“My brother was a climber back in the 50’s-quite good I
think’. As the Communist Party meeting emptied into the damp Mersey night,the
visiting national organiser from London chatted to local activists. “This is
Pete’; the area secretary introduced my informant. Pete Betts’. Mild interest
flickered. ‘Your brother’s name isn’t Vince by any chance?’
Later in the pub to my mounting excitement, Pete pieced
together the jigsaw. Vince Betts had exploded across the climbing scene in 1955
when he seconded Don Whillans on Slanting Slab on Cloggy’s West Buttress, of
which historians noted in ‘The Black Cliff’... No previous climb had combined
such difficulty, exposure and lack of protection, and few have since.
Then, like a one hit wonder, Vince had vanished. Out of the
blue (Or rather, out of the red!’, 30 years later I had stumbled upon his
trail. “ He lives in Harare, I’ll send you his address’ said Pete.In Braided Lives, novelist Marge Piercy skilfully weaves
together the apparently unconnected trajectories of her main characters into a
shifting web of interconnections. Discovering Vince Betts' tracks had the same
effect on me. I had followed his footsteps across Slanting Slab's still frightening
first pitch in 1965, when I seconded Dave Potts on an early ascent. In 1975 I
had written about the climb in a chapter in Hard Rock. Now, 18 years later,
across three decades and two continents, guess whose rope feels braided with
mine? We have never met, but Vince has corresponded voluminously; generous
outpourings of memory, hewn in painstaking hand-writing, by someone to whom I
suspect writing does not come easily.
His story shouts out to be told, a
forgotten fragment of our history that lights up a way of climbing life that
has all but gone. So I've picked out several recurring themes from the wealth
of material Vince's letters make available.
Vince Betts was born into a catholic family in Sheffield in
1934, the eldest of eight children. He left school at 15 and served an arduous
apprenticeship as a fitter at loco-motive sheds in Millhouses, Grimethorpe and
Derby. A neighbour, John Storrey, introduced Vince and some of his teenage pals
to climbing. "He got hold of Climbing in Britain by J.E.Q. Barford and
top-roped us up climbs at Burbage with a 100ft Italian hemp rope." Thursday
evenings were weekend planning time. "Every one was fun — climbing,
sleeping in barns, boozing, getting sick. I was very aware how many friends got
married very young. I just felt sorry for people who did not understand the
call of the hills.
To get to them I would let nobody stand in my way." Don
Cowan, who was to second Joe Brown on the first ascent of the Cyrn Las classic ‘The
Grooves’, introduced the youthful Vince to harder climbing and to the Rock and
Ice, and in 1955 he was accepted into the club. "In those days there were
strict criteria to join. You had to be able to lead VS on any rock in Britain
and also you had to be able to get on with the lads." Vince qualified on
both counts. "In the early 50s there were probably less than 5,000
climbers in all. You could go to Stanage on a sunny Saturday morning and see
only two or three other groups. Quite a few climbers were working class, but
most came from the university clubs. I viewed. Oxford accents with suspicion.
It was always them that went to the Himalayas with champagne and porters.
"Never did I train for climbing. As a manual worker it appeared a waste of
time.
In fact it was unheard of in the 50s. You got fit by doing
lots of hard climbs." By modern standards Vince's generation also climbed
without equipment. "The best footwear was Dunlop Ventner tennis shoes, or
the cheaper plain black Woolies plimsols — both gave a good grip. After a year
I managed to buy a pair of walking boots and had them nailed with clinkers.
With my own hemp rope, a few krabs and slings and an ex-army anorak, I felt like
a real climber. "From the Rock and Ice I learned a lot about safety
techniques. They were regarded with awe — not only because they had the best
climbers who went climbing every weekend in all weathers — but because they
had a tremendous safety record."
The summer of 1955 was glorious. Vince, often climbing with
Jimmy Curtis, Tom (Lou) Waghorn and Ron Moseley, had done Gargoyle and four
other climbs on Cloggy's East Buttress. On July 9, bound for Bow Shaped Slab,
Lou and he were enjoying Mrs Williams' Rock and Ice discount at the Half Way
House Cafe. In walked Don and Audrey Whillans. "We told him our plans, but
he insisted we should accompany him to 'have a look' at a new route he'd seen.
Knowing Don's surly moods of those days, we decided it was better to go along
rather than get a biff round the ear. "Well, we went to the start of what
was to become Slanting Slab. Don undid his rucksack and pulled out the gear. It
was only then I realised that 'look' meant attempt. "Don tied on, grabbed
a few slings, pitons and a hammer, and in a commanding voice told Lou to tie
on. At the time Lou was a sub-editor with the Sheffield Telegraph and was not
as developed bodywise as us manual workers. 'Don, this is not my type of
climb,' he stammered. Don's face became black with rage. 'Right oh! Vic, (he
always called me Vic), you can tie on then.'
Reluctantly I did so, and Don
proceeded to climb the access pinnacle and place the first peg." Vince had
never used artificial methods in climbing. "I came in for a torrent of
abuse from Don. He moved off the pegs and made the long leftwards traverse
above the Western Terrace." Twenty years later in Hard Rock, I wrote:
"Even as you crouch in slings on the eaves of the slabs, only 20 feet from
second, thermos flasks and solidity, the exposure begins to snap at you. Once
over the lip, the snap becomes a snarl..." Vince, like myself — and many
other seconds subsequently — was contemplating where his penduluming body would
end up in case of a fall when "a party of Cambridge types came up the
Terrace to see what we were up to, and one of them, Ted Wrangham, offered me a
back rope. I tied my 140ft rope round my waist, gave it to Ted and set off in
my sand shoes up the pitch.
