“…Never a cloud of the many that are,
That form and threaten and roll and dip,
Never a cloud had risen to mar,
The lovely radiance of comradeship…”

(from On Great Gable, by Mabel Barker, 1927)

This week, as the outdoor climbing season blossoms and Banff Mountain Film Festival comes to Leeds on April 30, Library and Digital Assistant Joey Talbot explores the life of the early twentieth century Leeds climber Claud Deane Frankland.

We begin our tale on a sunny day in July 1927, as Claud Frankland and his climbing partner Mabel Barker are sitting below the famous pinnacle of Napes Needle, on the rugged flanks of the Lake District’s Great Gable. They are eating lunch and reminiscing about their recent trip to Skye. Earlier this morning they climbed Eagle’s Corner and found an egg in the eagle’s nest, but this will soon be overshadowed by tragic events.

Frankland is one of the greatest English climbers of his generation. A contemporary has this praise for Frankland’s technique:

“I well remember C. D. Frankland’s descent from his Yorkshire Olympus at Almscliffe to the rocks at Laddow. The occasion had all the atmosphere of a visit by royalty, it was a tremendous privilege for me to climb with him…. His was the finest climbing I have ever seen, and a wonderful object lesson. He would choose a hold carefully, and once it was found he just stuck to it till he passed on to the next. There was none of that nervous paddling with the toe, or taking a handhold, letting it go, trying another, etc. It was just slow, smooth and inexorable movement”

Fergus Graham, in https://footlesscrow.blogspot.com/2011/09/claud-deane-franklandthe-hunter-home.html

Born in Whitby, Frankland is Headmaster of Sweet Street School in Leeds, where he lives with his wife Kitty and their two children. He’s an active member of both the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club – which, when founded in 1892 at the Skyrack Inn, Headingley, was the second mountaineering club in England – and of the Fell and Rock Climbing Club, one of the earliest mountaineering clubs to allow female members.

But let us rewind a little. As a climber myself, I was hoping to discover some mountaineering treasures here in the library archives, so imagine my joy when I learned that in our strong room we hold two books that used to belong to Frankland himself. He was introduced to climbing by his brother Willie. In 1909, Willie gave him a copy of a newly published guidebook, British Mountain Climbs by George D. Abraham. Abraham was a Keswick based climber and photographer, and the book was published, surprisingly enough, by Mills & Boon, and known to many in the climbing fraternity as the ‘Little Red Book’. The second guidebook, Climbing in the British Isles by W. P. Haskett Smith, was published in 1894, eight years after the author achieved the first ascent of Napes Needle.

Frankland added extra pages into these books, and attached photographs, route descriptions and other handwritten annotations. He augmented the illustrations with the lines of his new routes, marking out some of his first ascents.

Frankland doesn’t hesitate to make corrections when his opinion of a route differs from the author’s. Where George D. Abraham describes ‘tempting chimneys’ on the north side of Pillar Rock in Ennerdale, he has scratched out the word ‘tempting’ and written ‘wet, slimy’ in the margin. On another page, where Gibson’s Chimney on Scawfell Pinnacle is described as an ‘excellent variation,’ he has replaced the word ‘excellent’ with ‘rotten.’ We can only wonder about the experiences that led to these scathing reassessments.

Climbing in the early twentieth century was very different to the popular sport of today. They used stiff hemp ropes and the quality of protection was severely limited. Today, climbers can rely (if they choose to!) on a range of gear to secure the rope and provide safety if we should fall, but back then most of this didn’t exist, and a fall could mean serious injury or worse. Frankland had a reputation for being a very safe and secure climber, but was also innovative, for example in trying rubber shoes instead of heavy boots. He went through a period of soloing mountain routes in the Lake District, climbing alone without a rope. He reasoned that this was in fact safer than a roped ascent, and that it was best to be confident of his own skills before bringing in others who would depend on him for their safety.

Living in Leeds, Almscliffe Crag near Otley was Frankland’s major proving ground. On Sundays, he would catch the tram to the Lawnswood terminus with his Yorkshire Ramblers’ Club buddies, walk ten miles to Almscliffe to spend the day climbing there, walking ten miles back again when they finished. That might not sound so far, but after a hard day’s climbing it certainly is!

Frankland made the first ascents of many classic Almscliffe routes, such as Traditional Climb and Central Climb. But the finest of these was Frankland’s Green Crack. This was at the time the most difficult unprotected single pitch climb in the country, and by the time of Frankland’s death, nobody else had yet led it. It required a new style of climbing, with off-balance moves such as laybacking; techniques which are now widespread but were almost unknown in Frankland’s day. Having written this blog post (and with the benefit of modern climbing gear), I can’t wait to try out Frankland’s Green Crack for myself, and given he first climbed it at the age of 42 there’s hope for me yet!

Further afield, Frankland loved the Cumbrian fells. In the YRC Journal of 1922, he recounts his successful ascent of Central Buttress on Scafell, together with Bentley Beetham, who was later to join George Mallory’s ill-fated Everest expedition. Described in desperate terms as an expedition that “that ranks among the world’s hardest”, this had only been climbed once before, back in 1914, and even then it had been tackled in multiple stages rather than as a single unbroken ascent.

