For permission to study official records I am deeply indebted to the Air Ministry, and to the Chief Constables of Inverness-shire, Ross and Cromarty, and Gwynedd.

More personal assistance was given me by so many people that it would be impossible to list them all here, for my inquiries could produce ramifications, and a letter asking for details of a rescue might result in my correspondent discussing the point in question with other team members before replying to me. But in a book which depends on facts there must be some mistakes. I hope the reader will bear with me if he discovers some which have escaped our scrutiny.

The R.A.F. men who have helped me most are John Sims, John Hinde, Vic Bray, Ian Martin, Colin Pibworth, Jack Emmerson, Ralph Hetherington, Derek Bottomer and Johnnie Lees. Without Lees the book could not have been written by me, for it is not a textbook on mountain rescue but more the story of our association with it over the nine years that he was its chief instructor. He not only provided a great deal of the material but also much of the trimmings. In reading the typescript he corrected points and added others. He disparaged most accounts of his own rescues, but these were written from the eye-witness accounts of others and I refused to change them. Of the men who are not in the R.A.F., those who helped me the most were D. G. Duff, M.C., F.R.C.S., and Dr. John Berkeley.

There is a host of others civilian, police and R.A.F., who have helped directly. These I must acknowledge in a blanket credit. Everyone has suffered my visits, my interviews and my letters for long periods with patience and good humour, and many, if I flagged, recalled me, directly or indirectly, to the job in hand.

Where the individual teams were concerned it was a more difficult book to write than in any other respect. I have dealt with only three of these in any detail: Kinloss, Valley and Nicosia. Leuchars is involved in one or two rescues here, but St Athan, Leeming, Stafford and Khormaksar are hardly mentioned.*

There have been other teams, now disbanded: Aldergrove, West Freugh and Edzell. These receive scant mention, if any. I apologise to their members. I have two reasons for the exclusion of all these teams, the first less laudable than the second. They were omitted firstly because rescues make better reading, are more interesting and hazardous if they take place on difficult ground. And, of course, more accidents occur where there are most people on the hills. So the Valley team in North Wales, and Kinloss in the Highlands have the more sensational rescues because the great cliffs and the vast high massifs are in their areas, with large numbers climbing and walking on them.

The second reason for dealing mainly with Kinloss and Valley is that one writes with deeper understanding of the country one knows: the cliffs, the weather, snow conditions.

The two exceptions to this self-imposed rule have been the exclusion of Leeming and the inclusion of Nicosia. Although I do not know Turkey I felt that the very different circumstances and the high altitudes involved justified my writing of Nicosia's work of recovery after the two Turkish air crashes. I was greatly helped here by the graphic accounts of Emmerson, Bottomer, Hetherington and Whelan.

The exclusion of Leeming is a different case. I sympathise deeply with those teams who posses rather dull areas in comparison with rugged mountain country, and therefore reap few rewards for their hard and necessarily pedestrian training. But Leeming has a very large area which includes not only the Northern Pennines and part of the Southern Uplands but also the Lake District. However, the Lake District differs from the other extensive mountain areas of Britain in having a number of civilian mountain rescue teams, some of which have been in operation for many years. On the whole these teams deal with cliff rescues in the Lakes, Leeming being called in only to help with extensive searches - that is, unless they are exercising in the vicinity when a climbing accident occurs.

In writing a book about R.A.F. mountain rescue I have made little mention of civilian teams. This is not to disparage them. The Mountain Rescue Committee under A. S. Pigott does, and has always done, great work in attempting to improve the standards of mountain safety and of mountain rescue generally, and civilian teams receive their share of work. (Many, such as the Ogwen Cottage team in Wales, more than their share.) But again, as in the case of familiar areas, I need to write of familiar things. I knew the R.A.F. and I knew the men; not only this, but the Service was one organisation administered from one centre, Air Ministry, possessing form and a continuity which facilitated the task of writing a book.

There is another, but small, body of men who have received little mention in Two Star Red or anywhere else. These are the inspectors of mountain rescue: the men at Air Ministry who try to do their own work and at the same time to run a service containing over two hundred members and scattered throughout the United Kingdom, the Mediterranean and the Yemen.

There have been four inspectors of mountain rescue: Group Captain Brittain, Dave Dattner, Sandy Gordon-Cumming, and John Sims. All except the first were known to me, but although this means only that I can say they were good men (which sounds patronising but is not intended to be), a more deserving tribute is that they were known to all the members of the teams in their charge. To most Service units, a signal that an inspector was coming down from Air Ministry would mean a frantic rush to erect a facade and hide the blemishes. To men of the Mountain Rescue Service, a letter to the effect that their inspector could be expected was a signal for all-round satisfaction. It would be most unlikely that he wouldn't want some good climbing, and - perhaps more to the approval of the officer and N.C.O. in charge of the team - complaints could be made personally. There would be no facade and blemishes would be paraded. The inspector, the mountain rescue side of whose work amounted to a vocation, was confessor, advocate, oracle and general provider to the team.

This is, I trust, the sum of my acknowledgements. There were, of course, the people who allowed me to quote them, to use their photographs: these have received credit in the appropriate place.

My final thanks are for Jack Longland who read and corrected the script and made many suggestions for improvement, and for Elsie Herron of Hodder and Stoughton, who had the delicate and arduous task of converting a typescript bristling with corrections, maps, plans, photographs and all the rest into a proper book, and of working with the author.

GWEN MOFFAT
Ullswater,
1963.