Into the Wainwright Cave

Interview by Tony Greenbank

Chris Butterfield quizzes me as if he, not I, was Cumbria’s interviewer after activating his smartphone recorder in the Borrowdale Hotel lounge.

“So you, Tony Greenbank, were an assistant in Kendal library in the 1950s and actually stamped Alfred Wainwright’s library books?” he says, pointing his coffee cup at me. “Incredible! And you once fined him for returning an overdue book?”

“Absolutely,” I reply. “Said he’d been distracted by writing his Eastern Fells guide. Oh, and he had an umbrella that had seen better days, too.”

“Alfred Wainwright with a brolly!” he says as if striking gold. “Nice one.” His face falls when he realises the occasion wasn’t on Scafell Pike. Nor is my next answer much consolation. “Couldn’t you have let him off the fine?” he asks. “I mean, Alfred Wainwright! The world celebrated guidebook guru!”

“Heck, no”, I reply. “Not famous then. I was just some gangling youth at the counter. He was the Borough Treasurer. Even a fistful of shrapnel was much-needed revenue not long after the war.”

Mr Butterfield – “call me Chris” – is a top collector of Wainwright’s books in all their editions, reprints, and AW memorabilia, including voice recordings.

“I have,” he says. “the full printing history of Wainwright’s entire works and am registered with every auction house in the country.”

“So, if some Wainwright item pops up, you get in there?”

He nods. “Mitchells in Cockermouth and 1818 Auctioneers at Crooklands are best regarding AW”. Chris’s house in Scotland is full of Wainwright’s works, he tells me; he has a security-guarded Wainwright cave. Ulster lass Priscilla, his wife of seven years, joins us.

“Together in 2013,” he says, “we walked the Pennine Way for my fortieth birthday, following Wainwright’s footsteps.”

“Yes,” chips in Priscilla in her soft Irish brogue, “we also enjoyed a couple of free half-pints on AW at the Border Hotel in Kirk Yetholm.” She helps Chris on the AW front, being an ace at “mathematical modelling” and working as a pricing specialist for an insurance company. Chris, by way of contrast, is a mechanical engineer. He says all of his spare time is AW-work related.

“With me, Wainwright is a passion. I’m obsessed with his genius.” He agrees he must be one of the least idle people to come from Idle in Yorkshire (Idle’s Idle Working Men’s Club is well famed).

When he discovers I had dealings with Wainwright and Kendal librarian Henry Marshall…wow! Henry, after all, was the first to publish and distribute AW’s guidebooks from his Kentmere domain. “so how did Marshall and Wainwright get on?” he asks.

“Hunky-dory,” I replied. “At that time, the big three in Kendal, great outdoors-wise, were Henry, AW and Harry Griffin“ – famed for his Guardian Country Diary column. “It was Griffin, who was Henry’s real pal, arriving in the octagonal library hall each morning for coffee with HM.“

It’s here that Chris reminds me that HM felt hard done by when, after nearly ten years, Wainwright switched publishers without warning, from the Marshall household imprint to the Westmorland Gazette. A bit like a bride being dropped at the altar by text message. “I remember. Sad days for HM.”

Chris nods. “Story goes Wainwright’s name was banned in the Marshall residence thereafter.”

I tell Chris about the one time I was present while Wainwright and Henry Marshall were chatting. HM had a green eye and a brown eye, which affected his vision. He’d recently taken to climbing, a year later than me. We’d rope up together on a crag on Thursday afternoons, say on the Langdale Pikes.

So here was Harry telling AW how the previous day I had peeled off Amen Corner on Gimmer. To land with a thump on a ledge. AW, listening to our epic, walked away, shaking his head.

“Oh,” I say, “and I was also there when Harry Griffin told HM he’d fallen out with Wainwright. They arrived at a drystone wall near Kirkstone Pass. Harry climbed over, only for AW to say, ‘I don’t climb walls’. Nor did he.”

My coffee’s cold. No problem. I will gulp it down while Chris thinks of answers. Fat chance. He answers straight away, adding more “asks” of his own.

“Do you know,” he says, “only three people know exactly where AW’s ashes are strewn by Innominate Tarn?”

