Longland Jack Sir

(Bearbeiten)

Biografie:
Sir Jack Longland 1905 -1993
Jack Longland died on 29 November 1993 aged 88. He joined the AC at the unusually early age of 22, proposed and seconded by Claude Elliott and Geoffrey Young. He was on the Committee in 1939, Vice-President in 1961 and President in 1974. He was President of the Climbers' Club 1945-48 and Honorary Member in 1964; he was made an Honorary Member of various north country climbing clubs. I was two years junior to him at Cambridge but since he stayed on after taking his degree, as a Fellow of Magdalene College responsible for the Pepys Library, we overlapped for four years and remained friends ever since. As to the last years at Bakewell, I have depended on help and advice from his daughter Jo and from Jim Perrin.
At CambridgeJack was a brilliant all-rounder taking a first in the History Tripos and first-class honours with special distinction in English, while also winning an athletics Blue as a polevaulter and inevitably becoming President of the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club, a distinction which Basil Goodfellow used to equate to a Blue. In the mountaineering club he was contemporary with Lawrence Wager, with whom he did many of the major Alpine routes, and with Gino Watkins, Wyn Harris, Freddie Chapman and Ivan WaIler, all names to conjure with. But the father figure for some of us, and certainly for Jack, was Geoffrey Wrnthrop Young whose house and whose Easter parties at Pen y Pass were great gathering places for the climbing fraternity. Jack was a dashing figure on these occasions, active on the hills, a witty and stimulating companion, excelling also with his compact muscular figure at such gymnastic contests as arm wrestling and climbing round an upright chair without touching the floor. But it would be a mistake to make too much of Geoffrey Young's influence, for the tradition of guideless climbing was already strongly established in the Club. He was incidentally also a roof climber but deplored the Publicity which this activity later received. 'The whole point about roof climbing, he said, 'was its quietness and anonymity and the University authorities would not take any strong action, such as sending you down, if you kept quiet.' This versatility was a foretaste of what was to come in his professionallife. The high point of Jack's rock-climbing achievement, and the most famous, was certainly the first ascent of the climb which bears his name and which he pioneered and led on the West Buttress of Clogwyn du'r Arddu over the Easter and Whitsun weekends of 1928 when he was still at Cambridge. The Easter visits to the cliff were essentially for reconnaissance, exploration and preliminary gardening, in which Frank Smythe and Graham Brown were also involved. They abseiled off in bad weather halfway up the climb and came back at Whitsun, Jack with Frank Smythe,
Ivan WaIler and Peter Bicknell. When they got to the foot of the climb a party from the Rucksack Club, led by Fred Piggott, were on the point of starting up it but they recognised that Jack's party had prior rights and encouraged Jack to lead a combined attack. He described what followed in an article he wrote in old age for the magazine Crags (No 18, pIS): We had a sort of toss up to decide who was going up and who wasn't and Ivan Waller and Peter Bicknell stood down which was very gallant of them, and we linked together - myself, Frank Smythe, Fred Piggott, Bill Eversden and Morley Wood. 1thought Piggott was going to lead it, but he said that I'd been on this one first, and 1was simply flung the end of the rope and told to get on with the business. But Jack was no mere cragsman; he left the further exploration of Clogwyn du'r Arddu to others and turned his attention to the Alps, doing many of the classic ridge climbs and some new routes. Like the rest of us, he had his eye on the chance of getting to the Himalaya, and .when the 1933 expedition to Everest was being planned his climbing record made him an obvious choice for it. Not having been at high altitude before, he was at a disadvantage compared with Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and Wyn Harris and was not in either of the teams chosen to go for the summit. But he played a big role in establishing Camp 6 and had the formidable task of bringing down a party of exhausted Sherpas in a blizzard - a real feat of route-finding and leadership. Needless to say, he relished the whole experience of the expedition, the rivalry and companionship, the physical challenge of high altitude, and the mutual trust between Sahibs and Sherpas.
Jack's next major project was, in contrast, a journey to the Watkins Mountains in Rasmussen Land, the biggest mountain mass in Greenland which had first been seen from the air by Gino Watkins in 1930 when on a survey flight in a moth aircraft. The expedition was under the leadership of Lawrence Wager and was very much a Cambridge party with August Courtauld, who had chartered Shackleton's old ship The Quest to get them there, Lawrence's brother Hal and Dr Fountaine, a geologist. Bad ice conditions forced them to land 70 miles short of their intended starting point and the approach to the mountain required a nine days march hauling sledges over very difficult country before reaching the peak which they successfully climbed, measuring its height at 12,2S0ft - the highest mountain in the Arctic. Jack described the expedition in his second paper to the Club (AJ58, 1936).
