Dennis Gray: Essays from the Edge | Podcast

December 11, 2025December 11, 2025John D Burns

Outdoors In Scotland

Outdoors In Scotland

Dennis Gray: Essays from the Edge | Podcast

00:00 / 36:22

Dennis Gray is a legend of British mountaineering. Now, aged ninety and with failing health, he talks to John D. Burns about his life in the mountains. Despite his years, his intelligence and his love of climbing and the climbers he has known, shines through this interview.

Dennis Gray.

Photo Ned Kelly

From his early beginnings as a boy of eleven when a chance meeting on a bus led him to his first climb on the Cow and Calf at Ilkley, to his first steps on to the greater ranges of the Himalayas, Dennis gives a fascinating insight into the lives of climbers in the post war years. With little money and the most basic of equipment young people from the industrial cities of northern England set out to explore the high places of Britain and the world beyond proving that their passion for pushing the limits of the possible was unstoppable.

This Bradford Lad followed his dreams across the world and became one of the most highly respected mountaineers of his day. That he was also one of the pioneers of the indoor climbing walls that have become a feature of virtually every city in the UK speaks of his vision for the future.

Dennis Gray began climbing in 1947, aged eleven. By fifteen hehad tested himself on Yorkshire’s gritstone outcrops, Skye, the Lake District, North Wales, Glen Coe and, in winter, Ben Nevis. After school he studied printing and ran a photogravure unit reproducing Old Master prints. During national service in Manchester in 1954 he joined the Rock and Ice Club, climbing with Joe Brown and Don Whillans. He first visited the Alps in 1955, climbing in the Dolomites and Alps with Brown, before making the first ascent of the Manikaran Spires in 1961. Throughout the 1960s he organised expeditions to the then-unclimbed Gauri Sankar(7,134 metres) and, in 1966, to Alpamayo (5,947 metres) in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca; the expedition film of which, The Magnificent Mountain, won best mountain film at Trento.

Manikaran Spires

He went on to study social psychology at Leeds and in 1968 led a successful expedition to Mukar Beh (6,069 metres) in Himachal Pradesh. After a short spell in Kenya he returned to Britain in 1970. Appointed the British Mountaineering Council’s first professional national officer in 1971 and its general secretary in 1974, he served for eighteen years. His first autobiography, Rope Boy, appeared in 1970. With his former wife he launched the Boxing Day Chevin Chase in 1979, a seven-mile race in Otley attracting over 1,500 runners. After leaving the BMC in 1989 he led climbs and treks in the Himalaya and Morocco, then returned to academia in China, lecturing at four universities.

Sound editor. Derek Williams

Transcript

(may contain inaccuracies)

Audio file

Dennis Gray final edit.mp3

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Outdoors in Scotland. I’m John Burns and this is my podcast for everyone who likes to be outdoors in Scotland or anywhere else for that matter. I’m talking to you today from a very wet, cold and miserable Inverness. We’re in the grip of yet another named storm. I don’t know where all these named storms come from, but I’m not finding them very good companions at the moment really, but I think we’ve got to put up with. I’m very honoured to have my guest today. The man I’m going to introduce today was climbing before I was born, and when you consider I’m 70, that’s a fair old feat really, and he’s still very active in writing today. I’m talking to Dennis Gray. We’re going to be talking about his new, amongst other things, his new book, Essays from the Edge, 50 Years of Mountain Writing. Dennis is probably one of the most experienced mountaineers. around pretty well anywhere, I would say, right now. Hello, Dennis, how are you?

Thanks for contacting me. Very good. Thank you very much.

Lovely to speak to you. Lovely to speak to you. Some of your writing in the Essays from the Edge, you really go back over 50 years and you talk about climbing in the 70s with the likes of Don Willens and Joe Brown. Real, real sort of… I suppose, giants of the British mountaineering scene. The 70s, looking back on that now, seems like a golden age for British mountaineering.

What do you think? Well, everything changes so much in life.