“You one of them?” I ask. He doesn’t reply. I recall journalists would ask Willie Richardson, the farmer who at that time shepherded his Herdwicks on Haystacks, if he would consider changing the name of Innominate Tarn to Wainwright Tarn. As it was his own farm, he was at liberty to say, “Nowt doing”.

Chris says he loved walking the Pennine Way, especially the Cumbrian sections like Cross Fell and High Cup’s deep chasm, that he contacted snapper Derry Brabbs. Brabbs collaborated with AW, taking photos for coffee table books, including a rarity called On the Pennine Way. In 2015, Chris and Priscilla walked the Coast to Coast route from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay.

It was the first time Chris had used a Wainwright guidebook and followed the famed route that AW devised.

“I was using the guidebook on a day-to-day basis and was stunned by his genius for leading walkers by the hand, as it were, through terrain foreign to them. Priscilla bought me the clothbound editions of the seven Lakeland guidebooks, and I began ticking the summits off. Now I’ve just a few left of the 214 Wainwrights remaining. You only need to say, ‘I’m doing the 214s,’ and fellow walkers understand you’re Wainwright-bound.

“Most other collectors want to gather specific Wainwright editions. Me, I want everything. I probably go beyond regular, enthusiastic collecting by snapping up each and every AW edition issued by the various publishers – Henry Marshall, the Westmorland Gazette, Michael Joseph, Frances Lincoln et al. – including the physical differences, even tiny ones, like the different colours or sizes of the typeface on the title page, dust jacket, or down the spine.

“Since I put my collection on social media, such as Facebook, I have expanded my networking and got to know some major AW players, like Andrew Nichol [book publishing manager at the Westmorland Gazette]; Richard Else, producer of Wainwright’s TV series; and Chris Jesty, who has become a good friend. He’s the author and cartographer who revised AW’s Pictorial Guide of 1955 into a smack-bang, up-to-date Second Edition (2005-2009).

There are booby traps. Even AW dropped the odd clanger, usually typos of place names, nothing mega; things like, say, “gill” for “ghyll” or vice versa. Interestingly, in Fellwanderer (1966), he says that no one knows his first name. Wrong! For the June 1955 edition of Cumbria magazine, he had taken out a full-page advertisement announcing his forthcoming Eastern Fells guidebook, the first of the seven. And signs it “Alfred Wainwright”. As of now, it’s signed and safely delivered into Chris Butterfield’s Wainwright Cave.

Like Beethoven lost his hearing, AW’s eyesight began to fail by the late ’80s. In his book Fellwalking with a Camera (1988), certain photos snapped by the author were so blurry they had to be removed before publication. That meant their accompanying text had to go, too. Result? Forty per cent of the words AW originally penned have never been seen on public display.

Guess who has this book’s original manuscript, given to him by Andrew Nichol, who, besides his Westmorland Gazette role, became a great friend of AW? You guessed. Chris Butterfield, Alfred Wainwright’s champion, defender of the Borough Treasurer, I remember as a kindly Kendal Carnegie library borrower.

Tony Greenbank
17th April 2019

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Tony Greenbank was a freelance journalist at Newsquest Cumbria, previously Cumbrian Newspapers. He also wrote for The Mail in Barrow, Cumbria Life, and The Guardian and was known for his popular Bar Spy column in the News & Star and for covering sporting events in the county. He was originally from Yorkshire but spent many years in Cumbria, living in Ambleside and latterly in Keswick.

A keen climber, he was a close friend of mountaineer Sir Chris Bonington and knew Wainwright and his publisher, Henry Marshall.

A special thanks to my friend and outdoor writer John Manning, who arranged this special day. All credit goes to him for making it happen.

Priscilla and I met Tony in the Borrowdale Hotel, nestled at the foot of Shepherds Crag in the picturesque Borrowdale valley at the edge of Derwentwater. The sun was shining, and the flowers were almost in full bloom.

Tony was such an interesting character and full of charisma. As soon as he revealed his connection with Wainwright, that was it, and I tried to turn the tide of the interview. Whenever he paused to think, I seized the opportunity and fired questions back at him. Tony was a real pro, though. I couldn’t keep him on the back foot for long.

We intended to work together again but never got around to it. I shall always cherish the memories of those hours spent with him in the jaws of Borrowdale on that warm spring day. Retaining the audio recording of the meeting keeps him vividly in my memory, and it is a day I will never forget. Rest in peace, Tony.