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Memories of Uncle Harry
On a sunny May Saturday in Sedbergh,
I was delighted to receive the Society’s
cheque for £2000 for the Cumbria Wildlife
Trust’s current juniper planting project
(see pages 28-29). In conversation with
Society members, I mentioned my own
‘Wainwright connection’ and was asked
to write this article.
The connection is my Uncle Harry, Henry Marshall,
who collaborated with AW when his first guides
were published. Early editions of the Pictorial Guides
have ‘Henry Marshall, publisher, Low Bridge,
Kentmere, Westmorland’ printed inside.
As a young child, I went to live with the Marshall
family, then living in Kentmere, during some of
the war years, and attended Miss Mann’s nursery
school near Serpentine Woods and our favourite
excursion was to feed the many red squirrels
there. As I grew older, I used to spend most of my
school holidays in Kentmere, relishing the freedom
to roam with my cousin Roger and to ride Benny
Dickinson’s fell ponies.
Uncle Harry was Borough Librarian of Kendal
for about twenty-three years during the 40s, 50s
and early 60s, and I can remember visiting him
in his office. He sat behind a huge desk in the
room which is now the children’s library. He was
a fount of amusing and entertaining tales. He tried
to persuade me that the Chinese restaurants, just
beginning to appear locally, had a sinister ingredient
which, when the call came, would make us all rise
and head east!
The family house, Low Bridge, was a fascinating
place. It had once been a hostelry but it acquired
such a bad reputation that its licence was eventually
withdrawn. Uncle Harry was full of stories of evil
goings-on, bodies in the river that flowed at the end
of the garden, robberies and other wholly unsuitable
bedtime stories. As electricity took some time to
reach Kentmere, most properties had their own
generators but these were noisy and at an agreed
time in the evening were turned off and candles and
paraffin lamps took over. The flickering lights and
menacing shadows lent authenticity to the stories
and fired my already over-heated imagination.
Susan Garnett
AW with Henry Marshall, in Skye - June 1954
A task which all his family had to undertake was to
parcel up the Guides, hot from the presses, into
manageable amounts which Harry then dispatched
via his library vans to the ‘twigs’ (libraries not big
enough to be branches!). Some went via the post-van
to Staveley Post Office. Roger would take some
to sell on the bus en route to school. He became
a journalist and later moved to Canada where he
became a mountaineer of considerable skill and
courage, selected for several prestigious Canadian
expeditions. Tragically, in 1987 he fell to his death on
Mount Everest and was buried there. My uncle also
died relatively young, at the age of fifty-eight, in 1964.
He was an active member of Mountain Rescue. Their
memorials are in Kentmere churchyard.
I didn’t appreciate the unique nature of the Guides
at the time and any early editions my own family
may have possessed are, sadly, no longer around.
I was asked if I ever met Alfred Wainwright but,
being a teenager at the time, any significance of a
meeting would have been lost on me and I simply
can’t remember!
Susan Garnett – Chair, Sedbergh Local Support Group,
Cumbria Wildlife Trust
19