And when I started climbing, very, very young, I was only 11, and I went to Ilkley. And it was an accident, actually. I’d arranged to go with a crowd of young people from Woodhouse, where I lived. And a bus used to come to Hyde Park Corner close by and take it out to Oakley. It was a company called Leggard, a private bus. This is after the war. And so there was no public buses. For some reason, none of the kids got on this bus that took me. I was travelling half price, and the bus stopped again at a few miles up the road at the northern part of Edinley. And a guy got on the bus called Freddy Williamson. And over the years, I got to know him quite well, and worked out to Oakley. And of course, he was already a climber, and I went up to the rocks at Town Car with him. And after a bit, they asked me, he introduced me to the other climbs, if I’d like to go over to Rocky Valley and do a climb. It’s about six mile across the bar, Rocky Valley, away from the main, yeah, in Cory, at Ilkley. And so I went over there, and there’s just one climb. It’s called Head of Chimney. It’s a chimney climb. It’s a V-diff. And I was pracked down my width, so I was only about 11 years old. But I decided then, as I got home that night, I was going to become a client. That’s how I started climbing, yeah. Very good. I kept meeting Freddie Williams on the bus on a Sunday morning. Yeah.

Oh, right. And that would have been climbing, I presume, with pretty, well, basic or almost non-existent gear, is that right?

Very basic. people just tied on the rope. And of course, there’s not even nylon ropes. People using sisal ropes. You have to buy from a company called cars, and they’re used for pulling badges. They’re very thick, thick sisal rope. Yeah. We used to get about 40-50 feet, that’s all, because their clients were only short at Ilkley. Yeah, we used to go to Ilkley, and I went there, and we… Sunday for about a year. And I got to know all the climbers. And I was by far, there was hardly any young people climbing those days. And now if you go to a climbing wall, climbing centre, there’s dozens of kids about 11, 12, 13, 14 years old climbing. Yeah.

Well, participation has probably grown enormously. But looking back on those years as things developed, I mean, I can remember I suppose it would be in the 70s, where Joe Brown, Don Williams, people like that, were known to the public. They were public figures. I think they called Joe Brown the human fly, didn’t they?

The human fly. It was in the tabloids, picture of him, the human fly.

I bet he got some rubbing for that, didn’t he?

There’s a picture of villains in Stockport Gazette. I was in Manchester for two years on national service. I used to, in a special office, we paid officers. We paid, I’d be officer in the British Army from second lieutenant up to We’re paid for our office here. And we had a set of about 100 people. A lot of them were civil servants. I was there and I lived in Digged. The alley organised, but just around the corner from Joe Brown, where he lived with his brother.

He was just a boy then, I suppose, you know.

He was older than me. He’d be about 20, done, 22 then.

I was 18, yeah.

Okay, okay. I’m presuming in those days that you perhaps didn’t have the kind of cash around that people had. You must have had to make do with a lot of things.

Yeah, gear was very, very simple. By this time, there was nylon ropes. So people tied on them. But we used to tie them direct on the rope. We’d tie them. For instance, one of us did the first attempt at this very impressive group at the Roaches.

And I did the second ascent with Joe. And when I think about it now, all we had was just a rope. And he put a sling around the block, but there’s nothing else. And now, of course, people will blossom up on the equipment then.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And what’s incredible is how equipment’s at the lot over the years. somebody asked me this week about all the different kinds of playing and I explained to them that bowling was entirely different than league playing and that for instance sports playing.

And you know, there was no such thing as to watch climb when I first went to Manchester for a national service when I was 18, but people just climbed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it was one of the things you could do in those days, I suppose, was there was a lot of opportunity for exploration because a lot of places.

Of course, yeah. People like Brown was doing new climbs every weekend. And what changed things dramatically was the change in 1949 of the access to the countryside. Because places in Derbyshire, for instance, like Frogger Edge before 1949, you’re provisioned to go climbing there, private land. It’s the same with Curler. It was the same with Stanage. If you read my article in this essays, you’ll read about there was a confrontation when local clients were trying to claim at Stanage, and they were driven off by the police with dogs and everything. And that was in the very early 1940s. Yeah.

That seems almost absurd these days. That’s amazing that…

In 1949, it opened up all these edges in Dowdyshire, for instance. And to add a pool day, it’s going to places like Prague, curved them. and chat with and doing new climbs every weekend, you know?

