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by Ed Geldard
ISBN: 978-1848689503.
Published by
Amberley Publishing £14.99.
After AW’s ‘Road to Damascus’ first
visit to the Lake District in June 1930,
he devised an ambitious walking tour,
to be undertaken over Whitsuntide the
following year with three colleagues from
the Borough Treasurer’s department at
Blackburn Town Hall, Harry Driver, Eric
Maudsley and Jim Sharples.
On his plan, AW wrote: ‘It is the claim of this
programme that EVERY lake, EVERY valley, EVERY
mountain will be seen if not actually visited.’ AW
didn’t leave any specific notes about the trip
although he prepared a detailed itinerary which Eric
Maudsley retained and which has formed the basis
of the books written about the walking holiday.
Ed Geldard, a professional landscape photographer,
first met AW in 1989 when, to his great surprise,
AW asked him if he would be interested in doing
the photography for a new book he was planning
on the Limestone Dales. Wainwright in the
Limestone Dales was published in 1991 to critical
acclaim, shortly after AW’s death’.
It was not long after this that AW’s notes to
the walking tour of 1931 came to light in Eric
Maudsley’s possession, and Ed Geldard suggested
to Michael Joseph Ltd – then the Wainwright
publishers – that a book in the style of the earlier
Wainwright/Brabbs collaborations would be viable.
This was Wainwright’s Tour in the Lake District –
Whitsuntide 1931 with photographs by Ed Geldard
and text and drawings taken from AW’s Pictorial
Guides and sketchbooks.
In 1988, the publishers put the text into the
Pictorial Guide format, with the walk broken
down – at the suggestion of Eric Robson who had
produced a Striding Edge video of the walk – into
a more manageable eleven days; like the video,
it was called The Wainwright Memorial Walk. This
book is now available from Frances Lincoln Ltd.
This latest book about the Whitsuntide walk,
Wainwright’s Lost Tour, is very different from
the earlier version in that it is primarily a book of
photographs with only a little text. There are a total
of 182 colour photographs and accompanying each
one is a short narrative about the particular scene.
I found the Introduction of particular interest,
where the weather forecast for the six days is
given alongside notes culled from Maudsley’s
introduction to the first book, and together these
give an insight into why some of the planned
route was changed, and several summits were
abandoned. In his acknowledgements, Ed Geldard
mentions the help given to him in this respect by
Joan Self of the National Meteorological Archive.
This is the same lady who helped Derek Cockell
from the Society with his research into the actual
date of AW’s first visit to the Lake District in 1930
and his ascent of Orrest Head. See the article by
Derek in Footsteps of March 2010.
The photographs are good, some excellent;
those who have the original book, however, will
notice very many similarities. As with so many
photographic books of this sort, some of the
juxtapositions across the double-page spread are
uneasy, and the decision to use blown-up sections
of a later photograph as the opening to each Day
or chapter has not, to my mind, always worked:
the result is often what appears to be a rather
blurred image.
The book is not without a number of factual errors
and spelling mistakes but, in my opinion, overall it
is a book that merits inclusion in my Wainwright
collection.
John Burland -
Member No. 2