As they arrived at the base of the crag, Frankland and Beetham were surprised to spot, high above them, two men who had come armed with an abseil rope to study the route from above. This pair waited by the summit, while Frankland and Beetham made their way up the lower reaches of the buttress. A slimy staircase which Frankland squirmed up “like an inebriated Gulliver after a wet day in Brobdingnag” took them to a ledge below a long flake of rock. This was scaled by ‘novel tactics’, with Frankland using Beetham’s leg, shoulder, and even his head for toeholds. But as Frankland was crawling along the final knife-edge crest at the top of the tower, he was shocked to come face to face with one of the men crawling in the opposite direction. “They’re up!” the man shouted, in surprise and congratulation. Apparently he hadn’t expected them to complete the ascent so quickly!

Despite these achievements, climbing was by no means Frankland’s only sporting activity. He spent much of the summers underground as a keen caver, exploring systems such as Gaping Ghyll, near Ingleton, the passages of which were mapped out by the Yorkshire Ramblers Club.

Frankland also frequently climbed with his friend Mabel Barker, who we met at the start of this tale. Before we return to their fateful day in 1927, let’s explore her background a little. To be a female climber was a rare feat in this era, but Barker has always chosen her own path. We can learn much of her story from her biography, written by Jan Levi. She was born in Silloth, north Cumbria, in a house with an entrance guarded by a whale’s jawbone. Her mother died of pneumonia when she was 10, and she spent much of her early teens exploring the fells alone. An experience above Bassenthwaite in the mist seems formative:

“[I] wandered for a long time in a grey and mysterious fairyland. I question if anyone ever enjoyed mist more than I did on that first experience of it; I felt it as a thin veil hiding unimaginable things: enclosing me in a secret intimacy with something intangible, far from the world of men. In a small green hollow I found three witches’ brooms. But I came down out of fairyland safely, and alone as I had entered it.“

Barker soon became passionate about outdoor education, and she went on to found her own outdoor school in Caldbeck. She believed children would thrive through practical experience rather than rote learning. This interest was perhaps sparked by her godfather Patrick Geddes, an eminent biologist, sociologist and town planner, whose many achievements included developing the blueprint for the city of Tel Aviv, and creating the forerunner of the modern discipline of Peace Studies. Among Barker’s other influences were the Scouting movement and William Morris, leader of the Arts and Crafts movement and author of News from Nowhere.

As for climbing, Barker’s first experience of this was when she brought a group of school children from Essex to the Lake District on a pioneering ‘school journey’. Here she met Millican Dalton, a former insurance clerk who had taken to living half the year in a cave in Borrowdale. Another larger-than-life character, he had built up a reputation for himself as the ‘Professor of Adventure’, and for almost 50 years he lived in this cave, baking his own bread, sewing his own clothes (never bothering to finish the hems), and making a living hiring out camping equipment and taking groups on ‘Camping Holidays, Mountain Rapid Shooting, Rafting, Hairbreadth Escapes.’ He always wore shorts, and indeed claimed to have invented them. Daubed onto the wall of his cave you can still read his motto:

‘Don’t waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’

“Skirt detachable?” he asked Barker, as she and her gang of school children set off on a climbing expedition with him. Yes, she said, the skirt could be removed, and from then on she was hooked. She went on to climb frequently with Frankland, include a traverse of the Cuilin Ridge on Skye, and the fourth ascent, and first female ascent, of Central Buttress on Scafell.

But now we must return to Frankland and Barker’s fateful day in July 1927. They spot some friends nearby on Chantry Buttress and decide to join them. Frankland leads first, with Arthur Wood-Johnson following on the other end of the rope. Frankland nears the top of the second pitch, ascending a slab and a steep crack. Suddenly a loud crack is heard. The rope tautens and he is falling. Wood-Johnson frantically tries to pull the rope in, but there’s nothing he can do. Barker and the others watch helplessly from below, as Frankland falls forty foot, hitting a rib of rock before he comes to rest on the ground. Still clutched tightly between his fingers is a piece of rock, the handhold that broke off as he pulled up on it.

Frankland was buried in the little graveyard of St Olaf’s church at Wasdale Head, at the heart of the Lakeland fells he so loved. In memory to her friend, Mabel Barker wrote the poem On Great Gable, from which we quoted a verse at the beginning of this blog.

In Frankland’s obituary, his friend W. V. Brown writes:

“It is scarcely too much to say Claud Frankland was without equal among cragsmen, and it is fitting he should sleep his last long sleep at Wasdale, for to us who have climbed with him and loved him, the encircling mountains will for ever wear a mournful glory to his memory.”

“Frankland’s caution was as marked as his grace and strength. So that it is certain that the handhold must have stood testing from below. As we picture him moving steadily and certainly on far more difficult climbs, it is a struggle to realise that Frankland of all men perished by a fall, and more to grasp that Gable of all crags betrayed him in the rare moment he depended on one hold.”

“Of those that hearken to the mystic quest
A score return unscathed, one pays the price ‑ .”

On the inside cover of Frankland’s copy of British Mountain Climbs is the dedication written by his brother Willie. He quotes a phrase from page 12 of the book:

“Memories, which must last, yea, longer than life itself”

What more fitting conclusion to our tale could there be than this poignant, prophetic line?

Please contact our Local and Family History department for more information on any of the titles featured in Joey’s blog: localandfamilyhistory@leeds.gov.uk or 0113 37 86982

The portrait of Frankland, the Central Buttress sketch, and the Gaping Ghyll photo are all from the YRC online archive (with more details in the photo captions).