Stabart Ralph Forester

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Biografie:
Ralph Forester Stabart (1889-1979)
“Father has gone to fix a belay for us higher up”! Such was the laconic message which I had received from his son Geoffrey of the death of my old climbing friend, Ralph Stobart, who had long been known as “The Belay”. He had died from a stroke on 10 March this year at his son's home at Tregony, Cornwall, at the age of 90, having been born at Stavely, Yorkshire, the fourteenth of 15 children. His father, William Cutley Stobart, was a prominent mine owner and a director of the historic Stockton and Darlington Railway. His mother, nee Francis Wilkinson, was a niece of General J T. Walker, sometime Surveyor-General of India.
After Wellington College and then a spell in the railway workshops at Dirlington, Ralph studied engineering at Leeds University. His fine physique made him a useful Rugby footballer for Harrogate; but he soon developed a passion for potholing and local climbing. During the First War he was invalided out of the Grenadier Guards, owing to a peculiar form of sleepy sickness, but then joined the equivalent of the Home Guard in a battalion that was being trained to run the railways in occupied territory; and in the Second War he joined the Air Ministry Inspectorate as an explosives examiner, or as he put it “O. C. Squibs and Crackers”.
I first met him at the end of the First War, and we were soon climbing together in Snowdonia, the Scottish Highlands and the Alps. A frequent member of our party was R. A. Frazer (late AC), and I was glad in 1920 to propose Ralph as a member also. In 1921, after a preliminary trip on skis in the Alps, he accompanied us to Spitsbergen on the first Oxford University expedition, and it was only an unfortunate attack of blood-poisoning that prevented his being a member of my exploratory sledging party into the interior of that glacier-bound land.
Of our Alpine climbs the principal was perhaps the traverse (guideless) of the Grands Charmoz and Grépon in 1920, apart from other local peaks. He was a sound mover on rock, snow and ice, and he soon earned the title of “The Belay”, as an excellent anchor of our party on steep terrain. This was, moreover, well exemplified on 2 of our Scottish climbs: (I) The Tower Ridge on Ben Nevis under winter conditions and semi-darkness, with R. A. Frazer in the party, and (2) the first complete ascent of 'the Chasm' on Buachaille Etive, Glencoe, involving an II hours' climb, in which my wife took part, and on which Stobart performed trojan work as a belay, and in backing up my lead on some of the rather fearsome pitches. His cheerful and generous disposition was a great asset on all these expeditions. He would sing vigorously during night driving to the N and ask us to join in to keep him awake; and on reaching the Scottish Border he would burst out into “Ho-ro my nut-brown maiden .. .”, and 'Scots wha hae wi'Wallace bled .. .” ete.
Stobart had married 4 times and had 8 children in all, a son of his first marriage, terminated tragically by the 'Spanish flu' in 1918, being Tom (Thomas Ralph), born in 1914 and so well known as a photographer, mountaineer and big-game specialist. Tom writes that he recollects his father not as a 90-year-old, but as a willing and solid stance that had once provided his head for his own son's exit from Y Gully in the Cairngorm Mountains!
N. E. Odell
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 85, 1980, Seite 267


Geboren am:
1889
Gestorben am:
1979