University of Bristol Spelæological Society

CENTENARY WEEKEND - TIMETABLE

The Centenary weekend is fast approaching. There's loads going on, and even if you're not coming to the dinner at Wookey Hole, you're still welcome at any of the other events listed here, so do come along and say hello and catch up with old friends and make new ones!

7pm Friday 8th February. Open Evening in the UBSS Museum. Come along to the museum and library, meet old friends, take a look at some of the treasures in the society's collections, drink wine and eat some cake! The Stables are located behind 21 Woodlands Road, BS8 1UQ, near Senate House. The car park there is available for use after 5pm. Do drop in! Afterwards, there's a party at Hellie and Rob's, 30 York Gardens, Clifton, Bristol,BS8 4LN. Take some booze with you! They also have some bed/floor space available (see post on the club Facebook page).

9.30am - 12 noon Saturday 9th March. AGM and Talk. This is being held in the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol, BS8 1SS (almost opposite Elmdale Road). Parking is available at 21 Woodlands Road, BS8 1UQ, or on nearby meters (for up to four hours). Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available from 9.30am and the AGM will start at 10.30am. This will be followed by a talk by Prof. Rick Schulting who will be looking at some surprising developments on the human remains from Aveline's Hole, the cave where it all started for UBSS. Three-line whip on attendance!
 
1.30pm - 2.30pm Saturday 9th March. Field Trip to Aveline's Hole led by Rick Schulting and Linda Wilson. This will include an opportunity to see the possible Mesolithic engravings in the gated section of the cave. Please bring your own lights. All welcome!
 
2.30pm - 4.30pm Saturday 9th March. Afternoon tea at the Hut. See the results of the recent renovations and catch up with old friends. Tea and cake will be provided! Anyone who is on Cat's list for coach transport to Wookey must be in Burrington Combe at 5.15pm. The bus will not wait for latecomers!
 
6pm Saturday 9th March. Centenary Dinner at Wookey Hole. Meet in Captain Jack’s Bar for the start of the evening’s celebrations. At 6.30pm there will be a visit to the cave which will include a drinks reception. For anyone who doesn’t fancy the walk up to the cave, the bar will remain open. Those visiting the cave will be back by 7.30pm and the dinner will start at 8pm and will be followed by the usual awards ceremony, so if you have anyone you would like to nominate contact Cat Henry or Ruth Briggs. who are organising this. At various points in the evening, Elaine Oliver will be singing accompanied by Dickon Morris playing the fiddle. Last orders at the bar are at 11.20pm, and the bus to take those who will be staying at the Hut will be leaving from Wookey at midnight. Those staying at Wookey can then head over to the hotel bar.

Dress code for the evening is on the smarter side of casual, but essentially wear something you are comfortable in. Jeans have been banned for the under 18s, on the express order of his mother. And if you want to attempt the infamous Squeeze Machine, bring something to change into in the bar! Or alternatively give it a go in your posh togs!

If you need transport from Bristol to Mendip, please let me know and I will do what I can to put you in contact with people who might be able to help, and likewise offers to help with transport will be welcome, so contact me. Please help us out with the organisation by being prompt for all timings set out here! 

Oversuits, helmets and lights purchased with funds received from the Oliver Lloyd Memorial Fund and the University of Bristol's Alumni Foundation.

I'd be very surprised if Oliver - or Lloyd, as he was almost universally known to members of the club - doesn't feature in quite a few memories this year. I've certainly got a few stories to tell, and if we're lucky, we can get Marco Paganuzzi to relate his experiences with Lloyd's haunted typewriter! For those who didn't know Lloyd, it's probably fair to say that he was one of the great characters in the caving world and his death left a huge hole in the club, one that needed several people to take on his various jobs.

Our then president, Professor Bob Savage, mindful of how university grants were gradually being whittled away, was concerned about the long-term viability of our annual Proceedings, and he proposed setting up a trust fund in Oliver's name, with the intention of providing in-house funding for Proceedings as and when needed. A trust was duly set up, with the UBSS as its sole beneficiary. I was one of the original trustees, along with Bob, Desmond Donovan and Trevor Shaw. Bob led the initial fund-raising campaign, which raised in the region of £15,000.

