Herbert Hartley

Herbert Kent Hartley (1908 to 1986) was an English industrial chemist who was also one of the leading British climbers and mountain administrators of his day. Professionally he pioneered the use of polyurethane in the United Kingdom, an achievement for which he received the Gold Medal of the Plastics and Rubber Institute, and during the Second World War he devised the adhesive used on the sticky bomb. As a climber he took to the Pennine gritstone as a boy, founded the Manchester University Mountaineering Club as a student, and pioneered routes on gritstone, later climbing in the Alps, Nepal, the Atlas, New Zealand and the Tetons. He served as secretary of the Mountain Rescue Committee and as president of the Rucksack Club, and fellow climber Frank Solari praised his determined, elegant technique on rock in his obituary for the Alpine Journal.