He was invited by Tilman to join the 1938 expedition to Everest but had just undertaken a new job and felt obliged to decline. The course of Jack's professional life was decided in the depressed years
of the early thirties when he was first a lecturer in English at Durham University and then director of the Durham Community Service Council. He took an immediate liking to the Durham mining community and was deeply moved by the injustice of their life and hardships. This caring idealistic side of Jack is one that, in my experience, he never made a show of. His motivation to enter the field of state education is best expressed in his own words from an address he gave in 1970: I came into educational administration at the end of the squalid and hungry 1930s after some years working with unemployed Durham miners and their families. I think that those underfed children, their fathers on the scrapheap, and the mean houses under the tip, all the casual product of a selfishly irresponsible society, have coloured my thinking ever since. They were one main cause ofmy entering the statutory education business. I had been shunting about in social sidings for long enough, helping men to move mountains with little shovels. I wanted the mainline express to a new world and fair shares all round. After a spell as Deputy Director of Education in Hertfordshire (1940) he moved to the top job in Dorset (1942) and then to Derbyshire in 1949, a post he held till his retirement in 1970. Despite his own elitist Background he was an enthusiastic supporter of the move to comprehensive Schools and played a crucial part in introducing them in Derbyshire. An initiative which was particularly his own was the establishment at White Hall near Buxton of an outdoor education centre run by the county. It was the first of its kind and its success led many, indeed most, counties to follow suit. This led, in turn, to the establishment of the Mountain Leader Training Board of which he was Chairman from 1964 to 1980 and to his active membership of many committees and commissions dealing with sport and outdoor education, notably the Outward Bound Trust Council, the Central Council for Physical Recreation and the Sports Council of which he was Vice-Chairman 1971-74. He was also a member of the Royal Commission on Local Government, 1964-67.
In parallel with all these activities, Jack had in effect a second career as a broadcaster on various brains trusts and similar programmes. His erudition, quick wit and sense of fun made him an immediate success in this role and, in particular, he was for no less than 20 years the chairman of the famous programme My Word, one of the high spots of sound radio. The knighthood awarded on his retirement as Director of Education both surprised and gratified him but here I agree with another obituarist that the Establishment had missed an opportunity; for Jack had been a Long time in the Derbyshire job and was surely overdue for a move to bigger responsibilities and opportunities. Perhaps he just didn't want to move on or maybe he had given offence in high places, for he had a sharp tongue and could be quite combative, ever ready to stand up for what he thought right even at the risk of unpopularity. Back in the thirties he had been active in the behind-the-scenes dispute over the leadership of the 1936 Everest expedition, a stance which effectively ruled him out from joining the party. In his valedictory address to the Club he spoke out strongly in a way that, to my knowledge, no one else had done against the decline in manners and moral standards among some young British mountaineers. Later still, in his last years as head of the Mountain Leader Training Board, he got at loggerheads with the BMC and a deadlock resulted which the Sports Council was quite unable to resolve. It fell to the President of the Alpine Club to intervene as honest broker to get the contestants to agree to an impartial enquiry. After retirement Jack continued with his many activities and in 1974 was elected President of the Club. I have already referred to his valedictory address and at the end of it he recalled what Leo Amery had said on the same occasion: 'For myself I echo the voice of a more distinguished President, that he was prouder of being elected to that office than of being appointed Privy Councillor. I would put up the ante a bit and say I'd be prouder of the Presidency than if I were to become Archbishop of Canterbury:
As to Jack's last years, he had a great circle of friends whom he saw at Bakewell or in the Savile Club or at North Country dinners and events. For a man of his active disposition old age was bound to be a frustrating time and two strokes further cramped his style, robbing him of the use of the car; but there were always friends at hand to provide company and transport. He had great inner resources and retained his mental activity almost to the end. Then, in the nineties, came the great sadness of the deaths in quick succession of his son John and his wife Peggy. He will be sorely missed by many of us.
