Dave Hewitt and The Angry Corrie

I recently discovered Dave Hewitt died at the end of last year, and found the news genuinely saddening. If you didn't know Dave but are into the outdoors, there's a good chance you've heard of The Angry Corrie, the hillwalking fanzine he co-founded in 1991. I grew up in the hills with TAC: it came out at a formative time, just as I was taking my first steps into the hills, and it blew the magazines I had seen up to that point out of the water.

Dave Hewitt, courtesy of Perkin Warbeck: 

TAC was genuinely different. Up till then there was an earnestness in the written accounts I had read, which were either selling gear, purple prose on the spiritual beauties of the mountains, or feats of athleticism few could aspire to. Humour was stuck, like G.J.F. Dutton's The Ridiculous Mountains, in the drawing room. TAC was earthier, cheaper, self-effacing, and exceptionally nerdy. Black and white, word heavy, no photos or adverts, it was closer to Private Eye than Trail Walker. The man behind it was gently lampooned in cartoon form as Murdo Munro - He's a Bugger of a Bagger, Dave being an exceptionally long, thin man from Derby who mocked his native land as Albion's Plain. When I showed the cartoon below to friends they burst out laughing and said Craig, that's you!

TAC was punk, in the sense of do-it-yourself, but nowhere near as angry as its title. It was fun. Dave ran it, but it was the contributors and cartoonists who made it, writing in on all sorts of issues from boring squares (what is the OS grid square with the least amount of interest?) to electric lochs to bothy toileting to access issues and wee vignettes on the sort of people you meet up the hills. Dave especially liked a bit of wordplay, writing articles like 10 Differences between Albion Rovers and Albion's Plain. Exactly the kind of stuff you wanted to coorie doon with in front of a bothy fire, or in a tent up a hill somewhere at the weekend.

I met Dave in person a few times. He gave the impression of a man who lived on fresh air and stationery, but who was rich in terms of friendships and connections. The only time I climbed a hill with him was Peel Fell in the Cheviots for the 10th anniversary of his Walking the Watershed book. He invited a galaxy of weel-kent outdoor faces: folk such as mega Marilyn-baggers the Bowkers, author of The Relative Hills of Britain Alan Dawson, Geograph photographer Richard Webb, author of Who Owns Scotland (and subsequent MSP) Andy Wightman and for no obvious reason, me. Dave impressed me by walking in the middle of the muddy path (to reduce widening erosion) and picking up all the litter he encountered on the way. This was a man who walked the talk.  

Heading up Peel Fell courtesy of Richard Webb:

Dave was at bottom an absolute geek, but he wore his pedantry as lightly and warmly as a pair of W.A. Poucher's silk gloves. He could plough a furrow as monomaniacal as the best of us - 1700 ascents of Ben Cleuch in the Ochils testify to that - but his quests were also delightfully idiosyncratic, such as his mission to discover the point in Glasgow with the view of the most number of signs for the city's subway. If you described Dave in terms of his intellect and obsessions (cricket, chess, trig points) your listener might come away with a misleading impression. Dave was never, to me at least, boring, snooty or intimidating. A quote regularly misattributed to Maya Angelou goes along the lines of: 

People don't remember what you said, but they remember how you made them feel

and Dave made me feel validated, part of this subculture of bothying and bagging I was into every weekend. I might not have a girlfriend or a job or frankly, a useful purpose in life, but I wasn't alone.

Through TAC Dave gave me early experience of writing, and the fact he accepted and even encouraged my teenage contributions seemed miraculous to me. I had written a light-hearted piece for a student newspaper that was received badly; it led to an apology from the editor in the next issue as someone had taken offence. There was no such risk with Dave, whose good sense was as deep as his humour. Dave defused one potentially embarrassing moment when he noticed an unpleasant character I had invented in one of my submissions to him had a similar name to an Outdoor Figure we both admired. I hadn't actually noticed and was horrified, but Dave put it right. Experiences like this were a springboard to paid articles in TGO Magazine and the publication of my own book The Weekend Fix by Sandstone Press in 2009. 

TAC came out at a similar time to Muriel Gray's influential The Munro Show, and these two giants of the Scottish outdoors (along with the godfather himself, Jimmie MacGregor) came together briefly in a stupendously bad TV game show called The Golden Cagoule, lampooned by Armando Ianucci as 'A Question of Hills' (where he is asked the 'impossible question: which Scottish hill has the most sides?') I suspect Dave would have known the answer to that.* Posing that question would certainly have prompted vigorous correspondence in TAC.

Eventually though, we all grew older and apart. I was delighted Dave finally got paid for his writing with the Scotsman and the short-lived (but good) Caledonian Mercury. New issues of TAC were released less frequent and eventually... just... stopped. It had had its day. We live now in an Instagram world and Dave never owned a camera. I am glad TAC coincided with my own time up the hills, and feel enriched to have known Dave, its driving genius. 

Let's all meet somewhere (Pendicles of Collymoon perhaps, a question from the 1994 TAC Christmas Quiz) at a suitable anniversary and toast his memory.

 

*Beinn a'Ghlo.