Audio stories
Listening to voices can evoke a sense of ‘being there’ . From the voice of our first President Eleanor Winthrop Young to that of one of our youngest members, Milena von und zur Mühlen, listen to stories, conversations and readings that will transport you from the hut in Cwm Dyli, North Wales to the farthest flung places of the world.
An oral history of the Pinnacle Club
As part of the Heritage Collection we conducted a series of interviews with 23 Pinnacle Club members. We wanted to capture the depth and breadth of our membership, in age, climbing ability, geography and background. The interviews took place between April and November 2020 during the ever-changing restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the interviews were done in the open air or using remote technology.
Through a partnership with National Life Stories, the full oral history recordings will be housed in the British Library Sound Archive, to create the first dedicated oral history collection on climbing. These life stories will be available to listen to in full in the British Library Reading Rooms in London and Yorkshire, and eventually online at sounds.bl.uk. From autumn 2021 you can browse the collection by searching C1876 in the Sound and Moving Image catalogue.
Follow the links below to explore the interviews.
Watch and listen to a montage of our oral histories.
Recall of the Rock
Climber and poet Helen Mort responds to the Pinnacle Club’s recordings in a poetic interview with a constant witness - the rock itself. Interwoven with Helen’s new poem, we hear voices from the new archive - women sharing stories and thoughts about challenge, fear, independence, identity and risk.
Helen's poem personifies and ‘interviews’ the rock - millstone grit of Derbyshire, limestone of Kalymnos, rhyolite of Snowdonia, gabbro of Skye, granite of Yosemite - being as it is the great and ancient witness, the inspiration, the opportunity and the obstacle that attracts adventurers with a promise of personal achievement, which can also be a dasher of dreams and sometimes bodies.
Listen to our audio stories
Stories of friendship, adventure, family, and more
Stories of climbing at crags and cliff faces in the UK, Europe and around the world
Stories of adventures at altitude, from the Alps to the Himalayas
On being a female climber, the dynamics of climbing with women, and how to balance everything
![Gogarth-N-Wales-Jessie_Leong-[F79A1547]a.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e30984cd4be6126d4f602a7/1615755253128-U6AQCXMMFAXWYX3CKFUE/Gogarth-N-Wales-Jessie_Leong-%5BF79A1547%5Da.jpg)
The Pinnacle Club’s home in the hills
Eleanor Winthrop-Young
This recording of Eleanor ‘Len’ Winthrop Young (1895–1994) — one of the founders of the Pinnacle Club in 1921 — is a short extract from an interview by Alan Hankinson (Peel Session 8 May 1997; reproduced by the kind permission of the Mountain Heritage Trust).
The purpose of the interview seems to be to capture her memories of the mountaineers whom her father (William Cecil Slingsby) had known, for a biography Hankinson was writing about Eleanor’s then late husband Geoffrey Winthrop Young, whom she married in 1918. In this extract she recalls telling her father about Geoffrey’s ascent of the Matterhorn, which he repeated several times, and on this occasion completed after he had lost his leg during WWI.
Len in the 1970s