Peter Lloyd
John Hunt writes:
Jack was numbered among a small group of brilliant young men who emerged from the old universities with double firsts in the mid-twenties; they included John Wolfenden and John Redcliffe-Maud, who played leading parts in extending the perspectives and scope of formal education beyond the classroom and into outdoor experience beyond the confines of school playing fields. Those ideas had their genesis in the private sector of education; Abbotsholme and Gordonstoun both preached the equal and complementary values of academic or technical learning on the one hand, and outdoor activities additional to, or instead of, competitive organised sport on the other. This was a concept of education by no means generally accepted in the years immediately after the War. Longland was fortunate in finding himself, on beginning his career as an education administrator, appointed to Durham Education Authority as deputy to another of the elite progressives, John Newsom. He followed Newsom to Hertfordshire and helped him to institute Kurt Hahn's County Badge scheme which, in turn, led to the creation of a far more successful project, the Duke of Edinburgh's Award. I count myself fortunate to have been associated with that small band of Chief Education Officers: Alec Clegg and Jirn Hogan, Newsom and Longland; for they provided me with much help and encouragement in the difficult task of launching Prince Philip's challenge to youth. From Hertfordshire Jack was promoted to the post of Director of Education for Dorset and, in 1949, to the same Senior position in Derbyshire where he remained until his retirement 21 years later. The establishment of the first local authority Outdoor Activities Centre in Britain, at Whitehall, is a monument to the inspirational lead which Jack Longland gave to a more holistic concept of education. One consequence of this was the greatly increased numbers of People walking, scrambling and climbing on our British hills and crags. Jack described it as an 'avalanche. As President of the British Mountaineering Council, he appreciated the need to set standards of safety and to establish levels of adult competence in hillcraft. He took the initiative in codifying
standards of leadership, which would be operated by a training board. The Mountain Leadership Certificate was established which could be earned through the channels of mountain centres approved by the board. I was privileged to be closely involved in that work, and recall the disapproval and criticism which were voiced by some of our fellow climbers at the time. Happily, time and circumstance have proved its value and the need to enable all young people to experience adventurous activities in the hills, and to gain that experience with proper safeguards. In these and other ways, Jack Longland rendered a great service to youth.
Charles Warren writes:
My memories of Jack, as he was always known to us, date from my Cambridge days in the late twenties in the heydays of the CUMC. With Lawrence Wager as our president, we were strictly brought up. Any form of notoriety in respect of our mountaineering activities was frowned upon and considered to be in bad taste. If you were involved in an accident, however trivial, you kept quiet about it. I remember an episode when I slipped off a hold on the bottom slab ef Central Buttress on Tryfan and landed safely on a grassy ledge laughing, only to be soundly ticked off by Lawrence.
I also remember an occasion when a party of us in the CUMC dashed up to Derbyshire to climb on Black Rocks, near Matlock, under the direction of our member Ivan WaIler. Here I was encouraged to climb a sandstone chimney, only to find that the exit involved a hand traverse and a pull up to safety onto a mantelshelf over rounded holds. As my hands slipped back, Jack, who had seen my predicament, tried to grasp them from above but could not secure me. I slipped through his fingers and fell some 50 feet or so through a small tree, landing on my back between the rocks on a grassy patch unscathed. In the CUMC tradition of those days, I was immediately taken up another hard climb. But Jack will, of course, always be remembered first and foremost for Longland's on Clogwyn du'r Arddu - that classic and most original route up the cliff. I was not on the first ascent but have memories of my own of the 'faith and friction slab' and the following pull-up over the overhang a wonderful route up the cliff in its day! I was not with Jack on Everest in 1933; that year I was climbing around the Gangotri glacier. But all of us in the mountaineering world at that time knew about his famous descent with a group of porters from a high camp down to the North Col in bad weather. Post-war I climbed with Jack in Zermatt on the Dent Blanche and on the Zinalrothorn at the AC centenary meet.
I am unable to dilate upon Jack's academic activities except to say that I knew that he was, for a time, the Pepysian Librarian at Magdalene College, Cambridge. But Jack, the great mountaineer and our very distinguished Past President, will always go down in my memory as Longland of Longland's on Cloggy.
