Goodfellow Basil Robertson

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Biografie:
Basil Robertson Goodfellow (1902-1972)
Basil Goodfellow died suddenly in September on his way to an evening meeting of the Alpine Club. He was such an active and devoted member of the Club and had served it and other mountaineering organisations in so many ways that to some of us his death marks the end of an epoch. To me at least the climbing world will never be quite the same again.
His main love I think was for the Alps, especially for Zermatt and the Italian valleys running down from the Pennines; he was also devoted to the British hills, especially Snowdonia. But his experience was in fact very varied, including also the Pyrenees, Turkey, the Lofoten Islands, the New Zealand Alps, the Canadian Rockies and the Himalaya. As for his companions, these ranged from Bentley Beetham and Graham Brown through Cambridge and AC contemporaries to the generation of his son Terence.
Basil's father was Dr T. A. Goodfellow, CBE, a medical doctor practising in Manchester and his mother was a Robertson. It was in fact fanuly holidays in North Wales that first kindled his interest and ambition in the mountains, and he was always proud of the north country background which he inherited, a background which was later enlarged during the early years of his service with Imperial Chemical Industries. The next influence was Cambridge, where he went from Clifton with a senior science scholarship at Caius and where he took both the engineering and the chemistry tripos. Here his contemporaries included Wyn Harris, Laurence Wager, Brian Donkin, Frank Yates, Frankie Mayo, Gordon Manley and Ivan Wailer, with all of whom he climbed, and it was here with the CUMC that he got his grounding in mountaineering technique, especially in rock climbing. Here too he acquired the taste for guideless climbing: the greater part of his mountain journeys were all to be undertaken with amateur parties.
His career with ICI took him further afield, first in 1932-3 on a protracted world tour with the Company's technical director, a tour that provided an opportunity for a climbing holiday in the New Zealand Alps, then after a short period in
London to an appointment in China as technical director of the Company's subsidiary there. Soon after that came the war and this again took him to the East, first to serve with the special forces unit based in Singapore, where he was in charge of the Malayan section, later to become head of the Ministry of Economic Warfare unit, initially in India and then in Ceylon. As with most of us, the war brought a hiatus in his climbing career, but he contrived two short visits to the mountains, one to Sikkim and one to Garhwal.
From the end of the war until his retirement from ICI he was based in England but concerned with overseas affairs, first as head of the India department and as director of various subsidiary companies in India and Pakistan and finally, from 1960 to 1963 as director of the European Council, responsible for planning the Company's entry into Europe. Both appointments involved frequent journeys with occasional opportunity to combine climbing holidays with business trips. Nor was retirement from his senior post with ICI the end of his overseas activities, for directly after his retirement he undertook the leadership of an industrial development survey missioJ1 to Iran under the sponsorship of the United Nations. This involved living for a year in Tehran and enabled him to link up with the Iranian Mountain Federation with whom he did various excursions in the Elburz mountains. His last business appointment, from 1964 up to the time of his death, was as a director of the Ultramar Company, whose interest in Central America and Canada gave still further opportunities for travel. His last fling among the big mountains dates from this period, and was to the Bugaboos in the Canadian Rockies (AJ 73 page 251).
His climbing career did not, I think, have any dramatic climax, but one or two of his many seasons are worth referring to in more detail. One of these was that of 1933, when after a fortnight of guideless climbing in Zermatt he joined Graham Brown to climb in the Dauphine with Alexander Graven and Casimir Rodier. They accomplished five traverses, four of them classic routes on the Riheau, Meije, Ecrins and Ailefroide, and the last a new route up the NE spur of Les Bans. This was his first experience of climbing with a first-class guide, but a more important feature of the year was the cementing of what was to become a long friendship with Graham Brown (Ai 46 45). Another year that was certainly of importance to him was 1948 when the AC ran a summer meet at the Kleine Scheidegg. This was not only a happy return to the Alps after the long interruption of the war, but was the start of a new friendship with Andre Roch, from whose immaculate technique Basil felt he had gained much. His three Himalayan ventures were important too, the first to Lama Anden in Sikkim, the second to Nanda Ghunti in Garhwal (Ai 55202 and 373) and the last to the Annapurna region of Nepal in 1953. All were excursions rather than expeditions, undertaken when the opportunity offered and with no chance of detailed preparation, the first two being wartime leave trips while the third was fitted in to a business journey to India. None of them succeeded in the ascent of a mountain, but Basil was no mere peak collector and he savoured to the full the delight of travelling through those lovely valleys and forests, of being with the hill people and of seeing a new range. Of my own Alpine seasons with him in the fifties and sixties, there are only two things I would say; first to emphasise how deeply he enjoyed himself on a mountaineering holiday, not only on the ridges and summits but in the woods and on the pastures and among the people; second to say what a marvelous companion he was, considerate, even-tempered, adaptable, always contributing something to make the occasion more worthwhile.
