My Last Trip Report - Alan Brentnall

Will this be my last trip report for TSG? Well, maybe – we’re emigrating to Scotland pretty soon, and I’m not sure how often I’ll be back in the Peak District in the future. But it will be a trip report with a difference, as it concerns a caving trip from 52 years ago.

I was born and brought up in the woollen mill town of Bradford. In the late fifties and early sixties, my father did a fair bit of potholing, and we often had trips and walks in the Yorkshire Dales which were not so very far away. So, although my dad never actually took me caving, it wasn’t surprising that I eventually took it up as a hobby myself. In fact, in my teens, I got really hooked on caving, avidly reading all the books I could find, including all Norbert Casteret’s books from my school’s library. But the book which really captured my imagination was “Underground Adventure” by Arthur Gemmell and Jack Myers because it described the sheer excitement and passion involved in actually discovering the caves which were almost on my very doorstep. Even now, it’s books like Iain Barker’s “Classic Caves of the Peak District”, more history books than guide books, which I return to over and over again.

So it wasn’t a surprise that, as soon as John Cordingley published his sequel to Gemmell and Myers’s well-thumbed tome, “Adventure Underground”, I immediately bought a copy – and read it from cover to cover. But, reading it for the first time, I was very surprised to see a picture of myself in the Gaping Gill section – and looking at that picture took me back half a century to my early caving days, days when things were so different.

After the Font - Copyright © Alan Brentnall

It was 1968. My father who worked as a draughtsman in the traction drawing office at English Electric in Thornbury, on the border between Bradford and Leeds, was having to move to their new drawing office in the old Dick Kerr’s building in Preston. This took my family to the mill village of Longridge, on the other side of the Pennines – but still close enough to my Yorkshire Dales. In those days I caved on the fringes of my father’s old club, Bradford Pothole Club, and also with a group of friends from my school in Bradford. This meant that I often used the “Dump”, BPC’s hut at Brackenbottom, as a base, but I also still had connections with my old Duke of Edinburgh group from Bradford, and would stay at Moorend, a renovated farm on the edge of the moor above Kettlewell.

1968 was an exciting time for cavers. More people had cars and motorbikes, making trips up to the Dales much easier. Shops were even selling some caving gear, such as it was in those days, and neoprene wet suits (usually home-made, and totally un-lined) were starting to replace the traditional woollen rags and boiler suits, allowing cavers to push some of the very wettest places with comparative comfort!

It was during the 1968 August Bank Holiday that I’d arranged to meet a caving friend, Martin Milner, up at Clapham. This coincided with Craven Pothole Club’s Winch Meet at Gaping Gill, and our intention was to take advantage of this to see some of the further reaches of the system. During the preceding weeks, since BPC’s own winch meet in May, there had been news of some exciting discoveries in the far reaches of the East Passages, and also at the end of Hensler’s Passage, and we were keen to take a look.

Just like nowadays, winch meets then were very busy, involving a fair bit of queuing – not the best time to be taking a long trip into Gaping Gill. But these were the days before SRT became common practice, and any trip into a system like GG meant a lot of ladder work, lots of equipment and lots of people to carry it -which usually meant that it had to be a club meet. For a pair of keen cavers, the winch meets presented a rare opportunity to take a long serious trip in a pretty lightweight fashion.

So we walked up to Clapham Bottoms and joined the queue at the Gill. I knew many of the other cavers in the queue, and, for an hour or so, we sat in the queue chatting about caving matters. The chap in front of me, who I knew vaguely as “Chubbs”, was telling me that he could no longer cave down in the Peak District because he’d been involved in an “explosives job” at Giants Hole. Back then, Derbyshire caving (and rock climbing for that matter) was a foreign country to me; it would be two decades before I would eventually settle in the Peak District, so I really didn’t understand the import of what he was saying at the time; not until a month or so later, when I read about what had happened in a newsletter.

Back in 1968, the winch itself was powered by a small donkey engine, and, when I say “powered”, this power was only used when the winch was going up. A descent by the winch in those days was done entirely under gravity, and the speed of the winch was controlled by the winchman’s braking handle. There was a yellow-taped mark on the winch cable which told the winchman that the bosun’s chair was 30ft above the floor of the main chamber, and, when he saw this, he knew to slow down. The speed of the descent prior to this “slowing down” depended upon who you were. Tourists and the like descended at a “comfortable speed”, but cavers, especially those known to the winchman, were dropped at 32 feet per second per second. It was a bare knuckle ride which cannot adequately be described in words.

