James Dawson was born at Kilsyth, Glasgow, on 2 August 1898. No details of his early education are available, but after his first year as a medical student at Glasgow he volunteered for the Army. Having been in the Officer's Training Corps he was commissioned into the Lancashire Regiment and was in France by about the time of his 18th birthday. Thenceforward he was on active service on the western front until the end of the war. During that time he was awarded the Military Cross, with the later addition of a bar, and was demobilised with the rank of Captain. He then returned to his studies in Glasgow and graduated in 1922. After various resident appointments he was resident surgical officer at the Bradford Royal Infirmary from 1929 to 1932 when he became the first resident medical superintendent to St Luke's Hospital, Halifax. Reputedly not over-keen on medical administration he gradually developed St Luke's, working on the lines of the then voluntary hospitals, and built up a good relationship with the General Infirmary at Leeds which then appointed a part-time physician and a part-time surgeon from its staff. In 1934 Dawson returned to the Bradford Royal Infirmary as honorary assistant surgeon and shortly after also became honorary surgeon to Bradford Children's Hospital. In 1942, when he was 44, he again volunteered for army service and became a surgical specialist in the RAMC, serving in North Africa and India before demobilisation with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. In 1946 he became honorary surgeon to the Bradford Royal Infirmary and consultant surgeon to St Luke's Hospital, Bradford, while continuing to work at the Children's Hospital. He also built up a considerable private practice and, shortly before retirement from his hospitals, he was appointed to the medical appeals tribunal in Leeds until 1970. James Dawson had a life-long interest in mountaineering, dating from the late 1920s. In the early '30s he became a member of the Alpine Club and later, of the Swiss Alpine Club. He undertook many original and dangerous climbs in the Alps. At home, as a member of the Gritstone Club, of which he was later vice-president, he taught many younger men the skills of rock-climbing. Although he stopped rock-climbing after his retirement, within a few years he had climbed all the Munros in Scotland - hills over 3000 feet (564 in all). He then climbed all the equivalent hills in England, Ireland and Wales. At the age of 73, and again at 75, he travelled to Nepal and went with a climbing party to the 19000 feet base camp of Mount Everest, which meant walking for 31 days. At the age of 82 he did the circuit of the three peaks in Yorkshire. He remained a bachelor and was aged 88 when he died on 6 February 1987.