In reply to julieandlen:
Firstly to Boje. Yes, it’s good that Colin has cleared up the matter and (to Jon) that there’s ”no cat among the pigeons”. Your description of BB’s skill with ropes and runners reminds me of my past climbing partner Peter Biven, who often lobbed a Moac, Troll or Peck deep into a crack and clipped it if it didn’t fall out immediately!
Next to Colin Goodey. Thank you for confirming Barry Brewster’s unaided ascent of Vulcan. With 15 pre-placed pegs for runners I can now see why the ascent wasn’t heralded at the time, but nevertheless a good achievement even if a different interpretation to aid use as indicated in the posts above is applied. What he did is akin to modern Sports climbing.
I can also understand why Trevor Jones included the footnote to the 1st ascent detail as “climbed free by B. Brewster”, and still described it as an artificial route, rather than “first free ascent by B. Brewster” and describing it as a free route. There’s a big difference.
His ascent clearly cannot be compared to the modern E4. With all that pre-placed protection an E-grade would not apply, but if he didn’t rest on the pegs it’s still a 6a ascent especially as many good finger holds in the crack would have been blocked by peg placements.
Pete Crew's ascent of Great Wall on 27 May 1962 was shortly after - your aided ascent of Vulcan was on 20 April 1962; Brewster’s “free” ascent was “a week after” so around 27 April 1962. Crew used 6 aid points on Great Wall, today graded the same as Vulcan.
All this was before the days of “Rocksport” or even “Mountain” so it escaped scrutiny and analysis by the great pundit of that time.
Colin I do hope you get around to writing your article about BB. As this thread has shown, there is still a lot of interest in him almost 50 years on.
To complete the record of Barry’s achievement for posterity perhaps you could elaborate more on the occasion of Barry’s ascent of Vulcan, in particular: was he really wearing “bendy boots” and were you belaying him or was someone else there holding his ropes?
Finally to Mick Ward: Thanks for recognising the ingenuity of my detective work re Clements and Brewster’s free ascents. Yes, it’s a shame it’s not right because it seemed to fit so well with all the characters involved and with the technical grades free climbed in the early 60’s.
John Clements was indeed a fascinating person; intelligent, witty, confident, colourful and fun when I climbed with him. He made a short but significant contribution to British climbing and I’m sure he would have gone on to even greater achievements. The Holliwell brothers continued after John on Llech Ddu.
With Mike Kosterlitz, John made an early ascent (4th?) of the Philipp Flamm route on the North-West Face of Civetta, then a popular test piece for Brits in the Dolomites, including ascents by Pete Crew, Al Wright, Martin Boysen, Paul Nunn and Dave Potts.
I was contacted in 2007 by John McCormick who was then writing an article about John Clements for the Wayfarers’ Journal but I don’t know whether it was published.