Another Mans Shoes
Interviews with fellow military veterans and adventurers about their experiences of war, the lows and times of hardship, joining them on their journey and how this has shaped their lives in the most extraordinary way. Comedy moments, dark humour and witty banter.
Another Mans Shoes
Uncharted Adventures and Groundbreaking Expeditions with Colonel John Blashford-Snell S2E1
Get ready to be spellbound by the legendary Colonel John Blashford-Snell as he shares his extraordinary life of adventure and exploration. From his childhood during World War II, where he served as a runner for the Air Raid Precautionary service and had a memorable encounter with a downed German pilot, to mischievous tales of his pet monkey Jacko, John’s stories are nothing short of captivating. He also recalls forming a childhood gang with choir boys and girls to stand against the ‘Huns’ and reminisces about the German and Italian prisoners of war who worked in their garden, gifting him a handmade model battleship for Christmas.
Ever wondered what it takes to lead groundbreaking expeditions across uncharted territories? John Blashford-Snell takes us on a thrilling journey from the underwater archaeological missions in Cyprus to the treacherous Blue Nile expedition in Ethiopia. Learn how he and his team navigated hostile regions and overcame incredible challenges to establish the Scientific Exploration Society. You’ll be on the edge of your seat as John recounts narrowly escaping crocodiles and bandits, and the remarkable collaborative effort to traverse the Darien Gap, a mission that involved soldiers, scientists, and relentless determination to pave the way for the Pan-American Highway.
But it's not all about adventure; John’s passion for conservation and youth involvement in exploration shines through in our discussion. Discover his firsthand observations of environmental degradation and inspiring initiatives like the Flip Floppy Expedition, which transforms ocean plastic into usable materials. John's dedication to educating young people through programs such as Operation Drake and Rally International is truly commendable. This episode is a treasure trove of knowledge, courage, and the spirit of adventure, wrapped up with John’s charming anecdotes and invaluable insights. Don’t miss out on this fantastic journey with one of the world’s most remarkable explorers.
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Welcome to season two of Another Man's Shoes, and we're delighted to have on with us today Colonel John Blashford-Snell, cbe. John's going to talk us through his journey, which is an absolute roller coaster, and you're going to hear some fantastic stories from him, and I really hope you enjoy this one. Before we start, if you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, be great. If you could just hit the like button, give us a star rating. It does really help get us up through the ranks. And if you're listening to us on any other form, if you can get over to Apple, because that's the only one that lets you leave a review, then please do so. But anyway, let's get on with this. Really looking forward to hearing the story. Colonel John Blashford Snell, thank you.
Speaker 1:I was doing some research into Colonel John and I found a fantastic extract in the Telegraph a few years ago and it really emoted some spirits in my mind. It describes it says, from navigating deadly African rivers to transporting a grand piano to an Amazon jungle, chief Colonel John Blashford Snell's life has been the stuff of a boy's own adventurers At the time you were 79, and it says you haven't finished yet and I think today we're going to talk about your journey to date and what continues to be that journey, and we're really excited to hear what you've got to tell us. Can you sort of take us back to? Where did it all start for you? Where were you born and grew up?
Speaker 2:Well, I was born in Hereford. My father was a parson who was also an army chaplain and he came from Jersey, which I regard very much as my ancestral home. And during the war I was brought up in a vicarage on the outskirts of Hereford. In quite exciting times I was a runner for what was called the ARP, the Air Raid Precautionary. Hereford was fortunately sufficiently far to the west so we didn't get too much bombing. We had some. I remember the armament factory being hit just outside Everford and going off with a great bang. I remember a German aircraft being shot down in the fields just behind our house, the pilot being brought into the house by the Home Guard. He was quite a young chap and was obviously very shaken. The plane was lying in the fields on fire and he was made to stand in my father's study.
Speaker 2:My father was aware of the war, guarded by these rather elderly gentlemen with their shotguns, and I, being a small boy, was sitting on a desk and being rather precocious and I eventually broke the silence by saying to him were you in that airplane? Yes, he said. Ah, I said, and now you are going to prison? And he said, but not for very long. Well, of course he was there the rest of the war. But I always remember it because he then asked if he could have permission to smoke a cigarette and he reached into his flying jacket to get his cigarette case and all the shotguns came up leveled at him and he took out this beautiful silver cigarette case with a swastika on it and took out a cigarette and I noticed how his hands were shaking, which is not surprising because I didn't know it at the time. But he was the only survivor from the plane, the Spitfires and machine guns and brought down and we all stood in silence until the military police survived and casted this chap off. Looking back on it I realized he was probably about 18, a very young German pilot and a very frightened one. So that was one of my memories of the war, very frightening one. So that was one of my memories of the war.
