When I signed up for my first trip with Warwick University Mountaineering Club in the autumn of 1997, I pictured a peaceful weekend of cragging, fresh air and the chance to make some new friends. What I got instead was a chaotic convoy, boisterous hut games and a Land Rover painted like an ambulance. It was nothing like I’d expected but it would become another chapter of a story that has defined the last three decades of my life.
University mountaineering clubs in the 1990s had their own established characters, rituals and language. As a fresher, you entered a story already in progress, populated by people with strange nicknames, shared jokes and friendships formed before you arrived. Many clubs also seemed to pride themselves on outlandish initiations and WUMC was no exception.
I did not feel entirely comfortable with all of it. The drinking culture, loud personalities and expectation that everyone would join in with the chaos did not come naturally to me. At the time, though, it felt like a rite of passage, something you endured to gain access to the climbing and adventures beyond it.
Friday:
Our group loaded three minibuses, a car and Nick’s Land Rover “ambulance” with ropes, harnesses, crates of beer and enough food to feed an army. I ended up in a minibus driven by Mark (also known as John), alongside Dave “The Hair”, Sickboy, Spencer, Cathy and a few others. The journey was punctuated by pub stops and various spirited antics, so by the time we reached our destination, I already knew this would be a weekend unlike any I had experienced before.
At one point, we stopped to let Sickboy close a gate. The driver joked about leaving him behind and then accidentally reversed the minibus into a ditch. Luckily, we were not the final vehicle in the convoy. Nick roared around the corner in his “ambulance” and hauled us out. Apparently, this sort of mishap was considered fairly standard WUMC operating procedure.
By the time we arrived at Wernside Manor, the club executive had claimed the cosy bunks. The rest of us were left in a draughty classroom or portacabin known as the “schoolroom”. That evening, I got my first experience of Wizz, Boing, Bounce, a baffling drinking game fuelled by an apparently endless keg. The surviving club magazine describes the night in the exaggerated style typical of the period: every minor incident becomes an epic, everyone is ridiculed and nobody is allowed to retain much dignity.
I eventually crawled into my sleeping bag at around two in the morning.
My ME Dewline sleeping bag had seemed perfectly respectable when I packed it. It was not remotely up to the task. The schoolroom had little or no insulation and my strongest memory of the night is lying awake on the floor, gradually accepting that the sleeping bag was not going to become any warmer. I was more worried about hypothermia than about the climbing ahead of me.
This was not carefully curated hardship or what we might now call “type-two fun”. The accommodation was cheap, the room was cold and the sleeping bag I owned was insufficient.
Saturday:
After a quick breakfast prepared by Will “The Swedish Chef” and Lou, his bread-buttering assistant, we headed for a Yorkshire limestone crag. The name of the venue has disappeared from my memory and the surviving club account does not identify it clearly. On the way, we stopped at a waterfall, where Nick decided to wade into the freezing water up to his waist while the rest of us retained enough common sense to watch from dry land.
Despite the late night, I managed six routes. Others gave up rather sooner, whether because of hangovers, tiredness or becoming distracted by the continuing banter. Experienced members set up routes and introduced the freshers to the basics of outdoor climbing. They showed us where protection could be placed, helped us organise equipment and explained what we should and should not do.
Beneath the drinking stories and deliberately outrageous humour, this was the real value of the club.
There were climbing walls in the 1990s and we were fortunate to have a good one on the Warwick campus, but there was nothing like today’s network of walls, professional courses and online instructional material. University clubs gave inexperienced students access to equipment, transport and people who knew more than they did. Someone a year or two ahead showed you how to tie in, belay, place a nut or organise a climbing rack. Knowledge passed from one generation of students to the next.
The quality of that informal instruction probably varied. The most confident person was not necessarily the most competent. But it could still be extraordinarily powerful.
We returned to the accommodation for dinner and another evening of pints, drinking games and a mock court session. “Flash” Gordon was charged with every automotive offence known to humanity, while furniture climbing and other increasingly improbable activities filled the remainder of the night. By midnight, a number of us had squeezed ourselves into one of the bunkrooms. It may not have been particularly comfortable, but at least it was warm.
Sunday:
Sunday brought us to Brimham Rocks for an afternoon of bouldering and top-roping. Perhaps it is significant that the limestone venue has faded from my memory while Brimham remains. Gritstone has always held a particular attraction for me in a way that limestone never quite has.
