Alpine Club Notes Honorary Secretary
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OFFICERS AND COMMITTEE FOR 2016 PRESIDENT ..................................................................... Lindsay Griffin VICE PRESIDENTS ......................................... Sandy Allan, Malcolm Bass Alpine Club Notes HONORARY SECREtaRY ..................................................... Anna Lawford HONORARY TREASURER ................................................... John Dempster HONORARY EDITOR OF THE ALPINE JOURNAL ............................. Ed Douglas HONORARY LIBRARIAN ......................................................... Jerry Lovatt CHAIRS OF SUB-COMMITTEES: CLIMBING & EVENTS ...................................................... Jonathan White FINANCE .................................................................... Kimball Morrison MARKETING, MEMBERSHIP & RECRUITMENT ........................ Tony Westcott PROPERTY ..................................................................... Victor Saunders CHAIR OF THE ALPINE CLUB LIBRARY COUNCIL ...................... Hywel Lloyd COMMITTEE, elected ................ Charlie Burbridge, Susan Jensen, Neil Pitts COMMITTEE, co-opted ..................................................... Hugh Alexander OFFICE BEARERS LONDON LECTURE ORGANISER ............................................ Derek Buckle SOUTH-WEST LECTURE ORGANISERS ................ Tony Westcott, Chris Storie PEAK LECTURE ORGANISER ................................................ Martin Wragg LAKES LECTURE ORGANISER ........................................... Laetitia Sterling EDINBURGH LECTURE ORGANISER .......................................... Des Rubens WINTER DINNER CONVENOR ......................................... William Newsom BMC LIAISON OFFICER ................................................. Alison Stockwell MEETS OFFICER ...................................................................... Kate Ross CHAIR OF THE CLIMBING FUND SUB-COMMITTEE .................. Malcolm Bass CHAIR OF THE MEMBERSHIP APPLICatIONS SUB-COmmIttEE .. Richard Nadin CHAIR OF THE IT SUB-COMMITTEE ......................................... David Lund IT SUB-COMMITTEE SECREtaRY .......................................... Jeremy Gould MEMBERSHIP SECREtaRY ................................................ Sherry Macliver STUDENT LIAISON OFFICER ............................................. Sherry Macliver UIAA REPRESENtatIVE .................................................. Steve Goodwin CHAIR OF THE INTERNatIONAL PANEL ................................. Malcolm Bass HONORARY ARCHIVIST ........................................................ Glyn Hughes HONORARY KEEPER OF THE CLUB’S ARTEfaCTS ....................... Jerry Lovatt HONORARY KEEPER OF THE CLUB’S MONUMENTS............ Charlie Burbridge HONORARY KEEPER OF THE CLUB’S PAINTINGS ........................ John Fairley HONORARY KEEPER EMERITUS OF THE CLUB’S PAINTINGS .... Peter Mallalieu HONORARY KEEPER OF THE CLUB’S PHOTOGRAPHS ............... Peter Rowland AJ ADVERTISING OFFICER ............................................... Ursula Haeberli Illustration for An Olympus in the Dream, a bookwork which has taken 15 years ASSIStaNT EDITOR OF THE ALPINE JOURNAL (OBITUARIES) Catherine Moorehead to put together and is a deeply multi-layered piece of work using text, images, NEWSLETTER EDITOR ............................................................ Adele Long cut-outs, rubber stamps and music. It exists in an edition of 14 and while the text in each, telling a strange autobiographical story, remains the same, the WEBSITE EDITORS ..................................... David Baldock, Jeremy Gould illustrations, numbering over 200, are all hand-finished and provide a varied HONORARY SOLICITOR ...................................................... Rhys Williams counterpoint. Each copy therefore is a form of variation on an original theme. TRUSTEES ......................... Michael Baker, Adam Roberts, Philip Sanders GENERAL MANagER ...................................................... Ursula Haeberli Rob Fairley, 2006. (Ink, watercolour, gold leaf and digital photographs. ADMINISTRatOR ......................................................... Iwonna Hudowska 24.5cm x 17cm. Two copies in the National Library for Scotland (HB6.215.4.9 LIBRARIAN ............................................................... Tadeusz Hudowski and HB6.215.3.58), six in private collections, six still available.) 