Speaker 2:The other thing was that we had a pet monkey that my father brought back from the regiment. It didn't like soldiers because somebody had accidentally slammed the nappy door on its tail and bent it, so it had a rage whenever it saw people in car keys. So obviously you couldn't keep it in the regiment. And Jacko of course he was called, was brought back and he was a very difficult animal because he would go out and kill birds and my mother got angry about this and father, of course, had gone back to the regiment and left the monkey with us. We had a lot of animals because my parents were animal lovers and anyway the monkey ruled the roost for a long time. He used to climb onto the back of my parents' St Bernard dog, a huge animal weighing about 12 stone, and he would ride this wretched dog rather like a jockey. Everyone used to laugh at that. Uh. Another occasion I remember he climbed up onto the sandbags around the front of the pick, which has been put up because it was a arp post, and on top of the sandbags was a maxim machine gun that had been placed there by the home guard. It it was a World War I model, but it was a working model. It was sitting up there and of course it so happened that my father happened to come back on leave. As he drove up the drive there, lo and behold the machine gun with the monkey behind it, which caused a slight fit.
Speaker 2:But they were adventurous days and as a youngster we had a gang mostly of choir boys and choir girls from the church who existed for the sole reason of keeping the Huns out of heritager. And we were rather disappointed when the war ended because there were no Huns to keep out. In fact the only Huns we met thereafter were the prisoners of war who came to work in our gardens and actually they were very pleasant people. They were only too glad the war was over. They weren't too happy about what was going to happen to them when they went back to Germany, where the whole place had been virtually destroyed. But they used to dig in the garden and they were no trouble at all. And I always remember one Christmas there was a knock on the door and there were the two German prisoners and they were holding a model battleship that they'd made back in the camp as a Christmas gift for me a rather kindly gesture that was lovely so.
Speaker 2:I didn't feel too badly about them Italian prisoners working as well, and they used to sing all the time and they were delighted the war was over. The last thing they ever wanted to do was join the army. I also remember my father's batman, who was keeping an eye on us at the time. He was a local taxi driver and he was sitting on the garden bench with his stem gun, his submachine gun, on his lap, and frequently he would fall asleep and the gun would slide on the floor and these two Italians would go over and wake him up and say Signor, your gun has dropped. He would wake up. He wasn't a particularly brilliant guard, but in fact these Italians didn't need much gardening, they were perfectly happy to be working out in the garden. So there were many memories like that of the war and, of course, a few sadnesses, because people from the parish often suffered bereavements. Relatives and sons and daughters were killed, and so my mother, acting very much as a curate, used to have to go around and console people and look after them as best she could whilst my father was away.
Speaker 2:And then, after the war ended, I went back to Jersey, which of course had been occupied by the Germans, and I went to Victoria College, which is my father's old school, and life was absolutely marvelous.
Speaker 2:Jersey was a haven for a boy. You could dive underwater, which was what I loved doing, and you could climb cliffs and you could explore the German fortifications and tunnels left from the war. Our great hero was a man called Hans Haas who had a very pretty wife. I remember he was a diver and in those days of course diving was the new thing and eventually we all clubbed together and we bought one of the first aqualungs that we could dive. Like Hans Haas had died. And of course our other hero was Jacques Cousteau, the Frenchman, who really had invented the aqualung. So that really got me into diving and that did my health a lot of good, because I'd had problems as a boy with asthma. But this diving sort of widened my chest and the asthma went away. And that was just as well, because by now I decided I wanted to join the army and I managed to get through and into Sandhurst and had a wonderful time there and eventually got into the Royal Engineers and life has gone on since then.
Speaker 1:It has. And when you sort of growing up, I suppose from what you've just said, that must have really set some seeds of adventure because you didn't have a typical upgrowing as you think of it these days, with the war going on, with planes, planes crashing, with meeting prisoners of war diving in jersey, that is a real adventure growing up and it must have shaped you in some way and developed your thoughts about how you want to sort of carry on the rest of your life and continue on these adventures yes, well, I mean by becoming a royal engineer, of course.