So the world was your oyster in a way once that happened, I suppose.

Well, it was a small world, really, in that, you know, Tony was asking me how somebody like Joe Brown got from Manchester to Wales, and he hasn’t got transport. When I first, even when I went to Manchester to do natural tours, he hadn’t got transport. Right. We used to go on the buses. Nobody had a car. We used to catch the last bus from Manchester out to the feet district on a Friday night. Yeah.

And where would you sleep then? Where did you stay?

In a barn. We knew all these places that you could, you know, do what we called dot. Yeah. And the barns, yeah. And Princes in Wales, There was a rowmender’s hut in Longbury Pass.

I used to take down the rowmender’s hut.

There must have been a very strong sense of community in those days amongst them.

Oh, yeah. People used to share. And for instance, on a weekend, as a young climber, started going to the latest every weekend. This is before I had to do national tours. I was only 15, 16, and I used to hitchhike. from school out onto the road and hitchhike up to the Lake District.

Oh, really? Wow.

On a Friday. And I used to go to Wall and Barn with all the other clients and say, I would take a couple of tin tins, say rice pudding or something else, say rice pudding, and somebody else would have a tin of too thick, and we’d all, you know, mixing together, yeah.

Wow, that’s amazing.

And we knew everybody. Amazing thing was it’s a small world. And the number of times, you know, just a few thousand when I first started.

Yes, it must have been a very, it must have pretty well known everybody who’s climbing, you know?

I got to know all the climbs elsewhere, you know. And they were very next to each crown. And some of them, I only knew about their nicknames. For instance, one guy who I claim was called Lazarus. And I never knew his name.

Did he rise in the dead?

Something about 14 or 13. And so I then asked him what his proper name was. So I climbed with Lazarus.

Fast forward a bit now, if you don’t mind. So when did you begin to climb in the Himalayas then? What was your first experience?

What happened was I was in Darby. I studied at the Art College and Printing College in Leeds. perm you to pay for me if you like an apprentice really yes and I did printing printing techniques and I specialized in fine art and I went to Derby And because in Darby, there was a massive printers for the family, Benrose. They owned five factories around the country. One of the things they did to specialize in pine art reproduction, they had a special unit, plate gorilla. You’ve got to know that printer techniques to understand about plate gorilla. When you look at a picture of most printing, it’s half dough. You get a lithographic tap tone. In Plaqueville, it was always used screens with three quarter tones, until therefore you could get very, very dark art pictures. And for instance, we did Salador Darling. We did the Randbank from Rigton Museum in Amsterdam and so forth. And when I was in Darby, I got to know the clients there through the RA club. Right. And they were organized in 1961. I took to the Himalayas, and they asked me if I was interested in being a member of it. And I joined this, that was the first time we went, in 1961. And we were all very young, and there was six of us, and we got on vote from Liverpool. to Bombay, and then we went by trade up right across North India and climbed in the Kooloo Valley. And we climbed in the Himalayas there. And I did two very good climbs there with a guy called Ray Handley. I did the manicure and spires. They were only 18,000 feet. but they were incredible rock fires. I’ve got pictures of it, of the Atmanikaran fires here. And that was the first time we went to the Himalayas in 1961.

I mean, how old were you then?

I was 20, 25, yeah.

Right, still pretty young. And I mean, it must have been an incredible experience to go there.

Obviously going to India. But although I grew up in a very poor working class area in Leeds, my family came from a very wealthy background in the entertainment industry. My father was on the stage all his life. He was on the Northern Pub Circuit and also small theatre. and doing stand-up comedy, playing the piano, singing, and so forth. We once had a rock and ice meat at my house in 1958. And Joe Brown and Wilmers and everybody was there. My father played the piano and sang with them all and everything. And the old dust down in the house, we signed at Hunkley at Cookwright. And the Armstrong, yeah. There were some of the people we were down there. And we all ducked down at my house in Winnows. Amazing. Yeah, we’d all been in the Alps. We needed to challenge it.

Oh, right, okay, okay, okay. So you never felt drawn to the stage yourself then?

Well, I made two records of playing songs.

Really? I didn’t know that.

