Seventy five years ago, Harry Griffin’s first Country Diary first appeared in the Manchester Guardian. Possibly the most famous, and certainly the longest serving diarist, his missives from the English Lake District were to appear every other Monday from January 1951 to July 2004.
The story begins towards the end of 1950 when Guardian editor AP Wadsworth wrote to the largely unknown Kendal based journalist to ask if he would like to take on the Lakeland diary following the death of previous incumbent, George W Muller. His instructions were simple and to the point:
“Write about anything you like, but for God’s sake, keep off birds. We get all we want about them from the others.”
And so Harry’s first column on 8 January 1951 began with him silently swooping down a fellside on skis before observing how a dozen black-faced Rough Fells – the mountain sheep of Westmorland – were surviving the cold by digging out small snow caves. Over the next 50 years he was to more than stick to the brief, covering everything from mountaineering adventures, descriptions of the sheep herders craft, the growth in tourism (and an irritation at the sight of orange peel and ring pulls on the tops), erosion and battles against reservoirs. He was describing the joys of cold-water swimming long before it became fashionable, and birds – albeit the mountain variety – occasionally made an appearance such as golden eagles successfully rearing eaglets high on a mountain crag.
Arthur Harry Griffin was born in Liverpool in 1911 but the family moved to Barrow-in-Furness when he was a child. A school trip to nearby Stickle Pike began his lifelong love affair with the fells and he later became besotted with rock climbing, forming the Coniston Tigers, a club known for pioneering hard new routes on Dow Crag, near Coniston. At the age of 17 Harry became a cub reporter on the Barrow Guardian progressing to the Lancashire Evening Post and in 1937, the Daily Mail in Manchester. With the outbreak of the second world war he volunteered for the army and worked in intelligence in India and Burma, rising to become a lieutenant-colonel and serving as a staff officer to Lord Mountbatten.
After the war Harry returned to the Daily Mail and was later offered a transfer to London. But instead, he opted to rejoin the Lancashire Evening Post persuading them to let him be northern news editor, based in Kendal. Here, as well as getting scoops such as Donald Campbell’s fatal crash while trying to set water speed records on Coniston Water, he began writing a weekly page-long essay Leaves From a Lakeland Notebook. It may have been these that caught the eye of someone at the Guardian or perhaps Muller had suggested Harry as a successor.
Harry was delighted to be offered the role and to be writing for a popular series that had been running since March 1904 (now the longest known newspaper column in existence). However, with a word length rarely exceeding 300 words, the daily portrait required a different discipline. As such, he would adjust the size of the paper in his manual typewriter so that one diary would exactly fit the page.
But within this space, Harry managed to condense a day’s adventure, rich in detail. As outdoor writer and fellow diarist, Jim Perrin later wrote in his obituary, “For economical evocation of mood and soundness of approach, there was not a mountain writer to touch him.”
However, while he might occasionally describe skiing down Helvellyn or a tricky climbing route, Harry always wrote for the general reader. Throughout any given year there would also be missives from mountains further afield such as the Scottish Highlands, Howgills or the Tirol. His pieces were, as one of his former editors said, ‘a breath of fresh air’ amid the serious subjects on the leader page where the diary appeared for many years.
As well as taking the reader on a walk or climb, Harry would introduce them to Lakeland characters such as Lanty Slee, the whisky smuggler of Little Langdale, Millican Dalton, the cave dwelling ‘professor of adventure’ and guidebook author and illustrator, Alfred Wainwright. While very different characters, the two writers were friends and Harry asked Wainwright to illustrate his first book. This turned out to be first of 14 (including anthologies) – like many an enterprising journalist he was always one to repurpose material in magazine articles and books.
Harry always aimed to write diaries inspired by actual experience. He only stopped rock climbing at the age of 78 and skiing at 80 but continued to go fell walking. He died on 9 July 2004 with his final diary appearing three days later – a piece about Black Coombe, a fell he first climbed with his family in 1924.
Harry Griffin’s Country diaries are occasionally republished by the Guardian but a good place to start reading his work is Martin Wainwright’s A Lifetime of Mountains: The Best of A. Harry Griffin’s Country Diary. The GNM Archive holds records associated with him including the oral history and various photographs.