As Bob predicted, the university grant that used to go towards publications did eventually disappear,  but new technology meant that the cost of printing had gone down, and so the OCL Fund, as we usually term it, was largely spent on things to enhance production values, such as colour photographs and technical drawings. As time went on, the aims of the fund were broadened by a deed of variation to enable the trustees to benefit the UBSS more broadly, and the student experience in particular. A telephone campaign led by Andrew Atkinson and Helen Hodge led to the fund almost doubling in value and in the good old days it even used to attract a decent rate of interest and so was easily able to keep pace with spending. Both the original fund raising campaign and the telephone campaign led to various valuable annual pledges from members, ranging from one for £10 a year, to another at £200 per year that comes with the proviso that it can (for can read should!) be spent on alcohol for students to have a good time!

The fund stands aside from the UBSS main account, which is visible to the university and the students' union. It can only be used to benefit the UBSS and its members. The current trustees are myself, Clive Owen, Andrew Atkinson and Cat Henry (who recently replaced Bob Churcher as Bob will shortly be standing down as president). The fund has recently been the recipient of an extremely generous donation from Peter Standing, who was one of the club's student members 50 years ago!

Our aim for the centenary year (and I'll be the first to admit it's an ambitious one), is to raise 100 pledges to the OCL Fund in the form of standing orders to the fund. We already have several ongoing pledges to start us off, and huge kudos to Dickon Morris for being the first of the 100 pledges in our centenary year!

The aim of the fundraising is to future proof the life of the UBSS for the future. The club now receives no ongoing grants at all from either the university or the students' union. Occasional grants have been received from the University's Alumni Foundation, but recent changes to that body mean there is likely to be less money available for our sort of activities going forward, and so the club now relies totally on members' subscriptions and the OCL Fund for all its tackle and equipment, as well as other items. Recent purchases have ranged from oversuits, helmets, lights and other gear for use by students just starting caving to electronic surveying kit for use on the student re-surveying projects in Co Clare as part of the preparations for the next Irish guidebook.

The fund still supports Proceedings, as Bob Savage originally intended, and has contributed towards the cost of radiocarbon dating, as well as the drawings of the Picken's Hole flints that appeared in the last issue. The fund has also contributed £2,000 to the Oral History project that aims to capture as much of the society's history as we can in the words of its own members, in a major collaboration with the Department of History.

The UBSS relies heavily on the generosity of members and friends of the society to add value over and above membership subscriptions, and it provides a very direct way way for our older members to support the activities of the new generations of the student club , taking forward the fun and sense of adventure that we've all gained from our connection with UBSS, so I hope you'll all forgive the shameless plug for the fund, and won't mind too much if I go round rattling the metaphorical collecting tin during the year! For my generation, Lloyd did a huge amount to help student caving and the wider society, and his name lives on in the fund set up in his memory! If anyone would like more information or would like to  set up an annual pledge, make a one-off donation or remember the OCL Fund in your will, please contact me for further details. There will also be pledge slips available for completion at the AGM and Dinner on 9th March. The fund benefits from the tax advantages of being viewed by the Inland Revenue as a charitable trust, so lifetime donations and pledges can be gift aided, and the fund is regarded as a charity for bequests in wills.

TRIP REPORT - GB CAVERN
Lauren Manton gives an account of a recent wet trip to that old UBSS Mendip favourite, GB.

On a cold and slightly soggy Friday evening, four of us (Lauren Manton, Si Hadfield, Tabby Conole and Chris Hill) made our way to GB for a short evening trip. We set off at a reasonable time and made it into the cave around 8.30pm.

After passing some bats near the entrance, we made our way on past the entrance to Devils Elbow and soon arrived at the Gorge. Here the deafening sound of the river and waterfall reflected the amount of rain that had occurred a few days before. We continued downwards through Main Chamber and then across the Bridge, through the Loop and then on up to the sight point from where we looked back over Main Chamber and Simon pointed out some impressive stalactites and calcite formations.

