"It all goes back to a gentleman called Bob Wright, who at that time lived in Manchester and was friendly with a few people; one of whom was called Nigel Harper, who subsequently went to Guy?s Hospital to read Medicine. Bob Wright came to Bangor University [University College of North Wales], where I?d just started doing research for a higher degree. Knowing my interest in caving he asked me if I?d be interested in going down to look at this new cave that had newly been discovered in South Wales. I don?t know quite how he came to be involved with it, although he was a member of the Eccles Pothole Club. Somehow this club had got to know of this new discovery, The Keyhole Cave (Agen Allwedd), and they?d been down there and made an initial exploratory trip down the Main Passage. He asked me if I was interested when he arrived at Bangor as a first year student.
Within a few weeks of this we got a little party together and went down and had a look at the cave [1958] and we decided to plan a larger expedition with the intentions of surveying it, because nobody seemed to be interested in making a survey of it at the time.
There was some degree of competition of course . . .
The main group seemed to be the Chelsea Speleological Society who took the work very seriously and the explorations. They seemed very reasonable and nice people to get on with, for what we saw of them, but this was very infrequent - because we were doing these quick weekend trips down from North Wales and they were doing the same thing up from London. The South Wales Caving Club was vaguely involved, the Nature Conservancy was also vaguely involved through the South Wales Caving Club . . . [The Hereford Club was, I understand, involved . . .] I think there was another club called the British Nylon Spinners who were also fairly active down there, but it was a question of all these groups working completely separately without any co-ordination. As far as I know we were the only ones that were seriously concerned with making a survey of the cave as a whole . . ."
(Harold Lord, 1987)