I’ve got one which is called the Barroom Mountaineers.

And I think there’s ten songs on it.

I played the tenor banjo and the ukulele on this year. And we got all the people to take part as well. Yeah. So one of the things that was very prevalent when I started playing was the kind of sang and all the the walkers sang the people went hill walking and so on the on the evening they all get together say say those things that are youthful some are applying and they have a sing song.

That’s very different from today and.

There’s all these songs that people knew one of the songs that’s very popular and I still get people sending for me to send a copy. It’s a legend of Joe Brown.

That’s a song, is it? Yeah.

Oh, that sounds amazing. I’ll try and get, I’m trying to lay my hands on that somehow.

Well, I’ll send you a copy.

That would be great. That’d be fantastic.

Yeah, that’d be brilliant. Yeah.

It’s something I wasn’t thinking of. Lots of people get in touch with you but want a copy of it. Especially people, a guy who’s got in touch with me from America a lot is Rick Akowozo. And he’s just, as a book of the Bolman Tasca. And it’s book, it’s all about the stone wizards. A developed kind.

Yeah, yeah. in Denver. And he was across here last week for the Baldwin Nataska. I couldn’t go. And, you know, because of my illness, I can’t travel. I was a trustee of the Baldwin Nataska. I was founder of the Baldwin Nataska. And of course, Peter Baldwin worked for me when I was general secretary of the VMC.

Peter worked for about three and a half years from me, yeah. Oh, right. He was probably known by Alec McIntyre.

Yes, yes. Oh, right. I suppose you better mention your book, Essays from the Edge, because this is obviously not your first book, though, is it? You wrote Rope Boy? That was the time I don’t know.

Rick Ecko Morsell has gotten in touch with me about Rope Boy because he’s read it. And he wanted to know all about the, it was Tom Peggy. with TM Lerva. It’s very famous in America, TM Lerva. He didn’t descend in Yosemite. He was very famous as a person who, you know, was very witty, very fawny. I came with him. I went to your service and climb with TM. And TM used to make fun of everything and everybody. It was very well known in America. And Ricky Akamoto wrote to me early this week. He wanted to compare. When he got back to Denver, he’s reading the book by Tom Petey about the songs and the writing. I don’t read Peter’s book.

One Man’s Man’s Lancers.

Yeah. Yeah. So what inspired you to put together your your it’s a collection of features that you’ve written over the years, isn’t it? This new book.

Well, this book, as it is, has come out very, very strange. What happened was Kate more time. She has written the biography of Doug Scott. Right. And to do that, she came here and interviewed me.

And then about a year ago, she got in touch with me and said, I just thought of punching together my essays and articles into a book. And I said, Rosa back and said, no. And she said, I would be willing to edit it. If you let me have the articles, I will put them together and edit them all. And so this is what I did. And that’s how the book came about. I never, ever intended doing this book. Yeah.

It was a great retrospective, though, isn’t it? I mean, you’ve got Talking about the characters, people like Don Willens and Joe Brown.

Yeah, I mean, you.

Used to met some of the, you know, all the four wise climbers in those days, really. Yeah, but you were telling me earlier that you were involved in the development of a climbing wall, is that right? One of.

The first. In 1995, a group of us set together and formed a company and eventually managed to get a property in Leeds and Geller Road.

And we opened at the client center at the end of 1995, the Leeds Hall. It’s now called the Big Depot by this company. And what happened was, I was very ill with this cancer. Right. And I couldn’t get involved anymore. And the guy who was taken over from me, Eric Rhodes, he was originally from Sheffield. And he came to live and later worked for Yorkshire Water.

He also deal with cancer. And he died. And so we hadn’t got anybody to take over. And so we decided to sell the wall. And we sold the wall to the big depot. Yeah.

Right. Right. I mean, I wouldn’t have thought you could have foreseen all those years ago when you started that war, just how popular and how far clammy walls have done.

Well, you know, it was incredible. The first year was a very bad year. We hardly got.

Especially in summer. But suddenly, within the second year, it started being full every night. It became so full that people used to cook outside because we were limited by the number, by health and safety, how many people we could have. And the vaccine was 200. And we used- Oh, wow. So we got 200 people inside and about 20, 30 people waiting outside for somebody to come out. Yeah.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? Isn’t it really?

