Tabitha Dye is the granddaughter of Eric Hensler  and has sent the following request. If you have any contributions please send the to0 me and I will see she gets them.
Thanks


I would be very interested to find out how much information you have about Eric Hensler. Eric was my grandfather and I would love to collect any pictures and accounts other fellow cavers may have made about him, for my own children and for his daughter, my mother, Chlo?.
I live in France so this request may not be possible. But it is always worth trying....
Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
Tabitha Dye

There are, of course, four interviews by Eric in the BCL Audio Archive:

http://caving-library.org.uk/audio/listby-interviewee-Eric%20Hensler.html

His log books are also reproduced on the MCRA website:

http://www.mcra.org.uk/logbooks/?dir=Eric%20Hensler

There are a number of newspaper cuttings relating his Gaping Gill exploits in Eli Simpson's Gaping Gill volume in the online BCRA archive:

http://archives.bcra.org.uk/index.php?dir=simpson

Thanks Langcliffe - I have already pointed her at those plus sent a couple of articles from the library  - including a write up by Jenny when she went caving with him in 1975!
Ta
Mary

I think he is interviewed in Sid Perou's first film about trying to connect Gaping Gill to Ingleborough Cave:

http://caving-library.org.uk/collections/sid-perou-film-2.php

I met him about 1974. He was very friendly and unassuming. I asked him about his eponymous passages in the Gaping Gill system and he said he'd just kept on going, suggesting his discoveries were down mainly to luck. He was happy to chat to a teenage oik, as I then was. 

Eric was at Dick Glover's Gaping Gill field meet in August 1968,and I spent a couple of days surface surveying with him, and also had a caving trip into the Hensler Series with him through Mud and Water. The Far Country had not long been discovered, and the idea was to have a look in there. Unfortunately, Eric couldn't get through the Blow Hole, and he spent 45 minutes bashing it with a hammer whilst we went on.

Eric was about 60 at the time. My long lasting impression of him is that he was quiet, unassuming, modest, one of nature's gentleman, and thoroughly nice.

As someone who has never met Eric Hensler I like to think he was cool as a cucumber, I very much look up to the fellow and his interviews on the BCRA audio archive are among my favourites.  Rockets up the High Aven ha!

Is there also some interest about his time in germany as an army caver ?

David Rose is right about the first of the two Gaping Gill films - Eric actually appears underground in the film crawling along, having just lit his pipe.

I met him at Gaping Gill winch meets when I was a youth - very genuine bloke.