Donald Duff is a legend here in Fort William on the west coast of Scotland. He came here in 1945 having served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War, notably working as a surgeon at the Battle if the Somme. A great deal of time during the inter war years was devoted to perfecting a mountain rescue stretcher and the rather inappropriately named Duff stretcher was patented in 1946. Having served with the Home Guard in Wales during the Second World War, he was appointed chief surgeon at the Belford Hospital in Fort William in 1945 and soon married a local girl, Georgina Millen. He became leader of Lochaber Mountain Rescue Team around the same time and it was not unusual for him to help in the rescue of a climber on Ben Nevis and operate on him/her in the hospital immediately after. Curiously, his ice axe was discovered under the floor of a house in Fort William many years after his death; quite how it got there no one knows. It was kindly passed on to us by Ronald Cameron who acquired it after it was found. It is a Brades Axe from 1943 which is rather appropriate since they were produced for the Ministry of Defence during the war. How nice if the axe could tell us its story!