Don Whillans

Donald "Don" Desbrow Whillans (born May 18, 1933 in Salford , † August 4, 1985 in Kennington ) was a British mountaineer and climber.

biography

Donald was born in Salford, the first of two children to salesman Thomas Whillans and his wife Mary Burrows. After attending the State School and the Broughton Secondary Modern School of Salford, he began an apprenticeship as a plumber, which he did not complete. As a child and adolescent, he was a member of the Boy Scouts group and went on extensive hikes in the Peak District National Park . He started rock climbing in 1950, without training and insufficiently equipped.

With a few other climbers, he was involved in founding the Rock and Ice Club in Manchester at the end of 1951 , whose members were able to dominate British climbing until the late 1960s. In 1953 he was a founding member of the British Alpine Club's elite Alpine Climbing Group . On May 24, 1958, he married the dressmaker Audrey Whittall.

The award Member of the British Empire (MBE), for which he was intended due to his numerous successes, was finally no longer awarded after he had been in a fight with police officers in 1975 after a drunk driving.

From 1976 he ran a restaurant in Penmaenmawr, Wales . He died of a heart attack in 1985 at the age of 52. The British Mountaineering Council named a refuge for climbers in the Peak District National Park after him in 1993 ("Don Whillans Memorial Hut").

Rockclimbing

Whillans began rock climbing in 1950 and from 1951 formed one of the most famous rope teams in the United Kingdom with Joe Brown (* 1930). They climbed the rock formations Shining Clough Rocks in Derbyshire , Clogwyn Du'r Arddu and Dinas Cromlech in Gwynedd and opened the difficult "Sassenach" route on Ben Nevis in the Grampian Mountains . In 1954 they succeeded with the “Engländerführe”, today's most famous ascent through the west face of the Aiguille de Blaitière ( 3522  m ) in the French Mont-Blanc massif . In the same year, they were only the third rope team to climb the west face of the Petit Dru ( 3733  m ). Their climbing partnership ended with Joe Brown's invitation to a Himalayan expedition, where Brown made the first ascent of Kangchenjunga ( 8586  m ).

But Whillans did not remain idle either. In August 1961, together with Chris Bonington , Ian Clough , René Desmaison , Jan Dlugosz, Ignazio Piussi, Yves Pollet-Villard and Pierre Julien, he achieved the first ascent of the 500 m high Frêney central pillar on Mont Blanc ( 4810  m ). This was considered the last big problem on the highest mountain in the Alps. Less than a month earlier, a Franco-Italian attempt to climb the mountain had failed in the Frêney tragedy .

In January 1963 he and Chris Bonington also managed the first ascent of the Central Tower of Paine ( 2460  m ) in the Cordillera del Paine group in Patagonia . In May 1970 he wrote alpine history again with Dougal Haston when they first climbed the 3000 m high south face of Annapurna ( 8091  m ) in the Himalayas .

He also climbed the Roraima-Tepui ( 2810  m ) in the border triangle between Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana, as well as the Torre Egger ( 2880  m ) on the Argentine-Chilean border.

He was also considered to be an extremely cautious and prudent climber who did not complete several first ascents and summit victories for his own safety or that of other climbers. These included expeditions to Masherbrum ( 7821  m ) in 1957 (death of a rope colleague, frostbite of the expedition leader, task around 100 m below the summit), to the Trivor ( 7577  m ) in 1960 (symptoms of paralysis in the legs), to the Eiger north face ( 3967  m ) 1962 (rescue of an injured climber after falling rocks). Similar safety-related crashes followed in 1975 on Tirich Mir ( 7708  m ), 1981 on Shivling ( 6543  m ), 1983 on Cerro Torre ( 3128  m ) and 1983 on Broad Peak ( 8051  m ).

In 1971 and 1972 he took part in expeditions to Mount Everest ( 8848  m ), both of which failed due to logistical problems and disagreements among the participants.

literature

• Don Whillans: Portrait of a Mountaineer by Don Whillans and Alick Ormerod
• The Villain, The Life of Don Whillans by Jim Perrin
• Mountaineers from The Alpine Club

Web links

• Oxford DNB