Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

Castle Crag in autumnal splendour and the museums of Keswick and Ambleside spark a train of thought about four Lakeland luminaries and the landscape that inspired them.

Man vs Mountain

The curator pops her head around the corner to say she’ll be shutting up the till in a couple of minutes—if there’s anything I want from the shop. She glances at the screen and adds, “you’ve got time to see it through to the end”. Then she smiles, and I wonder if she can tell that I’m fighting back tears.

I dare say I’m not the first. I’m in Keswick museum, at the Man vs Mountain exhibition, watching a short film about Chris Bonington. Chris is recalling how he reached the summit of Everest for the first time at the age of fifty. The last difficult part of the climb is the Hillary Step. As Chris started up it, he began to doubt whether he still had the upper body strength required. All of a sudden, he sensed his old climbing buddy, Doug Scott beside him, offering words of encouragement and spurring him on. Whilst he was fully aware this was something his mind was constructing to help him dig deep, it worked: he found the resolve and his muscles didn’t fail.

From the top of the Hillary Step onwards is relatively easy (apparently), but as Chris trod the snow in the footsteps of the others, his mind filled with memories of the friends he’d lost. Men like Ian Clough, with whom he conquered the north face of the Eiger. Their faces fill the screen, and Chris wells up as he remembers collapsing in tears on the roof of the world. You’d have to be harder than the Eiger and colder than the Hillary Step not to be moved.

Ten minutes ago, he had me crying with laughter as he read out a letter from his former employer, refusing him leave to embark on a mountaineering expedition. Chris worked for a foodstuffs manufacturer and the letter has all the hallmarks of CJ giving Reggie Perrin a dressing down. His employer concluded that this request was hardly likely to be a one-off, and repeated absences for this sort of thing would almost certainly conflict with the young Bonington‘s career as a business executive. It was time he made a choice between mountains and margarine!

For all his far-flung adventures since choosing summits over Sunshine Desserts, it’s Cumbria that Chris calls home. He has said of the Lake District, “It may not be the most beautiful place in the world, but it is as beautiful as any place in the world”. Of course, it’s Lakeland for a reason, and today, torrential rain has driven me indoors, but yesterday, the District more than lived up to such an accolade.

The Professor of Adventure

It’s autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, and twenty-four hours ago in Borrowdale, Keats’s words found their full expression. As I walked through the woods beside the River Derwent and climbed to the top of Castle Crag, the trees were in their majesty, robed in leaves of amber, honey, mustard and flaxen against the purple fell—a last parade of pomp before winter’s winds strip them bare. Swathes of undergrowth were fire brick and barn red. The quarry-cut faces of slate-grey escarpments thrust from the flora like stalagmites, aspiring to kiss the volatile sky—all wisps of smokey mist and darker banks of rain-cloud, punctuated with shafts of soft yellow light. Over Derwent Water, Blencathra’s crenelated ridge was pale sunlit gold.

On the way to the summit, I stopped for coffee with the ghost of another Lakeland legend. A cave above a spoil heap, on the eastern slope of Castle Crag, was home to Millican Dalton. Like Bonington, Millican made a life-changing decision to quit his job as a London insurance clerk and live free, becoming a self-styled Professor of Adventure.

After selling his house, he overwintered in Buckinghamshire in a log cabin, but spent his summers in the Lakes, initially under canvas, but from around 1914, in this old quarry cavern. During WWII, when his Buckinghamshire home was a little too close to the Blitz, he spent the winter here too, obliged to put out his campfire at night at the behest of the blackout wardens.

In his book, Millican Dalton: a Search for Romance and Freedom, M. D. Entwistle reproduces an interview from a January 1941 edition of the Whitehaven News. It helps paint a picture of the cave as it was in Millican’s time—pots and cooking utensils, salvaged from village dumps, packed neatly in their places, and huge icicles hanging from the entrance. Dalton himself cut a dashing figure in his Tyrolean hat and home-made clothes—lightweight, functional but never quite finished. This wildman of the woods was anything but reclusive. On the contrary, he was well-known and well-liked around Keswick and would trade climbing lessons and adventures for Woodbines and copies of the Daily Herald.

Where the path swings away from the River Derwent, it forks. The left-hand prong climbs below spoil to a shallow waterlogged cavern. A little way above is Dalton’s cave, a split-level affair with a larger lower chamber and an upper room which Millican called the attic. Here was where he slept. Yesterday, I sat on a stone shelf beside his bed, which had been given a fresh mattress of bracken—maintained, it seems, by an invisible devotee. It’s easy to imagine Millican’s presence; easier still, to understand the cave’s appeal. Water dripped hypnotically from the entrance, but the interior was dry. I stayed a good while in quiet meditation, soothed by a pervasive sense of calm.