"I found no difficulty (the climbing was then
unprotected 5b) until around 20ft from Don's belay, when I asked him for instructions,
as there appeared to be no holds, just a huge void under my feet. 'You see the
big vertical crack, the one you can just get your finger nails in? Use that and
swing across.' Don was very pleased with my performance. "Ted still held
my rope from the back-stop position on the Terrace. Don climbed up the next,
easier section in good spirits, did not take a belay, and just kept on climbing
to the full length of his 150ft Viking nylon rope. "With a fisherman's
knot and two half hitches, I tied Don's rope onto mine, pulled up mine from
below, and belayed him up the rest of the 180ft pitch." When Whillans took
in the slack rope, the knot jammed, and Betts had effectively to solo part of
the pitch, coiling the rope as he climbed. "After that the climbing was OK
until I reached a steep wall with a loose, downward-pointing piton. As Don used
it, the piton had moved. With a tight rope I managed the move.
How Don - 5ft 3 inches against my 5ft 7, did it, I don't
know." Audrey, who had descended from the top, greeted the two climbers at
the top of this epic pitch. "We went down to Half Way House and celebrated
with a cup of tea. Mrs Williams had been following our progress through
binoculars. We didn't say much about the route because we didn't give it a name
for about a year. "Five years went by before it got a second ascent, by
Joe Brown and Harry Smith I think, and they were both suitably impressed with
its difficulty. We were even accused of breaking off the handholds, but we told
them there weren't any to break off. "Years later I heard that Hugh Banner
was talking to someone about the first ascent in a pub in Wales, and said that
Mortimer Smith was Whillans' second. Someone corrected him, whereupon Banner,
unaware that Don was listening, retorted, `Ah yes, Betts' only claim to fame.' " And what's thine?' floated Whillans' rejoinder along the bar."
The Black Cliff has little to say about Betts, save that he
was "a noisy, swarthy-faced character who enlivened the climbing scene at
the time." In one of my letters I asked Vince what he thought of this
description of him. "My most famous nickname was Black Betts, probably
because of my motorbike gear. It was said that I used to go through the
Betws-y-Coed bends clipping my own ears on either side on the bridge parapets.
"In the mid-50s everyone liked the old climbing songs, but we used to
worship The King', Elvis. I remember Dennis Gray singing Rock Around the Clock
while leading a climb on Cloggy, with the rope going up in jerks in time to the
music. At hard bits he'd go quiet, but at the jugs the music would start
again." Christmas '56 was a famous Rock and Ice meet at Wasdale Head.
"One night after closing time, we had a game of barn rugby, played with a
can of baked beans, about 25 to each team and several injuries.
Don Whillans was in
his element - right in the thick of it all. "Once Wilson Pharaoh, the
landlord, came leaping over the bar because a climber had used bad language,
although he later took the towel off the pumps after closing time, with a loud
shout of 'first orders please!'" Another theme runs equally strongly
through Vince's letters — work. It is unusual today, when Britain's
manufacturing has been laid so low, to read an account of a climbing, career
squeezed between loco sheds, factory and building site. His descriptions make
work in Sheffield and Manchester's heavy industry sound like hard, grueling graft,
so gushing about the "dignity of labour" is out of place. Nonetheless
the framework — the counterpoint— that honest toil provided, comes through very
strongly as the other side of the coin to Vince's bacchanalian hedonism, as
does his bitter resentment at "being too busy working when I should have
been climbing."
How the words of the
Manchester Rambler have echoed through the lives of Vince's generation of climbers.
"I'll be a free man ON SUNDAY." In 1960 Vince emigrated to Australia,
followed by spells in New Zealand, Canada, Zambia and Namibia — working on
hydro-electricity schemes and in mining, wherever he could use his engineering
skills, sometimes living what he calls "the alternative lifestyle" —
getting married, doing a teacher training course and all the time going into
the mountains. Sometimes he was spotted back in Sheffield, to which he
occasionally returned, but always wanderlust seemed to pull him again. Once
Whillans, on a visit to New Zealand, sought Vince out "in a town called
Cromwell, where they grow the biggest and best apricots in the world. I was
amazed how much weight Don had put on. He had just returned from an expedition
down the Amazon. Naturally we went to the pub and yarned into the night.
The original feature spread
Then
we breakfasted on Lake Waitaki shore." Now the family — a wife and three
teenage kids — is settled in Zimbabwe, where Vince trains new generations of
fitters for the engineering trade at the local poly, keeps bees for a hobby and
spends much time on exploration, visiting wildlife parks and going on walking
safaris; rock climbing on Wednesday evenings in Harare quarry, being an active
member of the rowing club and trying to import a pick-up truck from Japan. Old
climbers never die, they just climb different things! Vince's life is braided
also. "After Don lost his licence for drunken driving, (front page of the
Mirror - my mother sent out the paper), he bought a pedal cycle to get to the
pub when he lived at Rawtenstall. "I stayed at his place in Wales on a
visit in April '85. He gave me the bike — a green Peugeot sports — as he'd no
further use for it. I still use it. It's in my garage in Harare. I look on it
as a memento of a great climber and of great days."
Dave Cook: Climber, March 93.
