The Great NUFWS History
NUFWS is a society with a long and glorious history, with predecessors stretching back at least into the early 1900s. The first incarnation, and the earliest ancestor of both NUFWS and the Mountaineering Club was the King’s College Mountaineering Club (KCMC), with a definite history back into the 1930s and a shadowy unclear history back to the Great War and beyond. KCMC produced a climbing handbook to Simonside North Face in the 1940s, and many members went on to form the Northumbria Mountaineering Club (NMC) in 1948. The NMC’s first President, Professor of Electrical Engineering at King’s College (now Newcastle University), Emrys Williams (1910-1974) was himself instrumental in reinvigorating the KCMC after the war.
KCMC was reformed in 1948 following the Second World War, with the first post-war trip to Simonside in Northumberland, nearly 100 people participated. ‘The King’s Courier’ describes this as being the first trip of the new session (i.e. post-war).Large Fellwalking and climbing contingents were present during the 1950s, with regular trips to crags and hills across Northumberland, even to the Lake District, during the 1950s someone placed a Courier article about a guided ascent of the Barre de Ecrins, a 4000m peak in the Dauphin Alps of France with Walter Bonatti (the famous climber, who spent a night in the open at 8100m and -50C° on K2 in 1954) as the guide!
The King’s College Mountaineering Club, from 1963, the Newcastle University Mountaineering Club (NUMC) climbed and walked throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, although records are sparse for the period, in fact no meets are mentioned at all from 1964 onwards. The odd piece appears in the Courier in the early 1970s, with small pieces about the Mountaineers. A Student (Kenneth Holland) died on the Cheviot in cold conditions due to exposure in 1973; this may be the origin of the myth of deaths in the Fellwalking society over the years. Chris Bonnington’s visit to the university in 1974 seems to be on the initiative of both the Mountaineering Society and the Exploration Society. It appears that hillwalking had been phased out by the predominant climbers within the Mountaineers during the 1970s.
On Wednesday 20th October 1976, 37 years ago, the inaugural meeting of the ‘Student Representative Council Fellwalking Society’ was held. Some members coming from NUMC and others from independent hill walkers but descended from the old Fellwalking wing of the Mountaineering Club. We were founded by Dugald Wilson (Civ. Eng., President), Andrew Harrison (Civ. Eng., Secretary) and Jon Wetherell (Mech. Eng., Treasurer) ‘one evening in a Henderson Hall study’; the first tag line used was ‘Scafell this year, Everest the next’. Quite catchy we think. The first trip that Sunday was an introductory trip to Kielder taking two 60 seater buses!
Their successors began by advertising ‘orgies in mountain huts’ (very much in the spirit of the times at the Courier) in the Freshers’ edition of the 1977 Courier. That year saw a massive expansion in the size of the society, pieces were written every week or so in Courier about the trips that weekend and on one occasion three 60 person buses were taken to Northumberland!
The society continues to thrive in the present day having over 210 members in 2023 continuing to take members across the country to the Lake District, Snowdonia and Scotland for weekend and day trips as well as continuing the tradition of weekly trips to the Strawberry Pub. Every March is still the annual fellwalking ball where the society takes over Featherstone Castle in Northumberland for the weekend!
The Summer of 2022 saw NUFWS even go abroad with the first international trip to the Julian Alps in Slovenia and followed it up with trips to the South Tyrol in northern Italy in the summer of 2023 and the Aragon Pyrenees in June 2024.
Past NUFWS Presidents:
- 2024/2025 Joshua Nicholson
- 2023/2024 Harry Miller
- 2022/2023 Owen Lowery-Pearson
- 2021/2022 Fiona Hodgson
- 2020/2021 Fiona Hodgson
- 2019/2020 Tom Mitchell
- 2018/2019 Tim Brazel
- 2017/2018 Tim Brazel
- 2016/2017 Tim Brazel
- 2015/2016 Richard Ashby
- 2014/2015 David Bacon
- 2013/2014 David Bacon
- 2012/2013 Jamie Dodd
- 2011/2012 Jamie Dodd
- 1991/1992 Robin Henderson
- 1982/1983 S. Home and D. Ellis
- 1981/1982 Pete Scragg
- 1976/1977 Dugald Wilson
Newcastle University Fellwalking Society 