I first met Bill Murray on an icy February night in 1947 in the car-park of the Royal Hotel, Tyndrum. I was with a group of climbers travelling back to Glasgow in a mountaineering club bus. Around, the snow-covered hills and moors were bathed in moonlight. A car drew up with a group of SMC types including George Roger whom I knew. He introduced me to Bill and we stood together gazing at the mountains. I was immediately struck by his presence which seemed to have a spiritual quality. Indeed, as I learned later, he had spent time in a Benedictine monastery. He seemed to me, as a young and impressionable climber, to convey the image of a frugal, contemplative eagle.
As an avid consumer of climbing literature I had already devoured Bill’s articles in the magazineOpen Air in Scotland.Mountaineering in Scotland had just been published and this book captivated me, as it did thousands of climbers throughout the land. Bill had a magical gift of encapsulating a scene in a way we all felt, but could never express. Acknowledged as one of our greatest descriptive writers, he involves all who read him. For an ambitious climber it was his ability to get quickly to the centre of the action that I found particularly inspiring.
Bill was a free spirited adventurer, who could visualise sermons in stones and prose in the clarity of a mountain stream. I often wondered if his choice of Geoffrey Winthrop Young’s poem ‘Knight Errantry’ for the preface ofMountaineering in Scotland was inspired from within the confines of a prison camp:
‘There is a region of heart’s desire
free for the hand that wills’
It was during his prisoner-of-war years that he took up meditation, a practice which he continued all his life. This was reflected in his writings which often had a mystical quality.
‘May it not be possible, by some practical method to help one’s mind to grow in awareness of beauty, to develop that faculty of perception which we frustrate and stunt if we do not exercise? The answer is that growth may be given to the spiritual faculty as simply as growth and health are given to the body by awakening it from slumber, and providing nourishment and then by giving hard exercise. In this work there is no static position: one goes on, or one drops back. Therefore, and above all – persist.’
On the double traverse of theAonach Eagach Ridge of Glen Coe with Donald McIntyre in February 1947 he describes the scene as they linger on the summit of Meall Dearg awaiting dawn’s first light:
‘We knew, as surely as men know anything on earth, that the implacable hunter had drawn close … One’s ear caught the ringing of his footstep: and one’s eye gleams like the flashing of a shield.’
In a strange way Bill’s earlier mountain life appears entwined in the theme of ‘Knight Errantry’ – the urge to search and appreciate, the need to proclaim through his writings. Tom Patey – also a gifted writer – took up the theme in his ‘Ballad of Bill Murray’:
‘In that Tournament on Ice, Death or Glory was the price
For those knights in shining armour long ago –
You must forage for yourself on that ghastly Garrick’s Shelf
With every handhold buried deep in snow.’
In the post-war years Himalayan exploration became one of Bill’s driving passions. With Douglas Scott, Tom Weir and Tom McKinnon he took part in the Scottish Himalayan Expedition in 1950, a small time venture, big in achievement, run on the ‘old pals’ principle pioneered by Longstaff, Shipton and Tilman, all of whom Bill admired. As well as bagging three virgin peaks and attempting several others, they succeeded in getting through the Girthi Gorge to connect two great trade routes across the Himalaya to Central Asia.
In 1951, having organised the expedition from Loch Goil, he was with Ward, Shipton, and others in what was to prove to be the crucial Everest reconnaissance prior to the first ascent. This w
