RIP Tony Jarratt

rhychydwr1

Active member
Tony Jarratt by Peter Glanvill.  This first appeared in The Guardian, Friday September 19 2008

When Tony Jarratt (or JRat, as he was known), who has died of lung cancer aged 58, started caving on the Mendip hills in Somerset more than 40 years ago, speleology acquired a true original.
Caves need patient, prolonged and determined excavation. Nothing deterred Tony, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Over the years, his contribution to the discovery of the cave systems beneath the Mendips - and the mountains of Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands - was immeasurable. He spent more than 11,000 hours underground and took part in 500 trips, exploring caves in South Africa, Mexico, the US, south-east Asia, Australia, Europe and most recently the longest systems in the Indian state of Meghalaya.
Tony moved with his family from Dudley, in the West Midlands, to the Bristol area in his early teens, and started caving while at school. He worked for the Ordnance Survey before taking over the only caving equipment shop in the south-west, Bat Products in Wells, from a fellow member of the Bristol Exploration Club. In 1977 (with Dave Irwin), he wrote the Mendip cavers' bible, Mendip Underground, now in its fourth edition.
Tony lived only a few hundred yards from the village green in Priddy, Somerset, which lies over Swildon's Hole, the longest cave in the Mendips. During the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic, when his plans to go exploring on farmland were thwarted, Roger Dors, landlord of the Hunter's Lodge Inn, near Priddy, offered him the chance to dig a small hole at the soakaway in the car park which took drainage from the pub and nearby road in heavy rain. The dig was a considerable source of amusement to the caving fraternity, until Tony broke through into an ancient fossil cave passage containing a magnificent array of stalactites, now known as the Hunter's Lodge Inn Sink. He continued digging with a team of enthusiasts and was rewarded by the extraordinary find of Pleistocene bone deposits, including the remains of reindeer dating back to the last ice age.
Shortly before his death, he was a leading member of the team that excavated a dry way into the Claonaite cave system in Assynt in Sutherland, allowing a Scottish museum team to remove the bones of a bear from a passage which had previously only been accessible to cave divers, and in the process discovering one of the largest cave chambers in Scotland.

Reprinted with permission

 

rhychydwr1

Active member
Another nice obituary here:

Porter, Emmer 2008  Tony "JRat" Jarratt.  Craven Pothole Club Record October (92) 37 photo.
 
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