Harold Burrows, MBE.

Born 17th January 1949 - Harold joined the Llandudno Mountain Rescue team as a trainee in 1966; he was not allowed to say anything to the Police as he was not old enough to be a full member, you needed to be over 18 years, Harold was four months short of that.

He was involved with many rescues of young people that went after sea birds eggs and fell on to the rocks or became crag fast on the sea cliffs on the Great Orme.  One rescue he remembers was when the team was asked to help bring down a body off Cader Idris. The team were asked to be at the base for first light and then walked up the mountain lead by a chap with a tilly lamp to light the way.  On reaching the top of the mountain they were asked to wait in the small hut, as the location of the body was in a very precarious location. A team member called Bill helped with his joke about the fact that the brain generates some electricity so if all the team were to think hard they should get warm.

Harold moved down to Sussex working in an Outdoor Pursuits Centre where he would help search for people around the area, but this was not a formal team just a group of people who wanted to help the Police to find lost people.

His next position was at the Outward Bound school Rhowniar in Wales. Here all the instructors of the other two Outward Bound schools would join together into a Mountain Rescue team to find and rescue people lost or injured in the mountains of Mid Wales.  The most memorable was when six of them were taken by helicopter form the North side of Cader Idris to be dropped off at the top - to search for four lost young people.  As they flew towards the mountain in the high wind the aircraft was have difficulty keeping to a straight course, and as they  topped over the crest a down draft hit the top of the aircraft and they descended at a great rate of knots and they all gave a huge sigh as the rotor blades started to bite and the pilot regained control.

Harold moved to South Wales and joined the Morlais Mountain Rescue team (now called the Central Beacon Mountain Rescue team).  It was here that he set up the Casualty Care training for all the teams in South Wales, getting them to work together for the good of the casualty.  It was while he was with Morlias that he learnt about Search Dogs and that the Search And Rescue Dog Association Wales (SARDA Wales) was looking for volunteers to hide in the mountains for the dogs to find. Harold was so impressed with the areas the dogs could cover that when he returned home he bought a dog with the intention of training it to be a Search Dog.

His association with Search Dogs began in 1986 and he spent four days at the Lockerbie Disaster in 1988, on what was his second search as a qualified Search Dog Handler.  He was elected as Chairman to SARDA Wales and brought about greater structure to the training of both dogs and handlers.  Harold introduced the idea of Lowland search dogs, Trailing search dogs and recently Drowned Victim search dogs.

In 1992 he was awarded a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship and spent four months travelling across the USA from East to West to learn about the training and deployment of search dog teams.  He was impressed with the open mindedness of many handlers and the way they would train their dogs. This trip enabled him to bring back to the UK lots of ideas and he put into to practice lots of what he had learnt.

In 2004 he was elected as Chairman of the National Search And Rescue Dog Association (NSARDA) for the United Kingdom and Ireland.  Harold has spent a great deal of time being involved and developing setting of national standards for search dog teams to attain in all the disciplines of search dog work.  Harold readily acknowledges that he may have upset some people when insisting that there has to be national standards to work to, if there isn’t the very person teams are hoping to help will suffer.

Harold moved to North Wales and joined the North East Wales Mountain Rescue team in 1999 and he has played an active part within the team as medical lead.

One of Harold’s regional roles in North Wales is to run the Mountain Rescue Casualty Care courses for all the six teams in North Wales with his own unique training method.

Nationally he is a member of the Medical sub-committee of Mountain Rescue England and Wales. He is the Ambulance Service representative on the North Wales Mountain Rescue Association. For the last four national Mountain Rescue Conferences he has been the speaker co-ordinator