Chorley Katharine Lady

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Biografie:
Katharine, Lady Chorley 1898-1986
Katharine's place in the climbing world is set in the right perspective when we remember that she was offered the FRCC Presidency in 1958-28 years before the FRCC or the AC elected their first woman President. The FRCC chose her to open their first hut, Brackenclose, in 1937, and she and Len Winthrop Young were joint guests of the FRCC in 1980, as representatives of pioneering families in mountaineering. Katharine met her husband Theo through the FRCC, and her marriage in 1925 strengthened her devotion to the Lake District and to mountaineering. She was elected President of the LAC and Vice President of the FRCC in 1953, and Theo was President of the BMC and Roger of the CUMC in the same year. She was Editor of the FRCC Journal, 1928-32 and 1942-45. She and Theo between them edited the Journal for 18 years.
Katharine served as a VAD in the First World War and afterwards worked as her father's secretary and later for the Liberal Party. She had two special ambitions, to learn to write English prose and to become a good mountaineer. With typical modesty she felt unsure of achieving them, but she did so, triumphantly. As Katharine Hopkinson she was born into a dedicated and distinguished mountaineering family, related to the Slingsbys and a close neighbour and friend of the Pilkingtons. The friendship with the Pilkingtons began when Katharine's father and uncles carried Lawrence Pilkington (one of the first guideless parties to climb the Meije) down to Wasdale Head after an accident in Piers Ghyll. This ideal background was shadowed by a family tragedy, when her uncle John Hopkinson with one son and two daughters was killed on the Petite Dent de Veisivi in 1898. Her father never climbed seriously again, and Katharine found that the tragedy marked her generation too. But she enjoyed and led good climbs in the Lakes, the Alps and Norway. Sid Cross describes her as 'a very strong mountaineer' and mentions how, with her children Gillian and Patrick, “she walked round Mont Blanc after the war, long before the days of a guidebook to the walk” - it had been described in an 1886 Baedeker. Articles about her climbs include a delightful description of Pike's Crag on a rare holiday in 1941, and an ascent of the Whymper Couloir on the Aiguille Verte. In 1935 Katharine and Theo, with Dorothea and Ivor Richards, the Bowdens and Paul Sinker did a glacier tour of the Ötztal. Katharine in her) obituary of Ivor recalls that trip and the happy evenings of wide ranging “real talk” in Austrian huts. It must have been a splendid party.
In “Manchester Made Them”, an account of her early life, and in “Hills and Highways” Katharine shows a gift for the precise and striking phrase that reminds me of another north country writer and mountaineer, C E Montague. She shared his fascination with the shape of the country, dodging happily from an eagle's eye view to the ground beneath your boot. She edited a pamphlet, “Lakeland-a Playground for Britain”, and was a strong supporter of the establishment of the Lake District National Park. Other books were Annies and the Art of Revolution and a biography of Arthur Hugh Clough.
Katharine had the satisfaction of seeing her son Roger continue the family tradition with notable climbs in Britain, the Alps and Himalaya, and become President of the AC in 1983. She visited the Lakes with Ann in 1986, did some walks and was delighted to find that the country she felt half her home-she spent the war years there-had not lost its magic for her.
Katharine shared with Dorothea Richards a memorial meeting of their friends at the Alpine Club. They also shared an indestructible quality. Their commitment to the world of mountains and mountaineering, and their wide interests and sympathies, were undefeated by age and illness, and continued to enrich their clubs and friends.
Margaret Darvall
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 92, 1987, Seite 310-311



Geboren am:
1898
Gestorben am:
1986