Joe Brown (born 26 September 1930) is an English climber, born the seventh and last child of a family in the Manchester suburb of Ardwick. He became famous for climbing during the 1950s, and was a member of the Valkyrie climbing club and founding member of the Rock and Ice climbing club. An early climbing partner was Don Whillans, a fellow Mancunian and a plumber. They were among the first of a new breed of post-war climbers from working class backgrounds, in contrast to the upper and middle-class professionals who had dominated the sport up to World War II.
Brown is widely regarded as the outstanding pioneering English rock climber of the 1950s and early 1960s. He established an unprecedented number of classic new routes (especially in Snowdonia and the Peak District); that were at the leading edge of the hardest grades. Examples on Dinas Cromlech in the Llanberis Pass include "Cenotaph Corner" (1952, E1, with Doug Belshaw) and "Cemetery Gates" (1951, E1, with Don Whillans). As well as creating pioneering routes, he often helped create new types of "protection" to improve safety on climbs, and is acknowledged to have created some of the first "nuts". So famous was he that the Post Office would often deliver letters simply addressed to "The Human Fly, UK".
In this context, Brown's mountaineering achievements in the Alps and Himalaya have often been overlooked: he made many significant ascents in the Alps in the 1950s with Don Whillans and other members of the Rock and Ice climbing club and, in 1955, the first ascent of the third highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Nepalese Himalaya, with George Band. In 1956 he made the first ascent of the west summit of the Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram with Ian McNaught-Davis. The other members of the team, John Hartog and Tom Patey, reaching the main summit the next day.
Apart from his numerous classic rock climbs in Britain, and his considerable mountaineering achievements abroad, Joe is remembered for televised rock climbs in the 1960s, three in Snowdonia, and then, in 1967, of a spectacular new route on the Old Man of Hoy, a Scottish sea stack, with luminaries of the climbing world Ian McNaught-Davis and Sir Chris Bonington. Fifteen years later Brown repeated the climb on the Old Man on a popular TV documentary with his second daughter Zoe. Her bubbly personality led her to being chosen as a presenter on the children's TV show Tiswas.
Bibliography
- Brown, Joe (1967). The Hard Years. London, UK: Victor Gollancz. (Original Hardcover)
- Brown, Joe (2001). The Hard Years. Seattle, WA, USA: Mountaineers Books. ISBN 978-0898868456. (Reprint Edition)
External links
Joe Brown's downloadable (free) biography from his on-line store Joe-Brown.com
List of Joe Brown's first ascents
References
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