Speaker 2:I joined the very right um core because theppers, as they're known, were noted for going around the world building things, getting through obstacles, clearing minefields, blowing things up, and they were a very adventurous bunch and once I got with them I found that if I behaved myself and did a good job as a troop commander, they would very often let me go off and take some soldiers and start doing expeditions. But my first posting was to Cyprus. When I was asked where I wanted to go, I said to the brigade major well, please can I go somewhere where there's some adventure? And he said well, I'll find you a war, and there was a small one going on in Cyprus. So I was posted out there and one of my jobs was to take over the running of the underwater section. And in every troop we had so many divers and once a year we formed them all up for training and we would go off and do a project.
Speaker 2:And as the end of the conflict came about in Cyprus and the terrorists surrendered and we were looking for new tasks, and the commissioner of Limassol, who was a rather keen archaeologist, said why don't you get your divers to go looking for lost things under the sea, and in those days there were no archaeologists who dived. So we formed a series of expeditions that we called Operation Aphrodite and we went looking for the lost port of Paphos, which was underwater. We went looking for the lost port of Paphos, which was underwater. This was a place that was supposed to have existed up to about the 11th century, and we were very lucky. We did find lots of wrecks, lots of ruins, lots of pottery, and the local people appreciated it. And so the diving went on. We went on to other parts of the mediterranean where they wanted archaeological diving and we had a tremendous time.
Speaker 2:And then, of course, eventually I had to come back to england and to my horror, I was first of all offered a posting as a diver to the oil engineers diving school at southampton and, I thought, blimey Diving School at Southampton. I thought blimey diving in murky Southampton, cold water in midwinter doesn't sound like fun. But I got somewhere else. I was sent to the junior leaders regiment of the Royal Engineers as a lieutenant to command a troop of enthusiastic young men aged about 16 to 18 and taught them to dive. And then the great breakthrough came I was posted back to Sandhurst as an instructor, and when I arrived, the commandant, who was a very adventurous man, general Sir John Mogg, said to me you are going to be the adventure training officer. Do you know what that entails? I said I'm not entirely sure. Good, he said well, I want you to go and take as many as possible of these young men overseas in their long vacations and carry out worthwhile tasks for the benefit of their character and the least possible detriment to the empire. And so it was. We formed an adventure training wing and we sent out, whilst I was there, about 26 expeditions. Many of those who took part went on in the army, some of them became generals, and I still bump into some of them now and they say the adventure training wing changed my life. So it did change quite a lot of people, and this led on, of course, to other expeditions, and we started to do bigger and bigger ones.
Speaker 2:And after one of the adventure training expeditions to ethiopia, the Haile Selassie, who I met several times, said I'd like you to come back and explore my Blue Nile Well. That was rather like asking an average hill walker to climb Everest. I knew about this river that it was a considerably difficult waterway. So I nodded politely to the emperor and backed away. And then, when I got back to England, I was posted to the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham and the commandant again luckily for me was a very adventurous ex-power called Napier Crookenden.
Speaker 2:And one day he sent for me and he said we've had a letter from Haile Selassie. Do you know who I mean? I said yes, I met him. Wow, he said Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, and he's also, by the way, a field marshal in the British Army. He wants his Blue Nile explored and he tells me that you've seen it. I said well, yes, I have had a quick glance from a bridge. Good.
Speaker 2:He said well, what do you think about doing an expedition, daddy? Think about doing an expedition, daddy? And I said well, sir, it's a very dangerous place. It's full of hippos, there are a lot of crocodiles that have eaten people repeatedly, it's masses of bandits and there are landslides of radioactive rock said to come tumbling down the mile-deep gorge. And he paused and looked me straight in the eye and he said you're being very negative. I don't like negative officers. I think this is a wonderful idea. It's just a sort of challenge that the army needs these days.
