Early Life
Born in 1941 and educated at Redruth Grammar School, both of his legs were severed below the knee by a train in 1960 after he collapsed in a drunken stupor and fell down an embankment onto a railway line in Wiltshire. He subsequently trained to be a teacher but was still determined to pursue his love of mountaineering in spite of his disability.
He became the first person fitted with artificial limbs to walk the 900 miles from John O'Groats to Lands End in 1969 which he claimed also hardened his stumps for subsequent mountain climbing.
Read more about this topic: Norman Croucher
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I have always had something to live besides a personal life. And I suspected very early that to live merely in an experience of, in an expression of, in a positive delight in the human cliches could be no business of mine.”
—Margaret Anderson (18861973)
“So soon did we, wayfarers, begin to learn that mans life is rounded with the same few facts, the same simple relations everywhere, and it is vain to travel to find it new.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)