John Menlove Edwards

John Menlove Edwards was born at Ainsdale, near Liverpool, England, on 18 June 1910, the son of a politically radical vicar, George Zachery Edwards, and his wife Helen. His father's cousin was Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral.

Edwards was homosexual and was for many years involved in a relationship with climber Wilfrid Noyce, whom he met in 1935. Edwards saved Noyce's life after an accident on Scafell Crag in 1937. He became vulnerable to periods of mental instability in the early 1940s, and increasingly to paranoid delusions during the Second World War. He was sectioned to mental hospitals several times, and given electro-convulsive therapy and deep insulin injections at the North Wales Hospital in Denbigh. His later life is a story of decline and he committed suicide by taking cyanide on 2 February 1958 at a house belonging to his brother-in-law, Hewlett Johnson.

Climbing He learned to climb at Helsby Crag in Cheshire and at age 21 made the first free ascent of Scafell's Central Buttress.