John Syrett died instantly, in the small hours of Sunday June 9th, having presumably jumped from the lip of Malham Cove. Thus the climbing world lost one of its most vital and talented sons.
I first met John in 1968, when we both came up to Leeds University, where he read a degree in Applied Mineral Sciences. A shy lad in those days, he kept a distinctly low profile for the first year or so, but unbeknown to the rest of us more outward going types, busy ingratiating ourselves with the Club worthies, and wallowing in the stagnant climbing scene of the late sixties, a storm was brewing. It took the form of a dark-eyed, tousled-haired, incredibly bendy youth who could perform unheard of stunts on the University climbing wall. John had taken a lateral step; whilst we were all working up through the grades, he was exploring the effects of an already athletic frame, of specific climbing training using a climbing wall.
The results were astounding; when he was ready, John proceeded to demolish the mystique of a seemingly endless list of hard climbs, starting on the local outcrops, and working outwards.
Fame came quickly, with his on-sight second ascent of Wall of Horrors, at Almscliff, with token protection, one cold, windy November afternoon in 1970. This route had held local climbers in awe for nearly ten years.
The spell was broken, and a flood of new routes, mostly on grit, followed from Syrett and his contemporaries. Grit was John's milieu, and his routes were typically bold and gymnastic, such as Encore and Big Greenie at Almscliff, or violent like the Brutaliser and Felicity at Brimham; he was the master of offwidths.
John's ascent of Joker's Wall at Brimham was steeped in legend, for he would regularly jump off from high on the crux during early solo attempts— he was after all the 'rubber man', and could survive ground falls from heights that would have hospitalised lesser mortals.
John was a complex person, often difficult to get close to, but there was no mistaking his drive, no avoiding the eager fire that burned behind those anthracite eyes. It was as if life wasn't hard enough for him. He was constantly testing himself, against the rock, against other climbers, against the elements. His idea of losing weight was to run (literally) everywhere in just an open necked shirt, jeans and sandals in the depths of winter. (I tried this once, and nearly ended up with pneumonia.)
Just as John was getting into top gear, disaster struck. A shattered wine glass cut the tendons in a third finger, a seemingly minor injury to the layman, but it spelt the end for a climber of Syrett's calibre. Perhaps that was the moment when John began to die. Unable to channel his vital energies into the activity at which he excelled, he moved on, first to devote himself to a physiotherapy course in Newcastle, the very discipline that had failed to mend him, and finally to the brutal excitement and hardships of the North Sea drilling rigs.
But John's cruelly short life was shaped by a series of definite irrevocable decisions, as was his climbing, as was the manner of his death; not a cry for help of some lonely soul, but a bold statement, a premeditated decision to choose his own time and place.
It's been said that Syrett's influence on the development of rock climbing was far greater than this list of achievements would suggest. That's as may be; it’s been my good fortune to know a lot of extremely talented rock climbers over the years, but Syrettwas a genius, one of that rare breed of natural athletes whose performance makes a total mockery of the efforts of others. It was pure joy to watch him move across the face of steep rock. [1]