Freese-Pennefather Harold Wilfrid Armine

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Biografie:
Harold Wilfrid Armine Freese-Pennefather (1907-1967)
A good goer in his prime, Harold Freese-Pennefather was more a lover of the Alps than a climber, but he kept up his devotion to the details of alpine travel and the topography of sophisticated tourism in the valleys, if not on the heights, until the end of his life. His father, the Rev. F. E. Freese, who was a member of the A. C. from 1926 until his death in 1935 (on his tennis court during a men's four at the age of seventy-two) was for a number of years the Anglican chaplain at Wiesbaden and held seasonal chaplaincies in various Alpine resorts.
Here Harold developed his early mountain interests and affections and it was with his father that he first started climbing in the Valais in 1928.
From Arolla they did the Aiguilles Rouges traverse with, I believe, Joseph Georges le skieur, the Petite Dent de Veisivi, the Pigne and the Dent Blanche by the ordinary way. In the following year he introduced Quintin Hogg and myself to conventional climbing at Arolla, going over the V eisivi ridge again and following this with the Dent Perroc, Mont Collon by the North ridge, and the Col de la Dent Blanche, all with Joseph Georges. It was a happy time and I remember being cheered through a sightless day of snowfall on the Perroc (which disconcerted me much more than him) with tireless classifications of inns in remote villages.
In 1930 Harold went to the Engadine and North Italy, but only managed Piz Palü and the Cima del Largo. That summer he passed into the Diplomatic Service and it was the end of his alpine climbing until after the war. But his affection for hills and ·mountains was general and he records taking the splendid walk up Mount Washington, the summit of the northern Appalachians, while he was in America at his first post; the climbs of Trolltindene and the Romsdalshorn in 1939 while he was at the Embassy in Oslo, besides local skiing. In 1943 he was at the Embassy in Baghdad and it was a matter of course that when he visited me at Zahle near Beirut, and again outside Isfahan, he should ask to be taken on the highest local hill walk and be excited by the specifically alpine reminiscence of a soldanella at the edge of the Lebanon's snows.
After the war Harold returned briefly to the kind of mountaineering which was already, to his sentimental rather than selfish regret, becoming down-graded into mountain tourism, and he climbed the Rimpfischhorn and the Matterhorn, I do not know with what guide, in 1946, followed by the Cima di Jazzi in the following year. He was then elected to the A.C. and I think this satisfied his ambitions, which he had never taken very seriously. His earlier enthusiasm and his good temper were precious to his friends, so was his hospitality whether at Tathsallagh in Kildare or at his posts abroad. The fascination which all kinds of alpine arrangements and equipment had for him before the days of technical sophistication were easily exploited. All railway and hotel bookings for his friends were in his hands; so for ski novices was the hire of skins and sleighs. He made the humblest expedition not only happy but in some way exceptional and important, a local speciality reserved for connoisseurs.
After retiring as Ambassador to Luxemburg in I96I, Harold went to live in Lausanne. There I am afraid he found that marriage with a land and a way of life is liable to end the love affair. Still, he kept up such interests and affections as a gradual loss of health allowed, and was lately sharing in the establishment of a new skiing centre at the top of the Averstal.
M. Vyvyan.
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 72, 1967, Seite 356-357


Geboren am:
1907
Gestorben am:
1967