It is the usual practice to ask for nominations for the next
years committee in the August B.B., but the Committee have decided this year
to put this forward so as to allow plenty of time before the nominations close
and the actual voting forms are prepared.
Perhaps you are completely satisfied with the committee and
the way in which the club is run. Pirhaps you cant think of anyone else you would like to see have a go
at any of the jobs which must be carried out each year. If you are not in this state, then it will do
no harm to think of who, in your opinion, could make a useful addition to the
committee next year. Dont forget to ask
their permission before you nominate them. When you have done this, send or give a note
to Bob Bagshaw,
Knowle,
4, saying that you would like to nominate the following for the 1967
committee. You may nominate as many as
you wish. By the way, you might like to
be reminded that, according to the club constitution and rules YOU MAY NOT VOTE
at the A.G.M. unless you are PAID UP at the time. (Neither may you be elected to the
committee). This rule has sometimes been
treated liberally inn the past, but anyone who might wish to enforce it would
be within their rights, so play safe and make sure that your membership is
currently paid up.
Alfie
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IF YOU CAN HELP to improve the Belfry facilities by lending
a hand with repairing the Belfry; building the new showers etc, PLEASE get in
touch with Alan Thomas at the Belfry, Club or by writing to Westhaven School,
Uphill, Weston-Super-Mare, Somerset. We
have the plans passed, and the money allocated but NO OFFERS OF LABOUR. How about it?
Contents
Future Meets.
August 6/7
August 13th. G.B.
This will NOT include the Ladder Dig Series.
August 14th. Stoke
Lane. Meet at cave entrance 11am.
August 27/29 (Bank Holiday) Agen Allwedd. Summertime and Southern Stream Passage. Camping. Names of all interested
to be sent to Dave Irwin, 9 Campden Hill gardens, London W.8. by August 13th in
order to obtain permits.
September
18th. G.B. LADDER DIG SERIES. Meet at cave entrance 11am. This trip is limited to B.E.C. members
ONLY. Names to Dave Irwin by September
1st at the latest.
G.B. Ladder Dig Series.
A circular sent from the U.B.S.S. indicates that the L.D.S.
will be open to visits from other clubs by August 31st. The biological programme is taking longer
than expected. The circular makes
special note of the immense boulder ruckle. Its nature is such that a party must be limited to 6 and it is to be
made up of experienced cavers. An
interim report is expected with survey in the U.B.S.S. Proceedings (Vol 11, No
1) due out in November 1966. Off prints
will be available at low cost. For the
B.E.C. trip on September 18th, arrangements are being made to stagger parties
in the cave. Photographers will be
included on the first trip.
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ALAN THOMAS is joining a team from the Derbyshire area to
explore a pothole in
deep! No doubt the Christmas B.B. will
be a bumper number including reports from both the Austrian and Greek
expeditions. This year, members will
have visited
and
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There have been some complaints that certain members spend a
large amount of their time sitting around the Belfry stove talking about the
good old days. We never did that in the
good old days!
Journals
The next edition of the British caver will be available in
August 1966. Price 10/9 from Gerard
Platten, Rotherfield, New Milton, Hants. The S.M.C.C. Journal (Ser 4 No 1) June 1966 is now available and
includes Bob Craigs report of a discovery in St. Catherines II and B.M.
Elliss Some Caves of North Wales detailing location and description of each
one. This publication is available from
Bryan Ellis.
Digs.
The club is now actually engaged on two digs. Emborough Swallet and Springwood
Swallet. Anyone wishing to help, let
either Dave Irwin or Alan Thomas know when they will be available. (A chance to sunbathe too!). M.C.G. are digging Sand Passage in
August/Longwood and are also continuing their mammoth task at Blackmoor
Swallet. From all reports, this Velvet
Bottom dig is quite promising. The
are working at the termination of the August Stream Passage and the U.B.S.S.
have applied for permission to dig in Reads Grotto.
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The restarting of Emborough a favourite for many years of
the Editors had led him to one of his (luckily now rare) outbursts of
dubious rhyming
.
Come on and dig in Emborough,
Its deep, its wide. Its big!
I doubt if youll remember a
More entertaining dig.
In August or December, a
Good dig will keep you fit.
So DIG WITH WIG in Emborough
And shovel out the grit!
..which, on being shown to the rival dig proprietor, Alan
Thomas, caused him to coin a slogan
..
Maesbury the YOUNG mans dig!
Letter
According to the signature on
this letter to the Editor, we have a distinguished correspondent who appears
to be one up (as older members will remember) on His Grace the Duke of Mendip
To the Editor, The Belfry Bulletin.
Dear Sir,
There are a number of complaints that I would like you to
bring to the attention of members. First, I received no B.B. during the month of May. This was presumably due to the gross
inefficiency of the producers or distributors. I found this particular irksome as some months ago, I was asked to help
staple the magazine. If people are going
to undertake a job, why cant they do it without running to others for help?
The flush toilets at the Belfry are not yet completed. Some time ago, I actually offered to help
whilst I was waiting for my lift home (which was, of course late) and the
Belfry Engineer declined my offer because it said it was not convenient.
A caving meet I attended recently left much to be
desired. The transport with which I was
provided was unreliable. We were
expected to leave in the morning before I had my breakfast. I did not like the cave we visited and I am
sure that the Caving Secretary could have chosen a more interesting cave. Also, if he had picked the weekend before,
the weather would have been much better.
Why do we all have to have the same food at the
Barbecue? Surely the organisers could
take orders in advance and cook people what they want? I thought it was a good idea to have chicken
this year and was able to get there early and so had three pieces, but I
understand that some people who came later had none. This was bad organising. I must finally stress that I am only trying
to offer constructive criticism in the hope that those who are supposed to be
running the club may benefit.