Speaker 2:There was no war going on at the time. So he said I've decided we shall do it and we'll have a committee to run this. He said I shall be chairman and you can be secretary, and I see no need for anyone else. And so he was a fairly autocratic sort of general, and thus was born the Blue Nile Expedition, backed by the Daily Telegraph, and of course it became headlines for a year and ended up with films and books and so on. And at the end of it, back to my original general General, sir John Mogg, he said you know, you chaps ought to form yourselves into some sort of organization with charitable status so you can get the money through without having to be channeled through various systems in the army. So we formed the scientific exploration society to bring together the servicemen and the civilian explorers for expeditions that were considered worthwhile and would benefit mankind generally. And things have gone on since then they have.
Speaker 1:and so, touching on the blue nile, I've looked at that. That's a 900-mile river, is that correct? That's what it sort of says on it. Well, the river.
Speaker 2:The actual gorge of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia is about 400 or 500 miles, but that's… and it's a mile deep. There were hideous rapids down which no one has managed to go, and we succeeded by developing various types of boats. First of all, we took the Royal Engineer assault boats that were in common use, and when we had them on display during the visit by the Queen and Prince Philip at Chatham, prince Philip came over and gave us a long lecture on how to make a boat that would go down the Blue Nile, and so, based on his ideas, we built a special version of the Royal Engineer assault boat. But we realised that for the upper reaches, where the rapids were particularly bad, we would need something else.
Speaker 2:A number of expeditions had tried to get down it without success and had been wrecked, and I thought perhaps if we had a rubber boat that would bounce off the rocks, it might work better. So I went to see the Avon company in South Wales who made yachting tenders, and I said you know, we think that if you could lend us a few of your yachting tenders, we could get down what's reputed to be the worst river in the world. So they generously, they allowed to lend us some. We took them up to a weir in mid Wales, clern Gothlyn, and we tested them over the weir and we didn't manage to break them. And to be really sure, we put valves in the side and through those valves we put football bladders which we blew up. So we had tubes within tubes and we developed a virtually unsinkable boat. And those were the boats that tackled the worst of the Blue Nile. And of course, later on people saw this and thought what a wonderful idea.
Speaker 1:And that was how white water rafting started so, off the back of this sort of the emperor's letter, sort of saying I want you to go down blue nile you so, off the back of the letter that you receive on camp from the emperor, you think the letter went not to me.
Speaker 2:The letter was to the, to the ministry, that well, to the government the government but it wasn't to me personally.
Speaker 1:But it's amazing what that triggered, how many things you know. You've then created a new type of craft. You've created a new sport, essentially, which is extremely popular throughout the world now in whitewater rafting.
Speaker 2:But also, of course, our real aim was to do the scientific work, and we had zoologists and biologists and meteorologists and geologists with us. It was a big expedition. There were nearly 70 of us and we had to carry out all this scientific work on behalf of the emperor, who was interested to know about the minerals and the resources, minerals and the resources. And, of course, going on from those days, nowadays, there's a great controversial dam being built right across the Blue Nile, which the Egyptians are upset about, but that all leads back to the potential of harnessing the energy out of this incredible gorge that ran through the mountains of Ethiopia.
Speaker 1:Are there any moments that sort of stick in your mind, particularly of that trip that were difficult or any events that happened there?
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, I mean there were many of these. Sadly we lost one of our men who was a corporal in the Black Watch serving with the SAS, who was drowned crossing a tributary not on the main river, which is very sad, and Ian McLeod was a really good friend and a wonderful guy, but it was a tragic accident and no one ever liked losing somebody on an expedition, although over the years we've had the odd character. Secondly, on the way out, on the last stage, we ran into I like to think of them as income tax rebels, but they were local people or bandits who didn't like being taxed by the emperor and they saw us as members of the emperor's forces. So we were attacked on several occasions. Fortunately we were carrying weapons, so we were able to fight our way out and we didn't lose anyone.
Speaker 2:But we had some very narrow escapes, getting away from these people who were hell-bent on killing us. And having got out of them, we then met up with regiments and regiments of crocodiles who were trying to eat us. That got quite exciting for a time. Down the next corner we bumped into a large number of hippo. The problem was that the zoologists thought that the hippo would be attracted by our black rubbery boats. They might think of them as a male or a female hippopotamus. That could have been difficult, but we managed to get past all that and we all got in at the end safely, except for poor Ian McLeod who was drowned higher up the river.
Speaker 1:But by the end of this you became the first team of people to ever navigate the length of the Blue Nile, though.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think we probably were. There had been many attempts to get down it, but various expeditions had been wrecked and several had been shot up by bandits and hostile tribesmen. So it was a fairly and it still is a fairly hostile area.
