Joe Brown (climber)

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Joe Brown (born 26 September 1930) is an English climber, born the seventh and last child of a family in the Manchester suburb of Ardwick. He became famous for climbing during the 1950s, and was a member of the Valkyrie climbing club and founding member of the Rock and Ice climbing club. An early climbing partner was Don Whillans, a fellow Mancunian builder's assistant (Brown has often incorrectly been described as a 'climbing plumber'). They were among the first of a new breed of post-war climber, from working class backgrounds, in contrast to the upper and middle-class professionals who had dominated the sport up until WW2.

Brown is now widely regarded as the outstanding pioneering English rock climber of the 1950s and early 1960s, being the creator of an unprecedented number of classic new routes (especially in Snowdonia and the Peak District); these were, at the time, at the leading edge of the hardest grades. Examples in the Llanberis Pass include "Cenotaph Corner" (1952, E1, with Doug Belshaw) and "Cemetery Gates" (1951, E1, with Don Whillans).

In this context, Brown's mountaineering achievements in the Alps and Himalaya have often been overlooked: he made many very significant ascents in the Alps in the 1950s with Don Whillans and other members of the Rock and Ice climbing club and, in 1955, the first ascent of the third highest mountain in the world, Kangchenjunga in the Nepalese Himalaya, with George Band. In 1956 he made the first ascent of the west summit of the Mustagh Tower in the Karakoram with Ian McNaught-Davis (the remaining members of the team, John Hartog and Tom Patey, reaching the main summit the next day).

Apart from his numerous classic rock climbs in Britain, and his considerable mountaineering achievements abroad, Joe is also remembered for his televised rock climbs in the 1960s, three in Snowdonia, and then, in 1967, of a spectacular new route on The Old Man of Hoy, a Scottish sea stack, with Ian McNaught-Davis and other major luminaries of the climbing world, including Sir Chris Bonington. Fifteen years later Brown repeated the climb on the Old Man on a popular TV documentary with his second daughter Zoe. Her bubbly personality led her to being chosen as a presenter on the children's TV show Tiswas.