Yours
faithfully,
St.
Cuthbert.
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and a card sent to the Belfry from Alan Jackman: –
c/o M.C.U.
R.A.F. Muharraq
B.F.P.O. 63.
Dear Fellow members,
Just a few lines to say that I will be out here in Bahrain
for the next two years, but hope to be back caving around May 1968. I hope to be going on a trip to the
about three months time and I would be very glad to hear from anyone in the
club who has been climbing or caving there.
Happy
Caving,
Alan Jackman.
a chance for any globe-trotting members to pass on useful
gen!
Whitsun in
Yorkshire
by Kevin J. Barnes
The Saturday morning of Whitsun witnessed the gathering of
B.E.C. members as they arose from deep slumber at the Skirwith Farm camp
site. It was such a glorious day that
the party packed equipment into rucksacks and prepared to walk to Long Kin West
on the South-western side of Newby Moss.
With Phil (Ive been there before)
Roy Bennett saw some cavers in the distance. We arrived at the hole to find a party coming out. After some time lying in the sun, we laddered
the two hundred and seventy foot pitch.
The difficulty came in deciding who should be the first to
descend. The lot finally fell to Roy,
who descended followed by Phil, myself and Norman Petty who was insistent
that it was his twenty first birthday. The rest of the party acted as support group on the surface. About seventy feet down the pitch was a ledge
but the rest of the pitch except for a minute ledge two hundred feet down
was a sheer drop.
Everyone was able to climb up easily, times ranging from
eleven to fifteen minutes. When the
ladder was pulled out and laid across the Yorkshire Moors, the length of it was
wonderfully impressive.
On Sunday, the Bennetts set out for G.G. to test the
Bradford Clubs winching. The winch
turned out to be the nearer to free fall than jumping off the
Manchip, Phil and myself carried on to Grange Rigg. The entrance was fairly narrow and luckily
the pot was nearly dry. The crawls were
interesting, varying from flat out over large stones to a knee wrecker along
the opposite ledges of a high rift the Anemolite Crawl. The pitches are six in all and are of fifty,
ten, fifteen, thirty five, fifteen and twenty feet respectively and usually
consisted of a short drop on to a ledge followed by the rest of the pitch. We descended the last pitch and entered a
chamber, but we were unable to find the terminal sump. The trip in all took four and half hours.
The only other interesting point was the walk back. Dave and myself walked down to Clapham and
along the road, while the others went across the moor. The former trip took three hours and is
graded S.S.
Cave Photography [2]
After the article last month, I was asked by one or two
members to be a little more specific about cameras. Another members suggested that perhaps my
facts were a trifle out of date and said that the camera position was better
that the impression I had given. All of
this is very good, and I am sure that if other (and better!) cave photographers
keep pointing out this sort of thing, we shall between us write a much more
useful series of articles.
I have done quite a bit of looking up gen on cameras since
last month. There is an enormous range
and it would be quite out of the question to quote more than a few of them so I
have taken some examples along the lines laid out in the previous article. Thus, none of the cameras to be mentioned are
equipped with exposure meters these cannot register on the available lighting
one has in a cave (carbide lamps etc.).
In the cheap class, the Kodak Instamatic range are simple
snapshots cameras but are useful from the caving point of view by having
built in provision for flashcubes which are assemblies of four flashbulbs
with their own reflectors. The
Instamatic 104 comes for £6/12/5. A
slightly more expensive simple camera with built in flashgun is the Zeiss
Ikomatic F at £10/5/6 or the Voightlander Bessy K at £14/19/4 although this is
rather expensive for the type of camera. All these take Kodak quick loading cassettes, which give a slightly
smaller picture than 35mm normal frame seize, being 28mm square.
For slightly more, you can still get the Werra I (now called
the
lens, M & M flash and built in delayed action (useful for including
yourself in groups etc.) for £19/18/- the author has a Werra I for some years
now and can testify that it is practically cave-proof. It, and all the next group are 35mm cameras. Slightly cheaper (at £13/13/11) is the Silette
F which has a built in flashgun.
Apart from some recently introduced Russian cameras (the Fed
is the only one actually known to the author) the cheapest cameras having
interchangeable lenses is probably the Werra III de luxe at £32, although you
can get a single lens reflex with interchangeable lenses cheaper than this (the
Exa 1A for £22). With a few exceptions,
single lens 35mm reflex cameras with interchangeable lenses then run on to the
£70 – £80 class, all of which are very good cameras (they should be at that
price!). An interesting variant from the
usual run is the Exacta Varex II B which has a 26 speed shutter which can
controlled exposures down to 12 secs. and has a T setting as well as the more
usual B. Finally in the 35mm class,
for the enthusiast, the fixed lens Nikonos might be worth looking at, as it is
sealed against mud, sand, and is completely waterproof and guaranteed to work
at any temperature between -4oF and +104oF!
Twin lens reflexes of the Rollei type start at about £30
and go upwards. Whatever camera you get,
it is a good idea to collect as much information on the available range before
making a final choice and, whenever possible, finding someone who has used the
camera you have in mind as some cameras have built in snags which are never
mentioned in the advertisement blurb. A
common fault of this type is faulty flash switches and/or sticky shutters under
cave conditions.
S.J. Collins.
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Dont forget that the A.G.M. and Dinner will be on Saturday
1st October. If you are entering for
Photoessay Competition time is beginning to run out!!!
Have YOU any particular ideas you want to do at or after the
Dinner this year? Why not let a
Committee member know if you have? Its
not quite as much fun as grumbling afterwards, but much more constructive!