Joe Brown (climber)

Joseph Brown, usually Joe Brown, CBE (born 26 September 1930) is an English climber, born the seventh and last child of a family in Ardwick, Manchester, Lancashire, England. Brown was the first in his family to climb: aged 12, he began exploring from camp sites with his friends. They used discarded clothes lines that were not fit for purpose. Brown was employed by a company called Archies, where he was apprenticed to a plumber and general builder. He became famous for climbing during the 1950s, and was a member of the Valkyrie Climbing Club and founding member of the Rock and Ice climbing club. An early climbing partner was Don Whillans, from the neighbouring city of Salford. They were among the first of a new breed of post-war climbers from working class backgrounds, in contrast to the upper and middle class professionals who had dominated the sport up to the Second World War.

Brown was enlisted in 1949-50 for 18 months in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, where he spent his free time climbing with friends. Brown broke his leg in three places in a scrum for the tea urn but was back up and climbing three months later.

Brown is regarded as the outstanding pioneering English rock climber of the 1950s and early 1960s. He established an unprecedented number of classic new routes in Snowdonia and the Peak District that were at the leading edge of the hardest grades. Examples on Dinas Cromlech in the Llanberis Pass include "Cenotaph Corner" (1952, graded E1, with Doug Belshaw) and "Cemetery Gates" (1951, E1, with Don Whillans). As well as creating pioneering routes, he helped create new types of "protection" to improve safety on climbs, and is acknowledged to have created some of the first "nuts" by drilling the thread out of nuts and threading the centre with a sling. So famous was he that the Post Office would often deliver letters simply addressed to "The Human Fly, UK".

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