All this happened within a year, two years, completely changed. And as I say, within 10 years, we started having people who never climbed outside. they just went to climbing walls yeah yeah yeah a guy comes here to visit me Phil Dudson he was secretary on the Leeds wall and Phil is a very interesting person he’s just written a book which was published it’s besides he’s a playwright it’s written about three players and He was managing director of the IT company, and he was headhunting from Cambridge. And he came here from Leeds, and it’s a company set up jointly with the university, and it was developed IT. They’ve got 100 programmers now. They’ve got a place down by the river, special building built. And it’s a real dynamic person, but he had me ever climbed outside. It’s still climbed. It must have been nearly 60. And it’s climbed. And it was here about two weeks ago, came to see me. And he’d been to a bouldering wall.

Well, it’s– In Leeds now, there are seven walls in Leeds. Seven.

Seven, really? Seven.

Five bouldering walls and two leading walls. And one of the leading walls is a pimp and climb for the children. Yeah.

Well, it’s great that the walls have made climbing a lot more accessible for everyone, really.

Yeah. Well, when I look back now, I think it’s attracted a lot of people into the sport.

I have no feeling at all about the outdoors and about playing as they develop traditionally. And they’re very much orientated on Just the performance on the climbing walls. Yeah.

And of course, younger people, this business have been getting too prepared, diet. They’re too serious. They come to the climbing wall, they climb on the wall, they go home to bed. Yeah, yeah, well- That’s not a problem.

Well, I can remember when climbing used to be fun, you know.

I’ve got some of the like bones, it became unfortunately it became an alcoholic the last few years.

Well it was quite a character.

It was an incredible climb when he was young, when he was 20, early 20s, 25.

All the climbers you’ve seen, who would you say was the most gifted? Who was the most talented, the most able?

Joe Brown. Why would you say that?

He was the best rock climber in every kind of conditions I’ve ever climbed in, especially in bad weather. There’s at least times he did, say in 1951.

And the reason he came in bad weather was it was such a job to get to somewhere like Wales. You used to catch a train on Friday night after work. I used to go by train to Flan Dugdo Junction, sleep there on the station, and then hitchhike from Flan Dugdo in the morning. up to Llanberries and you find. And that was, say, in 1951, he did the first ascent on the cloggy of the boulder. And he did it in really bad conditions. The second was Ron Mosley. And Ron Mosley couldn’t second it because it was wet and greasy. And yet afterwards, Mosley led it in good conditions easily. Yeah, Brown was incredibly, he could climb. I did the corner on plugging with him once when it was wet through. It was like climbing up top. And how he managed to lead it in those conditions, I don’t know. I was on a tightrope all the way. Yeah.

And yeah, I led the climb before this easily in perfect conditions. So Brown was As a very young, I climbed Dolphin, and Aaron Rosasso, and Peter Greenwood, and they were all very good climbers. Dolphin was the best climber in our area, and he was really outstanding. But he was not as good as Brown. Brown was absolutely incredible as a rock climber. I never saw anybody as good as he was. He was even better than Williams. Well, probably from down on very overhang ground.

Very strong, presumably.

Yeah. Very, very aggressive. Yeah. Yeah. And he’s very atterving. It didn’t matter to me because I grew up in a very, very far area of religion, and the kids were all like him. Very aggressive. I didn’t know. Lots of fights.

Oh, God. It’s been fascinating talking to you. We’re running out of time, unfortunately. I could talk to you for a lot longer, I think.

Well, that’s very, very kind of you to get in touch.

It’s been brilliant.

It’s been brilliant. An old stager now. It’s very good because people still get in touch. Today I got you know, the the the people who are acting as secretaries are Janet and Steve Dean. And Steve gets in touch with me regularly. And he sent me the book about John Newbank. I don’t know you’ve seen it.

Well, I knew Newbank. He was from Tripoli. And I met him when he was 15. Elkley and he said to me oh I’m I’m really ped up said why he said I’m having to go out to Australia and there’s no climbing there and then of course when he got to Australia he found out there’s climbing everywhere.

