DON’T FEAR THE REAPER - One Day as a Tiger - page 52

group was perhaps best recorded in the pages of Mountain magazine throughout
the 1970s, but individual tributes still appear, in the writing of Jim Perrin and oth-
ers.
A formal structure and published programme of activities was required to get
grants from the student union, but such things were anathema to most members
of the LUCC. Still, we had to make the effort. Elected officers were often appointed
because they were absent from the pub on the evening of the annual general meet-
ing. Executive officers had the habit of never actually joining and paying their dues
but there were plenty of new arrivals, not yet disillusioned, keen to join the club
for fifty pence, or about $1.50.
New victims enrolled during the freshers' fair at the student union building each
year. The benefit of membership was dubious to say the least. First of all, having
paid over your money, unless you were part of the inner circle you were not invited
to join the club officials later that afternoon in the pub to drink away the club's
subscriptions for the year. Next day, the list of new and existing members was
taken to union officials as proof of a vibrant and growing club. [3] A grant was then
awarded on a per capita basis, which usually amounted to several hundred
pounds.
This money was used in a variety of ways. On the first Saturday in the first term
of each year we held an official meet and hired a bus to take us to Stanage or some
other more distant crag. This gave the club some credibility among the paid-up
new members. It was also evidence that we were doing what we said we were doing
to impress the student union. The credentials of new members were carefully
weighed: could they climb, did they have any money, did they have a car and were
they female? That was more or less the order of priority. There were not many fe-
male 'stayers' in the club. A few became the anchor of sanity for some of the more
dissolute and disillusioned members of the club - Syrett in particular. Some of the
girls joined in with antics that on several occasions made national press headlines:
'Vicar's Daughter Arrested in Pub Theft' was one; others included 'Skylight Col-
lapse Near Death Fall For Leeds Uni Fresher'.
On the whole, the male club members were men without women.
We were basically too interested in climbing and short-term kicks - in other
words, too immature. There were some excellent women climbers in the club at
the time: Cynthia Heap and Angela Fowler to name but two. Although they joined
in on many trips, they found the conversation and pub antics of the leading lights
in the club pretty inane. Angela Fowler once famously said of the climbers in the
club: 'I can't really tell the difference between the drug addicts and queers.' It is