About Alfred Wainwright
Alfred Wainwright - MBE
(17 January 1907 – 20 January 1991)
Alfred Wainwright was born in Blackburn, Lancashire on 17th January 1907, and was a British fellwalker, guidebook author and illustrator.
He was the youngest of four children and lived at 331 Audley Range which was about a mile from the centre of Blackburn. At the age of 13 he started work as an office boy in Blackburn Borough Engineer's Department where he spent several further years studying at night school, gaining qualifications in accountancy which enabled him to further his career at Blackburn Borough Council.
His first visit to the Lake District was on the 7th June 1930 when, at the age of 23, having saved up enough money for a week's walking holiday in the Lake District, he travelled with his cousin Eric Beardsall from their home town of Blackburn to Windermere. Upon their arrival they climbed the nearby hill Orrest Head, a hill 780 feet high overlooking the town. From there Wainwright saw his first view of the Lakeland fells. This moment marked the start of what he would later describe as his love affair with the Lake District.
Orrest Head
In 1931 he married his first wife, Ruth Holden, with whom he had a son Peter. In 1941 Wainwright was able to move closer to the fells when he took up a position with the Borough Treasurer’s department in the town of Kendal, rising to the rank of Borough Treasurer in 1948. He lived and worked in the town for the rest of his life, serving as Borough Treasurer from 1948 until he retired in 1967.
During this period virtually all of his spare time was taken up walking the Lakeland fells until he knew them intimately. On 9th November 1952 he started work on a series of seven guides to the Lake District Fells that took up the next thirteen years of his life. The first page he penned was the ascent of Dove Crag from Ambleside. The Pictorial Guides were completed in September 1965, Starling Dodd in the Western Fells being the last fell visited.
Starling Dodd
His first marriage ended when Ruth walked out three weeks before he retired. They later divorced.
Wainwright followed the Pictorial Guides in 1968 with the Pennine Way Companion, applying the same detailed approach to Britain's first long-distance footpath. This was for many years a leading guide to the Pennine Way, rivalling the official guide book by Tom Stephenson. Wainwright's book consists of a continuous strip map of the route with accompanying commentary, with an unusual quirk: because the route goes from south to north (bottom to top on a map), contrary to normal reading order, the map and commentary start at the bottom of the last page and work upwards and backwards towards the front of the book. The guide was prepared with the aid of four helpers (Harry Appleyard, Len Chadwick, Cyril Moore and Lawrence Smith) and its preparation was affected by the major outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in 1966 and 1967, which closed access to many of the moors.
In 1970 he married Betty McNally (1922–2008), also a divorcee, who became his walking companion.
In 1972 Wainwright devised the east-west Coast to Coast Walk, partly as a conscious alternative to the north-south Pennine Way. The Coast to Coast, he declares in his guidebook to the route, which follows the same format as the Pennine Way Companion.
Wainwright continued writing and The Outlying Fells of Lakeland (an idea he had previously rejected), published in 1974, and was his last major guidebook.
Thereafter he concentrated on sketchbooks of larger-size line drawings until his eyesight began to fail in the mid-1980s, which consisted mainly of either guidebooks or sketchbooks of areas mainly in Northern England and Scotland. His Ex-Fellwanderer, an autobiographical work published in 1987.
Alfred Wainwright died in 1991 and a memorial to him can be found in the church at Buttermere.
Betty McNally carried his ashes to Innominate Tarn at the top of Haystacks where they were scattered on his favourite mountain, Haystacks, which is part of the Western Fells, as per his last wishes.
Haystacks viewed from Fleetwith Pike
Wainwrights seven-volume Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells, published between 1955 and 1966 and consisting entirely of reproductions of his handwritten and hand-drawn manuscripts, has become the standard reference work to 214 of the fells of the English Lake District.
For this labour of love, as he called it, he was awarded the MBE.
The Pictorial Guides are currently being updated, for the first time since their original publication, to take account of changed conditions on the fells. The revisions are being made by Chris Jesty, who uses an imitation of Wainwright's hand lettering to make the alterations look as unobtrusive as possible. The most notable changes are that the covers of the revised books show photographs of the Lake District by Derry Brabbs, rather than the drawings that were on the covers of the originals, and the maps show the paths in red. As of September 2010 the seven books in the 'Lakeland Fells' series have been issued in the revised edition. It has been announced that the remaining guides are also to be revised, first 'A Coast to Coast Walk', then 'The Outlying Fells of Lakeland' and then 'The Pennine Way Companion'.
Wainwright also produced several further books of drawings and illustrated works by other authors notably "The Plague Dogs" by Richard Adams in which his maps are fairly essential for following the dogs' progress. Similarly his drawings and a map were included in the book "Scratch & Co." by Molly Lefebure which has recently been republished.
For further information about Alfred Wainwright, please see The Wainwright Society