Speaker 1:I think people that are listening to this today if they've been on adventures in recent years. Was this around about 1968 that you did the Blue Nile?
Speaker 2:Yes, and I went down again in 2005, and again we were attacked by bandits and this time we didn't have a large number of weapons because the Ethiopians saidians didn't need them. They sent a lieutenant with us with one pistol, which wasn't much good, and we were held prisoner for about 24 hours by these chaps who were armed with AK-47s. But we managed to get the message through to the Ethiopian army to say that we've been taken, and they instructed the local police to go and intervene. And these Ethiopian policemen, who were about 40 miles away over the mountains, ran through the night and came down into the gorge and approached the bandits at about dawn, when it was still half dark, and there was a brief dust-up and that was the end of the bandits and we then sailed on back down the river completing our work. So we got to know the people of Ethiopia and the bandits quite well.
Speaker 1:Doing these adventures back in those days compared to now, is you had to be much more self-sufficient. Uh, there wasn't satellite communications. You didn't have the sort of the radios, a lot of the equipment that you have now, so you very much relied on your training and probably quite simple devices to survive we did have radios On the Blue.
Speaker 2:Now we had I think it was called an AS-16, which was an SAS radio, which was extremely good, but we used to have to use Morse code, which of course people don't know about now. And we also had hand-to-hand walkie-talkies. Of course. Today we've got satellite phones and once you're in more civilized areas you can get Wi-Fi and use emails and all the other methods of getting through. But certainly I think in modern days the technology has improved considerably and you've also got food, and clothing has changed. I mean, gore-tex has made quite a difference to exploring in clothing, wear and also navigation equipment like the GPS. On the Blue Nile we used a fjord light and we had to try and sight the stars at night and work out our position in that way, wow.
Speaker 1:And when you got back to the UK after the Blue Nile, was that you then kind of identified right, if there's another expedition or there's an adventure you know you're the man to go to, and was that your sort of card mark for that?
Speaker 2:well, after the blue nile we formed the scientific exploration society at santos, which goes on to this day. I was chairman for many years and I then handed over to one of the young bloods who became chairman I'm now the president and that does take people all over the world and does expeditions and encourages other people to do expeditions. We have a bursary scheme which awards money to people who want to do a worthwhile project. That's got its own website and everything if people are interested. But we of course were faced with invitations from other organizations to carry out projects which had hitherto been considered too difficult or too dangerous. And after the Blue Nile the next big one that came up was to find a way of crossing the Darien Gap, and that was to take vehicles from Alaska to Cape Horn, which is the longest road in the world 17,000 miles but in the middle of about 250 miles there's a gap through dense jungle, swamps, hills, creepy crawlers, bandits again called the Darien Gap, and that's in Panama and Colombia.
Speaker 2:And the people of South America were very keen to complete the Pan-American Highway and several expeditions had tried to do this without success, and they felt that if an expedition could get through and make a pilot track. They felt that if an expedition could get through and make a pilot track then the American government would come up with the millions and millions of dollars needed to build the road. So a committee of South American gentlemen came to London, threw down the challenge to the Anglo-Hispanic Society and the Foreign Office and eventually I got asked to set up an expedition to try and do it, which of course was no easy undertaking because it was a very difficult and still is a very difficult piece of terrain. But nevertheless we formed an expedition of soldiers and civilians, again with loads of scientists and civilians, again with loads of scientists. And the rover company were just developing a new car called the Range Rover and they wanted to test it out. So they provided two cars which the RAF flew into Alaska and these were then driven by soldiers from the 1721st Lancers down the Pan American Highway to Panama. And then we had something like 20 or 30 sappers and other soldiers in Panama to help them get through the gap. We also had pack horses carrying the fuel. We had an army aircraft to help us and we had the full backing of the Ministry of Defense. But we still had to raise a certain amount of money. So that was hard work.
Speaker 2:But in January of 1972, we set out. Unfortunately, the weather, which should have been dry, wasn't. The rains were late and they kept on raining and this turned the area into a morass, sort of like the Battle of the Somme. And the Range Rover was really well tested and in the end the back axles began to break at an alarming rate and we got through nine differentials in no time at all.
