THE estate of climbing legend Hamish MacInnes has been entrusted to the Scottish Mountaineering Trust.
MacInnes – a mountaineer, explorer, mountain search and rescuer, and author – passed away at the age of 90 in 2020 after a lifetime dedicated to his love of Scottish mountains. He is credited with inventing the first all-metal ice axe and a lightweight foldable alloy stretcher called the MacInnes stretcher, which is widely used in mountain and helicopter rescue to this day.
He had also held the ambition of becoming the first person to conquer Mount Everest in 1953 when, at the age of 23, he and his friend John Crabbe Cunningham were ready to depart for Nepal from New Zealand when they learned Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had already reached the peak.
Despite an endless list of impressive climbs and expeditions, it was inventing, designing and refining mountaineering equipment that consumed much of MacInnes’ focus – a passion which also encompassed search and rescue.
Indeed, his 1972 book International Mountain Rescue Handbook – one of several he penned – is still highly regarded as the standard manual worldwide in the mountain search and rescue discipline.
MacInnes was awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the 1962 New Year Honours. In the 1979 New Year Honours, he received the OBE for services to mountaineering and mountain rescue in Scotland. In 1992 he received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University, the University of Stirling in 1997 and then University of Dundee in 2004. In 2007 he was awarded honorary fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society before an induction into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2003.
In 2018, a documentary film was produced for BBC Scotland, titled ‘Final Ascent: The Legend of Hamish MacInnes‘. Introduced by his friend, Michael Palin whom he met while serving as he mountaineering consultant on The Monty Python film Life of Brian, it recounts the story of MacInnes’s life and achievements, and how he used archive footage, his photographs and his many books to “recover his memories and rescue himself”.
This week, more than four years after his passing, the executors of his considerable estate revealed The Scottish Mountaineering Trust had been chosen to manage his £446,000 estate to continue his life’s work.
“We are delighted that the MacInnes trustees have decided to pass Hamish’s legacy to the SMT,” explained its chairman, David Broadhead.
“We recognise that this is a big responsibility, as Hamish was a complete individual steering his own course through life, and the SMT will ensure that his values and memory will live on through the projects we support.”
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