The Post War Oread

The Oread (originally the Burton-on-Trent Mountaineering Club) was founded in that brewing town, on the border between Staffordshire and Derbyshire, in March 1949, but quickly gravitated north so that, within a few years, its active membership was mostly resident in Derbyshire and the Nottingham area. The Peak District with its lavish supply of gritstone outcrops became its natural home.
In his Preface to Climb If You Will (1974) the late Sir Jack Longland wrote:"...Born of a mixture of ex-servicemen and their girls; with tents, anoraks, and probably ropes, all ex W.D the Oread came into existence pat on cue. The men (and the women) matched the need, and they were inspired by a fanaticism about mountains..... but always mitigated by a humour which would not let them take themselves too seriously, by a Rabalaisian anarchism which inspired their doings in huts and pubs, by the civilising influence of girl friends and wives who sometimes climbed as well as they did."

J.L.L. got it about right and perhaps the most significant reason for the club's survival into Millennium, its development from a small group of climbing fanatics into a senior mountaineering club with its own property in North Wales, and a secure base in the heart of the Peak District, is the continued re-generation of that early spirit and recognition that serious administrative requirements must never diminish the aspirations of the first constitution "mountaineering regardless".

The period 1949/99 occupies a particular niche in the development of British mountaineering. As others have recounted the enormous influx of would be climbers in the aftermath of the second world war presented the older establishment with a problem. How were they to accommodate this mass of half rebellious youth who, radialysed by recent experience, viewed the pre-war insularity of the senior clubs with something of a jaundiced eye? But the young men (and women) solved it themselves. They founded their provincial and regional clubs throughout the U.K. They taught themselves to climb and provided the climbing scene with some of the earliest examples of post-war street cred. They did not wait upon sel