Emily (Pat) Kelly

Emily (Pat) Kelly is remembered as the founder of the Pinnacle Club.  There were of course many people at the inaugural meeting on 26th March 1921 but Pat’s vision and energy had laid the foundations for the gathering through conversation and example over the previous years. 

Dorothy Pilley wrote at the Golden Anniversary: “The founding of the Club might have waited long without her combination of gifts: her superlative ability and composure as a climber; her interest in other people's climbing; her not a bit ‘feministic’ estimations of people's abilities; and, not least, her humorous, infectious enthusiasm.”

Pat was political with a small p; as a teenager living in the time of emancipation she was conscious of the prevailing view of a woman’s inferior social status. Around this time she presented a paper about George Eliot to the local Literary Society, challenging the cheap male sneer that woman's only place is at home looking after the baby. Pat worked hard to attain her independence even though she had responsibilities as the eldest child in a large family. This involved above average domestic duties (in the days of no washing machines, hoovers or irons) and working fourteen to sixteen hours a day as a business woman, and at self improvement through study of topics like geology. She was obviously also a charismatic communicator and appears to have been excellent at debate and persuasion; the editors of the first Pinnacle Club journal note that: “We should say that her chief characteristics were an indomitable will, an almost inexhaustible vitality (which had remarkable powers of recovery), organising ability, and selflessness.”

Her organising ability led to a successful gathering of 17 women from all over the country for the Foundation Meeting of the Pinnacle Club on Saturday 26th March 1921, to approve 43 applications for membership. This was a feat of persuasion to attend a pioneering event, and of logistics to contact and gather the group in days before having a telephone was usual and most communication was by post.

Pat’s own journey to climbing came out of her own passion to be independent; her husband, Harry Kelly recalled that “early in her climbing career Pat felt that, while male advice was not unwelcome, it was better to thrash out problems of technique herself, and this she became determined to do. Consequently anyone visiting, say, Castle Naze in those days would find her diligently back-and-kneeing in Deep Chimney.”

Kelly was unstinting in his support of his wife and the new club, but says (with irony perhaps) in an article in 1980: “it is amusing now to read in my climbing diary that when I gave full details of my own climbs her efforts were dismissed in a line — Pat also did some climbs on her own.”

As a climber Pat’s grace and confidence was admired and Dorothy Pilley says that “she was a climber whom one watched not only with admiration, but without the slightest sense of anxiety which frequently accompanies the watching of others in exposed positions. On easy and difficult ground alike she was always in complete command of the situation.”

Just over a year after the founding of the Pinnacle Club, Pat Kelly died a few days after a fall descending easy ground on Tryfan; she was descending behind the rest of the party and no-one saw how she fell, but she was missing a boot.  The mystery was cleared up after the death of Harry Kelly some 60 years later when one of Pat’s friends told how they found her boot caught fast to the ground by one of its nails.

Her death hit the club members badly; it could have been touch and go as to whether the club should be continued in the absence of its charismatic founder, but her friends were clear they should carry on, knowing it was their best memorial to Pat, who had worked so hard to establish it.

Pat is commemorated today through the name of our hut in Cwm Dyli – the Emily Kelly Hut. We didn’t acquire it until 10 years after her death, but she would have been delighted to know her vision had a home in the hills, and of the way the club she founded has developed over the last century.