About Bremex

Its name, Bremex Mountaineering and Climbing Club, will be recognised by countless number of people who have been involved in its 45 years of previous incarnations. The BMCC is the successor to The Bremex Trust and the Bremex Training Scheme.

First, a bit of history to give a flavour of the club's ethos: Bremex was the brainchild of the late Hugh Freeman MBE. In the late '50s/early '60s Hugh wrote a series of articles which outlined a concept for the training of leaders to facilitate the expedition section of the "Duke of Edinburgh's Award" and to provide youth leaders in the voluntary sector with low cost training for adventurous activities.

Through the Youth & Community Service of the London Borough of Brent, he ran a successful pilot course and, in 1963, the Brent Mountain Expeditions training scheme was launched.

Bremex offered tiered, instructional courses in mountaineering and expedition skills so that each participant could develop from novice to competent mountaineer. "Students" signed up for a nine month course of weekly lectures and 10-11 weekend "expeditions" to areas such as Dartmoor, The Peak District, North Wales, The Lake District and The Cairngorms. The course ran at four different skill levels, meaning that it could take up to four years to complete - and hundreds of people did just that. It was commonplace for 8-10 minibuses full of Bremex students and instructors to head north up the M1/M6 on a Friday evening, returning late on Sunday. In the early days, one Land Rover was also included in the travelling contingent. It would roll up after midnight to a North Wales or Lake District camp site with "London Borough of Brent" painted on its sides, though when the front door was open, the resulting proclamation "rough of Brent" was sometimes more appropriate. The Bremex season started in September and ended in May. Its participants always camped, no matter the weather; often high-camping after their first year.

Bremex covered summer and winter mountaineering, single and multi-pitch rock-climbing and snow and ice climbing. It was an inspirational and formative experience for most. The intensity and longevity of the contact with the same group of people was quintessentially club-like. It meant that lifelong friendships (and marriages and babies) were created. Those who were interested progressed through the course to become instructors themselves (after a fifth year spent as a trainee leader). They would then feed back to new students the skills that they themselves had learned. Some of its instructors have gone on to be Mountain Instructors, International Mountain Leaders and, in one case, a leader of expeditions to 8,000m peaks.

Hugh continued to be the driving force of Bremex for over 30 years. A man who didn't understand the concept of "no", he used to magic up group travel discounts, long after British Rail had stopped offering these, for the overnight sleepers from London to Scotland for Bremex's three day weekends north of the border. No-one knows how he did it, but he managed to organise annual training weekends with RAF Mountain Rescue teams from Leeming and St Athan (training which came in handy in 2006 when two Bremex old boys organised the stretcher lower of a spinal injury victim for the Shropshire Air Ambulance at Pontesford Rocks).

Bremex ran continuously until 1994, when it became an independent charity, The Bremex Trust. The balance switched to-one off weekend skills courses and to National Governing Body Awards, but the ethos stayed the same and those who attended commented frequently on the club-like atmosphere.

Hugh Freeman died in 2000, aged 93. The club which bears the name of his creation works in the same way that he envisaged 45 years ago. In keeping with its club-like beginnings, Bremex MCC provides a welcoming structure for the experienced and inexperienced alike who want to get out regularly in the company of others to acquire, maintain or improve the skills involved in hillwalking, mountaineering and climbing.