On this day in Yorkshire 1950: Leeds Climber falls from rocks

Members of Leeds University Climbing Club and ramblers, working in relays, yesterday helped to carry an injured member of the club over rough moorland country for two and a half hours to an ambulance.

He had fallen 40ft. while climbing the 200 ft. high Laddow Rocks, on the fringe of the Peak District.

The Injured climber is a Pole, 21- year-old Jan Gurnzweig, living in Bainbrigge Road, Headingley, a research student in metallurgy at the University.

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Mr. Gurnzweig was leading a party of climbers up the rocks when he fell.

All the climbers were roped, but the other men had not started the climb when their leader fell.

The climb was abandoned and one party set off to the nearest village, Crowden, on the northern boundary of Derbyshire, to obtain medical aid. Others stayed behind to make the injured man comfortable.

The party got medical supplies from a first-aid box at Crowden and returned across the moorland carrying a stretcher.

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Mr. Gurnzweig was strapped to the stretcher and members of the club and ramblers took turns in carrying him to Crowden, from where an ambulance took him to hospital at Ashton-under-Lyne.

Later he was transferred to the General Infirmary at Leeds, where he was detained, suffering from a fracture of a thigh and an arm. A member of the club, Mr. Keith Allen Stanley, of Richmond Avenue, Headingley, told The Yorkshire Post last night:

“This was the club’s first visit to Laddow Rocks. I do not know how the accident happened and Gurnzweig himself is not sure what made him fall. There was no danger to the other members of the party.

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