His services to mountaineering were manifold and they were happily recognized by the award of the OBE in 1962. After joining the Club in 1930 he was first elected to the committee in 1947, was honorary secretary from 1950 to 1954 and vice-president 1959-61. He was president of the British Mountaineering Council 1968-1969. A member of the Rucksack Club since the twenties, he was its president in 1950-1951. He ran the Alpine Dining Club for ten years or more. Of these many responsibilities the most important was undoubtedly his secretaryship of the AC in the early fifties, for this carried with it the joint secretaryship of the Himalayan Committee at the time when the long wartime closure was ending and when new opportunities for Himalayan travel were opening up, especially in Nepal. The Himalayan Committee had the tasks first of launching the 195 I Everest reconnaissance, then of negotiating with the Swiss Stiftung which had permission to go to the mountain in 1952 and taking the agonising decision not to participate in any way in the Swiss expedition of that year; lastly of organising, equipping and launching the successful British expedition of 1953. In the crucial and often difficult discussions of those years Basil Goodfellow with his wide knowledge and his sound judgment played a most important role. He was equally involved too in the exploitation of the success of 1953 by the setting up and administration of the Mount Everest Foundation, which has since provided essential finance for so many Himalayan and other expeditions. An original member of this Committee of Management, he was its Chairman 1958-1959 and also served for many years on the Screening Committee.
Basil Goodfellow's most outstanding quality was, I think, his sheer efficiency; when he did something he did it well and this applied to all the other interests that helped fill his life. In photography, for instance, he attained a professional competence and developed some original techniques. In motoring he was not content with the ordinary and got enormous pleasure from skilful handling of fast cars, whether his pre-war Alvises or more recently his Jaguar XK 120. In gardening he was always an experimenter and loved to collect plants and seeds from far off places. But what we shall remember most of all is his gift for friendship.
He will be sorely missed.
Peter Lloyd
Lord Hunt writes;
'Well John, this is the first time in all my Alpine experience that this has happened to me.' The voice came from beneath a neighbouring boulder as I was trying to settle myself under the exiguous shelter of a rock below the seracs of the Bies glacier. In sodden clothes, with no food or sleeping bags, the unforeseen bivouac certainly seemed unattractive.
Basil and I had just completed that splendid 'horseshoe' of the E and N ridges of the Weisshorn, continuing over the Bieshorn where a sudden mist had held us up: darkness overtook us before we could find a convenient gully down to the Gross Kastel. This was the last of our climbs in a splendid season during August 1951. Indeed, apart from a brief interlude four years later, when he led a support party to help my wife and myself, with a few friends, to complete the integral traverse of the Cuillin ridge, the Weisshorn traverse turned out to be the last time I climbed with Basil.
Partly because of this, those words come clearly across the span of 21 years as I think of Basil Goodfellow. The remark was made in self-reproach: his sense of proper planning and Alpine proprieties were alike offended by what he felt to be bad management on our part. It certainly resulted in a wretched night as we shivered the hours away in acute discomfort, the lights of Randa twinkling tantalisingly in the dark valley below.
But what a superb day it had been! I recall how, all day long, Basil revelled in that climb, bubbling with enthusiasm alike for the foreground of the great N ridge and the wide panorama of Valaisan peaks which he knew so well. I had appreciated his steadiness on that first, exceedingly narrow blade of ridge as we left my wife and our other two friends on the summit earlier in the day.
Basil was a mountaineer in the great tradition of our pioneering forebears. He was a very competent alpinist, but I think he climbed because he loved the mountains even more than because of the interest of a particular route. He was a superb administrator with a quick, tidy and incisive mind. His work for the Himalayan Committee and the Mount Everest Foundation contributed in large measure to the saga of Everest and its sequel in the form of British expeditions elsewhere in the world. He was tenaciously loyal to friends and institutions; no one will forget his fierce defence of tradition at a meeting of the Alpine Club not long ago convened to enable members to consider its place in the context of modern climbing and the needs of climbers in a rapidly changing society.
Basil was modest about his own considerable mountaineering achievements and generous in his praise of the qualities and qualifications of others. Among the very numerous messages received as we made our way back from Everest towards Kathmandu in June 1953, I was especially delighted by a letter from Basil; he had done so much to aid our success and it set the seal on the essential unity of our enterprise, Management Committee and climbing party alike.
Robin Fedden writes:
The most delightful of climbing companions, and one of the most quietly competent, Basil Goodfellow was also, to an extent that is perhaps rare today, a man responsive to mountains in the fullest sense. His technical assurance, his soundness on ice and rock, were but one facet of a wide involvement. Sensitive to the aesthetics of mountain landscape, he was no less interested in the geology that had shaped the peaks he climbed, in their flora and fauna, in their history, and in the ways of those who earn a mountain living.
The extent of his involvement was reflected in a number of ways. It probably accounted for his ability, which often seemed like instinct, to find the best route to, and up, some little-known peak in a remote massif. It certainly had something to do with a topographical recall that is hard to parallel. Basil Goodfellow never forgot the lineaments of a mountain. As the years passed, his memory encompassed the vast panorama of the Alps, not to speak of less familiar ranges. He could recognise, pin-pointing routes and peaks, an untitled photograph of almost any Alpine landscape. In the circumstances it is not surprising that he should also have been among the outstanding mountain photographers of his generation. The scene that he knew so well he brilliantly recorded, re-creating for all of us his mountain vision.
Few people have loved and understood mountains as well. They repaid him, as they usually do, generously. For half a century they were a vocation and delight.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 78, 1973, Seite 285-289


Geboren am:
1902
Gestorben am:
1972