After ogling Main Chamber for long enough, we proceeded on towards the Ladder Dig. Here we then ascended into the small wriggle passage towards the duck. Unfortunately upon arriving at the duck, time meant that we could not continue any further, so we made our way back down the ladder and started up the river towards the waterfall. When we got there, I was initially hopeful that we may still be able to make our way up, but before too long that idea was shattered by the sheer volume of water cascading down. This meant that the required step across the waterfall in order to continue up the other side was nearly impossible.

Now very wet, we backtracked and reversed our original route into the cave. We soon made our way through the Loop and back to the Bridge and from here we followed the top half of the river back to where the exit route lay to our left. Following this passage back through the cave, we made our way out and into the night.

100 MEMORIES - DIVING IN LITTLE NEATH RIVER CAVE


Little Neath Rver Cave. Photograph by Pete Glanvill

As part of the ongoing UBSS - 100 Memories project, Graham Mullan recounts a trip from the 1970s which formed an played an important part in the exploration of Little Neath Rive Cave.

In 1973, Sump 6 in Neath was finally passed by UBSS member Aldwyn Cooper and it was realised that Sump Passage had already bypassed Sump 6 and that the way on was a previously overlooked outlet passage in Sump 6A, really Sump 7.

The passage was pushed inconclusively by Adrian Wilkins who had a sizeable support team but also something of an epic, although I forget why as this was about the only diving trip that I didn’t take part in at that time, Not only did Adrian seem reluctant to have another crack at it but desire amongst the sherpas also seemed lacking.

By that time, I had left uni for the world of work and Bob Churcher was with the army. Neither of us had been on Adrian’s dive trip, but Bob was keen to take a look himself and I was happy to help carry the kit although a team of two seemed a touch on the small side. Bob, however, found that part of his duties, if stretched a bit, allowed him to take squaddies away on caving trips and that the army would even pay his expenses for undertaking this ‘training.’ So one weekend in May 1973 Bob turned up in Bristol with two squaddies in tow and we deemed this enough for a team.

Neither of them had been caving before, of course, so on the Saturday we gave them a short trip on Mendip to familiarise them with the underground and on Sunday we set off for South Wales and Neath Sump 7.

After the usual stop at the village shop in Ystrafellte and the equally usual assurance to the lady there that we wouldn’t dream of doing anything dangerous, we drove down to Bridge Cave and got changed. Bob dived in through the Bridge Cave sump and I took the rest of the hot-shot Sherpa party in through Flood Entrance to meet him. I’m not sure they were awfully impressed, but they got through and between the four of us we carried all his kit down to Sump 2.

In no time at all, Bob had kitted up and vanished into the water and I now had two slightly unhappy and tired novices to look after for the next few hours. It seemed unlikely that they would have been keen on any of the usual waiting activities of digging in Gyrn Fawr or exploring in the Old World series so I dug myself a trench in the gravel, got in and promptly fell asleep.

Many hours later, I was woken from sleep by people moving around and looked up to see Bob crawling out of the sump. He was knackered and dumped his diving kit as soon as he hit airspace and so I crawled down to retrieve it. He and I packed it away while he recovered and the rest of team walked up and down a bit to get warm. As we finished and were about to set off out he turned to me and said, “Oh by the way, it went.” That was all I got out of him until we were out.

Despite being so knackered, Bob was still in better nick than his two squaddies and so a little re-organisation of duties was needed. In short, I carried out a full twin set of diving kit and Bob cajoled and harassed his two charges into keeping moving. Well, he probably wouldn’t have got his expenses if he hadn’t returned them in reasonable working order.

Two years later we returned with larger parties, the streamway beyond Sump 7 was explored and the inevitable Sump 8 dived. This ended in a choke of large gritstone boulders at a depth of something over 20m and has not been passed during the following 30 years to now.