Review1

Last update: 22-07-2009

Cheesewring & South East Cornwall

A CLIMBERS’ GUIDE
by Sean Hawken

OUT OF PRINT

Review published in The St Ives Times & Echo,
20th November 1998:

A guide with an excellent slice of history

Regular observers of St. Ives harbour life may be forgiven for turning a Nelson’s eye to a book about rock climbing in a redundant quarry on Bodmin Moor. But this latest publication from the St. Ives Printing and Publishing Company contains, as well as its esoteric rock climb descriptions, the remarkable story of the commando climbers who were based at St. Ives during and after the Second World War.
   The climbing core of the book is written by East Cornwall climber Sean Hawken, an enthusiastic producer of new climbing lines at Cheesewring, that great, open-mouthed shock of quarried granite on the southern edge of Bodmin Moor, near the village of Minions. The book is a first class climbing guide to the quarry as well as to the intriguing sea cliffs of South East Cornwall, and such land-locked delights as Roche Rock, near St. Austell and the hidden, mysterious boulders of the Luxulyan Valley.
   The book is edited by Toni Carver whose connections with Cheesewring go back to the 1960s, when he and his schoolboy contemporaries at Truro School began an adventurous climbing development at the quarry. Carver was the leading pioneer of daring, though controlled climbing at Cheesewring and his discovery, some years ago that Sean Hawken and other young climbers had begun a modern climbing development at the quarry inspired the idea for this guidebook.
   Never one to mix words sparingly, or to miss his climbing connections, Toni Carver has taken the opportunity of seasoning the book with a thorough and entertaining history of the Commando climbers who were his early mentors at St. Ives, and occasionally at Cheesewring. It was these professional soldiers such as Jim Smith, Joe Barry, John ‘Zeke’ Deacon and Mike Banks, who, during and after the war, bequeathed a legendary element to the history of Cornish climbing, not least on the golden granite of West Penwith.

Carver’s research has been a labour of love, a determined following up of literary lines as much as climbing ones. His research led him to such luminaries as Everest veteran Sir John Hunt (who died last weekend), Noel Odell, member of the Everest expedition of 1924, and to Geoffrey Rees-Jones, the initial moving force behind Commando cliff assault training. Carver makes a persuasive case for the Commando climbers of St. Ives as being major contributors to the development of modern rock climbing. Their activities were on a genuine war footing at first, but many of the Marines continued, post-war, as accomplished civilian climbers, guides and instructors.
The story of how Commando climbing evolved into ‘cliff assault’ from an early military need for mountain warfare troops destined for the Norwegian fjords is well told. The history is rigorous, the anecdotes hugely entertaining. Famous St. Ives Bay landmarks such as Hawke’s Point feature in vivid detail of seaborne commando exercises. The archive photographs of Commandos and early climbers are fascinating and sit well with the colour action shots of today’s modern climbers.
Beautifully produced to the expected high standards of the St. Ives Printing and Publishing Company, this must be the first guide to modem climbing that incorporates such an excellent slice of military and social history.
Cheesewring and South East Cornwall: A Climbers’ Guide by Sean Hawken is published by St. Ives Printing and Publishing Company, distributed nationally by Cordee and priced at £9.90. It is also available from The
St. Ives Times & Echo Office and through mail order: ISBN 0-948385-26-X.

Des Hannigan

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