Pioneer rock climbers jammed pebbles or small chockstones into cracks and fissures in the rock and threaded rope around them to make anchors or belays. Later on – 1950/60 – they used engineers nuts, as in nuts and bolts, to do the same thing with the advantage here being that you could thread rope through the hole in the nut and carry several different sizes on one piece of rope. When the gear manufacturers started mass producing various ‘wedgy things’ to put in cracks, it followed that they called them ‘chocs’ or ‘nuts’ and even though the modern versions look nothing like their predecessors, they are still collectively called nuts or chocs. In the early transitional years (circa1960) folk of an engineering ilk would often make their own ‘nuts’ and we have an excellent example here in the collection which was made by well kent, Scottish mountaineer, Bill Skidmore, who worked in the Glasgow shipyards, though we are told by Bill’s old climbing pal, Bob Richardson, that the swage – that’s the brass bit that joins the wire together – would have been done by the Chief Rigger in Scotts yard where Bill worked. Bill passed away in 2015 and his widow, Mary Henery, kindly passed on some of his gear which included this nut/choc!