So, going down was very fast, but going up was just the opposite. The engine’s fastest speed was still pretty slow, and it took between four and five minutes for the chair to reach a point some twenty feet below the surface where it came so close to the wall that the winch man had to slow the engine to a crawl for the last section. Consequently, when I got off the winch in the main chamber, after my brief, but terrifying ride down, I knew that it would be at least ten minutes before the next caver, Martin, would appear and we could set off up into Old East.

What I hadn’t bargained for was a man named Sid Perou. At the time I didn’t even know his name, although I’d been very impressed with his film of tragic rescue at Sunset Pot. But, on this occasion, Sid was filming somebody on the winch for what would become his “Lost River of Gaping Gill” film, eventually released in 1970. The filming went on, and on, and on … and, of course, I was completely unaware of what was really happening. All I knew was that the winch wasn’t coming down. So, after almost an hour, I went over to the wall of the chamber, where CPC kept a field telephone for contacting the surface, and had a “conversation” with somebody on top. I found out what was going on, and, I’m afraid, I gave the chap on the other end “a piece of my mind”.

Eventually Martin did appear, and we set off up the scramble and iron ladder into the Old East Passage. This leads to Mud Hall where, these days, there is a traverse ropeway (on and off though, as the mud keeps collapsing). Back then, the only way on was a rope ladder down to the bottom of the chamber – and by rope ladder, I mean a ladder made of rope and wood, not an electron ladder. I suppose they kept an old rope ladder for this purpose because the chunky wooden rungs would be easier to hold for cold, muddy hands. Anyway, the bulk of the “pitch” was a simple 45 degree slope, with the only real ladder work coming in the last twenty feet.

Opposite the ladder, a muddy slope leads upwards into Far East which terminates in a muddy canal of sorts, and it was here that we stopped and searched, for there didn’t appear to be any way on. After looking everywhere (or so we thought) I suddenly heard voices – in fact, I recognised one of the voices as a chap I used to cave with in BPC whom I knew as “Snake”. Snake’s voice seemed to be coming from a muddy puddle and I shouted to him, asking where he was. He replied that he was through in the main “Whit Series” passage, and, if I wanted to come through, I needed to get my eye down to the surface of the pool to see the way.

This I did, and, sure enough, there was an inch or two of air space above the brown water. This duck is now known as The Font, and it is the entrance to the Whit Series. I pushed through and, as soon as my lamp dipped below the surface, it seemed to extinguish – because the brown water was really liquid mud. Once through the Font, I found Snake together with Gerald Benn. Amazingly, Gerry appeared to be wearing a totally clean boiler suit, and operating a camera on a tripod; he was trying to get a picture of one of the 8ft long straw stalactites which wobbled visibly and probably (sadly) doesn’t exist nowadays.

Gerry insisted on taking a picture of me “to show the outside world what caving is really like”, and when Martin came through a minute or so later, he entered the Font feet first, which was OK until he tried to exit into the main passage - an uphill thrutch meaning that his head was under the mud for quite a few seconds.

Saying goodbye to Snake and Gerry, Martin and I headed on into the further reaches of the series, excited by the prospect of seeing new cave. It really was an excellent journey, and the final chamber, Farrar Hall, was certainly worth all the crawling. And when we finally returned to the surface, after this satisfying trip, the chap on the gantry looked in his book to mark the fact that I was out of the system and pointed to a huge black asterisk by my name. “What’s that all about?” I asked, to which he replied, “You’ve been blacklisted! – Must have been something you said.”

Postscript: a few years later, when I visited The Crown in Horton-in-Ribblesdale after another caving trip, a friend from Craven Pothole Club came over to tell me that they had “un-blacklisted” me, and presented me with a copy of the menu from their annual dinner at the Flying Horseshoe Inn near Clapham Station. On the front cover was Gerry Benn’s picture of me from that trip, and on the back cover were the words:

I saw the old homestead and faces I knew,
I saw England’s valleys and dells
And I listened with joy as I did when a boy
To the sound of the old village bells.

The stars were shining brightly,
‘Twas the night that should banish all sin,
For the bells were ringing the old year out,
And the new year in.