Queer Places:
8 Meadow Rd, Vauxhall, London SW8 1QD, UK
Pattison Rd, Hermitage Ln, Childs Hill, London NW2 2HE, UK
John
Menlove Edwards (June 18, 1910 - February 2, 1958) was a strong, athletic man,
a gifted climber and one of the great rock climbers of his times. Armed with
his degree in medicine from Liverpool University, he decided to specialise in
what we would now refer to as `mental health issues' and set up clinic as a
psychiatrist. This gifted man also wrote poetry and in 1935 he gave a sermon
at Stokesay church in Shropshire (his brother was the vicar there), calling
for understanding of homosexuals and stating his view that homosexuality and
Christianity could be reconciled. When the Second World War started, Menlove
registered as a consci-entious objector, so he also had the courage of his
convictions but as he was not allowed to practise as a result, he spent the
war in Wales working on his research. Menlove was not a man who fitted into
the caricature of a limp wristed, foppish male who only had frivolous thoughts
and lived only to have a 'good time'. Here was a serious professional man,
strong and compe-tent, who just happened to fall in love with other men, who
did not cruise the streets looking for casual sex so far as we know, but had
meaningful relationships instead.
John Menlove Edwards was born at Ainsdale, near Liverpool, England on 18
June 1910, the son of a politically radical vicar, George Zachery Edwards, and
his wife Helen.[1][2] His father's cousin was Hewlett Johnson, Dean of
Canterbury Cathedral.[1] John Menlove's sister Nowell Mary was known as Nowell
Mary Hewlett Johnson, after becoming Hewlett Johnson's second wife.[1][2] John
Menlove attended Fettes College, trained as a doctor at Liverpool University
to be near his family home and assist with the care of his ailing father, and
went on to qualify as a psychiatrist, afterwards setting up in private
practise on Rodney Street, Liverpool. During the Second World War he was a
conscientious objector, and worked as a child psychiatrist in London, at Great
Ormond Street Children's Hospital and the Tavistock Institute.
Edwards was homosexual and was for many years involved in a friendship with climber
Wilfrid Noyce, whom he met in 1935. Edwards saved Noyce's life after an accident on Scafell Crag in 1937. He became vulnerable to periods of mental instability in the early 1940s, and increasingly to paranoid delusions during the Second World War. He was sectioned to mental hospitals several times, and given electro-convulsive therapy and deep insulin injections at the North Wales Hospital in Denbigh. His later life is a story of decline and he committed suicide by taking cyanide on 2 February 1958 at a house belonging to his brother-in-law, Hewlett Johnson.
He learned to climb at Helsby Crag in Cheshire and at age 21 made the first
free ascent of Scafell's Central Buttress.[3] The climbs he pioneered on the
cliffs of North Wales in particular created a new dimension in the repertoire
of the sport, tackling steepness, looseness and difficulty that had previously
been dismissed as beyond the pale. His exploits on water were similarly
fearless, and included swimming down the Linn of Dee, near Braemar, when it
was in spate, and rowing alone in a heavy wooden boat across the Minch in
midwinter. He is regarded by many as "the finest of all writers about the
sport [of climbing]", and his witty, stylish essays were acutely insightful
about motivation and character. He was also an innovative writer of guidebooks
to climbing venues such as Lliwedd and Tryfan.
Edwards' climbing style was described by Geoffrey Winthrop Young as "serpentine and as powerful as an anaconda coiling up loose or wet overhangs, I had the conviction that human adhesiveness in movement could go no further".[3] He was happier climbing overhangs and loose rock than his contemporaries and predecessors, meaning he could pioneer climbs in new areas.[3] He made more than a hundred first ascents, most of them in Snowdonia and including many of the now-classic rock routes on the crags of the Llanberis Pass in Snowdonia such as Flying Buttress, Spiral Stairs, Crackstone Rib, Nea and Brant.[citation needed]
As with many other British climbers of his era he was passionately against the use of pitons.[3]
Edwards described that he "grew up exuberant in body but with a nervy, craving mind. It was wanting something more, something tangible. It sought for reality intensely, always as if it were not there ... But you see at once what I do. I climb."
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