Main image: David ‘Heavy’ Whalley in Ryvoan Bothy | Credit: David Lintern
Few of us can claim to have fulfilled all our dreams but for Dave Whalley, otherwise known as ‘Heavy’, the transition from a troubled son of the Manse in Ayrshire to one of Scotland’s most respected mountain rescue experts is the stuff of legend.
He once told me that as a teenager that had he not joined the military, he would have ended up in jail. Thankfully, he chose the former, with a strong ambition to become a member of the RAF Mountain Rescue Team.
Initially working in catering at RAF Leuchars, his application to join the Rescue Team was mocked – at 5ft 4inches and 7 stone, he was too small. He earned his nickname, and it stuck. He was eventually accepted.
As the youngest, he earned his stripes doing the worst of the work. As the smallest, he wore size 12 climbing boots with three pairs of socks because the equipment stores didn’t have gear small enough to fit him. The rest is history.
He was involved in over a thousand rescues, eventually becoming leader of both the RAF Leuchars Team and then the RAF Kinloss Team. He travelled to the Himalaya and Alaska on training exercises and on his retirement became a member of the Torridon MR Team and Chairman of the Mountain Rescue Committee of Scotland.
He was one of the first on the scene at the Lockerbie disaster and told me the sight would haunt him forever. Like many of his colleagues he suffered from PTSD, a condition unrecognised by the MoD at the time. They were told to ‘man up and get on with the job.’ He spent years campaigning for the MoD to acknowledge and help treat PTSD, and his lobbying was eventually successful.
Saving lives and then minds was his life’s work. I never heard a bad word about Heavy Whalley, and I never heard him utter a bad word about anyone else. Like his great hero, Hamish MacInnes, he will long be remembered as a mountain rescue legend.
