Wrapping Up The Cobbler  > 

Wrapping Up The Cobbler

By Hugh C. Rae.

Back in the mid-fifties my pals and I were keen rock climbers and headed by bus for the ‘Arrochar Alps’ almost every weekend.

Being a soft lot from Knightswood’s garden suburb we didn’t fancy sleeping rough under the Narnairn boulders or in one of the other dank ‘dosses’ that peppered the hills. We settled for a comfortable berth in ‘Campbell’s Kingdom,’ the youth hostel at Ardgartan, which became our base camp for the Cobbler. We had none of the skill and daring of the real hard men who were forcing airy new routes up the Cobbler’s sheer faces at the time but shared their love of rock and, being young, spent much of the working week praying for a dry weekend.

To keep ourselves in trim for ‘the real stuff’ we mooched about the suburban streets in the evenings and climbed anything and everything that offered a hand or foothold, from garden walls and ornate lampposts to the girdle traverse of the Congregational church hall - which, by the way, still remains to be conquered.

Prime site for our shady gymnastics was the palatial public toilet at Anniesland Cross which had the advantage of being handy for the Top Hat cafe and, as a bonus, was ringed with little bushes that, in theory anyway, cushioned your descent if you fell. Imagine our consternation, however, when, one March evening, just after dusk, we discovered that Glasgow’s Health & Welfare Committee had had the audacity to drape the balustrade of ‘our’ toilet with a mile-long canvas banner advertising Glasgow’s mass X-ray campaign.

Vandals we were not; nor did we disapprove of an X-ray campaign designed to reduce the instance of chest diseases in the West of Scotland. On the other hand we wanted our climbing wall back and weren’t prepared to wait five weeks for the banner to be taken down.  Iain, Alan, Ken and me, we dunted our heads together and came up with the notion that removing the banner might be justified by putting it up elsewhere. Like where? Like the top of the Cobbler, of course.

The painted banner, which weighed a ton, was swiftly removed and spirited away to a hiding place in Ken’s garden shed from whence, stuffed into the biggest rucksack we could find, it was transported to Ardgartan by Ken and Iain. Alan and I arrived on Saturday afternoon in, naturally, a driving rain that rendered hijinks on the Cobbler out of the question. The rain persisted all through Sunday when Ken and Iain departed for home, leaving Alan and I - who had no work on Monday - to do the deed unaided.

Fortunately Monday was dry, gloomy and windy, but dry enough to lug the blessed rucksack up the Buttermilk and man handle it on to the ledge of the Eye of the Needle on the Centre peak.

The banner was no mere swathe of cloth, like a Tibetan prayer flag, however. When we unfurled it we found that it fitted the flank of the little hunched ‘cobbler’ very nicely but that securing it there with ropes was a lot more hazardous than we’d expected thanks to huge gusts of wind blowing up from the loch. Paragliding hadn’t been invented back then but there were moments, I swear, when Alan and I, each hanging grimly to an end of rope, were in danger of winding up at the top of the Rest and Be Thankful.

It took an hour of scraping, scratching, cursing and yelping but at last honour was served and, as far as we were concerned, the Health & Welfare Committee’s advertising campaign had reached it’s zenith, flapping securely for all to see right on top of the Cobbler. We toasted our little achievement in lukewarm coffee and headed off downhill to catch the bus back to Glasgow, safe away from the scene of the crime.

But that wasn’t quite the end of it. A newsman from the Evening Times was on the hill that week, reporting an accident. He was both astonished and amused enough to print a little piece, with photograph, about ‘our banner.’ This, inevitably, led to confession; my mother was not well pleased but my old man thought it was hilarious. What the chairman of Glasgow’s Health & Welfare committee thought of our act of petty larceny remains unrecorded - but if you do happen to run across a few scraps of canvas with the faded letters X or R upon them somewhere on the slopes of Ben Arthur I’d be grateful if you’d bury them..... Just to be on the safe side.

Hugh C. Rae   July 2011