Beyond the crest, sheltered suddenly from the freezing wind, he rejoins Don, who is already fixing a piton from which to abseil back down the last rock wall. No words are exchanged, there is no feeling of triumph, exaltation, conquest – all those wearisome imperial abstracts that the uninitiated imagine to be the province of the mountaineer. Instead, they have to contend with the climber’s usual summit reaction: ‘The mind was still too wound up to allow such feelings to enter . . . the greatest moment of our climbing careers, and there was only a kind of numbness.’
They had achieved the most momentous ascent to that date in the history of mountaineering. From Annapurna’s summit, it only remained to go down.
1The Whillans Box – a very sturdy-framed square tent, easy to erect and redesigned by Don for this expedition. Made by Karrimor, it was to prove very useful on all the major British Himalayan expeditions of the 1970s.
2Rather mischievous, this, on the part of its source. Dougal welcomed the pairing with Don, and Bonington concurred in it because, in his own words, ‘they were by far the strongest pair’. He went on to comment that ‘the thing the others couldn’t come to terms with, understandably, was that Don and Dougal were in a different league. They had the extra drive of genius and motivation that were very complementary. Mick and Tom were very competent, as shown by their ascent of the rock-band, but still hadn’t got that extra push. Martin and Nick were tired from the amount of carrying they had done, and also had not got the push of Don and Dougal. I was going as well as anyone else in the team, and as leader had to take on the bigger picture and quite often filled fire-fighting roles to keep things going. This was particularly the case at the end, when I supported Don and Dougal from Camp Five, first with Nick and then with Ian, ferrying up the loads they needed to sit it out. Without that support they would have been unable to make their bid for the summit.’ More on the politics of the expedition in Chapter Sixteen.
Railings, Ramparts and a River Stack
Walk down Salford’s Blackburn Street to cross the Irwell by the Adelphi footbridge today, and you enter a world significantly changed from that of Don Whillans’s childhood. In the crossing of the Irwell’s water – no longer quite so black and noisome as it was in the 1930s – there is a challenge to your imagination. It is to take yourself back to the times and social conditions into which he was born – to reconstruct something of them from the traces which lie around and ponder how, anyway, they might bear upon a man’s life.
Forget for the moment the tenement tower blocks along Silk Street which loom in the mist or cast their 15-storey-high shadows across Adelphi in the morning sun. Ignore the rotting posts, a scatter of crushed lager cans around them, of an abandoned children’s adventure playground – a gesture of 1960s social hope – and the jerry-built contemporaneous maisonettes. These are not the clues to the time we seek. For those, you must look instead at the derelict street-corner pub, its gimcrack stucco steeped for decades in an industrial marinade of soot and sulphurous smogs. Or you must catch at the sharp sourness, the damp reek which clings to the piles of rubble lining the bridge approach. In their demolition, as in their life, that is the defining smell of poor housing, of the slums. Crumbled brick, failed mortar, sodden plaster, rotted timber – this rubble is all that remains, or deserves to remain, of the old Adelphi.
How the area ever came to be called Adelphi is an unfathomable mystery and a dreadful cosmic joke. Its social history over two centuries was a denial of the Greek fraternal ideal which the name so boldly proclaims. Physically, Adelphi is defined within a great meander, a horseshoe bend of the Irwell, low-lying, looked down on by the Georgian elegance of The Crescent, bounded on the river’s west bank by Peel Park, from which on fine days you can look out over the rooftops of northern Manchester to the Pennine moors – ‘the ramparts of paradise’, Robert Roberts called them, describing in his autobiographical classic, A Ragged Schooling, how his mother brought him to view them from this exact spot. But as for the old Adelphi, from wherever you glimpse it in space or time, it is down there – physically, and socially too.
