Pat Kelly (climber)

Martha Emily "Pat" Kelly (nee Bowler) (Mar Qtr 1873 – 26 April 1922) was an early female climber and founder of the Pinnacle Club. Pat Kelly worked with her husband, Harry Kelly, an insurance clerk, and began climbing in 1914. One of her most best known achievements was to climb solo Owen Glynne Jones's route up Scafell pinnacle from Deep Ghyll in the Lake District. She encouraged many women to climb and founded the Pinnacle Club, the first rock-climbing club for solely women, at Pen-y-Gwryd in north Wales on 26 March 1921. A year later she was mortally injured in a climbing accident on 17 April 1922 at Tryfan, north Wales, and died from head injuries on 26 April.

Further reading

• Shirley Angell, Pinnacle Club: a History of Women Climbing (1988)

Sources

• Audrey Salkeld, ‘Kelly, (Martha) Emily (1872/3–1922)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004