Hugh Bonner was born in Crosby, Lancashire and went on to study chemistry at Bristol University but more interestingly for us he was an iconic figure on the 1950s and 60s climbing scene. A time that one of our leading outdoor authors, Jim Perrin, describes as “mortally fixated” by which he probably means that because of the poor equipment around at that time, or the lack of it, if you fell off you didn’t always survive. Hugh took a slightly different approach by falling off his motorbike at various times, fracturing his skull on one occasion and losing a leg on another.

Having survived these, and various other escapades, Hugh became a bit of an expert in making camming devices and for a while in the early 1980s he made offset cams for Wild Country before creating his own designs, initially with Micromates in 1987 and Quadcams which came shortly after along with HB Climbing Equipment, the company he set up with his wife Maureen in 1988 to produce and sell his gear.

Not sure exactly when, but the rigid stemmed Fix came along followed by the Flexi-Fix, an example of which we have here in the collection. We suspect it dates from the 1990s. Mick Tighe acquired it somewhere along the way and HB ceased trading around 2004. Hugh passed away in 2007.