These days, if you saunter between the spiked parapets of the footbridge into the Meadow Road estate, the only signs of the old landscape are a few stained walls, left jaded and pragmatic among those of new industrial developments. There are bright new council homes of clean, warm brick. A well-dressed young woman with none of the weariness of the slums upon her crosses the bridge and balances a Sainsbury’s bag on her knee as she leans over to unlatch her garden gate. An old man comes out of another door and idles along the pavement. I ask him where Nora Street was.
‘Nora Street? Nora Street, d’you say? That was a street from the old time,’ he corrects me. ‘It would be just about where you’re standing now, but it was no sort of a place. No sort of a place at all . . .’
His voice tails off. There’s a look of pained remembrance on his face. The tones are those of the west of Ireland, County Mayo maybe, or Connemara or Roscommon I hazard, and he endorses the last. We look across the river together. The squat fins and black towers of Strangeways-of-the-riot fill the skyline. What memories my question raised for him I don’t know, and don’t question. But for me, the resonance is of the thousands of his fellow countrymen who fled the imposed, certain starvation of Ireland’s famines only to die here in the Manchester and Salford slums in epidemic upon epidemic of typhus and cholera. Adelphi in the 1830s was Salford’s worst slum and one of the worst of all slums of the industrial north.
Not that the Adelphi of Don Whillans’s childhood was the pestilential sink about which Engels wrote in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Things did change in the hundred years between. By the 1930s and the time of the Great Depression, narrow cobbled streets and hastily built terraces had been standing here for half a century, had replaced the reeking scandal of the Irish immigrant workers’ shanty town. Engels’s working class had climbed a step up the ladder of social condition and become the inhabitants of Robert Roberts’s The Classic Slum. Salford was now the ‘Dirty Old Town’ of Ewan MacColl’s song – filthy, narrow, constraining, but with a bitter sort of romance about it too: ‘Smelt the spring on a Salford wind/Kissed my love by the factory wall’. It was the social milieu of Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, strong in community, sentimental in its aspiring, but knowing in its appraisal, impoverished, supportive.
This, then, was the district and its history into which Mary – formerly Mary Burrows – and Tom Whillans moved, after their marriage in August 1932, to set up home at 105 Nora Street. Mary was 23, and came from a family with a tradition of soldiering. Her father was a regular army soldier who served in India before the Great War. A family photograph shows her as a small child in his arms outside a tent, with the foothills of the Himalaya in the background. Tom Whillans was 26 at the time of their marriage. Both families were local to Salford – Mary’s mother lived in Earl Street, 200 yards away across the Lower Broughton Road. In the two-up, two-down, outside-toileted house on Nora Street on 18 May 1933, Mary gave birth to her honeymoon baby – a son, who was christened Donald Desbrow Whillans. (The ‘Desbrow’ was after a member of Mary’s family who had been press-ganged into the navy but who had ended up being decorated for gallantry at the Battle of Trafalgar. His medal is still preserved as a family heirloom.) The birth was without complications, the baby healthy but even for those days notably small.
As parents go, Don could be thought particularly lucky in his. The balances and bargains of matrimony, according to the testimony of those who knew them, were struck sound and early between them. Mary was a warm, outgoing, engaging woman with a bright sense of humour and fine timing in the delivery of a story or a joke. She was physically powerful, too, and in appearance Don took after her. Tom Whillans was a perfect foil to Mary, laconic in style, an embodiment of the old-fashioned virtues of straightforwardness and uprightness, a believer in the tried and true, in maxims such as ‘having the courage of your convictions’, ‘sticking up for the underdog’, and ‘staying with a job – once started – for as long as it takes to finish it’. Study a photograph taken of him in his mid-thirties, in soldier’s uniform, and the physical characteristics passed on to the son start out at you – the small stature, the broad, high forehead, the glittering, piercing eyes, the unwavering firmness around jaw and mouth. It’s a strong and characterful face, that of a man not to be trifled with. But there is a reticence and a hovering kindness about it too. This was the man to whom Don was closest. Between father and son throughout their lives there flowed a reciprocal fierce loyalty and pride.
