Side Anthony Douglas Bertram

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Biografie:
ANTHONY DOUGLAS BERTRAM SIDE
Douglas Side died on February 16, 1961, at the age of sixty-four years after a life closely associated with mountains and mountaineering froman early age, and his death removes one of the most sturdy characters of the Club. He was also well known in other climbing clubs in this country, and was a member of the Wayfarers' Club (for whom he sat on the British Mountaineering Council) and the Fell and Rock Climbing Club. He played a considerable part in founding the Mountaineering Section of the Camping Club in the early nineteen-thirties, and was its first Chairman.
Douglas Side began his mountaineering in his teens, and visited Gilgit with his father as early as 1913. In 1914 he began climbing in the Alps, at Zermatt and Arolla, and, after service in the 1914-18 war as an Artillery Officer, he was able in 1919 to pay a visit to the Darjeeling area. Following this he was for a time in 1920 at Grenoble University in close reach of the Dauphine mountains, and this was the beginning of an alpine climbing career which continued until within a year or two of his untimely death. He was elected to the Alpine Club in 1937 with an extensive list of climbs in the Dauphine and Mont Blanc groups in particular, and by the end of ·his life he had climbed widely in practically all the major groups of the Western Alps. He was proposed for the Club by G. R. Speaker and seconded by P. J. H. Unna. He was a member of the Committee from 1954-56.
His association with Lake District climbing was an important part of his life and climbing career, and in 1932 he married Margaret Boothroyd, of a family well known in the Fell and Rock Climbing Club.
A great deal of his climbing over many years was with his wife, and they celebrated their silver wedding in the Lake District in 19 57 at Grasmere, where they had been married. We convey our sincere sympathies to her and to their son.
At the beginning of the 1939-45 war, Douglas Side was called to the services from the reserve, and was in 1943 sent to the Middle East in a financial advisory capacity. He was in civil life an Inspector of the Midland Bank. In Cairo on the way he was suddenly transferred to the Mountain Warfare Training Centre that had by that time been set up in the Lebanon, and he remained there for approaching a year and a half, giving instruction in mountaineering. When the Centre closed in September, 1944, he was posted to the Mountain Training Teams in the Apennines in Italy. This notable experience served him well in the years after the war in training young climbers. He was one of the leaders in the A.C. Novices Meets held after the war, and many climbers owe a great deal to him for his encouragement in their early days.
After the ascent of Everest in 1953 and the subsequent establishment of the Mount Everest Foundation, Douglas Side became its first Honorary Secretary, and much of the burden of work in the earlier years of the Foundation fell on him. The assistance he gave to the Himalayan and other expeditions supported by the Foundation will be well remembered.
Douglas Side was a fine mountaineer, and a rock climber of ability. He was a man of outstanding integrity and firm principle, and he set standards of behaviour for himself that few of his friends could match but which he never seemed to expect of them. Indeed towards his
friends he showed a quizzical liberality of thought and an ironic humour which made him a wonderful companion in the mountains, and he was capable of generating a feeling of affection which is given to few men.
It is not for nothing that one of his friends said to me after his death that for him the Club would never be quite the same again. He was a sick man for many months before his death, but some of us saw to it that he attended the meetings of the Club during this time, and he was there a month before he died.
I myself first met Douglas Side in the early nineteen-thirties soon after my student days, and I climbed with him both in the Alps and in this country well before the war. He proposed me for this Club.
Over the war years I did not see much of him and I was in Berlin until 1948, but after my return to England he and I took to climbing together in the Alps, and we were together in successive years, alone or with others such as L. R. Pepper and my brother, until illness overtook him.
Over these years we were in Zermatt, Saas Fee, the Oberland, Chamonix, the Italian AIps and other places as well, and I recall those occasions with pleasure and gratitude. My best recollection of him I have recounted elsewhere, but it is appropriate to repeat it here as characteristic of the man. It was on the Wildelsigen Ridge of the Balmhorn in 1956, when he and I set out from the hut along with two other parties, one a Swiss guide and his client and the other, two young English climbers. The other two parties soon went ahead, but in the middle of the morning a blizzard fell upon us and turned the day to the worst I have ever spent on a mountain. The Swiss guide and his companion struggled over the summit; the two English lads were never seen again. Douglas and I turned back, and took six hours to climb down seven or eight hundred feet of the open rocky couloir sheeted with rain and sleet and with hardly a belay. At its foot late in the afternoon I muttered that it had been an even chance, but he turned in surprise and bleakly replied that he had never been in any doubt.
C. G. WICKHAM.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 66, 1961, Seite 420-422


Gestorben am:
16.02.1961