I have a friend who is something of a modern day Millican. Like Dalton, he’s gregarious and works with people—that’s what makes him tick—but he loves the solitude of wilderness too. He has a house but only retreats within its walls for the worst of the winter. For the rest of the year he camps wild, moving his tent every two days to avoid leaving an imprint. His eyes sparkle as he describes the joy of living so close to the wildlife.

People talk about getting close to nature as an escape, but when we’re out in the landscape, it feels much more as if we’re getting closer to reality—closer to who we really are. Modern living divorces us from the natural order and can fill us with all kinds of unnatural, trivial neuroses. The landscape restores a sense of belonging, but it also triggers a survival instinct: nature does not owe us safe passage; we must keep our wits about us; we will survive or fall by our judgements. The more challenging the terrain, the more intense that feeling. Ultimately, it’s more liberating than intimidating, because nature’s threats bear no malice, they’re just part of a system that, deep down, we fully understand. Bonington and Dalton simply took it to another level.

Both men quit their regular jobs to do what inspired them. By contrast, Kurt Schwitters was forced out of his because of what inspired him. He would eventually find refuge, fresh hope and a new muse in Lakeland, but it took a circuitous route to get here.

Mier Bitte

Schwitters was born in Hanover and studied art at the Dresden Academy. In the chaos surrounding the First World War, he felt conventional modes of artistic expression were no longer relevant:

“In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.” – The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press 1993

Merz was a term coined by Schwitters to describe his technique of building ‘psychological collages’ from fragments of found objects: bus tickets, bits of wood, wire, newspaper cuttings. The pictures attempt to understand the world by assembling something new, witty, poignant or thought-provoking from its broken and discarded pieces. Mier Bitte hangs in Kendal’s Abbot Hall Art Gallery. It takes its name from the words that appear in the top right-hand corner, a corruption of the German for “me please”. Or is it? If you look closely enough, you can almost make out the letters that have been covered up—cut from an advert for Yorkshire Premier Bitter.

Picture With Turning Wheel comprises a set of wheels that only turn clockwise—an allusion to right-wing drift in German politics that gained momentum between the wars. When the Nazis took power, Schwitters was denounced as a degenerate. He was relieved of his contract with Hanover City Council; his works were removed from public galleries and ridiculed. Kurt feared for his safety when the Gestapo summoned him for interview. He fled to Norway. His wife stayed behind to manage their properties and visited regularly at first, but eventually they became estranged.

In 1940, the German army invaded Norway, and Schwitters escaped to Britain where he was interred on the Isle of Man. The camp was home to a number of artists and writers. Schwitters was a popular figure and a mentor to young creatives, but some accounts suggest he worked tirelessly to shut out depression. His internment ended in 1941, and he moved to London, where he would become a major influence on British Pop Artists like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, as well as their American forerunners, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

In 1942, he visited the Lake District and found a volcanic landscape that reminded him of beloved Norway. He moved to Ambleside three years later and set up a studio in an old stone barn near Elterwater. Schwitters was a Merz artist and his studios were his Merzbau: more than just workshops, they were installations, transformed into works of art in their own right, walls, columns, ceilings becoming Merz sculptures. His original Hanover Merzbau was destroyed by Allied bombing, and his second in Norway burnt down. The Elterwater barn was the only survivor.

After his death, Schwitters’ legacy languished, and for a while, he was largely overlooked. The barn fell into disrepair. Eventually the Tate Gallery and Richard Hamilton got involved and airlifted one sculptural relief, spanning an entire interior wall, to a new home in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.

In recent years, Schwitters’ reputation has enjoyed a renaissance. In 2011, Lakeland builder, Mike Hodgson, was commissioned to build an exact replica of the Elterwater Merzbau in the forecourt of the Royal Academy—a reminder to the artistic establishment that the arts have flourished beyond the boundary of the M25.

This morning, I visited the Armitt museum in Ambleside to see a small exhibition of Schwitters’ oil paintings. Schwitters never entirely abandoned what he learned at the Academy. He continued to produce figurative work alongside his Merz experiments, if only because these were easier to sell. This small collection comprises richly evocative pictures of Ambleside and the Lakes. Bold and expressive, the paint so thick it’s almost sculptural in its textures, these canvases take you deep into the landscape beyond the walls. This is the work of a man who understood this wild terrain: the rough fell pasture and the craggy pinnacles, the haunting light and the white rendered farm houses, the twisted wind-blown trees and the drama of brooding weather fronts. In the dramatic shadow play of late afternoon, light dimming, leaves blown in spirals by the brutal buffets of a bracing wind, a thin veil of mizzle softening focus, hard lines blur, blending building, tree, shrub, scrub and hill; in these paintings, Ambleside’s iconic Bridge House is organic, tree-like, growing from the foliage behind; the gables of a grand Grasmere residence are siblings to the crags of Silver How; and the shifting patterns of light unite lake, leaves and fell in one ephemeral sweep of green and white.

