Tom
Weir, MBE, climber, author and broadcaster, was born on December 29, 1914.
He died on July 6, 2006, aged 91.
THE
mountaineer and writer Tom Weir became something of a Scottish institution,
thanks to his long-running television series, Weir’s Way — in which
he travelled Scotland, exploring its natural history and landscapes and
meeting its people.
Weir was born in Glasgow in 1914 and raised in a Springburn
tenement. His childhood, though poor, was happy; his sister, the actress
Molly Weir, describes their childhood as close and loving in her memoir,
Shoes Were for Sunday (1970).
The Campsie hills were a short bus ride away, and many
children have now experienced their first day on the hill following
Weir’s Walk from Clachan of Campsie, where a cairn was (most unusually)
erected to Weir’s memory while he was still alive.
After the Second World War, in which Weir saw active service
as an artillery battery officer during the Italy campaign, he worked as a
surveyor for the Ordnance Survey, a role well suited to his talent for
judging the lie of the ground. This was a skill often found among the
ex-Army working-class climbers of his generation, of which the average
Glaswegian member was memorably described by an observer as equipped with a
coil of shipyard rope, a packet of fags and a sarcastic expression.
Weir climbed in many parts of the world, and was a member of
the first postwar expedition into the Himalayas in 1950 led by W. H. Murray,
in which five peaks were climbed (with nine attempted). Murray’s account,
The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951), includes an affectionate
portrait of Weir and his gift for culinary improvisation.
“Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness
has genius, power, and magic in it!” Murray wrote, and it is an effective
summary of Murray and Weir’s philosophy about climbing.
Weir returned to the Himalayas in 1952, becoming one of the
first Westerners to attempt previously unexplored peaks in Nepal, a journey
described in his East of Katmandu (1955), in which he describes
feeling a Wordsworthian affinity with the “solitary wanderings of my boyhood
days” among the Scottish hills.
By 1976, when his Scottish Television series, Weir’s Way,
began, Weir was increasingly being taken for granted as a Scottish
institution, and certainly he became a much imitated one. Affectionate
impersonations of Weir usually involved a bobble hat, a Fair Isle jumper and
a theatrical shading of the eyes. Yet Weir’s true place in history as an
influential environmentalist was rarely given the acclaim it merited.
Weir wanted to see the wilderness protected, and took great
pride in being given a rarely bestowed John Muir Trust Award in 2000 in
recognition of his contribution to the wider understanding of the value of
Scotland’s wild places. He was appointed MBE in the same year.
Muir, who once tied
himself to a tree to see how it felt to be a tree in a storm, and Weir, who
was sometimes photographed in stagey poses, shared an
engaging disregard for the possibility that they might occasionally look a
bit daft.
Weir’s Way
was hugely popular, and a five-DVD set of the series was released this year
(it also has an afterlife on satellite TV) . Weir also wrote a column for
that surgery staple, Scots Magazine, for more than 40 years.
As the climbing fanzine The Angry Corrie once
observed, Weir has been underestimated as a writer, and his evocative
portraits of wild and lonely places will endure. His other works include
Highland Days (1948), Tom Weir’s Scotland (1982) and Weir’s
World (1994). He was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
He is survived by his wife and fellow mountaineer Rhona. whom
he married in 1959.
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