Orange peel on the fells
12 April 1954
It is a sober commentary on the British way of life that the National Trust has to spend £250 a year picking up litter on its properties in the Lake District. People presumably visit these places to drink in the especial beauty of the scenery, but apparently they leave them more or less covered in orange peel, bits of paper, cigarette packets, and – an increasing menace – camera film cartons. It is a relief to discover that the Trust is not greatly inconvenienced by empty bottles, but it is very conscious of the near indestructibility of orange peel and the durability and brightness of the snapshotters’ rubbish.
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The first glimpse of Alfred Wainwright
8 April 1957
The guide writer spends his working life among files and ledgers at an office desk, but every free hour he is striding over the fells. He is not greatly concerned with valleys and lakes but only with the contours and all that they conceal. Every mountain and hillock must be quartered, measured, photographed, and explored, every faint track followed and recorded, each beck traced to its source and each waterfall, cairn, tarn, quarry, and sheep-fold tracked down and sketched. He has spent many patient hours on lonely summits waiting for a gap in the clouds to expose the view, and on many a wild, wet afternoon he is poking about in long-forgotten mine workings or searching for some old spring. Down from the fells in the evening the task k goes on in the quiet of his study. Working with pen and Indian ink he painstakingly prints out his text, draws his maps and panoramas, and sketches his illustrations. A night’s careful toil might yield two-thirds of a page, but each evening for four year the work has gone on. This week the second of his two volumes has emerged from the publishers –each page an engraving of his own original work without one word of type, even to the cover. It is one man’s way of giving thanks for the great joy which can come from the hills.
Clear, cold water brings you to life again
27 June 1960
The best place to be on a day like today is deep in some limpid pool among the hills, with a waterfall splashing in at one end and a rowan overhead for shade. Preferably, you jump or dive in when covered in perspiration and as exhausted that you can hardly walk, but the shock of cleaving the clear, cold water brings you to life again. Down you go between the dark, dripping walls of rock, and then, in a second, you are breaking the surface with all aches forgotten, your skin a-tingling, the sun in your hair, and an urge to push over mountains. The Lake District teems with pools, several in all the valleys, and in the best of them you can become a new man within the space of seconds. But pools bathing should not be tackled with too much deliberation, for the most enjoyable bathes are the unexpected, the casual, ones. You should not set out in a Lake District heatwave for a day in the pools, for if you do, as like as not, the sun will be off the water, or there will be a nasty cold breeze, or the pool will have dried up. No, you carry on with your day on the fells or on the crags and, if you are lucky, just when you are reaching your limits of endurance, you will find your pool. Perhaps the best bathes of all are those captured on a warm, summer’s evening, after a hard day in the hills, with the valley, and food and drink, an hour’s easy walk away, and the sun still shining on the water. Try one, when there is nobody about, and you will come striding down to the valley like a giant refreshed.
Dunmail Raise – perhaps the oldest highway in the Lake District
16 June 1969
They say the wild geese on their way south from the frozen north first discovered the gap through the hills we call Dunmail Raise, and they still go this way. Perhaps this is the oldest highway in the Lake District and down the centuries a great stream of travellers has passed this way – the early settlers, the Romans, the monks and the miners, merchants and smugglers, pedlars and poets, on foot, on horseback, by four-in-hand, and today, the tourists drawing their caravans. Mostly it has been a slow, laborious climb, mounting “in mazes serpentine” as Wordsworth had it, and when I was a boy visitors used to send home picture postcards of the pass to snow what exciting places they had seen. But today all that matters is speed – with safety – and so Dunmail is being tamed, at a cost of one-third of a million pounds, so that traffic can pass up and down unhindered.
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Down with route-cairns
16 November 1981
Who, I often wonder, builds all these unnecessary route-cairns in the Lakeland fells? Scores, probably hundreds, of new ones have appeared during the year – most of them on clearly defined tracks – and similar proliferation has been going on for years. But, in up to 100 outings each year, I’ve never seen anybody actually build one. Youth parties, under well-meaning but quite misguided adult leadership, might be partly responsible; their energies would be far better employed in the demolition, on every trip, of a few dozen of the more ridiculous ones.
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The highest height: Harry’s final diary
12 July 2004
People were always asking me to name my favourite mountain in the Lake District – an impossible task. All I could say was that it was the mountain on which I happened to be at the time. Great Gable, Scafell Pike, Coniston Old Man and many others were considered but all had to be rejected. But now, well into my 90s, I feel forced to name a favourite, and have decided to plump for Black Combe which, to some people, is not a mountain at all since it does not attain the magic 2,000ft.
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