Speaker 2:So whilst repairs were being made and new differentials were being flown out from England, we bought a rather battered old Land Rover and took off every bit of weight that we could. It was just a bare sort of chassis with a few bits and pieces and seats on it, and we used this with the engineers as a pathfinder to go ahead and start cutting this road in the hope that one day the Range Rovers would get moving again and could follow at top speed. Whilst all this was going on, the scientists under an extended cavalry colonel called Peter Reed, who sadly died. Now they were doing all their work round about us, looking for the bugs and the beetles and the snakes and the birds and also making plans about what would happen to the local people once the road went through, because that was something you had to consider that their life was going to be disturbed and in some ways destroyed by the presence of this road. So we wanted to try to ensure that the work we were doing for the roadside didn't have too adverse an effect on the local people. However, eventually, of course, the rover company did sort out the Range Rovers and meanwhile the Pathfinder had got well ahead and the road was open and they raced on through.
Speaker 2:Our final obstacle came in the crossing of the Greater Toronto Swamp, which was a vast flooded area about the size of Wales, with deep plasmid swamp.
Speaker 2:We very luckily had a couple of inflatable boats that formed a raft, and so whenever we got into rivers or swamps we could blow these boats up and mount the Range Rovers on them With an outboard motor, we could drive across onto dry land and, bit by bit, we got the cars over all the water obstacles and through into Colombia On the way, sadly, five Colombian soldiers were drowned, coming out to join us when their boat turned over, coming out of a port called Turbo on the Colombian coast, and another six were killed by bandits coming down with a convoy to join us inside Columbia.
Speaker 2:So the Colombians had quite considerable losses trying to help us, but by good fortune all our people got through alive and we reached eventually Bogota. It was a great ceremony of welcome and then the Range Rovers motored off down to Cape Horn and after six months they reached the, the end and they'd done 17,000 miles that's fantastic marketing for Range Rover at the time yeah, it's the 50th anniversary coming up next year and we're planning to get those of us who are still alive together celebrated that'd be a wonderful get together.
Speaker 1:One of the things that sort of strikes me. I was listening to uh, I think it was david attenborough or someone a while back and someone made a comment and they pretty much said that, um, people like yourself and attenborough and other explorers who you've seen more of the world than anyone will ever see, because a lot of what you've seen and you've explored and the place you've been just no longer exist. I suppose you know we've evolved as societies, our towns have grown and a lot of the natural world is is diminishing and, uh, it's quite a sad thing to see, but you've seen a lot of these countries in their bare form, you know, before technology sort of got a hold of them and it must have been an amazing sight to see well, of course, yes, and we're very much.
Speaker 2:I think anyone in the exploration business now is very conscious of trying to protect the environment um, um.
Speaker 2:Certainly, from my point of view, we always concentrate on the environment, the people, the fauna, flora, and doing everything we can to protect it. Also, of course, there's this problem of global warming. Anyone who says it doesn't exist is talking rubbish. I've seen the glaciers melting, I've seen the effect on plant life and, believe you me, it is a real thing and we I think everyone has got to fight back against this and try to conserve everything. The other problem we see, of course, in the oceans is the pollution, particularly with plastic.
Speaker 2:At the moment I'm helping an organization called the Flip Floppy Expedition, and this was set up by a friend of mine who was appalled by the amount of waste he saw lying along the beaches of Kenya.
Speaker 2:So he started a program to gather up as much of this plastic as possible and have it turned into usable logs, if you like, made of refurbished plastic.
Speaker 2:He took it up to a refurbishing plant in Nairobi where it was turned into logs very heavy ones brought them back down to the coast, to Lamu, where African boat builders built boats to the traditional style, and he got them to build a dow out of refurbished plastic, and the outside of the dow, on the hull, was coated with refurbished flip-flops that are drifting around on the sea. So it looks rather bright and gay and of course, it's now known as the flip-floppy expedition. And, as we speak, going around Lake Victoria persuading the people to stop throwing rubbish into the lake, is the flip-floppy boat, and they're making films and putting them out, and this is part of the the work of defending the oceans and the lakes from pollution. And they've also taken another voyage down the coast to zanzibar, stopping at all the main centers and and preaching to people uh, to stop polluting the ocean I think we've all got responsibility to to be more responsible in protecting the climate.
Speaker 1:I guess that wasn't the end of your expeditions, so you finished the Darien Gap and then you went off to the Congo.
