John Laycock - Early Life

Early Life

Laycock grew up in Manchester, England, and was an influential figure in the early development of rock climbing on the gritstone edges of the Peak District of Derbyshire along with his close friends Siegfried Herford, also of Manchester, and Stanley Jeffcoat of Buxton. In 1903 Laycock became a founder member of the Manchester-based Rucksack Club which included many other luminaries of the Manchester mountaineering scene of the day including Charles Pilkington of the glass manufacturing dynasty. Laycock, Herford and Jeffcoat climbed numerous new routes on many of the fine escarpments of Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Yorkshire in the years leading up to the First World War, and these were faithfully recorded in Laycock's guidebook 'Some Gritstone Climbs' which was the first guidebook on rock climbing in the Peak District ever published. The Rucksack Club was opposed to the publication of the book as a number of the crags described were on private property and the club was concerned about trespass law. Laycock resigned from the club in disgust and the book was published by the Refuge Printing Department (an insurance company in Manchester at the time) in 1913. In the years that followed both Herford and Jeffcoat were killed in the trenches of Flanders, and Laycock never fully recovered from their loss. He left England for Singapore and, it is said, never went rock climbing again, although he wrote a wonderful preface to Fergus Graham's guidebook 'Recent Developments on Gritsone' published in 1926.