Tony Jones
Search and rescue expert who transformed medical aid to injured mountain climbers
TONY JONES, who has died aged 77, was a leader in the field of mountain rescue; known to some as “The Ogwen Warlord”, he chaired the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation in the Snowdonia National Park, from 1968 to 1990, and influenced mountain search and rescue techniques worldwide.
Jones took part in more than 900 rescues in South Africa, Britain, Norway, Austria and the US. When he began, it was the usual practice if anyone in a party of climbers was killed or injured that the party took responsibility for bringing them off the mountain.
From the 1960s, however, volunteer teams of rescuers were established on an ad hoc basis and over time these teams became well organised, welltrained and well-equipped, working to a professional standard with the other emergency services. Jones was pivotal both nationally and internationally in bringing this about.
Anthony Stewart Gervais Jones was born on July 20 1938 in Kasauli, Himal Pradesh, India, where his father was serving in the Army, and brought up mainly in his parents’ native South Africa, where he finished his schooling at Diocesan College, Cape Town.
He took up mountaineering in the Drakensberg Mountains in the Royal Natal National Park aged 15 and then joined the Cape Town section of the Mountain Club of South Africa, discovering a lifelong mission for mountain rescue.
Jones graduated in Geology and Geochemistry at Cape Town University in 1961, after which he worked for two years as a research assistant in the departments of Oceanography and Geology. In 1963 he moved to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, to take a doctorate on recent sedimentation in Cardigan Bay. He then moved to the University College of North Wales, Bangor, where he spent the rest of his academic life working as a marine geologist, a somewhat perverse choice of career since he was always seasick in small boats.
Joining the staff at the Marine Science Laboratories, Menai Bridge, Jones worked on North Atlantic sediments, describing grain size variation in sand, clay and calcium carbonate in cores obtained by the British and Dutch Royal Navies during a survey of the North Atlantic. He was then appointed earth sciences lecturer on deep-sea geology and coastal processes.
In 1966, a year after its foundation, Jones joined the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation (OVMRO). He drove his own Land Rover on rescues and during the 1970s and 1980s his vehicle, kitted out with a yellow stretcher on the roof, and an air raid siren, almost became part of the Snowdonia landscape as he rescued survivors or recovered fatalities of climbing accidents.
Working with Dr Ieuan Jones, a trauma specialist at Caernarvon & Anglesey General Hospital, Bangor, who had become increasingly concerned by the numbers of mountaineering accident casualties he was seeing, he transformed medical aid to casualties of mountain accidents by promoting the use of emergency first aid at the site of an accident rather than several hours later in hospital.
Together they developed programmes, including in-depth medical training, for rescue volunteers which have saved countless lives worldwide. This resulted in Tony Jones’s influential publication Some Thoughts on the Organisation of Mountain Search and Rescue Operations (1973), to which Dr Ieuan Jones contributed vital medical notes. Jones insisted, however, that
nobody ever has a “right” to be rescued and would always warn those thinking of going on to the mountains that they could not assume they would automatically be saved if they got into difficulties, though volunteer rescue teams would always try to assist as an act of “goodwill”.
Jones’s administrative skills were widely recognised. As well as serving on many mountain rescue organisations in Wales, he served for nearly 40 years on the National Association for Search and Rescue and the Mountain Rescue Council of England and Wales. In 2000 he was a member of the mountain rescue subgroup of the Home Office Standing Committee on Police Health and Safety.
From 1973 and 2010 Jones lectured at mountain rescue courses around the world. . His papers include Ropes and Wire in Crag Rescue; Professionalism in Search and Rescue; You Have No Right of Rescue; Mountain Rescue in the 21st Century – The
Challenge and Fifty Years in Mountain Rescue. In the 1980s he trained as an honorary member of the USAF’s Para Jumpers.
At Bangor, Jones inspired generations of student geologists, and when demonstrating to first year undergraduates he would encourage them to feel and taste rock samples. These often included coprolites which, he would later explain, are fossilised dinosaur dung.
In 1993 Jones, who did not own a television set, was nonplussed to be ambushed by Michael Aspel for This is
Your Life. In the studio, Jones recalled an occasion when he might almost have needed rescuing himself. Climbing in the Cairngorms with a friend, an ice cornice gave way, sending them tumbling 200 ft down a gully, over a 40 ft frozen waterfall and 120 ft of scree; each time one climber stopped, the rope between them yanked him downhill as the other shot past. Finally, “after realising we had survived unscathed, we shook hands and ran like hell in case anyone had seen us.”
Tony Jones was appointed MBE for services to mountain rescue and received the Queen’s Jubilee Medal in 2002.
He was unmarried and is survived by two sisters.