The regular posting of obituaries,  if sustained over the years as when established national newspapers function as journals of record, a succession of  obituaries becomes an invaluable historical archive of individual contributions to the progression of society and civilization.  Thanks to electronic communication from world-wide contacts the Mountain-Portal will be able to build such an archive of those who contribute to maintaining the health  of the world's mountains. 

Obituary
 

ESME KIRBY, who has died aged 89, was a fierce defender of Snowdonia in Wales against busy-body bureaucrats and developers.

She was a hard-working hill farmer, though she resembled a delicate "Dresden shepherdess", in the words of the bestseller "I Bought A Mountain" by her first husband Tom Firbank. She first made her mark as a conservationist by preventing a youth hostel being built behind the celebrated Pen-y-Gwryd climbers' hotel. With her second husband Peter Kirby she then launched the Snowdonia National Park Society in 1961.

Self-assured, unafraid of treading on toes even to the extent of questioning the high cost of Welsh language programmes, Esme Kirby doggedly shadowed the work of the National Park Committee, containing local authority representatives. She was an uncomfortable member of the committee for a time, but long after resigning she continued to attend its meetings so regularly that a seat was designated "Esme's chair".

Esme Kirby was never happier than when genially drawing attention to an overlooked fact or offering to do something everyone else regarded as impossible. When it was proposed to blow up the Cromlech boulders on the Llanberis Pass as part of a road straightening scheme, she pointed out that they had been used by Edward Lluyd, the 18th-century Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, as a yardstick for dating the world.

Dolgelly Council once declined to clear a disused mine because the cost was estimated at £20,000. Esme Kirby said she could do it for £1,000, and with friends the following weekend she cleared the eyesore for £400.

She was born Esme Cummins at Addington, Surrey, on August 1, 1910, the daughter of a golf course manager. On leaving school she became an actress with Sir Frank Benson's touring company. In 1935 she was helping to run a riding stable when she married Tom Firbank, who had bought a 3,000-acre farm at Dyffryn Mymbr near Capel Curig.

According to Firbank's idyllic account, completed in 1940 while he was training at the Guards Depot, Caterham, Esme threw herself into the life of a farmer's wife. With her hard, trim body and elfin features, she delighted in carrying food high on the mountain for the men and fizzed with ideas for the farm. These included starting a piggery with scraps from local hotels and buying a gypsy caravan to entertain tourists.

The work also left her with the energy to complete the circuit of 14 peaks over 3,000 feet in nine hours 25 minutes. The book praises Esme for doing "work which would prove beyond the power of most men". Although Firbank went on to win an MC and Bar in North Africa and Italy, he never returned to Dyffryn.

After letting the farmhouse and living in a cattle shed to pay for help on the farm, Esme married in 1945 Major Kirby, who had been running a nearby battle camp. It was he who later suggested that the area needed an equivalent of Friends of the Lakes.

The concept of conservation was still in its infancy. Esme Kirby's characteristically outspoken suggestion that the way to deal with the increasing number of visitors was to castrate them prompted The Daily Telegraph's Peter Simple to award her a "Way of the World" plastic (non-returnable) ecosphere.

Whenever an ugly plantation, mining operation or building was proposed, the society was there to question and, if necessary, oppose outright. It attracted more than 3,000 members, but Esme Kirby's style of leadership led to her ousting from its chair in 1988. She then founded the Esme Kirby Snowdonia Trust to do things her way.

In recent years she threw herself into preserving the few remaining red squirrels on Anglesey. She also surveyed the milestones placed by Thomas Telford along the Holyhead road in the early 19th century. After reporting on them to the Welsh Office, she and her husband were exasperated when the bureaucrats immediately responded by painting one the wrong colour.
 
 

Mallory´s body found, Knoydart rescued, Himalayan glaciers-alarm grows, Everest Forests-a Sherpa's view,
The epic of Mt. Everest, The state of the world mountains, My first summer in Sierra
Poems and Belles letters, The Yellow brick Road - Polemic, Paradise fishing at Autannes, Traditional Solar Science,Dogs on high, Obituary, Esme Percy, Web-sites for browsing
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan on sustainable mountain tourism
P.B. Stone on mountains under pressure (general overeview of so-called Mountain problematique

 Return to the Mountain-Portal