I remember Brimham’s strange rock formations, people struggling with problems and small children apparently moving over the rock without experiencing any of the difficulties troubling the adults around them. Few things are more effective at puncturing a climber’s confidence than watching a child in trainers wander effortlessly up something you have been struggling to climb.
The club magazine describes thrown chalk balls, ambitious leaps between rocks and various members becoming stuck on routes. It is far more interested in personalities and mishaps than in recording route names or grades. I stayed mainly on the easier problems, still recovering from the previous night’s revelry. As the light began to fade, we packed up and headed for food in Leeds before returning to campus, exhausted but carrying a weekend’s worth of stories.
Finding My Own Place in the Club
That first trip did not instantly make me feel that I had found a ready made community. I remained uncomfortable with aspects of the drinking culture and the public ridicule that seemed to accompany it. Many of the larger than life nicknames in the club magazine belonged to older, established members rather than the freshers who would become my closest friends.
But I did not walk away.
Instead, I gradually worked out which parts of the experience mattered to me. It was not the drinking games or the need to turn every mistake into a performance. It was the climbing, the journeys, the practical skills and the friendships formed through doing things together.
The everyday reality of my university climbing life was often quieter than the club write up suggests. I spent a great deal of time at the Bear climbing wall on campus. I had an annual pass, which I remember costing around £60 and climbed with friends after lectures. Later, we sometimes arrived in the morning before the academic day had properly begun.
There were evenings at Top Banana in the students’ union, lunchtimes at the Cooler and conversations about possible weekend trips. We worked out who had transport, where we might stay and what we wanted to climb. Those ordinary moments were the glue of the experience.
I increasingly preferred smaller groups in which the climbing or mountain journey remained central. I discovered that I did not have to become one of the loud characters in the magazine to become part of the club. I could find my own way of belonging.
The following year, I became club treasurer (more on how that happened here). That marked an important shift. I was no longer simply one of the newcomers following the convoy and relying on others to make the weekend happen. I became involved in the accommodation, transport, finances and logistics needed to get groups of students into the mountains and safely home again.
I began to appreciate how much invisible effort had gone into that apparently chaotic freshers’ weekend. Someone had found the accommodation, booked the minibuses, collected the money, bought the food, gathered the equipment and encouraged experienced members to help the beginners. The apparent spontaneity depended on people taking responsibility.
Over time, I helped organise the kinds of trips I valued: often smaller and more focused on climbing or mountaineering than on the drinking culture surrounding them. I did not consciously set out to change the club. I simply helped create the experiences in which I wanted to participate.
That, I have since realised, is one form of leadership.
Looking back, university climbing club culture has undoubtedly changed, largely for the better. Even during my time at Warwick, I noticed the beginnings of a shift as the new millennium approached. The hazing rituals, excessive drinking and reckless antics gradually became less central, making space for a more inclusive and thoughtful culture.
Some of the language and humour preserved in the old club magazine have aged badly and should remain in the past. Greater attention to inclusion, competence, safeguarding and the consequences of alcohol centred events is a genuine improvement.
But the club also offered something enormously valuable. It gave students with limited money access to equipment and transport. Experienced members shared their skills freely. Beginners were taken to real crags and mountain areas. Responsibility passed gradually from one generation of students to the next.
That first WUMC trip became one early step in a much longer journey. I went from being the inexperienced fresher at the bottom of the route to helping organise trips and climbing independently. Through years of practice, mentoring and days spent on rock, I eventually gained my Single Pitch Award, the qualification now known as Rock Climbing Instructor.
I would not claim that one freezing weekend led directly to that qualification. Development is rarely so simple. But the line between them is visible.
The club also gave me friendships that have survived for nearly three decades. We may now see one another less frequently, and much of our contact is virtual, but many of those people are still climbing and still finding their own forms of adventure.
On that first WUMC trip, I learned that climbing was only half the story. The other half involved friendship, shared discomfort, practical responsibility and the gradual discovery of where I fitted. I learned to distinguish between the culture around an activity and the activity itself.
I left behind the pressure to perform, the alcohol centred social life and the idea that belonging required tolerating every joke. I carried forward the climbing, the friendships, the shared knowledge and the willingness to help other people begin.
That cold schoolroom floor was not where I discovered a ready made identity. It was where I began taking my own line.