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Wainwright – His Life from Milltown to Mountain
ISBN 9781905080663 - £16.99
Published by Great Northern Books

Bill Mitchell, the well-known former editor of Dalesman and Cumbria magazines, followed the life of A. Wainwright from 1954 when he first encountered AW’s hand-drawn and written pages for The Eastern Fells prior to its publication.

Because Bill got to know AW reasonably well (as well as most people were ever allowed to) over the following thirty-five years, this book perhaps gives a more personal insight into the life of AW than Hunter Davies’ biography did. Bill and three of his friends formed what is known as the Geriatric Blunderers walking group and they regularly called upon AW and Betty.

After AW’s death in 1991, their friendship continued for the rest of Betty’s life until her own death in the summer of 2008. In the book there are new, previously unpublished, details about AW’s family, supplied to Bill by Jack Fish (AW’s nephew) and Linda Collinge (AW’s great-niece) along with several family and archive pictures also previously unpublished, making this a book that will appeal to all Wainwright aficionados.

However, a word of warning! Unfortunately, the author did not appear to have the services of a good editor who might have picked up some errors, for instance, the spelling of Cleater instead of Cleator. There is a quotation from a letter from Betty on page 122 mentioning an outing with AW to High Pike in 1962 which totally contradicts Hunter Davies’ information in the biography (page 204 ) that they didn’t meet until September 1965 when Betty went to see him at the Town Hall, and this has been confirmed to me by Betty’s daughter, Jane King. Perhaps the author meant 1972? Another error occurs on page 132 where Bill says that Castle Crag was Joss Naylor’s penultimate fell when he ran the 214 fells in seven days. This is incorrect – it was Outerside: Castle Crag was number 193, not the 213th.

It is a pity that Great Northern Books did not arrange for the book to be sub-edited by someone who knew the Lake District well so these errors could have been corrected prior to publication. I am disappointed that there is no index in the book making it difficult to look up specific items; I was also disappointed in the quality of a number of the photographs. But worst of all, there is no acknowledgement to the Wainwright Estate for permission to quote from the letters – the copyright of a letter is with the writer or the writer’s heirs, not the recipient. I just hope that verbal permission was cleared.

Having got the brickbats out of the way, let us move onto some positives. There are some very interesting chapters with people who knew AW – letters from Bob Swallow, for example; quotes from Joss Naylor and the late Harry Griffin also help to make this a good read. It is certainly a much better book than Martin Wainwright’s Wainwright: The Man Who Loved the Lakes where too much plagiarism took place from both Hunter Davies’s biography and various other books. Despite the errors mentioned above, Bill Mitchell’s book is certainly worth buying as part of your essential Wainwright collection if you have not done so already.

reviewed by John Burland - Member No. 2