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A Centenary Collection of
A. Harry Griffin - by Peter Hardy
ISBN 978-0-7112-3179-5.
Published by Frances
Lincoln £14.99 (£11.99 to members)
Arthur Harry Griffin, who died in 2004
at the grand old age of ninety-three, was
a fabled fellwalker, rock climber, author
and journalist, perhaps best known as a
contributor to the Guardian’s Country Diary
for over fifty years. This book of previously
uncollected writings has been compiled by
Peter Hardy (who previously edited The
High Places, which comprised a selection
of A. H. Griffin’s articles in the Lancashire
Evening Post up to 2004) to mark the
centenary of Harry’s birth in 1911.
While the book includes sections on rock climbing
and Harry’s other great interest, classical music, it is
the extracts from his years of journalism that form
the core of the book, specifically articles written
for the Lancashire Evening Post, Cumbria, and the
Guardian’s Country Diary. Most of these are taken
from a twenty-year period extending from 1946
to 1966 and, with their occasional references to
the old counties of Westmorland and Cumberland,
have an undoubtedly nostalgic feel, which captures
the time when the Lake District was a quieter
place. There is, however, a reference in a 1962
article to ‘when Helvellyn, Gable and the Langdale
Pikes are swarming with people and cars are
grinding over Hardknott Pass in scores’.
This is very much a book to read at random, articles
having such enticing titles as ‘Neat Cairns are Best’
and ‘Who was St. Sunday?’ My personal favourite is
an article on ‘The Incomparable Screes’, referring to
those by Wastwater, described as the most dramatic
mountain view in England for the motorist, where
‘among fantastic minarets of rock and the black
cavernous gullies, could be the abode of trolls’. The
book contains a section of photographs taken by
Harry over a period of many years.
Much of the period covered by this collection of
articles coincides with the years when Wainwright
was compiling his Pictorial Guides, and one of
Harry’s Country Diary articles duly acknowledges
these as being ‘the most comprehensive study
ever made of the hills of the Lake District’. Harry
Griffin often expresses a desire for solitude, and
presumably detected a kindred spirit in AW.
All in all, this is an interesting compendium that
concentrates on the earlier period of Harry Griffin’s
writings – his later work having been covered
elsewhere, including in High Places.
Kevin Whalley -
Member No. 743
