‘Freddy’ Jones attended the Central School, Leopold Street, Sheffield, in its early years, leaving in 1925 at the age of 16 to enter a bank. After six years he left to do a degree in Metallurgy at Sheffield University, graduating in 1935 with First Class Honours. He then went to the firm of Metro-Vickers in Manchester where he did his Ph.D. in Crystallography. During World War II he worked at the National Physical Laboratory. In 1945 he worked in Germany with the Control Commission, and subsequently moved to Firth Browns’ in Sheffield.

William (‘Bill’) Thorpe Catton attended the Central Secondary School in Sheffield, and entered the University to do an Honours Degree in Zoology at the same time as Freddy Jones, also graduating in 1935, and completing a Dip.Ed. the following year. He then lectured at the London College of Pharmacy until 1940, serving in the Army from 1940 to 1946, and finishing with the rank of Captain. In 1946 he did research in the Zoology Department at Sheffield, and then took a post of Lecturer in Physiology in the Medical School at King’s College, University of Durham (which later became the University of Newcastle) in 1947. In 1967 he completed his Doctorate at Sheffield, and worked in the Zoology Department at Newcastle on problems of compound-eye vision from 1952 to 1970, retiring as Reader in Neurophysiology in 1977.

The activities of the Sheffield University Mountaineering Club were, in the period when Jones (who had begun climbing at least as early as 1921 at the age of 12) and Catton were members, largely confined to climbs in the Sheffield area (Stanage Edge and Wharncliffe Crags), the Peak District, North Wales and the Lake District, using primitive equipment. Club members at the time, some eight in number, included T.R. Stobart, also a Sheffield student of Zoology, later Photographer on the 1953 Everest Expedition. Jones and Stobart did one climbing tour together in the Stubai Alps in Austria.