William Gadsby Peet sits down with survival legend Ray Mears to talk bushcraft, manhunts and gorillas
DAVID OSBORN
Having followed Google Maps, lemminglike, through a series of turns of which the falsity was increasingly apparent, I am five minutes late for my interview with Ray Mears. The irony of getting lost on the way to meet a man who can navigate the Australian Outback with only the night sky and a pocketknife is not lost on me. Fortunately an “utterly useless” Uber driver causes Mr Mears himself to be 10 minutes behind schedule and my blushes are spared.
It is hard to over-egg the Titan-like status of Ray Mears within his field (no pun intended). Respected across the world as one of the foremost experts in bushcraft, he is more responsible than anyone for bringing woodlore to the attention of the British public. His is a CV calculated to go to one’s head. And yet there is not a hint of arrogance in the polite, unassuming man with whom I find myself trading small talk on the superiority of black cabs over Uber. Humility and stoicism are his trademarks on screen, and the favourable impression survives our encounter undimmed.
Born in Purley and raised in Kenley – both just south of Croydon in Surrey – Ray was first drawn to wilder regions through the medium of print.
“I grew up in an age when we had wonderful, beautifully illustrated encyclopaedias and I think that’s where it all started for me,” he reflects. “Some of my first memories are of poring over those amazing books. I remember once in junior school, we were asked to draw a picture of a scout and I did one of an army scout on the North-West Frontier at the time of the Riel Rebellion. Everyone else had drawn a Boy Scout in shorts with a funny hat.”
The other shaping influence on young Raymond was his judo instructor and mentor, Kingsley Hopkins, a WWII veteran who had fought behind enemy lines in Burma and was a member of London’s Budokwai martial arts club.
“He taught judo as a way of life,” explains Ray. “He learned it from a man called Gunji Koizumi, who brought it to Britain from Japan and was himself taught by the founder of the art, Jigoro Kano.
DAVID OSBORN
“There are two fundamental concepts in judo, which I learned from Kingsley, that have informed my whole life. You’ll have to look them up to get the right Japanese words, but the first [Seiryoku-Zenyo] is about maximising efficiency while minimising effort – something absolutely fundamental to bushcraft.
“The second [Jita-Kyoei] is the idea that, when you practise, you do so in a society that’s mutually supportive. That’s also something I really believe in, with regard to how bushcraft should be taught. It’s not about competing with others, it’s about us all growing together.”
Modern bushcraft, it would appear, owes more than a little to the world of 1880s Japan.
After leaving Reigate Grammar School, aged 16, Ray endured a brief stint in a London office job – which he hated – before joining the recruitment team for Operation Raleigh, the globe-circumventing youth project that would act as the forerunner to sustainable development charity Raleigh International.
“It was great. For the first time in my life I met other young guys who were outdoors enthusiasts in different fields,” he recalls. “That was an eye-opener for me because, up until then, everything I’d done was in isolation.”
Along with touring the country to drum up interest in the expeditions, Ray’s duties included occasionally dressing up as a gorilla to frighten potential recruits.
“In Operation Drake [The 1978 precursor to Operation Raleigh], they actually had a real gorilla and we’d heard all the stories about it, but we couldn’t afford a live animal ourselves. So we got a gorilla skin instead and took it in turns to pretend to be this gorilla,” he says smiling.
“It actually really helped with a test in the selection process. Obviously it was a bit of fun, but also quite interesting, in that people were a little scared of carrying out tasks in a room with a dangerous animal. By having someone in the suit, you could get feedback on how people performed.”
DAVID OSBORN
And the standard response?
“Sheer terror, probably! A few of the hopefuls just bolted through the door. Nothing would stop them, almost like in cartoons with a human outline through the wall. There were lots of bits in the British press about Op Raleigh mistreating this gorilla, and all the time it was just some young lads in fancy dress having a laugh.”
After finishing his role at Operation Raleigh, Ray found various bits and pieces to make ends meet, balancing a job as a photographer for World magazine with the foundation of his bushcraft school: Woodlore. His first TV break came in 1994 as a presenter on the BBC programme Tracks, which quickly led to his own show and the glut of incredible programmes for which he is most widely known. Ask for some of his own personal career highlights, however, and you are likely to meet a brick wall.
“I’m not one to look back on my career,” he explains. “I think about where I am now and live very much in the present, with a small eye on what I want to do next. I think we should live our lives like Vikings: somebody will hopefully sing the song of your life at the end, when you’re dead. In the meantime you need to fill it with things to sing about.”
Still, to give you a rough idea, the more extraordinary verses from the Ray Mears songbook include: diving with Polynesian islanders for clams off the coast of Samoa with only a t-shirt as a buoyancy aid; learning spirit stories from the Pitjantjatjara people in Central Australia; teaching Ewan McGregor to survive in the Honduran jungle; building igloos in the Arctic Circle and surviving a helicopter crash in North America.
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Down under: Ray in Australia for his new series (C) Tin Can Island Media
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Down under: Ray in Australia for his new series (C) Tin Can Island Media
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Down under: Ray in Australia for his new series (C) Tin Can Island Media
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Down under: Ray in Australia for his new series (C) Tin Can Island Media
It was a tragedy in 2010, however, that would provide the biggest test of Ray’s career: volunteering to help with the largest manhunt in recent history, for the fugitive killer Raoul Moat. Unsurprisingly, it is sensing the call of duty that constitutes Ray’s main recollection of that unhappy time.
“I didn’t want to mess up, that was the most important thing. There were a lot of people counting on me,” he says grimly. “I was right at the front of operations; the tip of the spear. He [Moat] had crossed the Rubicon and become a danger to everybody. He’d gone to ground in the woods – and that’s my world.”
Using all his practised skill and intuition, Ray tracked Moat – who had shot dead his ex-girlfriend’s lover, wounded the ex-girlfriend and blinded a policeman – from the Northumbrian woodland where he had been sleeping rough, and on through a series of hideouts, encroaching to within – police believe –20 metres of the murderer himself. While the two never came face to face, it was Ray’s tracking skills that were credited with flushing Moat out into the open. For when the killer found himself staring at a police sniffer dog, he realised that the search team were closing in and made a run for it.
Seven years later Ray remains characteristically self-effacing about the part he played in the manhunt.
“You simply have to do your bit to bring a situation like that to resolution. I had the skills to help and felt duty-bound to do so,” he reflects.
Just one more line in the powerful Viking ballad of Ray Mears.
- Ray Mears’s new series, Australian Wilderness, will be on ITV this autumn. His Born to go Wild tour will also be stopping off at Reading's Hexagon on October 21 and Guildford's G Live on October 25. For more information visit: blog.raymears.com
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