Together we learned to take the rough with the smooth. Boxing Day was a traditional climbing day, so we opted for Avon and a route called Hiatus, a run-out VS across Central Buttress. Overnight a mist had clad the cliff with frost and we soon found ourselves committed to sloping holds covered with verglas – and with just the odd 60s peg for protection. Every digit in our bodies was numb, our feet would be slipping this way and that, yet we had a great day out proved by the fact that I still remember it so vividly.

I was lanky, Dave was small; but what he lacked up-ways he gained width-ways with powerful shoulders and arms: I remember him clearly in action in his dapper breeches, arms swelling with the pump, those wiry tendons and veins pulsing as he led HVSs that would become E2s ten years hence. On the rock he was ‘mister calm’, taking most things in his stride, concentration and determination unimpeded except by my singing or that of mate Steve Woollard screeching out Pink Floyd’s ‘I was standing by the Nile’. But Chicago’s ‘Better end Soon’ proved to be the end of Dave’s tolerance while he was fighting Brant Direct: ‘Shut that whining up’ he instructed. So I shut up; respect your seniors and all that. Maybe the abominable experience helped steer Dave towards classical music.

We had many memorable days in Cheddar Gorge – including our first full-on epic. Aid climbing was de rigueur for the overhangs in those days: it would be many years before rock athletes arrived to free them. The Paradise routes and Fornicator Simulator were to our liking, Dave revelling not only in ‘the nice and technical’ but in the otherworldly positions and gluttony of space. My parents didn’t normally worry about me, but that winter’s night when Dave and I were still pegging up Warlord in the pouring rain at 1.00a.m. tested their faith to the limits. They trusted Dave implicitly, as did I, and the rescue team was told to stand down.

We only climbed together for less than two years, across 1972 and 1973, and it’s curious how such a short partnership can have such a penetrating, life-lasting impact. I suppose for us both those were our formative years as climbers: everything was mysterious, new, and exciting – and there were no bounds on where we could go, what we could do. We shared two alpine seasons, neither being without incident, which was par for the course for many British numpties abroad. On the first night, just as we pulled up outside the campsite in Zermatt to unload, a tippled Suisse driver smashed into the front of the van, catapulting me at the back down the road. Luckily my injuries were significantly less than those endured by Dave’s pride and joy, its radiator squashed, its bonnet crumpled. Yet all came good on the day Dave and I summited the Matterhorn, neither of us relenting to the woe is me of the campsite – ‘It’s plastered up there, someone else died today.’ And the icing on the cake was that the new radiator for Dave’s van had just arrived, so we could get home.

Dave never made exceptions for my younger age, and sometimes I suspect he’d cannily exploit the advantage I might have on the hardest pitches: ’Go man go, but not like a yo-yo’, he’d shout up, syntax for: ‘For God’s sake don’t fall off, otherwise you’ll die’. A match made in and outside Avon, he transmitted warmth and care up and down the rope, ever-ready to step-up or to make any sacrifice as befitted the aims, mood, and capacities of the team. On Mont Blanc in 1973 I collapsed with food poisoning just at the wrong time, the poor climbers behind being forced to follow my orange trail until it ended just before the Bosses ridge. I was exhausted, and despite the summit being only 15 minutes away, Dave insisted that we go down. I said don’t be silly, and within minutes he was back to help me down to Chamonix chuffed at reaching the top.

Dave and I kept in touch once he’d left his desk-job for Outward Bound. He would send me postcards and letters reliving his latest adventures abroad: how he survived an avalanche or a fall into a crevasse or a benightment in sub-zero temperatures. Just reading his accounts gave me palpitations. Epics (or ‘big grips’ as he called them) seemed to be a means to take him closer still to nature, to Mother Earth. Many years ago, when telling him I’d become an Environmental Health Officer, Dave surprised me by saying: ‘You should be working to protect the environment, not so much people’. This coming from an affable, community-spirited, and much-loved man only showed how much he cared dearly about both.

Martin Crocker 2021