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I can say some nice things about the other photographs in the book (by a variety of photographers, including Derry Brabbs). Many of these are glorious, especially some of the double-page spreads. The design – very often photographs put next to each other clash horribly, whilst others disappear in the ‘gutter’ of a double-page spread – their caption area, and the subsequent text occasionally reminds me of a Battenberg cake. AW would have been extremely rude about much of the design. BBC Books has recently been bought by Ebury Press, both fine publishers in their own right. Neither should be proud of this production. The book is incomplete without an index. Now to the text. I suspect that the book was put together in a huge hurry, to cash in on the successful television series but that is absolutely no excuse to perpetrate the horrors that appear on almost every page. Are my words too strong? Decide for yourselves. The book is divided into three parts, the first being Wainwright, The Life (with copy lifted/borrowed from both Memoirs of a Fellwander and Hunter Davies’ biography). Credit to the former is covered in a very loose acknowledgement given at the end of the book – loose in that the book is not named nor the copyright date given. The author acknowledges the debt he owes Hunter Davies in the Afterword, but, again, there is no copyright line. There is very little new in this section that Wainwright aficionados won’t know already. The next part is inexplicably called Wainwright, The Lakes. The author uses the words ‘The Lakes’ as someone might when deciding that ‘a drive up to the Lakes next Sunday might be fun’. The Lakes as in the Lake District or Lakeland. I am sure (but might be wrong) that AW never used this term. For that reason, the book’s title isn’t very clever. Wainwright loved, first and foremost, the fells. In this second section, Martin Wainwright goes through the seven Pictorial Guides, picking bits out here and there – and I reckon that quotes taken from the guidebooks account for between a third and a half of the text, and that excludes the whole pages reproduced from the books. I hope the Wainwright Estate was paid accordingly. But herein lies the crux of this review. The author breaks just about every rule there is about quoting other people’s material. Quotes – set within quotation marks – should be 100% accurate. If they are not in quotation marks, they can be paraphrased (but it is still polite to acknowledge the source). If the sentences are separated by other words that do not appear in the original, then they shouldn’t be put together in the same set of quotation marks. When words are omitted from a quotation, it is permissible to indicate the omission by ellipses – three dots. As a senior newspaper editor, Martin Wainwright should know all this. The publishers should know this. The way the quotes have been bastardised in this book is a disgrace. Let me give a few examples. Describing Small Water, Martin Wainwright writes: Small Water in its cove on Harter Fell is likewise ‘the finest tarn in Lakeland – and how the larks sing at dawn on Harter Fell on a summer’s day. On Harter Fell 2, AW wrote: ‘… a shelf cradles Small Water, which is the finest of Lakeland’s tarns’, and on Harter Fell 7, he wrote, ‘And how the larks sing on Harter Fell at dawn on a summer day.’ Both Martin Wainwright’s quotes are incorrect, and they should never have been joined up like that. He even manages to get a 3-word quote wrong: for ‘thigh-length gumboots’ he has written ‘thigh-high gumboots’. One quote has been so bastardised that I blanch on behalf of AW. Martin Wainwright has taken the following quote from Great End 11: ‘The author, after twice timorously attempting to climb the pitch with no real hope of succeeding, retired from Cust’s Gully with a jeering conscience and went home to write, in capital letters on page 11 of his Great End chapter: NO WAY FOR WALKERS’. and changed it into: Wainwright admits ‘twice timorously attempting to climb the difficult pitch beneath a huge, edged boulder, before retiring with a jeering conscience to go home and write in capital letters (again): No way for walkers.’ There are other errors, other than the quotes: ‘little Grange Fell’ is called ‘Little Grange Fell’; he gives the height for Gray Crag when he is describing Grey Crag; and when listing AW’s finest half-dozen fells from the end of Western Fells, he gives Scafell instead of Scafell Pike. At a quick count, this section alone contains 45 inaccurate or bastardised quotes, six instances of incorrect information and some incorrectly spelled names. The third part of the book is called Wainwright, The Walks and describes the walks that were shown on television. This section is the least bad of the three in that there is not so much leaning on other people’s works, although there are at least four inaccurate quotes from Fellwalking; that book does not get a mention in the acknowledgements, let alone a copyright line. How much Martin Wainwright has borrowed from other books, I don’t know; it does appear that he has done some or maybe all of these particular ascents. There is some unnecessary repetition of information from earlier sections, which should have been edited out. Why it was decided there should be no captions to the photographs in this section, I cannot fathom. Those who watched the television programmes will recognise the attractive woman who appears in quick succession (there are four photographs of Julia Bradbury) but it will be guesswork for others. Perhaps there weren’t any decent photographs for the Castle Crag, Helvellyn and Bowfell walks; and the mind boggles as to why the drawing from Western Fells’ Yewbarrow 9 should appear in the chapter on Helvellyn. Mention of the final page of the last fell of Book Seven tells me it is time to stop. Except for one quote to which I would draw Martin Wainwright’s attention (and his publishers’ who are far from innocent in all this) and that comes from AW’s Personal Notes in Conclusion to Book Three: ‘I should just hate to see my name on anything that could not be relied on’. I am truly sorry, AW, that I was not there to protect you from this mish-mash. reviewed by Jenny Dereham |
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I will begin this review with the attractive paperback cover with flaps. The photograph of AW on the front was taken by Homer Sykes which, he tells me dates from 1971 for an article in the Daily Telegraph. (Does anyone have that article? It would be interesting to see what was said then.) There are three other Sykes photographs in the book: I wish I had known about them when I was publishing Hunter Davies’ biography of AW. The author of this television tie-in book is Martin Wainwright (no relation to AW), who is Northern Editor of the Guardian. 