Carr Herbert Reginald Culling

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Biografie:
Herbert Reginald Culling Carr 1896-1986
I was surprised early last year to receive a message from Herbert Carr saying he wished to see me. We had never met before, although over the years I had received a number of letters from him: some of the early ones, to be honest, quite peppery. All that was long forgotten, and I wasted no time in making the trip to Cheltenham to visit him. He was approaching 90, and I knew from David Cox that he had already looked frighteningly old and frail the year before, when he had been guest of honour at the Helyg Diamond Jubilee celebrations in N Wales. Nevertheless, he had delivered a spirited speech and enjoyed himself so much that he made the long journey north again a month later so that he could spend his birthday at Pen-y-Gwryd.
Herbert was propped up in a chair when I arrived, several books and papers on a nearby table. The midday sun was streaming into the room and his lunch, he said, would be brought in at any minute. Had I remembered to bring some sandwiches? I had? Good. We shared a bottle of wine as we talked.
Conversation was obviously a strain; sentences would hang half-finished in the air while he regrouped his thoughts, and he wasted no time getting to the point. “I want you”, he said, “to write my obituary for the Alpine Journal”. True, I had been very curious to know why he had summoned me, but somehow this reason had not occurred to me. I protested. There were others, I said, who knew him and his climbing career far better than I. He waved a transparent
hand. “No matter”, he said, “I'll send you what notes you need.”
So that was decided. We talked a little more over coffee; then it was time for his nap and I was shown out. It was the only time I saw him. Over the following weeks, there were a number of telephone calls and a few short notes arrived for the Carr-box he had instructed me to buy, plus an -invitation to attend his 90th birthday party in July, when, to satisfy an old man's vanity, would I mind writing a brief report for the local newspaper? Sadly, it was not to be. On 23 April, Herbert Carr died.
What, then, to do? I had been right first time: from a bald list of facts and dates, there was no way I could contrive a reasoned assessment of Carr the mountaineer, even though his name had been familiar to me for as long as I had been interested in climbing. One of the first books I discovered in my early days of enthusiasm, when each week I rapaciously scoured the library for climbing books, was The Mountains of Snowdonia, which he had written with G A Lister in 1924. It was not long, either, before I heard the story of his accident in Cwm Glas in 1925 when his companion Stanley Van Noorden was killed. Herbert was severely injured, but, with no one to raise the alarm, he lay for two days and two nights out in the-open before being discovered, quite by chance, by a local shepherd. Almost 40 years later, when I began coming to Wales, Herbert's ordeal was still one of the legendary horror stories, frequently retailed.
Later, I learned of the leading part he had played in rebuilding the Oxford University Mountaineering Club after the First World War; and how, by virtue of his success, he was promptly co-opted into the Climbers' Club to perform a similar miracle there. One of his first acts was to discover a near-derelict cottage, Helyg, and to persuade his fellow members of its potential. It became the first club hut in Wales. Raymond Greene told of alpine adventures with Herbert; Herbert himself related how he helped put together the first Oxford University arctic expedition-to Spitsbergen in 1922-but how he relinquished his own place on it to Noel Odell, in order to accompany his father to the Alps.
What became obvious, the more I learned, was that, whatever his climbing achievements, Herbert's greatest gift to the mountain world was as a social 'fixer'. He could come up with bright ideas and see them through to success on the streng.th of his talent for creating an atmosphere of comradeship and enthusiasm. He enjoyed organizing and was generous with his time and affections. His devotion to his family, too, was unstinted: he shared several alpine seasons with his father, who had taken up climbing in his retirement, and together they were elected to the Alpine Club in 1922. Herbert told of an epic traverse of the Matterhorn he and his father had made with the young Chamonix guide, Alfred Couttet, in 1924. Surprised by storm, he feared for his father's safety. The old man was utterly exhausted when finally shepherded into the Solvay Hut. It was on one of the alpine meets he organised for the CC that Herbert met his future wife-Evelyn. They, too, shared many climbs together in a 58-year marriage.
Herbert's energy- persisted into old age. When he was 82 he set about editing the diaries of Andrew Irvine, who had died with Mallory on Everest in 1924 (see the review in AJ8S, 249, 1980).
But in 1984 Evelyn Carr died, and Herbert sank into ill-health and depression. It was then, fortuitously, that he received the invitation to take part in the Helyg celebrations. With a renewal of his characteristic vigour, he plunged into preparations and came up with the idea that a book be published to commemorate the occasion. After Herbert's death, his daughter confirmed that this last renewing of links with the climbing world, and all the many projects and enthusiasms it engendered, contributed enormously to the happiness of his last two years. Besides reviving old friendships, he had been able to make new friends among younger climbers, and he was inspired, largely by their interest, to start on an autobiographical work The Halcyon Days. It covered his early climbing years, up to the time of the Cwm Glas accident, after which, he said, his beloved mountains never seemed quite so halcyon again.
Audrey Salkeld
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 92, 1987, Seite 297-98



Geboren am:
1896
Gestorben am:
23.04.1986