Brocklebank Thomas Anthony

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Biografie:
Thomas Anthony Brocklebank 1908-1984
By a coincidence, Tom Brocklebank's application for membership in 1932 was proposed and seconded by three of those same Eton masters who proposed and seconded John Bingham (see above - Ed), Powell, Howson and Slater, and he started climbing as a novice member at their meets. He rapidly became an excellent climber and joined them in many of their Alpine seasons in the late twenties. He was chosen for the 1933 Everest expedition, and the 1934 issue of the Climbers' Club Journal, which contained the obituaries of Powell and Howson, contained an article ofhis on the expedition. A journalist by profession, he was 76 when he died.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 90, 1985, Seite 282

Thomas Anthony Brocklebank 1908-1984
I know Tom's many friends would wish rather more about him to be added to the brief obituary which appeared in the AJ 90. It was, I think, inevitable that he was best known as an oarsman. He stroked Cambridge to victory three times, stroked the winning crew at the Grand at Henley twice, and very nearly won the Diamond Sculls against the then finest sculler in the world. I think he was undoubtedly the greatest Cambridge oarsman in the period between the wars, light in weight but of immense stamina and determination. But when Tom was chosen to join the 1933 Everest team, he was very much more than “the inevitable rowing Blue” whom Sandy Irvine had prefigured in 1924.
He had served a thorough and very well taught apprenticeship in guideless alpine climbing in the 1920s and early 1930s, thanks to the Eton masters who used to take promising pupils to their own favourite mountain districts, and put them through their paces. It was a terrible shock to Tom when three of them, Powell, Howson and Slater were killed on the Piz Roseg just when Tom was returning from Everest.
Competition to be chosen for Everest in those days was understandably fierce, but let there be no doubt that Tom Brocklebank more than amply justified his selection in 1933. As Hugh Ruttledge wrote in his book, “His one idea was to be of service, and he never departed from it, now or later.” Tom Brocklebank, and his companion and friend “Ferdie” Crawford were the essential link between the leading climbers and the support party of older and necessary specialists down the line. Hugh Ruttledge pays informed tribute to what they contributed. “Crawford and Brocklebank began their great series of six ascents and descents of the North Col slopes, revictualling Camp IV and escorting porters. This hard work made the position of the higher party secure ... the fact that it was carried through without a single accident reflects the greatest credit on both the skill and the energy of the pair.”
In the lost days between 21 and 25 May when through a conjunction of human failure and unlucky weather we forfeited our one real chance of reaching the top of Everest, Tom and Ferdie were putting in an immense amount of work, escorting parties up and down the North Col and keeping the long line of steps in order. When Camp V had temporarily to be abandoned, Ferdie and Tom were a tower of strength at the top of the ladder (over the ice bulge) roping up the invalid porters and lowering each man to one or other of us helow. It was when the going got tough that Tom and Ferdie justified their selection to join the 1933 party.
Tom's contribution to Ruttledge's book, Everest 1933, included anonymously as “Extracts from an Everest Diary”, is one of the most human and revealing sections ofthe book. None of us who has been there will forget Tom's vignette of the great pyramid of town, monastery, fort of Shekar Dzong, wantonly destroyed by the Red Guards in the 1950s – “The rock looks immense in the moonlight, and the clusters of ghostly white buildings seem to stand upon nothing at all.” Or there is the coming of spring to climbers chilled, frozen and debilitated by weeks of storm and cold on the upper mountain. “When we reached Camp I, we found little tufts of grass all around the camp. The change is really wonderful; six weeks ago Jack and I were hacking through a young glacier with ice-axes to get water here.” Tom goes on to Base Camp, and tells, 'I slept in a Whymper tent all to myself, and it felt like bedding down in the nave of St Paul's.'
Our friendship, nurtured on Everest, continued, to my good fortune, till Tom's death in 1984, the night before Jane and he were coming to stay with us. After 1933, we did not climb much again together, but the occasions when we did perhaps have a certain significance. Between VE day and VJ day there were naturally readjustments in the plans for the future of the armed services. There was a real risk that the lessons learnt in fighting through mountain terrain might be lost in lowland Europe. I believe that the laboriously fashioned Mountain Division was employed in capturing the infamous island of Walcheren, which is mostly below sea-level. There seemed also a risk that the commando units might be scrapped in the expected rundown which peace would bring. Tom Brocklebank had, as an Eton beak and housemaster, organised two very successful mountain training courses for members of school cadet corps, in Snowdonia in 1944 and 1945. This gave us a certain leverage, and Tom recruited me to visit Leo Amery, a Cabinet Minister but also, most appropriately, a former President of the Alpine Club.
At the India Office, Amery listened sympathetically to our plans for the official and continued blessing on mountain training. It is not for me to say what degrees of results we can possibly claim. The facts are that the Commandos survived, mountain training gradually blossomed into the Mountain Leadership Training Board, the Outward Bound Schools grew and flourished, and bit by bit Adventure Centres emerged from encouragement by local education authorities and voluntary organisation, a long time before royal endorsement was gratefully received in the Duke of Edinburgh's Award Scheme. In these linked developments, Tom Brocklebank played an early and influential part, and many who do not know of this have cause to be grateful to him.
Tom was pre-eminently a Preux Chevalier, fortuned by birth, looks, talents. But he gave back far more than he received, and it is not only mountaineers who have cause to be grateful to him.
Jack Longland

Anthony Rawlinson and Alec Malcolm write:
Tom Brocklebank was a modern language master at Eton from 1936 to 1959, and a housemaster from 1946 to 1959, when he retired because of failing health. At Eton he is remembered as an aesthete rather than an athlete, but he was a highly successful rowing coach, and an intensely compassionate if sometimes moody housemaster.
He took part in parties of Masters and Old Boys which assembled at the Old Royal Hotel, Capel Curig, or at Pen-y-Gwryd, in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 91, 1986, Seite 264-266


Geboren am:
1908
Gestorben am:
1984