Tilman and Attenborough

[Skyva_2]

Never thought to associate these two, But David Attenborough in his excellent book describes interviewing Tilman on the radio. Tilman was supposedly pushing his new book. It went like this:

The target of his voyage had been the Crozet Islands. Getting him to agree that reaching them had been to any degree difficult was almost impossible.

'The Crozets are quite far south, aren't they? Well down towards Antarctica.'

'Ysss.' (Pipe clenched in teeth).

'And down there in the Roaring Forties, the seas are pretty rough I imagine.

'Ysss.'

'Navigation, I suppose, that far south is quite difficult.'

'Tricky.'

'And the Crozets are quite small, aren't they?'

'Ysss.'

This was like getting blood from a stone.

'So here you are, the two of you, in a small boat with a more or less permanent gale in your sails blowing you westwards, in mountainous seas, navigating with nothing more than a sextant, trying to find landfall on a group of tiny islands. You could easily have missed them, couldn't you?'

'Ysss.'

'What would you have done then?'

'Gorn round again.'

What he would have gone round again, of course, was the globe.

Keith

 

[Mirelle]

Attenborough's memory must be at fault; there were five in the boat, not two. The reason why HWT always sailed with a crew of five, or very occasionally more, was that a climbing party had to be landed, and the boat had to be looked after by those remaining on board whilst the climbers were ashore.

A bit of HWT apocrypha has HWT and Eric Shipton (who would allegedly talk the hind leg off a donkey) bivouacked on a ridge in the Himalayas, sometime in the 1930's....

Shipton feels the need to talk...

"Tilman"

"Yss"

"We have been climbing together for ten years now. You have saved my life, I have saved yours"

"Yss"

"Do you think we have got to the point where you might call me "Eric" and I might call you "Bill"?"

"No" .....!

 

[claymore]

Tilman and Shipton

Tilman - "And on reaching the summit, we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands"

regards
Claymore

 

[jimi]

Don Whillans

Reminds me a bit of the late great Whillans of climbing fame who according to Joe Brown's "The Hard Years" was extremely taciturn and once worked with another equally taciturn individual. Allegedly they would go for weeks without exchanging vocal signals.

 

[claymore]

Re: Don Whillans

Everest the Hard Way - Bonningtons book on the SW face Expedition has a brilliant passage which describes the Whillans impersonations that the climbers did on the walk in to base camp.

regards
Claymore

 

[Twister_Ken]

What\'s the Joe Brown verse?

Talk of Whillans has reminded me of teh days when I used to play about on rocks. There was a climber's song at the time, of which I remember very little, except the ending of the Joe Brown verse. Can anybody fill in the blanks?

Something something something
On an overhanging wall
Suction, faith and friction
And f*ck all else at all

 

[claymore]

Re: What\'s the Joe Brown verse?

It might be in Tom Patey's book - One mans mountains.

regards
Claymore

 

[Ohdrat]

I will never forgive Tilman for wrecking all those gorgeous Pilot Cutters... <deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep sigh>

Sailing with the man must have been a nightmare... (a very talented sailor/boatman/climber) but utterly unbearable..

 

[pugwash]

You missed the punchline. Shipton told me it was at the end of their seven-month expedition together in the Pamirs and Tillman was about to go up the gangway of the ship taking him back to Kenya. Shipton said "Isn't it high time you called me Eric." Tillman shuffled his feet and looked at the ground and said: "It just sounds so damned silly."

 

[Viking]

Re: Tilman and \'Claymore\'

He sounds like a 'boring old fart ' Claymore would approve of

 

[Mirelle]

I call for bell, book and candle....

I did sail with him.

He was by no means unbearable. Quite the reverse, I can think of few people whom I would rather spend a long journey with (after all, I did so!)

He expected things to be done properly - not an unreasonable attitude, when to do otherwise was to put lives at risk - and he commonly led by example rather than by exhortation, but he never asked anything exceptional of anyone.