Oliver Turnbull writes:
This may be the occasion to record an account of an accident involving my uncle, Professor H.W Turnbull, later FRS, AC member and President of the SMC, and Jack Longland. In a letter in June 1960 my uncle wrote to me:
, ... you have completed what the family vainly tried many years ago! It was March and there was some ice about on the bottom pitch of the slab. I remember it was hard, but nothing like the difficulty about halfway up the climb where one has to step across onto another slab on its right - the Faith and Friction Slab according to Smythe, who was in the party of the first ascent with Longland leading. I was third in a party of four, with Longland again leading in his second ascent. He went up all the pitches rapidly each time, until he reached that step: and he took a good quarter hour or more over that pitch, having first fixed a stone in a crack for a running belay. When my turn came I took even longer - in fact I missed my footing and came off, and dangled 70 or 80 feet below, about 15 feet from the nearest point of Wales, for 25 minutes before someone had time to climb up to my level and lassoo me with a spare rope. Then, as I beat a retreat, alas our number two Paul Sinker (now Sir Paul) badly burnt his hands with my running rope as he tried to save my fall. He and Longland had fixed a piton at the top of the pitch, which was a merciful safeguard, for they told me that their grass footing had slid down a good 12 inches during the tension on the rope ... '
There is a family tradition, recently confirmed as fact by my Cousin Derwent, which throws light on a possible cause of the accident. Before setting out for the climb my uncle, being a competent but modest rockclimber, had no rubbers of his own so had to borrow from others. The best he could obtain consisted of two right-footed shoes, and these had to do. When he came to the crux move the curve of the shoe caused him to slip off as he swung up and round on his left foot. On my ascent in the 1960s I had the benefit of a pair of matching PAs, but it is not hard to see how he was inconvenienced by his illmatched footwear. The Professor at least was none the worse for his experience. He was known to carry a small flask of brandy in his sack and when asked later if he had felt in need of a reviving nip replied: 'Oh no, I only take the brandy in case of emergencies. But I hope he offered the flask to his leaders who had saved the party from a catastrophe which would have devastated the climbing world.
Quelle: Alpine Journal 1994, Seite 336-341

IN MEMORIAM SIR JACK LONGLAND (1905-1993)
SIR JACK LONGLAND
On a crisp bright Saturday 4 December 1993 the remembrance service at All Saints Church Bakewell was well-filled. Family, friends, representatives of Local Government, educational and mountaineering worlds assembled. A well-ordered service, with characteristic lighter points, was followed by the usual half-comprehending retreat outside. Despite sadness in parting, converstion lifted, even lightened, once the congregation spilled into the sunlit churchyard. Mourning contemplates an end to so rounded a life. Yet Jack's was so full as to be celebrated by most who knew him.
For climbers he was one of the few, including Noel Odell, A.B. Hargreaves and Ivan Waller, who bridged twentieth century British mountaineering from the First World War to the present-day. His continued passion and literary and historical bent ensured that his pithy contributions always hit home. He was a personal contact with mountaineering's taproots. Like many, Jack became a climber after going to University.
Times were changing, and after a few seemingly carefree years aided by adequate income, ample academic leisure and motor car freedom, Jack settled into a full time English lecturing job at Durham University from 1930-36.
1933 was a pinnacle of his active climbing career, as an obvious candidate for Hugh Ruttledge's Everest Expedition, staffed from 'the well-to-do middle-classes, with a background of Oxbridge and a decent sprinkling of Army Officers and Government officials' {Everest, W. Unsworth)
Jack helped fix the route to the North Col for porters, and in setting up Camp V at 25,500 ft on 22 May. After going down with a sick porter he went back up to Camp V on 28 May. Next day with old, friends Wager and Wyn Harris and eight Sherpas, he established Camp VI at 27,400 ft halfway up the yellow band. This camp was higher than in 1924, and about 400 yards closer to the summit. Jack took charge of the decent, while the other two remained.
Reprinted (abridged) from High, (February 1994) with kind permission of the editor and author. Though Sir Jack Longland was not a member of the Himalayan Club, this obituary notice is printed as a special tribute — Ed.
The ascent route on the slabs of the North Face had been complex and Longland fhought and accident in descent very possible, and decided instead to descend the North Ridge.
A moment before all had been quiet and peaceful. In a few seconds Nature seemed to go mad. The far horizons vanished as the voice of the wind rose to a scream and the snow tore past in blinding sheets. The effect upon the tired men may be imagined. Their world disappeared, their goggles iced up till they had to be discarded, whereupon their eyelashes froze together, making it difficult to see at all. They were literally fighting for their lives.
It was well for them that they had a great leader and a great mountaineer at their head. Longland never faltered though, to use his own words, '...visibility suddenly narrowed to a snowswept circle of some twenty yards, and I was taking a party of porters down a ridge which I had never been on before, but which I knew to be illdefined and easy to lose, particularly in such conditions.'
Though he suffered moments of doubt, they kept close file and regular checks that all were present. He feared that they might be too close to the East Rongbuk glacier, and was not convinced even by the sight of the remains of the 1924 Camp VI. Some of the porters became exhausted in the wind and sat down and had to be urged back on their feet.
