IT is far from easy to pay an adequate tribute to the memory of Denny Biggane in a short space. He was a most interesting, rather complex, and lovable character, and to enlarge upon his many fine points would take up more space than I may claim. Of one thing let us be clear at the outset: the 1941 Climbers’ Club Journal says that: "In the spring of this year there was a great renaissance in Welsh climbing, chiefly caused by the activities of the C.U.M.C." Denny was one of the people most concerned with that renaissance.
He was a true man of the rocks, for they, and the Welsh rocks especially, were his happy hunting ground. He was a great stylist, and to watch him moving gracefully, carefully and with the minimum of effort up such a slab as that of Mickledore Grooves was an experience never to be forgotten. The "wide open faces " were his delight, and upon them his technique of delicacy and nicety of balance came into its own and he excelled. In chimneys and cracks he was never so comfortable. He did not enjoy to the same extent, the cruder methods for which they called, but in such places he could always be relied upon for a humorous time.
He was indeed a curious mixture of efficiency on the rocks and haphazard lack of concern about his equipment. He would walk from Langdale to Scafell in his Sunday shoes; he seldom carried a rope, and when he did, he did not expect other people to trust it, so we took our own. He would do similar odd things in everyday life at Cambridge, and his eccentric ways led to the weaving of numerous comic tales about him, which only served to amuse him, and to make everyone like him the more. On one occasion he set off from Helyg to climb a route on Dinas Mot, for which crag, remote as it is from Helyg, he had such an affection that it became known as "Denny’s Mot ". He took with him an old envelope, on which he had scribbled what he could learn about the route, and an ancient, rusty and bent piton from the tool drawer in the hut, "just in case ". At the top of the first pitch the envelope blew away. A little later, the stone which had served as a piton hammer split in half and nearly dislodged the second man. Despite these mishaps they accomplished the climb successfully, but with some doubt as to the route taken. At first, such tales of apparent incompetence led to distrust and doubt, but one had only to climb with him to know that he was a first-rate leader upon whom one could always rely in any difficult situation.
His quiet and modest, but deep, courage was well displayed on those days when he could not find a companion. Then he would climb alone, and he amazed many of us by ascending in this way such climbs as the Munich climb on Tryfan, Asterisk on Gimmer Crag and the South-west on Pillar Rock, and by making serious attempts on such places as Grooved Wall on Pillar Rock and Lot’s Wife on Glyder Fach.
From Cambridge he went to the R.A.F., and his colleagues in Bomber Command evidently appreciated him as much as we did. He became very fond of flying, perhaps on account of its affinities with climbing, and his deeds in the air made some excellent stories. I remember well the great joy with which he told me of flying over the Alps to Italy in bright moonlight. His own supreme modesty and capacity for understatement left me to guess at the part which he himself had played in these operations, but his navigator, now a prisoner of war, has written to say that Denny was the bravest man he ever knew; and if we had thought, we might have known that he would be.
We have lost an incomparable climbing companion and a great friend. All who knew him in the C.U.M.C. will agree to this, and will join in an expression of sympathy with those who knew him better than we did, and have so lost more. This stanza by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, which was a favourite of Denny’s, seems an appropriate conclusion:
I have
not lost the magic of long days;
I live them, dream them still.
Still am I master of the starry ways,
And freeman of the hill.
Shattered my glass, ere half the sands had run –
I hold the heights, I hold the heights I won.
C.F.R.