Revelations — Jerry Moffatt

by Jerry Moffatt and Niall Grimes
Vertebrate Publishing (UK, 2009) 978-1906148119

Margaret Thatcher’s great contribution to pushing rock climbing standards in the 1980s can now be better appreciated: mass unemployment, climbers existing on the dole (welfare payments), dossing in caves and tumble-down shacks at the foot of crags in North Wales and the Peak District, and all the while, in Jerry’s case, training, training, training, to produce (a random selection this) first ascents of Masters Wall, Cloggy, The Face, Frankenjura, the first X-in Germany, Messiah (E6 6c), hardest route on UK gritstone at the time, first one-day ascent of Kauk’s Midnight Lightning boulder problem at Yosemite, a one-day ascent of The Nose in 1993, and Nelson’s Column, Trafalgar Square, London, to publicize the plight of Canada’s Innu people.

ACC member Lynn Martel presents the Book Festival Grand Prize winner at the Banff Mountain Festivals. Photo: © Kim Williams

Who would have thought there was a readable book to be got out of sport climbing, competitions and bouldering? Well this is it. What impresses is Jerry’s obsessive training regime and his sheer dedication, hauling himself back from injury and performing superbly across a range of rock climbing disciplines. He was the best, and not backward in saying so, yet this story is told with a disarming ordinariness, droll at times. There’s none of the familiar ice-gripped “heroics” we’ve become inured to in climbing books, and instead of dark introspection, the diversions from the actual climbing are bikes, dossing, travel, having fun and becoming a businessman (a founder of Sheffield’s The Foundry climbing wall.) Moffatt and Grimes have done climbing history a service in setting down the story of UK climbing in the “dole era” of the 1980s — a story that was quickly becoming forgotten.

— Stephen Goodwin