At last, over a little edge, and not a hundred feet below, appeared a green tent. It was camp V. Longland had brought his party safe through a test which even Mount Everest could hardly make more severe.
(Everest 1933, H. Ruttledge).
Though Lawrence Wager, Wyn Harris and Frank Smythe all continued, going as high as any man had ever climbed, the mountain remained unclimbed. Jack's retreat became famous, and gave him just cause to ask of later stalled efforts on the unclimbed NE ridge in the 1980s: 'Have you got up to our bit yet?'
Jack's life changed direction a little after Everest, though he played a part in the acrimonious disputes about the leadership of the expedition proposed and agreed by the Tibetans for 1935 or 1936. He supported Crawford as a new leader rahter than Ruttledge, one of a band of upstart young climbers to do so'. He thought Ruttledge too military, too little experienced as a mountaineer, and insufficiently decisive, though there was only slight evidence of this from 1933. There were other fissures in the 1933 party. Smythe disliked Longland's sharp argumentative side, and had something of an inferiority complex, and so was almost certainly glad to be rid of his group. They in turn were supported by Tom Longstaff. The consequence was that Longland, C.F. Meade, Graham Brown and Crawford resigned from the AC when the Everest Committee member Cox sought to be rid of Crawford on a. pretext. It was a sordid business. Crawford, favoured candidate of what Cox and Mason called 'The Soviet' was excluded from the 1936 team. Longland refused to go also: '...because he was not prepared to give unconditional support to the leader.'
Though the early monsoon clinched the issue, the failure of the 1936 expedition weakened the 'Old Guard' of the Everest Committee. George Ingle Finch demanded in the press: '...the leader of the next expedition... should himself be a climber — preferably the climber whose chances of getting to the summit are most fancied.'
Jack Longland now faced the dilemma of being offered a place again for 1938. He was refused leave of absence by his employers, the National Council for Social Services.
(Everest, W. Unsworth)

He compensated by an inspiration piece for the CUMC (1938) Why Climb Everest'. It was a controversy which had a curious echo in his opposition to the sacking of Eric Shipton as leader of the 1953 Expedition.
In great demand as a witty lecturer and after dinner speaker, he married, and along with his wife, in 1935 visited the Watkins Mountains of East Greenland in Shackleton's old boat The Quest where with Hountaine, the two Wagers and Courtauld he made the first ascent of Munck, 12,250 ft, Greenland's highest mountain. (ACJ May 1936.)
Jack made another career, earning the nickname 'Broadcasting Jack' among Bakewell locals. First as a regular member of the panel on BBC's 'Any Questions', then as Question Master for more than 20 years in the Radio Quiz 'My Word' he became a household name.
In mountaineering he became a ubiquitous patrician figure, with two sons who became well-known climbers and two daughters. He served ¦is president of the Mountain Training Board from 1963-78, was President of the BMC, and chaired any number of symposia and conferences in the last two active decades 1960-80, and the Peak Area Committee of the BMC for a long period when Eric Byne and his successors revamped the guidebooks to the Peak. Signs of dissatisfaction with some trends in mountaineering appeared, just as he occasionally put the knife to those in the past. Thus in the Alpine Journal under; Colonel Strutt in the 1930s he thought:'Too often appeared in the role of a shocked and censorious maiden aunt'. (AJ 1957 'Between the Wars'). ¦
Beyond the thickets of the training debates of the 1970s, and occasionally distressing exchanges with what he saw as unwise and doctrinaire oppositions. Jack's presidency of the Alpine Club from 1975-7 can be seen as another high point in a long caraeer.
He was a paradox, upper middle class in culture and social position, he lent his considerable strength and wit to the widest popularization of the outdoors that Britain had yet known. He wanted the climbing clubs to open their doors and educate in climbing's best traditions to defend them, but thought their real strength lay in affirming not in disapproving. He was one of the country's greatest rock and Alpine climbers who missed the 1936 Everest expedition on principle and 1938 because of professional commitments. He reamined opposed to 'irresponsible' and unstylish climbing to his last gasp. In the face of troublesome provocations at an age when most tire, he carried it all off with wit with and style, even disarming many who caught blasts from a sharper side which did not tolerate fools at all.
As he said on retiring from the AC Presidency:'I'd be prouder of the presidency than if I were to become Archbishop of Canterbury.'
Paul Nunn
Quelel: Himalaya Journal Vol. 50, 1994, Seite

Geboren am:
26.06.1905
Gestorben am:
04.12.1993