Feeding the Rat by Al Alvarez

Author:Al Alvarez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1988-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Snowdon Mouldings

At home in Nant Peris, however, even before Mo put the second storey on the house, the standards of comfort had risen steadily as Snowdon Mouldings expanded. The Joe Brown helmet, designed by Joe and Mo in 1968, quickly established itself as the best you could buy and became standard wear in the climbing world. When the German Alpine Club tested sixteen different makes of helmet the Joe Brown came first easily in every category; in a British equipment test its shock-absorption ability was so good that the testing laboratory rechecked its own equipment because it did not believe the results. Mo, who is strong on climbers’ gallows humour, produced a celebratory promotional T-shirt picturing a JB helmet on top of a vaguely human mess and a pair of boots; the caption read, ‘Well, his head seems OK!’ As early as 1971, the reputation of the helmet was so high that a Japanese distributor representing 2,500 retail outlets came to Mo with a huge order. But at that time the whole operation was just four people in a little cottage off Llanberis high street. To fill the Japanese order would have meant expanding considerably, and that might, eventually, have led to a large production capacity and not enough orders. So Mo persuaded himself that it made sound business sense to turn the Japanese order down. Certainly, it made sense in a more personal way. Mo’s attitude to Snowdon Mouldings was rather like his attitude to his first job, as a climbing instructor at Ogwen Cottage: it was something he would do as long as it did not spoil his enjoyment of climbing. In other words, he wanted to run the business but not be run by it. Since then, JB helmets have been sold to climbers all over the world, as well as to NATO and the FBI, and Snowdon Mouldings has grown and grown, and Mo no longer thinks of getting out. But the principle still applies: climbing first, money second.

Yet this, too, makes a kind of business sense, for his mountaineering experience is continually being fed back into the products that finance it. On winter routes in the Alps and on difficult ice in the Karakoram, Mo several times found himself in trouble when an ice-piton broke or the shaft of his ice-axe snapped. So he designed a titanium ice-screw and an ice-axe with a fibreglass shaft, neither of which would break under any circumstances. Since there was no room to make them in the Llanberis cottage, he took over a disused church in the Scottish Highlands in 1975 and converted it into a factory. Although the new factory was more than 500 miles from his base in Wales, the place was beautiful and the winter climbing marvellous. He named the axe the Curver, because of its droop-nosed head, and he celebrated it with another T-shirt. This one had on its back an end-on picture of the head of the axe buried squarely between the wearer’s shoulder-blades, and the slogan ‘For better penetration’.

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