Since December 2018 I have been a member of the Alfred Wainwright Facebook Group, which is run by Chris Butterfield. He is considerably younger than me, and he has kindly agreed to take over my website when I am no longer around to do so. The messages are now difficult to find because you have to scroll down though everything that has been written since, so here are some in which I am involved. I have corrected minor mistakes, and I have omitted most of the items that are complimentary to myself. I have left a gap between items that are not related.
Shane Wilkinson: I just found this 40-year-old typed letter by Chris Jesty together with my first edition of A Guide to the View from Scafell Pike.
Chris Jesty: I was very pleased to discover that one of my press bulletins has survived. I couldn’t find it in my archives, and I had forgotten what I had written.
Chris Jesty: I remember the television broadcast with Griff Rhys Jones. It was recorded while we were walking up Catbells. The conversation was continued while we were walking down again, but then the microphones were switched off. I remember telling him that William Wordsworth was opposed to the extension of the railway from Windermere to Grasmere, and that the islands on Derwent Water were covered in trees because of the absence of sheep, showing what the Lake District was like before the sheep arrived. I looked forward to reading about this in his book, but it wasn’t mentioned.
Chris Butterfield 16/6/2019 [referring to an illustration]: How many people recognise the location, and which book does it feature in? I am sure many of you know.
Chris Jesty: The summer house is featured on page 4 of The Outlying Fells of Lakeland and on page 171 of Westmorland Heritage. [I might also have mentioned that it appears on the last page of Kendal in the Nineteenth Century.]
Chris Jesty: When I started working on The Outlying Fells of Lakeland I bought a second-hand copy of the first edition. In it I found a press cutting in which somebody suggested that the route from Faulds Brow to Caldbeck should be diverted to visit the Howk. I thought that this was an excellent idea, and I featured this as an alternative route in the revised book.
Chris Butterfield 24/6/2019: Another great story, thanks for sharing.
David Johnson [about my autobiography]: The book covers a range of subjects, but there’s quite a bit about Wainwright and his work (including reproduction of articles written by Chris and published in Footsteps). I was honoured that Chris asked if he could include on the back cover of his book my photo of a presentation to him by Eric Robson. I had forgotten that the last words in the book are my name!
Maggie Allan [to Chris Butterfield]: I wondered if it was Chris Jesty that you were meeting this weekend. By co-incidence I read his biography yesterday, quite fascinating! There’s a chapter about AW at the end and there are also snippets throughout the book referring to AW. I was interested to find out how AW pronounced Scafell Pike.
Chris Jesty 16/8/2019: When I revised the last two pictorial guides I used a computer to make the alterations. I found this so easy I was able to go through every page of Walks on the Howgill Fells (and, to a lesser extent, Walks in Limestone Country) cleaning up the places where the lines were too thick. I should be very interested to know whether David Utteridge thinks that this made an improvement.
David Utteridge: Hi Chris Jesty, yes a huge improvement. It wasn’t until I compared the 1st edition of ‘Howgills’ with your revised version that I realised how much work has gone into the revised book. I know the font is slightly larger but the text is so much clearer after your ‘cleaning up’. One example that jumps out is in the Whinfell Ridge introduction; on line 14 of the third page in the original there are ink smudges on ‘to the’ which I presume you rectified – although I am not sure why AW didn’t rewrite that particular page at the time.
Anthony Lomas: I had no idea there were more similar Chris Jesty maps! Why didn’t anybody tell me?
Chris Jesty: I also produced a number of books about the south of England. Like the panoramas, these are out of print, but you can read them if you go to my website chris-jesty.co.uk and click ‘my books’.
Chris Jesty: The only change I made to the Coast to Coast book in Wainwright’s lifetime was to page 6. (See the note in the bottom right-hand corner.)
Chris Butterfield: There were also alterations made to page 7. I presume AW made those.
Chris Jesty: I made the changes to the relevant text on page 7.
