Another unpublicised factor of R.A.F. rescues is that many call-outs occur on a Sunday night or in the early hours of Monday morning, just when the team has returned to base after a two-day exercise with anything up to two hundred miles of travelling behind them, in wet clothes, in the back of an open three-ton truck. They may have no chance of rest or food, nor even a change of clothing, before turning round and going up a mountain again for the third time in three days. When, combined with all this, it is remembered that most rescues take place in bad weather and darkness, one may understand something of the nature of their work.

Although rescue is the job of the team in general, only five members are full-time; the N.C.O. in charge, a ground wireless operator, two drivers and an administrative orderly. The remainder of the team - up to twenty in four teams, up to thirty in Valley (Anglesey), Kinloss (Inverness), Leuchars (Fife), and Nicosia (Cyprus) - are volunteers, employed in their own trades on the station at normal times, and giving up their weekends to train. The question of danger money is often raised but so far without success. The N.C.O. is the only full-time member who goes on the hill, the others being base staff. He receives nothing more than his basic pay, in sharp contrast to senior N.C.O.s and officers who are parachutists and in receipt of a supplementary 6s. gd. per day Parachutist Instructor pay.

The N.C.O. is the most important member of the team, being responsible for running and training the section and for keeping the team up to strength. He is not only in charge of the practical training and must be a competent mountaineer in addition to knowing all the technique of rescue, but he must be able and willing to lecture on all aspects of the work: navigation, First Aid, rope-work, snow and ice climbing, and the organisation and application of rescue itself. He has a great deal of paper work to do, keeping the team records, writing reports, running the stores section. He is also responsible for setting up and equipping the sub-units.

Sub-units are established at police and fire stations, hotels, mountain schools and other salient points in the team's area. Their purpose is to assist the team when necessary. They are manned by volunteers, and they obtain early information about accidents and sift it preparatory to the arrival of the R.A.F. They provide advance search parties if possible, using the equipment which is on loan to them. Each mountain rescue team is authorised to form twelve sub-units.

Back in the 40's mountain rescue had not reached the desirable state where every N.C.O. was a competent mountaineer, and equipment, training and sub-units were not as highly efficient as they now are. Hardly had the Service been formed when it seems to have become a Cinderella, limping painfully and almost unnoticed through the post-war years, the Llandwrog team tagging along behind as the R.A.F. transferred from Llandwrog to Llanbedr in 1947, and thence to Valley, near Holyhead, in 1949. Elevating responsibility from Station to Command level did little to improve the lot of the teams. They had considerable difficulty Continue to page 5