Speaker 2:After that came the Congo, or the Zaire, as it was then known that was looking into a disease called onchocerciasis which was affecting 20 million people. We had a team of 11 ophthalmic experts who had to be got from the source of the Congo River to the mouth, which was a distance of around 2,700 miles. Again, it was a very formidable river and we designed special 40-foot inflatable boats which the Royal Engineers modified. These boats came from America, where they were part of an inflatable bridging pontoon, and we turned them into craft, as people had done on the Grand Canyon in America. We took three of these. We also got hold of some jet boats from New Zealand that had just been invented. We used those in the lower, very dangerous rapids because they had this enormous power that they could actually climb up a rapid. Again, we had the Beaver aircraft and the Army Air Corps. There were over 100 people on the expedition, including many scientists of different categories and all these doctors doing their research, and this has done something to help solve the problem of onchocerciasis. It hasn't solved it completely, but it was a very useful study and also found out a great deal about the wildlife, the archaeology, the geology and so on of the river.
Speaker 2:Again, we were lucky. We all survived and got through in one piece. We had some very exciting mishaps with the boats, but that was a success. And at the end of that because we had two or three young people with us who'd been chosen as a result of a newspaper campaign in Jersey the result of a newspaper campaign in Jersey the word got to the Prince of Wales and he found that these young people were excellent at going and lecturing to their schools and talking about their experiences and inspiring other young people. So the Prince asked me to come to see him and he said you know, if you can do this with two or three young people, why can't you do it with two or three hundred?
Speaker 2:And so we went away and produced a plan which became known as Operation Drake, with a beautiful brigantine as our flagship, and we took 400 young men and women from 27 countries around the world. They were specially selected and went through all sorts of tremendous tests to be selected. And then they had three months at a time with us on the expedition and they did various community aid tasks, scientific tasks, conservation projects and so on. And halfway through the Prince of Wales said you can't stop, you must make it a bigger one. And so eventually Operation Rally was born, which goes on today as Rally International, and there have been over 40,000 young people through that now, and although I retired from Rally at the end of my army career because it was my army job for my last eight years in the service, the organization's gone on and gone from strength to strength and once this COVID is over hopefully they can get back into action again.
Speaker 2:It's rather frustrating at the moment, but meanwhile of course the Scientific Exploration Society has gone on with expeditions encouraging other young people and we've been running a number for older people that's the sort of 25 and upwards, the Winklies as they were called, and I've got two expeditions at the moment that are planned and hopefully, covid permitting, will carry out One in Bolivia on the Amazon area, probably at the end of November this year, god willing, and the second one in Mongolia, and the Mongolian one is all dependent on whether we can fly in, but that's again doing various scientific and community aid projects. But to go on that you've got to be able to ride a horse, because every movement in mongolia is on horseback it is, and you've obviously put pen to paper and you've sort of written about your experiences as well.
Speaker 1:You wrote a book. Was it Lost Behind the Ranges?
Speaker 2:Yes, that was the last one I wrote. That's the autobiography. I also wrote Mammoth Hunt, which was a story about discovering some giant elephants in Nepal. Then we wrote the Kota Mama books, and right at the moment I'm working on a new book which Brad the travel publisher is aiming to publish next year, and there I'm trying to bring it all up to date with the stories of various adventures and achievements over the last 25 years.
Speaker 1:I can imagine that would be quite a big book. There's a lot to cram into that Well.
Speaker 2:I'm limited to 100,000 words. The problem is trying to keep the word number down.
Speaker 1:I think we'll all look forward to reading that when that comes out. And so on your expeditions you're sort of doing later on this year, have you got support from organisations, or do you have to do much more sort of fundraising these days to put them on?
Speaker 2:Well, nowadays we do get support from organisations and companies who make equipment and Motorola have always been very good to us, and EP Varus, who sell outboard motors, have been tremendously helpful, and the Avon company help us from time to time with boats. But as far as the funding goes, we now say it's much easier, as it's older people, if they raise their own money. Each person raises so much. In general, the expedition costs about £3,000 per person, and so it's not like being in a golf club. You all pay a subscription and that just about covers the cost. We do occasionally get grants and of course, as I mentioned, the Scientific Exploration Society runs a bursary program of awards which helps young people who can put in applications. Last night I was watching one by a young man who crossed Africa from the West Coast all the way right across the southern end of the Sahara right to Somaliland. An amazing journey. We produced some really excellent new generations of young explorers and I'm now looking very much to the ones who are coming on and trying to help people. You know, give them a chance to do what I had.
