Internationally acclaimed mountaineer, author and ex-coal miner Andy Cave will present his lecture show Learning to Breathe.
Andy Cave is a figurehead for British Mountaineering, with more than 20 years of desperate routes to his name. Aged just 20, he became one of the youngest mountaineers ever to climb the North Face of the Eiger, an achievement made all the more remarkable as just 4 years earlier, Andy was working 3000 feet underground at Grimethorpe Colliery in South Yorkshire.
Andy’s story of transition from Yorkshire coal miner to one of the UK’s best climbers is a gripping and compelling tale. Aged just 20 he left his job as a miner and became one of the youngest mountaineers to climb the north face of the Eiger. At the same time he entered into higher education gaining a PhD for his linguistic and social research. In 1997 he climbed the north face of Changabang one of the most difficult climbs in world mountaineering.
Traditionally a gentleman’s sport, a young coal miner from Barnsley was an unlikely mountaineer. His journey from the blackened grime of the pit to the breath-taking Himalayan summits is both moving and startling. His gritty insight into the turmoil of the miner’s strike – which ravaged his local community – and his audacious decision to break with family tradition and seek out a life of adventure in higher education and in the mountains is a tale of tremendous courage and ambition.
Despite suffering from claustrophobia, at the age of sixteen, Andy followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and became a miner at the local Grimethorpe colliery. Enduring the 1984-5 miners’ strikes – the poverty, the division of communities, the broken friendships – Andy continued to pursue his newly discovered obsession with climbing. In 1986, he quit his job at the pit in order to devote himself to mountaineering, climbing the infamous North Face of the Eiger at just twenty years old. At the same time he decided to educate himself, acquiring almost from a standing start, academic qualifications including a PhD in socio-linguistics.