David Geoffrey Dalgliesh, naval surgeon was born on 22 March 1922 to Kenneth and Ellen Dalgliesh. With three sisters and a younger brother he grew up in Sidcup, Kent, in semi-rural surroundings of gardens, fields and woodlands where he developed a lasting love of natural history. Aged nine he learnt woodwork, a manual skill that re-emerged later in his gift for surgery. He attended Merchant Taylor's School until 1939, taking the 1st MB examination in preparation for entering medical school. When World War II began in September 1939 he was of military age but compulsorily reserved as a future doctor. After a gap year as agricultural labourer, fire watcher and founder member of the Local Defence Volunteers (forerunner of the Home Guard), David joined St Thomas's Hospital Medical School in 1940. His early months of study coincided with the London blitz, in which every city hospital was fully involved and severely tested. Later he served in emergency dressing stations, set up in southern England to treat casualties returning from the Normandy invasion. On graduating MRCS and LRCP in 1946, David had gained an unusual but invaluable practical training in emergency medicine.

Keith Richard Greenaway, who died on 21 May 2010, aged 94, established himself early in his career as the pre-eminent authority in north America on Arctic air navigation. He was only a flight lieutenant, RCAF, with 11 years service when he published his Arctic air navigation (1951), which immediately became the standard textbook in its field. The book deals with all aspects of air navigation, bringing information scattered in various publications together with the author's already very wide practical experience. The heart of the book details the limitations of the magnetic compass in high latitudes and sets out procedures in the reliable Asco-Gyro system of navigation, which Greenaway did so much to develop and which involves the determination of aircraft heading by astro compass and the maintenance of direction by gyro compass, continuously corrected for gyro-drift.

William Harvie (‘Tommy’) Thomson, DSC (1922–2012) was born in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, Scotland on 13 September 1922. Following distinguished service as a Fleet Air Arm pilot in World War II, he joined the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (FIDS) in 1946, serving in 1947–1948 at Base E (Stonington Island) as pilot of the Survey's newly-acquired Auster aircraft.