Speaker 2:But of course, the other side of my life, which doesn't get written about quite so much, is working with underprivileged children. For the last 30 years I've been helping with various organizations in places like Liverpool, Brixton as well. In Liverpool we built a wonderful center in Hanover Street called the Door, which was an old block of council offices 32,000 square feet which we completely converted. But that meant raising two and a half million, which we had to work hard to do, and we now had over 40,000 young people through that, Not so much giving them recreation, but more giving them opportunities in life and training, trying to help the ones who are homeless or single parent or kids on drugs or even pregnant ones. That's been a huge success.
Speaker 2:I've got another much smaller organization I'm working with in South London, in Brixton, run by a very nice Jamaican lady, and these are mostly youngsters who can't find work and have got no particular skills or training. So you need to get them educated and help them in every way to find a new way in life. And I've been also working with the Trinity Sailing Trust down in Bricksham in Devon, taking young people to sea and giving them an experience of a lifetime, For some of them, of course, never having been on the sea, it's quite remarkable. I remember one small boy coming down up to me at Plymouth one day and saying why is it people put salt in the water here?
Speaker 1:About some of the other charities that you work with, about the Not Forgotten Foundation and the Army Benevolent Society. So is that something you sort of work with?
Speaker 2:Yes, not Forgotten is a service based charity which helps soldiers and veterans. It started off very much from the war and, of course, has gone through to modern times, and they're not as well known as people like the British Legion. Or sorry, excuse me one moment, darling darling junior, can you? You're echoing right through the talk, sorry, sorry about that, that's okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Not Forgotten organization, which is a very good service organization, is not run by the services but it's run to help veterans and people who've had misfortune and I think it's one of the best I've seen and it helps disabled people who've been wounded and it does a lot of good work with veterans coming back from right back to Afghanistan, iraq and so on. And then the other one, of course, is the Ireland Benevolent Sun, which I've always supported, and of course, the British Legion.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, they're all wonderful charities. We'll plug that on the podcast. So we're very keen. So one question I'm going to put you on the spot here slightly that we ask all our guests on the show is your three must-haves. So if you're planning an expedition or going somewhere, are there three particular bits of equipment. You always think I'm always going to have that in my travel bag.
Speaker 2:Well, the first thing is a good pair of boots, the second thing is a Swiss army knife and the third thing is a bottle of whiskey.
Speaker 1:Well, the third one, clearly the most important. Well, I think, for everyone that's going to listen to this podcast, they're really going to have enjoyed that journey. And obviously, they can go online. They can go to Wikipedia, they can go onto your website, onto Instagram, and they can follow your journey and your expeditions further. And they can also, you know, if they want to apply to come on these expeditions, they can obviously do that via your website. These expeditions, they can obviously do that via your website.
Speaker 2:Yes, they can look at my website or the Scientific Exploration Society website and it's got all the details there.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic. Well, I think from me personally, I'd like to thank you for coming on to the show today and we'll push this out there and I think we're going to get a lot of listeners on this. We've had a lot of appetite for people to hear more about exploration and adventures. I think what you told us today is uh is really gonna sort of help that.
Speaker 2:So thank you very much all right, all my best adam cheers bye, bye, bye well, that's brilliant.
Speaker 1:You know, I've just really enjoyed speaking to colonel john then, and thank you everyone then, for joining in as well. So that is episode two, season two completed. If you want to hear a bit more about John Blashford Snell, you know, head over to Google, just bang his name in there and you can read all about him. Go on to johnblashfordsnellorguk and you can find out more about Operation Rally and all the various adventures over the years, and more to follow coming up next week.
Speaker 1:We've got a great guest for you Not going to say who it is at the moment, but we can say climbed a lot of Rocky faces and done some pretty scary stuff, so we're going to enjoy interviewing her. Please, as always, head over to Apple, which you just mentioned earlier on. If you can just leave a review, just do a star rating. It helps get us up the list, and then the more people that see us, the more people hear it and the greater we can spread the word. But for now, that's us. That's season 2, episode 2 of Another Man's Shoes. Have a great week.