© J A D Healey 2014
The photograph is of Eileen taken in 1953. She was born in Brighton on 11th September 1920.
Eileen became a mountaineer and rock climber of great renown.
This transcript of her climbing diaries. are all written in her own handwriting, in 26 volumes, and each has a rough length of twenty seven thousand words.
More astonishing than the length is that they are detailed accounts of her climbing in narrative style, not only giving fine detail of the actual climbs but also of the travelling to each venue.
She climbed in Britain, Wales, England, Scotland, Norway and the European Alps and also in the Himalayas.
The first diary was when she was an 11 year old child and the last when she was 39 years of age.
The diaries have been fully transcribed for ease of reading but there are hypertext links to each of the original diaries in its bound volume.
In the transcript they have been fully indexed and can be searched.
Eileen was devoted to climbing and she was very happy to climb with women and men, many of whom were highly respected and skilled climbers.
No one knew that she was writing these diaries and they were discovered stored in cardboard boxes in the loft of her house only a few weeks after her death. Eileen married in 1958 and she had two sons and four grandchildren.
The diaries are a valuable history of mountaineering and its social context but above all they are to be enjoyed.
She was a member of the Polaris Mountaineering Club based in Nottingham and Derby, the Ladies Alpine Club, the British Alpine Club, the Alpine Climbing Group and the Pinnacle Club with its base in Snowdonia.