Bridge A.W.

(Bearbeiten)

Biografie:
A. W. Bridge 1902-1971
When I first met 'Alf' his serious climbing days were over, and he had already outlived that part of his legend which placed him with the 'hard men' of his day. Even the more rumbustious of his quarrels, resignations, and campaigns against 'The Mandarins' had taken on the pink glow of old, forgotten, far-off things. I made a friend that night and we never had a word of disagreement between us. Now he is dead and the whole climbing world is poorer by the loss of so truculent and altogether delightful a figure. A commonplace obituary notice setting out the virtues of the deceased would not do for Alf. His prickly controversial existence was the essential man. It is true that he could not tell a lie, had never told one in his whole life. It is true that he would not sit in a room, or bar, and hear a friend disparaged, particularly a friend with whom at that moment he was not on speaking terms. But it is also true that he found it almost impossible to agree with anyone about anything, was certain that the world was full of persons having educational or family advantages which they were employing to weaken the steel bonds which hold climbers together, and thought that nothing would ever be again as it was in that Golden Age when he climbed with Kirkus, Hargreaves and Longland, thought nothing of a cycle ride from Manchester or Sheffield to Helyg, and preferred a walk over the tops from Aber to the sinful luxury of trains to nearer stations.
The Alf legends were founded on fact, but he liked to correct the more bizarre of them. It was true, he said, that he had witnessed, had indeed helped, a man to propel a bicycle round the parapet, 8 ft across, of a 200-ft chimneystack, but he was not that man himself. It was true that he had climbed on Lliwedd in a (borrowed) bowler hat, but this was not through fear of falling stones or other natural hazards, but a dislike of having oranges dropped upon him by tourists.
'Watch the Mandarins', he would say whenever we met. These were the men who required a climbing standard in a climbing club, or ventured to say that X (disliked by Bridge), was a better man for an expedition than Y, the Bridge nominee of the moment. It was 'The Mandarins' who drove him to resign from the Alpine, Climbers' and Rucksack Clubs. They could not see that as far as Alf was concerned they were completely in the wrong. For Alf there were never two points of view, and it was this unyielding tenacity which endeared him to his friends, nearly everyone of them a 'Mandarin'.
Bridge was no Alpinist, but his mind and heart were in the high places and he knew himself to be of that great company bound together by success or failure on the ultimate peaks. He was tireless in the background preparations of many expeditions, notably of those to Everest and Kangchenjunga, and for the last thirty years every mountaineer capable of going high counted Alf among his friends. His ashes have been scattered near the summits of the Glyders, but Alf himself will live on in everyone of those conversations between climbers which, sustained in acrimony, make no breach in the indissoluble friendships of a shared obsession.
Kevin Fitzgerald
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 77, 1972, Seite 294-295


Geboren am:
1902
Gestorben am:
1971