Very charming, very modest, rather shy, dry sense of humour, extremely well read and highly intelligent. And a first rate, very safe, seaman.

At the time when he bought Mischief and Sea Breeze, Bristol Channel pilot cutters were going to rack and ruin all over the place. You could pick one up for a song; no-one wanted them. Too big, too old fashioned, too slow and too expensive to run.

Whilst he was sailing Mischief into the Southern Ocean, Bristol Corporation were allowing one of the very best of them to fall apart in front of their very eyes. She never made it out of the Bristol Channel, and was broken up in 1960 - at least Mischief, Sea Breeze and Baroque made some glorious voyages.

He rebuilt Mischief, and Sea Breeze, and did a good deal to Baroque (she surely needed it). He was not responsible for losing Mischief, and Sea Breeze was the sort of accident that does happen if you venture into remote places.

Oh, by the way, the food was good too.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>Edited by Mirelle on 13/01/2003 21:49 (server time).</FONT></P>

 

[Mirelle]

Thanks; I knew it was a Shipton story, but I only heard it at third or fourth hand.

 

[BootleBumtrinket]

Isn\'t it true

Isn't it true that the first leg of every voyage was deliberately long?

Because most of the crew would run away?

Mirelle will loyally disagree, and I like her very much for that!

 

[claymore]

Re: Tilman and \'Claymore\'

Absolutely
Boyhood Hero and Role Model
I'm so flattered you should think that I have aspired to such dreams and ambitions.
"Tilman and Claymore".....has a certain ring to it I think!


regards
Claymore

 

[Violetta]

I suspect

that if people were likely to run away because the reality of that kind of voyaging was a lot tougher than many aspirants realised - not because of Tilman himself. Personally I would trust the judgement of someone who actually knows what he is talking about (Mirelle) than a lot of assumptions taken from the books. I don't think Tilman would have accepted me as crew (not so keen on women, I believe) and, despite having been a professional sailor for a while in my youth, I think his voyages would have been far too tough for me. But I recently read through the sailing books and came away with an impression of amazing tolerance, not despotism. We all have our private thoughts, after all, which are what the man records.

 

[claymore]

Re: I suspect

Picking up on your comment about tolerance - I know I don't possess the capacity for endurance of the harsh conditions that they tolerated, it would have been interesting to see how Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, Tilman, Fiennes, Bonnington and Novak would have fared on expedition together.

regards
Claymore

 

[Mirelle]

Try this

Bob Comlay, who sailed with HWT twice, has a website at

http:/www.comlay.net/tilman/

which is worth seeing - very good photos.



<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1>Edited by Mirelle on 14/01/2003 12:00 (server time).</FONT></P>

 

[Mirelle]

And this...

There have been two biographies of Tilman, one by JRL Anderson and one by Tim Madge. Neither are much approved of by those who knew him, but David Glen is just finishing a third, so fingers crossed...meanwhile he has made a documentary which is available on video, see

http://www.tilman.tv

 

[Ohdrat]

Re: I call for bell, book and candle....

OK I take it all back.. it's just the way he comes across when reading his books... I might even find it in my heart to forgive the wrecking of those gorgeous boats...

I never doubted his sailing and / or mountaineering qualities!

Buy what an amazing peice of sailing / mountaineering cred to have sailed with the man himself.. Where did you sail with him... are you in one of his books?

 

[Mirelle]

Cancel the bell, book and candle...

1974. Unfortunately, it's the only sailing name I can drop - the rest of a long and utterly undistinguished sailing career has been spent mostly pottering around the Thames Estuary!

He does tend to go in for self-deprecating humour in his books, and sometimes pretends to be Colonel Blimp - which he was'nt. There's a new biography coming out soon, written by David Glen, which should be better than Tim Madge's dreadful one, because the author, a climber, has really gone out of his way to talk at length to former climbing companions and crew members.