Ruskin said, “Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural landscape”. A pulmonary edema ended Schwitter’s life at the tender age of sixty, but he died in the shadow of the Lakeland fells: they had become a happy final refuge from the chaos and turmoil he strove to capture through Merz.

In their own ways, Bonington, Dalton and Schwitters have all been champions of Lakeland, but in the adjacent room hangs the work of a woman, who may just have been the greatest champion of them all.

Mrs Heelis

The exhibition comprises a number of scientific drawings and watercolours of fungi. Painstakingly accurate, they have long served as a reference for the correct identification of species, but they are also exquisitely beautiful artworks. The artist was a woman and an amateur mycologist. The daughter of an eminent London lawyer and a socially ambitious mother, she may have seen scientific research as a way out of the rather straight-jacketed existence of a dutiful Victorian daughter—permitted a tightly circumscribed choice of activities until her mother could find a respectable match for her to marry.

Her uncle was a distinguished chemist and arranged a meeting with George Murray, the Keeper of Botany at Kew Gardens. They struck up a friendship, but Murray remained sceptical about the woman’s theories on the nature of lichens. Her uncle attempted to go over Murray’s head by arranging a meeting with the director of Kew, William Thistleton-Dyer. It was not a great success—Thistleton-Dyer was dismissive and patronising.

Undeterred, and with the help of her uncle and George Murray, the woman submitted a paper on “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae” to the Linnean Society. At the time women were prohibited from attending Linnean Society meetings, so her paper was presented in her absence. By all accounts, it was well received, but the society felt it needed more work before they would agree to publish it. The changes were never made, and the paper was lost.

There is some debate as to whether this was a case of a promising young mycologist being stifled by a misogynistic establishment, or whether an amateur with a slightly inflated view of her own work’s importance simply lost heart when confronted with legitimate demands for greater scientific rigour. Perhaps the paper simply got put on the back burner when the woman found a more fruitful path to freedom.

She had enjoyed some success with her designs for greetings cards, featuring animals dressed in human clothing. In 1901, she developed the story of one such character into a book, which publisher, F. Warne, published to widespread success. Lovers of the Lakes must be thankful that the doors of the Linnean Society slid shut at the right time. If Beatrix Potter had forged a successful career as a mycologist, the Lake District might look very different today.

Beatrix used the profits from her first book, The Tale Of Peter Rabbit, to buy Hill Top farm in Near Sawrey. It became the inspiration for several of her later, equally successful stories, but it also kickstarted her interest in farming and conservation.

Much to the dismay of her mother, Potter married a humble Hawkshead solicitor, William Heelis. With William’s help, and motivated by the work of family friend and National Trust founder, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (once described as “the most active volcano in Europe”), Beatrix began buying and conserving other Lakeland farms, including the huge but run-down Troutbeck Park. The Heelises’ objective was to protect the land from the property developers who were quickly waking up to its commercial potential.

Beatrix’s coup-de-grace came when the vast Monk Coniston estate was put up for sale. She realised this might be the writing on the wall for the traditional Lakeland fell farms that surrounded Coniston and Hawkshead. She petitioned the National Trust to buy the land and preserve it in the national interest. They lacked the funds to do so, so she made them a deal. If they bought half the estate, she would buy the other half, and she would manage it for them until her death, at which time, she would bequeath the Trust all her land. Without her intervention, the National Park, as we know it today, might not have been possible.

As I drive out of Keswick under Skiddaw’s vaulting peaks, and journey beside the black primordial waters of Thirlmere, Grasmere, Rydal and Windermere, glinting inscrutably in the encroaching darkness, my mind is full of four Lakeland luminaries and the ancient landscape that inspired them. I may never climb Everest or live in a cave in Borrowdale. It’s unlikely I’ll be persecuted by fascists or facilitate the formation of a national park. But for many of us, the months ahead will hold their own challenges. As they loom on the horizon, some might even seem as insurmountable as Everest. To meet them head on may mean stepping far outside our comfort zones; but if I’ve learnt anything in the last two days, it’s don’t be afraid to fail; and always, choose mountains over margarine.