Tom’s job was in John Allen’s, Grocers. It was the type of establishment which awarded itself the epithet ‘high-class’ – an old-fashioned emporium with sawdust on the floor and a composite aroma of coffee, bacon and salt ham. The shop was by The Shambles – the row of medieval half-timbered buildings that miraculously survives to the present day in the centre of Manchester. Tom spent his working life there, apart from the break taken by most men of his generation during the 1939–45 war. He rode motorbikes and was reputed a good sportsman in his youth. Both parents, in the way of northern people from what is now termed the ‘inner city’, loved and yearned for the weekend release of the outdoors, for the breadth and spaciousness of the surrounding moors. That was the way out, the escape, the future, at a time when the present, to a child, looked like this: ‘My world was the backyard and the entry and a set of railings where the river flowed past and I could see the footbridge that crossed the river and was forbidden.’
Across the bridge – the same spike-railed Adelphi footbridge of today – was Don’s first school, St Matthias’s Infants. It’s gone now, cleared. Over 30 years later, he was to recall his first impressions of it thus: ‘I couldn’t grasp the fact that I had to stay in one place all day. I can remember looking through the railings of the playground and feeling like some animal in a cage. I thought: “Well, what they got me blocked up in here for?”’ Railings, spikes, barbed wire, walls topped with broken glass – these are the ever-present obstacles which contain or debar the street kids of the city, and which spring out at you from their perception of every adventurous situation. In a more physical time, before video security equipment and rapid-response professional guards, a simple physical response was enough to break through the barriers into the forbidden environments. The initiative and independence of action required for this was evident in Don’s character from a very early age:
My mother used to come and collect me from St Matthias’s. I remember thinking, ‘I can make it home on my own’, so one day I tried it. I hung about for a bit waiting for my mother, half-hoping she wouldn’t come, but I knew she would so I buggered off early and wound my way through all these streets – my first bit of route-finding – and I was really pleased and relieved when I got to the Adelphi footbridge and could see the house.
Don would have been barely five at this time. His mother’s response was understandably less than enthusiastic: ‘She was very upset about it. She lectured me and gave me a clout or two and I couldn’t work this lot out at all. I thought it was a real big effort on my part.’
It was not the only big effort towards independence that Don made at this age. Mary’s sister-in-law Dolly remembers being in the kitchen at Nora Street one afternoon when Don returned from school. His shoes were muddy so his mother asked him why he hadn’t come by the road and footbridge. He calmly told her that he’d come by the river-bank because it was more adventurous. At about the same time she was called to Manchester’s Exchange Station to collect him after he had presented himself at the ticket office with sevenpence in old money and asked the booking clerk how far that would take him and back again.
In 1935 Mary gave birth to her second and last child, a girl who was christened Edna. With the family growing and Tom’s job at the respectable grocers more secure as the country came out of recession, a move to a better area was obviously desirable. An application was made to be put on the council’s housing waiting list. In 1938, when Don was five, the offer came through of a first-floor maisonette on a newly built council estate in Lower Kersal. Less than two miles away up-river to the north-west, it was set in a different, cleaner, freer world than the one Don had known throughout his infancy.
We went on a bus – a number 13 it would be – and there were rows of houses with gardens. I kept running on and stopping outside each one: ‘Is this ours, Mam? Is this ours?’ There were trees in some of the gardens, big trees not bushes, and when we came to our house it had a grass patch in front of it. The door was at the side as we only had the top part of the house. I always wanted the door at the front . . .
The ‘cottage flat’ had a garden, the address was 26 Stanton Avenue, and the Whillans family seized the chance and tenancy with alacrity. One of Edna’s earliest memories gives a graphic illustration of the newness of it all. She and her mother were in the sitting room of the flat when Don came racing up the stairs with an enormous worm in his hand, shouting, ‘Mam, Mam, I’ve found a snake in the garden!’
