Pye David Randall

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Biografie:
DAVID RANDALL PYE
1886-1960
DAVID PYE was born in 1886 and was educated at Tonbridge and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he gained a 1st Class in the Mechanical Science Tripos and a half-blue for rifle shooting. He then spent a short period in Mather & Platt's works, and in 1909 he was appointed to the Lecturership in Engineering Science at Oxford, to be followed in 1911 by a Fellowship of New College. During the First World War he served as Experimental Officer with the R.F.C. and R.A.F. and after the war was over he returned to Cambridge as a Fellow of Trinity and Lecturer in Engineering. In 1925 he felt it his duty to accept the offer of the Deputy Directorship of Scientific Research at the Air Ministry and twelve years later he was appointed Director. His work at the Air Ministry was of the highest value to the country: he was appointed C. B. in 1937, and in the same year he was elected to the Royal Society. In 1943 he became Provost of University College, London and there, till his retirement in 1951, he was conspicuously successful in dealing with the immense problems of post-war reorganisation and reconstruction with which he was faced. He was knighted in 1952. In 1926 he married Miss Virginia Kennedy, who survives him with two sons and a daughter. He died in February, 1960, after a long illness.
He left no record, not even the baldest notes, of his ascents, but it appears that he first climbed seriously in 1911 when he stayed at Ogwen, and that in the following year he climbed with a guide from Argentiere.
From 1912 to 1938 he scarcely missed a season in the Alps, except during the First World War, and he constantly visited North Wales, where he was often a member of Geoffrey Young's Pen-y-Pass parties. He made his last high Alpine expeditions in 1947, but till 1956 he walked every year in Switzerland or Austria.
He usually climbed without guides and he was often leader of the party. After his marriage he was frequently accompanied by his wife, and his capacity for friendship is witnessed by the large number of those who at various times were with him on the rope. Most of his expeditions were in the Pennines, the Oberland and around Mont Blanc, perhaps the most exacting of them being the Fletschhorn-Laquinhorn-Weissmies traverse in fast time with H. E. L. Porter. He was elected to the Alpine Club in 1922, George Mallory being his proposer and Geoffrey
Young his seconder, to the Committee in 1927 and to the Vice-Presidency in 1956.
In Britain he usually climbed in North Wales whither he returned again and again, and there he led the first ascents of Faith and Charity on the Idwal slabs. (In A.J. Vol. 38 there are reproduced some excellent photographs of him in action on the Garter Traverse on Lliwedd.) He also climbed in the Lakes and in Skye, where he was with Mallory, L. G. Shadbolt and Mrs. Mallory in 1918 and led the first ascent of the severe Crack of Doom after climbing the Cioch Direct.
Pye was a reticent man of gentle and friendly humour, and outwardly imperturbable. His companions will not forget the quiet confidence with which he met a daunting thunderstorm on the West ridge of the Lauterbrunnen Breithorn. He was ahvays bored by any analysis of the urge to climb, and his friends will remember his impatience with solemn speculations on the inner meaning of Mallory's famous answer when asked why he wanted to climb Everest. He wrote nothing about his own mountaineering, but his memoir of Mallory is a model of its kind. Its last paragraph, which has passed into Alpine literature, reveals his own attitude and that of thousands of others. But to give some idea of Pye as a man and a mountaineer I can certainly not do better than quote, with Lord Adrian's leave, what he has written about him:
His physique was not exceptional: he was of medium build, compact and neat in his movements. He climbed deliberately, with no untidy struggles or display of brute force, relying on balance and skill and moving smoothly and seemingly without much effort on the most arduous routes. One could see him sometimes as the engineer instinctively judging thrusts and pressures, or as the craftsman confident in his skill and happy in using it. At the summit of a high mountain in the Alps he would rest in the sunlight with little said but in profound contentment, satisfied with the world ....
David was fastidious and he had the charm of the man of taste and intelligence who can explain his preferences but feels no need to assert their superiority. He was not unconventional, but there was something aristocratic in his nature, an independence and a set of rules and values which were not to be distorted by the fashions of the moment. In Council he was never arrogant or certain that his decision must be right and many of them were not made without stress.
It was in fact the high standards he believed in and his honest awareness of difficulties and other points of view which gave him his authority. It was in part because he seemed to be without the ambition to lead that we trusted his leadership, as the director of scientific organisation, as the head of University College, or as the first on a climb in the Alps.
C. A. ELLIOTT.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 65, 1960, Seite 269-271


Geboren am:
1886
Gestorben am:
1960