British Caving Library

Gerard Platten (1899-1970) is probably best known for his journal The British Caver, a bi-annual publication of material relating to caves and caving in Britain and the rest of the world. He produced this for almost 30 year years, originally by himself, but later, as his health degenerated, with a number of helpers. In 1964 it was taken over by Tony Oldham.

Platten was a very active caver in the 1930s, being instrumental in opening up Cow Hole on Mendip, and organising much of the exploration of Dan Yr Ogof. He was also a prolific collector of caving material - books, pamphlets, ephemera, and just plain information. In the late 1930s and early 1940s for a period of about six years, he maintained a set of caving scrapbooks, containing a cornucopia of material relating to caving, including photographs, maps, re-typed articles, and re-drawn surveys. These he passed round to a select few cavers who in return gave him information. In total, he produced 40 of these scrapbooks, of which 12 are currently unaccounted for (if any of these turn up we would be grateful if you would let us know).

Those that were available at the time were indexed by Dave Irwin in 1989 for the Wells and Mendip Museum, a copy of which may be downloaded here (30Mb PDF file). Alan Gray also went through the same scrapbooks, and compiled a list of all original Mendip-related material which may be found here (PDF file). The photographs were scanned and some are available on the MCRA website. Volumes 1, 12, 20, and 27 were found later and Dave Judson produced a table of contents for each. Their availability is shown in the notes below.

Gerard Platten bequeathed his caving collection, including the scrapbooks, to the Wells and Mendip Museum, where they may be inspected. The following table summarises the current availability of the scrapbooks. Currently only Volume 20 is available online.