Chris Butterfield: The next giveaway is ‘Naylor’s Run’. Like Wainwright, Jos is a Lakeland legend. He celebrated his 60th birthday by running the 60 highest peaks in the Lake District.
Chris Jesty: Not only did Joss Naylor climb sixty mountains in a day at the age of sixty, he also climbed seventy mountains in a day at the age of seventy. When I heared that he was planning to do this I thought that it would be absolutely impossible, but when I read the details I realised that it was possible because he included many of the lesser fells. In 1974, when I was working on the Guide to the View from Scafell Pike, I spent three months in his farmhouse, which was only three miles from the summit. [I spelt ‘Joss’ with two ‘s’s because that is the way the name is spelt in his biography.]
Chris Jesty has a website which features his recently published book – which you can read in FULL online. If you wish to purchase a signed physical copy (£10), let me know. Chris is also a cartographer, and for those who are interested in the maps he produced (including the Scafell Pike panorama with Wainwright), feel free to view them on his website https://www.chris-jesty.co.uk/.
Chris Jesty, 10/9/2019 [commenting on a photograph]: On Saturday I discovered a panorama from Glastonbury Tor in the internet, the first I have seen since I published my own version in 1980. I tried to send an email to the person who produced it, but I got a lot of messages that I didn’t understand. In the photograph Priscilla is showing me how to do it. I am not the only person to have this problem: Wainwright once said on television that he didn’t understand machines. [Priscilla is Chris Butterfield’s wife.]
Chris Jesty, 3/11/2019 [identifying a photograph]: The village is Feisor, featured on page 16 (3) of Walks in Limestone Country.
Anthony Lomas, 3/11/2019: I’d have been concerned if you didn’t get that, Chris!
Andy Guy, 4/11/2019 [accompanying a photograph of the Scafell Pike panorama]: I bought this in Keswick, probably late ’70s or mid-80s. I haven’t seen it mentioned here yet.
Chris Jesty, 5/11/2019: I devoted three and a half years of my life to that publication.
Malcolm Clark [accompanying a photograph of the Scafell Pike panorama]: Does this count as Wainwright memorabilia? I cannot recall where I picked this up.
Chris Jesty, 6/4/2020: The cover was designed so that the upper extract highlighted my contribution to the panorama and the lower extract highlighted Wainwright’s contribution.
Malcolm Clark: Hi Chris. Do you know if £1.80 was the original price please.
Chris Jesty: The original price was 75p. If you look closely at the top of the first fold of Sheet 1 you may be able to read this. The last time the panorama was reprinted the printers used the wrong version, and I had to stick labels on thousands of copies.
Chris Jesty: Wainwright helped with the Ben Nevis panorama by lending me his copy of James E. Shearer’s panorama of 1895 so that I could produce the 1977 edition without visiting the mountain. I later photographed the view so that I could make changes to the 1980 edition, but most of the panorama is still based on Shearer’s work.
Chris Jesty, 12/4/2020 [referring to a photograph]: This is the same view that was featured in my television interview with Griff Rhys Jones on Catbells in 2007.
Chris Jesty, 1/5/2020 [referring to a photograph]: According to pages 10 and 11 of A Coast to Coast Walk and pages 2 and 4 of the Grike chapter of The Western Fells it is called the Kinniside Stone Circle.
Bob Huggett, 21/5/2020: I have noticed an omission in Chris Jesty’s Western Fells Guide. Mellbreak’s Pillar Rake ascent from Crummock Water is included; Mellbreak 6, but is not coloured red on the map on Mellbreak 3. It appears in black on AW’s original drawing but is easily overlooked due to the detail of the fell side and contour lines.
Chris Jesty, 22/5/2020: Pillar Rake is not shown on page Mellbreak 3 of the Western Fells because it is not shown there on the first edition. It is not for me to question the decisions of the author. In October 2008 I received an email from Kate Cave of Frances Lincoln saying that Eric Robson had found a mistake in my description of Pillar Rake. I went back there on 30th October and found that Eric was right. I told him this when I met him at Villa Levens in November 2019, but he didn’t remember the occasion.