by Dave Hewitt » Tue Jun 22, 2021 9:25 pm
It does appear to be roughly a rate of ten to one, Munroists to Corbetteers, with the latter almost entirely comprising people who have completed a round of Munros first - there's long been a postgrad feel to the Corbetts. Non-Munroist Corbetteers are very rare - I can only think of three or four, eg the late Rowland Bowker was one. It's important to bear in mind with all this kind of stuff that the numbers completing the various lists are considerably higher than those known, so it's inevitably an inexact science. Quite how many people have done a round of the Munros is near-impossible to estimate - I tend to work on a basis of 10% above the published list (which started life as a Grampian Club thing courtesy of Eric Maxwell, not an SMC list at that stage), but it could well be higher than that. I've heard 25% extra suggested a time or two - goodness knows really, but to me, having rootled around in a lot of archives and libraries over the years, 25% feels too high. The percentage of Munroist women appears to be higher in the unlisted finishers however compared with the main list - there are various theories about why that might be.
With the Corbetteers list, it's been a complicated business. For years the SMC took no formal interest in this, quite firmly so, and a lot of the earlier research was done by me off my own bat, with useful and kind assistance from various SMC members and officials. Then the SMC did start to take an active interest and I've worked with them more formally quite a bit in recent years. Because of this, my feeling is that the Corbetteer total is possibly more accurate than the Munroist one, as there's been a lot of letter-writing and general chasing in research terms, whereas with the list of Munroists it's almost always (apart from when Maxwell researched the first 100) been a case of individual completers being asked to contact the club and there being far less active research. But as I say, goodness knows - there are a lot of estimates and educated guesses in all this.
Two other things are perhaps worth noting. I've not had so much chance to pursue the Corbetteer research in the past few years - hence it being not up to date on recent people - but the new data protection laws have also made this kind of thing more difficult to do, particularly for an individual researcher such as me with no formal organisational backup. Also, people known to have done a second round of Munros appear to run at roughly half the rate of Corbetteers, ie one in every 20 or so Munroists.
