Clark Ronald William

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Biografie:
Ronald William Clark 1916-1987
Ronald Clark died after a short illness on 9 March 1987, collapsing in his study at Camden Street, London, still working. He was proposed for membership of the Alpine Club in 1974 by Sir Arnold Lunn, primarily on the basis of his contributions to mountain literature. He was in fact an experienced mountaineer, but preferred the mountains of Scotland to the higher ranges, although he climbed the Ecrins in 1947 and the Schreckhorn in 1948. I first met Ronald at Idwal Cottage Youth Hostel in 1940; we were taking our first steps at rock climbing with our Lawrie boots and newly-acquired Jones Golden Seal Hemp Rope. He was tall and slim, but then so were my brother Arthur and I in those austere war years. We were devotees of Owen Glynne Jones and the Abraham brothers. Ronald was several years older than us. I was very impressed that he was a journalist and worked in Fleet Street, one of the 'Gods of modern Grub Street'. I was still at school!
Born in 1916, he had a conventional upbringing, educated at Kings College School, Wimbledon, leaving school to enter a journalistic career in magazine writing. He later progressed to the British United Press where, early in the Second World War, he was a night editor. He was appointed a War Correspondent and followed the First Canadian and Second British Armies through Europe to the war's end; he then stayed to report on the Nuremberg War Trials. After the war he wrote on a variety of topics, including the problems of postwar Europe. He was very fond of cats; I remember visiting him around 1951 at Camden Street when he was asked for 600 words on cats to fill a space in a magazine: these he gave by reply, with barely a pause, over the telephone.
His main interest, then, was writing about mountains, and in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he wrote a series of books, The Splendid Hills, The Early Alpine Guides and then, in 1953, The Victorian Mountaineers. He made accessible to a wider and younger range of readers the lives and writings of many of those who have enriched the history of climbing. With the late Edward Pyatt he wrote Mountaineering in Britain which became a reference book in its day. In his early days he would first make a mock-up of the book he wished agents to consider, with photographs and chapter headings in the appropriate order and with chapter summaries, in an old book turned upside-down and most of the pages stuck together. In An Eccentric in the Alps he wrote of the climbs of W A B Coolidge and his pioneering assaults on the Meije. His
quotation of Coolidge's description of his descent from the Glacier Carre in 1878 as 'the most arduous and terrible piece of climbing' reminded me of our retreat from the top of the South Face Direct across the unforgiving ice of the Glacier Carre, in growing darkness and threatening weather, unroped, as we gambled for mutual survival. I think my companions would have agreed with his description of the descent off the great wall as 'ten times worse' than the ascent.
Ronald Clark wrote many books for young people which found a wide audience. Great Moments in Mountaineering was a modest volume which a top newspaper reviewed, saying how pleasant it was to read a book with so few long words. He thought this was meant to be a compliment. It sold worldwide and I have a copy, with the Japanese edition alongside it. In all, he wrote more than 60 books, as well as innumerable magazine articles. Aseries on stations of the now, alas, defunct Department of Scientific and Industrial Research led him into writing on scientific matters and personalities. He was asked to write a history of British contributions to the making of the atomic bomb, The Birth of the Bomb. Despite a lack of 'higher' education he had developed a formidable talent for writing readable books. They were the product of intense research and concentration on the job in hand. He wrote a shrewd life of Sir Henry Tizard, the wartime scientific adviser. He spent several months in India researching the life ofJ BS Haldane, the Communist scientist, who did so much to advance the art of deep-sea diving by his work on high pressures during the war, and who sought refuge in India afterwards. His Life of Einstein might have deterred a lesser man, but he knew where to go for the information and the scientific magazine Nature could find neither typographical errors nor errors of fact. Some of his more literary critics were less kind. His major biographies ranged from Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin and Ernest Chain to his last book, Lenin, which is shortly to be published.
Although we kept in touch from time to time through the years, I only once walked again with him, on the North Downs after our meeting in Wales. He once unsuccessfully tried to persuade BOAC, who were carrying out routetrials with the Comet airliner to Nairobi, to give us a free flight so that we could try to climb Kilimanjaro in a long weekend! Despite his serious approach to his work he had a whimsical side which revealed itself in his few fiction books. His Queen Victoria's Bomb revealed that one man developed a destructive device during her reign and tested it in the foothills of the Himalaya. The blast was so great that accompanying army observers thought it could only have been caused by a terrible natural event, so the Queen insisted on secrecy, and the discovery lapsed after the death of the inventor.
Ronald illustrated many of his books with photographs, taken with his faithful Rolliecord; he made many enlargements which he systematically indexed and bound into albums. He also kept a collection of Victorian alpine photographs. Although he planned his books like a military operation, he was a private person with a reluctance to step outside his chosen profession. He could have excelled in academic historical research and might well have succeeded as a barrister or television presenter! - but he stuck to his 'last'. He contributed a thoughtful article to AJ81, 1976 on alpine pollution in its broadest sense.
He was married three times, but had no children. His wives Pearl, and later Elizabeth, writers in their own right, supported him professionally throughout his career, unselfishly relieving him of many of the tedious tasks of writing, like indexing, for - true to his Fleet Street background - he never adopted the word-processor. He is sadly missed by his wife and friends.
Dave Thomas
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 93, 1988-89, Seite 316-318


Geboren am:
1916
Gestorben am:
09.03.1987