414 415 416 T HE A LPINE J OURN A L 2 0 1 6 A LPINE C LUB N O T ES 417 Rob Fairley: Renaissance Man of Moidart to the Himalaya with Duff, he was also recruited This year’s section pages are illustrated with works by Rob Fairley. Rob by Henry Todd, and in his own words worked joined the Club in 1991 as a result of an encounter with George Band on as a ‘climbing mercenary’ there for many years, Roisbheinn a few years before, when Band was president. A stag was the during which he visited Annapurna, Annapurna target, Band was the gun, and Fairley, who keeps a croft at the foot of the III, Kusum Kanguru, Ama Dablam and Tawoche hill, was employed as the stalker. The pair found no stag, perhaps because besides many trekking peaks. Numerous wonderful they spent the day discovering their mutual acquaintance with various watercolour landscapes from this period survive giants of Nepal. A presidential command to join the Club followed shortly. – Fairley is notorious for destroying his own There are five distinct strands in the rope of Fairley’s life: artist, crofter, work – and are represented here by ‘Everest from educator1, mountaineer and writer2. He was a pupil at George Watson’s Rongbuk Glacier’, ‘Andy Perkins & Andy Cave at School in Edinburgh in the 1960s where his interest in mountains was Annapurna III Advanced Base Camp’, ‘Annapur- fostered by Archie Hendry, who taught languages there and who also na Camp One’, and ‘Breakfast with Henry’. influenced Robin Smith and Mal Duff, Fairley’s exact contemporary. Fair- Fairley became fascinated by Nepal’s culture and ley’s early mastery of mountain landscape drawing is evident in the Eiger people, and grasped every opportunity to record drawing in ‘John Harlin’, painted while still a schoolboy. After graduating this in his sketchbooks and in watercolour work Sketchbook portrait from Edinburgh College of Art in 1975, he moved to Mallaig briefly before finished at home. His sketching method (illustrated of a Nepalese girl. becoming the sole human inhabitant of the tidal island Shona Beag in Loch below) used a tube of watercolour, whatever sort Moidart until 1979 when he moved to a croft at Alisary on Loch Ailort. of water was to hand, his unused hand as palette, and many such sketches During this period, besides regular landscape work, Fairley practised a form were executed in a very few minutes. of ephemeral shamanistic ‘land art’, occasionally recorded by drawing or While all of this portrait work is remarkable, it is perhaps his pure by pinhole photography from cameras constructed from animal carcases, watercolour portraits that deserve most respect. These are in the tradition of stone enclosures, etc. To some degree ‘A Line Made by Red Deer’, and the likes of George Richmond or James Guthrie, but the technique is purer. ‘A Line of Fox Bones’ reflect these early interests3. At the same time, he did This work is represented here by ‘Tibetan Trader’, ‘Tsering’ and ‘Quin Ego not neglect mountaineering, climbing regularly at a high level in winter and Hoc Rogem’. The latter is in egg tempera colours, not watercolour, but this summer, usually solo except for the company of his intrepid collie Jinny, medium has the same qualities of flatness and transparency, and will last who dodged the cruxes but never failed to greet him at the top of the routes. 1,000 years or more. The two huge pencil drawings of Ben Nevis, ‘Building in a Landscape’ and I am delighted to have had this opportunity to present Fairley’s work ‘Figure in a Landscape’ date from late in this period. According to Fairley, in the Journal, and I commend him to readers as a mountaineer-artist they were done in his croft/studio by the light of oil and Tilley lamps, work- of the first quality, to my mind to be ranked alongside such distinguished ing more or less naked because of the extreme heat they generated. These pre decessors as Edward Compton and Ernst Platz, but undoubtedly with are extraordinary works, perhaps the most impressive mountain drawings greater range. in pencil since Edward Lear’s Lake District drawings in 18364. Robin Campbell In the mid 1980s, Fairley resumed acquaintance with Mal Duff. Duff had taken two poets, Andrew Greig and Kathleen Jamie, to the Muztagh Fifty years of the Troll Wall Tower and had the idea of taking an artist along to illustrate his expeditions. If you were into new routes and big walls in the 1960s you would have In Fairley, he found an artist who could climb as well. As well as going known about a monster in Norway about which ominous stories circulated that can be summed up in one word: ‘unclimbable’. The Troll Wall was 1. Fairley was involved from the beginning in the extraordinary Room 13 experiment at Caol Primary School, Fort William, in which children pursued art and photography projects of their own devising, lightly advised by also known as ‘the vertical mile’, and described as ‘the largest overhanging Fairley, and managed grant-getting, exhibitions and sales of their work, etc. The initial project was expanded wall in Europe’. It was reputed to be smooth and holdless for 5,000ft, and to other Lochaber schools and then around