Harold Drasdo obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/06/harold-drasdo

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The rock climber Harold Drasdo, who has died aged 85, tackled the heartlands of British mountaineering with the leading climbers of the postwar era – and later became an incisive writer and educationist, whose books unearthed the sport’s deeper philosophical roots.

In his highly regarded memoirs, The Ordinary Route (1997), Drasdo drew out the threads that formed the fabric of his life: the relationship of the individual with the state, the importance of landscape in the imagination, what risk can teach us, and how a life of physical exploration can inform an equivalent philosophical process. He was a lifelong anarchist, who marched at Aldermaston and campaigned at Greenham Common. Drasdo’s writing, always slow-cooked as he reflected and revised, was thoughtful and wryly honest as he interrogated his experiences for every ounce of meaning.

On a miserable winter’s day at the end of the 1940s, a 14-year-old called Dennis Gray, newly in love with rock climbing, was mooching around Ilkley Quarry in Yorkshire when he met a long-faced youth with narrow eyes five years his senior. Drasdo was newly returned from Athens, where he had served the last portion of his national service at the fag end of the Greek civil war. Almost consumed by the intense heat, Drasdo told Gray that he had spent the past few months resenting what he was doing and dreaming of climbing at Ilkley under a soft, refreshing rain.

Within a few months, Gray and Drasdo were the nucleus of a group known as the Bradford Lads, a moniker Drasdo was happy to question given the majority were not from Bradford and that the lads included at least one girl, Marie Ball, who led climbs of Very Severe-graded terrain and held her own in rugged company. The group included Drasdo’s brother Neville and the brilliant Pete Greenwood. Their figurehead was the iconic Arthur Dolphin, a few years older, and already established as one of the leading rock climbers of the postwar era.

The Bradford Lads were friendly rivals with other newly formed groups of climbers from northern cities, particularly the Rock and Ice Club from Manchester and its stars, Joe Brown and Don Whillans. Climbing folklore tells of how the arrival of a broader social spectrum in climbing helped to raise standards and energise the sport. The intellectual contribution this influx brought is less widely appreciated, but Drasdo’s was a crucial voice, describing the climbing experience from a deeper, more thoughtful perspective.

His climbing career was long – and he was initially in the front rank, as the Bradford Lads put up new routes across the heartlands of British climbing, particularly in Yorkshire and the Lake District. With the end of petrol rationing in 1950, the Bradford Lads acquired motorbikes or tried their luck hitchhiking; they were adventure beatniks on the road, first in the UK and later in the Alps. “If the Boys had a fixed address,” Drasdo wrote, “that address was Wall End Barn,” the informal doss in Langdale where the future legends of British climbing would coalesce.

Drasdo’s best known contribution from this era was North Crag Eliminate on Castle Rock in Thirlmere, climbed in September 1952 and involving a precarious step up off the upper boughs of a tree to regain the rock face high above the ground. Though he lacked the technical brilliance of Brown, Drasdo was tenacious and determined on rock, belying his contemplative and softly spoken persona.

The following summer, Dolphin was killed in a fall below the Dent du Géant in the Mont Blanc range. It was a loss for the Bradford Lads, who spun apart, and a personal one for Drasdo, reinforced the following year when he witnessed the death of a climbing partner, the Polish émigré André Kopczynski, when the rope sling he was abseiling from broke. The trauma of these events changed Drasdo powerfully, and when he looked back, served as the limit of his ambition to be a hard climber. Exploration, philosophical and geographical, was his new direction.

He focused his energies in the mid-1950s on the Poisoned Glen in Donegal, a magical place in Drasdo’s imagination, and in those days physically remote. He wasn’t the first there, but he made important contributions, often with Neville, like Berserker Wall on Ballaghageeha Buttress and the Direct on Bearnas Buttress. He became deeply interested in Irish literature, too, and formed longstanding friendships among Ireland’s small band of climbers.

This love of the esoteric was reflected in the guidebooks he wrote. In the 1950s he surveyed the eastern fells of the Lake District, crags that were then new to most climbers, often hitchhiking to cliffs and climbing solo for want of partners; then, in the late 1960s, Lliwedd in the Snowdon massif, famously unfashionable but atmospheric and looming.

Drasdo was born in Bradford, son of William, a town-hall clerk, and his mother, Ella, a significant influence. Soon afterwards the family moved to the village of Thornton, to the west of the city – a liminal place between town and country with the rewards of both, a niche that Drasdo prized. Leaving Thornton grammar school at 16, he earned £1 a week as a hospital administrator and reliedon two institutions to widen his horizons: the Youth Hostel Association and Bradford’s public library. On a cycling trip to Snowdonia, he saw climbers heading off to the cliffs with ropes over their shoulders and knew what he wanted to be.

Both he and Neville, who was working at an optician’s, studied in the evenings, and went on to higher education. Neville became a professor and distinguished research scientist in optometry, while Harold trained as an English teacher before becoming an instructor at White Hall Outdoor Education Centre in Derbyshire, the first such facility for state-educated young people. His boss, Geoff Sutton, would join him in the Poisoned Glen. In the early 1960s he was appointed chief instructor and then chief warden at the Towers Outdoor Education Centre near Capel Curig, owned by Wolverhampton local education authority, where he stayed until retirement.

His years in outdoor education led him to write an influential treatise, Education and the Mountain Centres, published in the aftermath of the 1971 Cairngorm tragedy, when six young people died of exposure in a storm. Drasdo’s work was a thoughtful analysis of the role of risk and the experience of nature in developing young minds.

Drasdo took great care with his writing and published rarely, but retirement allowed him to finish The Ordinary Route and cultivate his smallholding above Llanrwst, while exploring the crags of Arenig Fawr in south Snowdonia.

He is survived by his wife, Maureen.

• Harold Drasdo, climber, writer and outdoor instructor, born 21 February 1930, died 3 September 2015