FELL & ROCK CLIMBING CLUB CELEBRATES ITS CENTENARY

Members of the Fell & Rock Climbing Club of the English Lake District (FRCC) will celebrate the club’s centenary on Saturday 11 November, exactly one hundred years to the day after its formation in Coniston.
The Centenary Meet was held at the Shap Wells Hotel near Penrith where nearly 500 members and guests gathered for a weekend of activities and celebrations.

The FRCC is one of the premier climbing and mountaineering clubs in England with a strong tradition of pioneering new routes throughout the UK, the Alps, the Himalayas and worldwide. The first ascents of many of the most famous Lakeland climbs were achieved by members. The club has been publishing a definitive series of climbing guides to the Lake District since 1922. It continues to be active in the Lakes on issues such as crag development, access, conservation and footpath repair. The club led the way in developing climbing huts in the major valleys to create inexpensive places for climbers to stay. Members were instrumental in pioneering mountain stretchers that led to the creation of the first mountain rescue teams. In 1922, the club purchased 1,200 acres of land covering 12 mountains in the central fells (including Kirk Fell, Great Gable, Glaramara, Great End and Lingmell) as a war memorial to fallen members and gifted the land to the National Trust in perpetuity to enable all men and women to enjoy the freedom of our hills.

On Saturday 11 November there was a special commemoration of the founding at the Sun Hotel in Coniston at 11:30 where members recreated some of the original photographic scenes from 1907.
On Sunday 12 November members of the club led the annual simple, silent Act of Remembrance at their war memorial plaque on the summit of Great Gable.

In private celebrations at the Shap Wells, former club Presidents hosted a Reception before the Centenary Banquet with Eileen Clark, the current President of the club. Guests of honour include Jim Curran (a noted mountaineering film-maker, author and climber), Alan Hinkes (the first Briton to scale all 14 of the world’s 8,000m peaks) and the Presidents of the Climbers Club and the Scottish Mountaineering Club.

Several commemorative items were launched over the weekend. The original Climbing Book kept at Wasdale Head from 1863 to 1919 has been edited and reproduced by Mike Cocker in a lavish private edition. This book contains the original descriptions and drawings of such routes as Steep Ghyll, Eagles Nest Ridge Direct, Botterill’s Slab and Central Buttress. There are numerous entries by George Mallory, WP Haskett-Smith, Aleister Crowley, OG Jones, and George and Ashley Abraham.

Three CDs have been produced including a selection of over 150 archive photographs by George and Ashley Abraham, an oral archive of pre-war climbers describing their exploits, and an electronic version of the club’s historic Journal from 1907 to 1921.

Centenary events are scheduled to run over six months, culminating in a major
Mountaineering Festival throughout the Lake District on 5-7 May 2007.
The Festival will include a public exhibition “10 Decades of Mountaineering” at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick bringing together paintings, photographs, books and many archive materials to illustrate the club’s contribution to mountaineering in the Lakes and around the world. This exhibition will subsequently transfer to the National Mountaineering Exhibition at Rheged, near Penrith, and later to the University of Lancaster.