Even today, Lower Kersal estate is compact, tidy and surprisingly green in its surroundings. Built on the west bank of the next great Irwell meander upstream from Adelphi, on three sides there is open ground. Littleton Road playing fields and on their far side the Northern Cemetery lie to the west. To the north, in succession came Brand’s Fields, where shabby, empty tower blocks from the sixties now await demolition, then the wide spaces of Old Manchester and Prestwich golf courses, with Kersal Moor between and Carr Clough leading out beyond unhindered into rural east Lancashire. To the east, within the loop of the river as it curved under the wooded slope, above which the large, expensive houses of Higher Broughton stand, was Manchester Racecourse. In the 1980s, Groundwork Trust schemes and urban fringe renewal projects cleaned up the detail, planted trees, cleared eyesores away to produce a tidier, almost picturesque landscape. Today there are wild duck along the banks, spiky yellow gorse, and the river runs almost clear, a suggestion of gravelly bed beneath the filmy water. But even in the late 1930s, when Don was growing up here, it was a marvellous adventure playground, and one of which the young Whillans made full use.
Don’s new school had only been open nine years when he started there in September 1938. Lower Kersal Council School is a light and spacious building in large grounds, their boundary defined by substantial green railings on the other side of which runs the Irwell. Moving into the area just before the start of term, Don had not had the chance to make friends, and his first memory of the place was a painful and unsettling one:
You’ve no mates. You know you’re on your own, and then the standard stuff for a new kid, first thing you get is ‘D’you want a fight?’ Then they gave us the old diphtheria jab [a numbing blow with the knuckles to the top of the arm], and I thought, ‘Well, if this is a sample of what they’re doing here, I don’t want to know.’
Don was very small for his age – even as an adult he measured less than five feet four inches – and it’s easy to imagine the bigger children picking on the little newcomer, bullying him on this first day at a new school. In the course of time, they would not find it quite so easy. His physical courage soon became obvious. Edna remembers him going to the local baths in Broughton, climbing on to the high diving board, holding his nose, jumping off into the deep end and relying on necessity to do the rest in teaching him to swim.
As he grew in confidence, the river became the focus of activity. At first his explorations were tentative. There was a point on a bend at which the water broke over shallows and could be waded to the racecourse bank when the flow was weak. One of Don’s friends once dropped a shoe in here and Don, though he could not swim at that time, went after it. But downstream the river deepens and he was soon in over his head and struggling to the bank, where he stripped off and the boys made a fire to dry his clothes.
Eventually, even though it was then as polluted as any river in the country, an open gutter of effluent and industrial waste, black and oily, and even though, as Edna remembers, ‘It was a well-known fact that if you swallowed Irwell water you’d be poisoned’, the local boys, Don included, took to swimming there:
We used to go in five or six times a day in the holidays and at weekends. No towels, no trunks. I just sort of walked out of my depth and then had to swim. I did some daft things there. I used to come out with my feet cut by broken bottles and there were hundreds of bloody black leeches that stuck on you. We used to have some good fun diving into great lumps of foam that came drifting down from the weir above Littleton Bridge. ‘Here’s a big ’un,’ we’d shout, and we’d dive right into it.
There were problems, of course, about playing by the river, and one of the main ones was parental concern, which would naturally manifest itself as ferocious disapproval:
There was a big log just off the bank and when the river was high it was covered. We played for hours on it at ‘King of the Castle’, jumping on and off, scrapping, getting filthy wet. You couldn’t see the street from around the log and suddenly some kid would shout, ‘Hey, your mam’s coming,’ and there’d be a panic, charging round after your shoes and socks. If my mother had found out that I swam in the Irwell, she’d have killed me.
Even had she known, and even though this could never have been explained to her, she needn’t have worried. The prudence which was to keep him alive as a mountaineer throughout a career in which so many of his peers were killed was evident in him, alongside the derring-do, right from the outset: