After school at Aysgarth and Sedbergh, Beverley L Holt did his National Service in the R.A.F. and because he had gained some mountaineering experience at school, he was appointed officer i/c of a mountain rescue unit in Cyprus. He also took part in the ill-fated Suez campaign, being co-pilot on one of the first planes to land at Port Said. His first degree was in Geology from Cambridge, he then went on to study Medicine and later specialised in Anaesthesia and Intensive care. Along the way he took time out to be an Outward Bound instructor first at Eskdale and then throughout East and Southern Africa.
Shortly after qualification he found himself in Africa as an Army Medical Officer fighting a terrorist war in the African bush. Apart from all the tropical conditions, he had to deal with heat exhaustion, and treat gunshot wounds and landmine injuries. He was then in Cape Town working with Christian Barnard and where he gained his first consultant post.
After Africa the next stop was Northern Canada where he worked with the Grenfell Mission in Newfoundland and Labrador. This included being part of a flying doctor service that served small communities all the way up to Baffin Island and the arctic conditions were very different from Africa. He was then invited to join the academic staff of the newly established medical school at St. Johns Newfoundland where he eventually became director of Intensive care and President of the Medical staff. The family returned to the U.K. and he became involved in research, in particular Phase 1 studies which concerns the first-time administration of new drugs to humans. He was then asked to undertake the inspection of clinical research units worldwide.
He also became interested in the Ethics of doing research in humans and lectured widely on the subject. His passion for mountaineering continued and combined with medicine led to a study of high-altitude physiology. He was doctor on several Himalayan expeditions notably the British K2 expedition.
More recently he was Chief medical officer with the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Society's major expedition to the Indian Ocean, this project known as the Shoals of Capricorn lasted over three years. There were several base camps on different islands and the main objective was to explore the Mascerene ridge which runs down the centre of the Indian Ocean. This involved nearly 100 marine scientists nearly all of whom were working underwater. To prepare for this he took a course in underwater medicine with the Royal Navy. He had the use of a decompression chamber in the Seychelles but most of the time he was on his own.
An abiding passion for fly fishing as well as mountaineering has taken him to some remote and wonderful places from Mongolia to Patagonia and from Alaska to the Antipodes. All-in-all an interesting life of travel and adventure combined with a professional life at the forefront of medicine during which he somehow managed to hold consultant posts in South Africa, Canada and the U.K.
To celebrate his eightieth year he went to the North Pole and took part in the Shackleton centenary voyage to South Georgia and Antarctica.
And in his eighty-seventh year he embarked on a solo train journey through Europe to Germany and Poland on an historical tour of world war sites.