That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. Thanks very much for talking. It’d be fantastic. And I really hope your book does well. It really will discuss.

Thank you very much for that.

An absolute pleasure.

It is going very well. The hardback, it’s sold out.

Really? Okay. Okay. I’m sure it’ll do it.

The paperback is sold.

Dennis, great. Thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you very much indeed.

Lovely. Thank you very much. Well, that was an absolutely wonderful little interview to do with Dennis Gray there. I really enjoyed talking to him. Imagine a world, right, where people got together, shared food and sang songs together just for the joy of it. Hey, that’s a long way away in it really. It just feels like another world. Dennis talked about Tom Patty’s song. as a tribute to Joe Brown, the legend of Joe Brown, and I’m very pleased to say he’s let me have a little loan of it. So I’m going to play you out with Dennis Gray singing The Legend of Joe Brown. What I do, to all my listeners, I hope you have a lovely Christmas. I hope the weather picks up, I hope it gets cold and there’s not a lot of snow. But if there ain’t, we can always watch the telly, I suppose. We could either sing a few songs, who knows? But very nice to talk to you. I do hope you’ve enjoyed this little podcast and I’ll see you on the other side of Christmas. Here’s Dennis Gray.

Many tales are told of climbers bold who perished in the snow. But here’s the rhyme of a rise to fame of a working lad called Joe. He came from good old Manchester, that quain old-fashioned town. And his name became a legend, I, the legend of Joe Brown. And he first laid hands upon a crag in the year of ’49. He’d know but pluck beginner’s luck and his mother’s washing line But he scaled the Gridstone Classics with unprecedented skill And his fame soon reached Penny Gurid Likewise the Dungeon Guild I’ve sung it once, I’ll sing it twice Hardest man of the rock and ice Marvellous, fabulous A Wonder Man Joe Brown. In the shades of Dinas Cromlech, Where luckless leaders fall, The corner, it was towering high, Joe and Common small, But his heart was big as a mountain, And his nerves were made of steel. So it had to go, or so would Joe, in a monumental peal. Then he crossed the seas to Chamonix to show what he could do. He knocked three days off the very best time of the west face of the Dru. On the unclimbed face of the Blatier, the crux had tumbled down. So he cracked the crux by the crucial crack, now known as the Fisher Brown. We’ve sung it once, we’ll sing it twice. Hardest man in the rock and ice, marvellous, fabulous, a Wonder Man Joe Brown. When Evans raised his volunteers for far away Nepal, ’twas young Joe Brown, he hurried down to answer to the call. On mighty Kanjung Jungur, his country’s banners blow, and the lad who took the standard there was of course young Joe. In the cold, cold Karacorum, the crags are 5 miles high. The best in France, they saw the chance they could pass him on the sly. You can talk of Paul Keller, Dantamine or Parago, But the man of the hour on the Mustag Tower’s known as Monsieur Joe. We’ve sung it once, we’ll sing it twice, Hardest man in the rocking eyes, Marvellous, he’s fabulous, A Wonder Man Joe Brown. He’s like a human spider when he’s crawling up the wall. Suction, faith, friction, there’s nothing else at all. But the secret of his success is his most amazing knack of hanging by a hand jam in an overhanging crack. But… Some say Joe Brown, he’s sinking down to mediocrity. Why he’s even climbing with useless types like Peyti and me. And he’s lost the pace to stay the race and keep up with the van. And Baron Brown, that tragic clown, he’s now an also-ran. We sung it once, but let that suffice, For the faded flower of the Rockanites. What’s he doing? He’s going off canoeing! He’s long gone hand-jammed Joe. Thus speak Martin Boyson and young Bazzing Bull too, A ranting Alan Austin, Peter Motley Crue, When from the outer darkness A voice like thunder spake And Baron Brown with angry frown From slumber did awake He’s shown ’em once, he’ll show ’em twice The grand old man of the rock and ice He’s marvellous, he’s fabulous He’s a wonder-man Joe Brown

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One thought on “Dennis Gray: Essays from the Edge | Podcast”

Vic Scott says:

December 11, 2025 at 10:57 am

Dennis always approachable.great raconteur…

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