Ed Stafford was an army officer who got bored and moved on. He took to expedition leading and eventually decided that he wanted to walk the Amazon from source to mouth.

The book intrigued me because as a child living in South America, I'd been given a copy of Exploration Fawcett about a Lt Col PH Fawcett RE (see wiki) who spent some twenty years in the first quarter of the twentieth century exploring South America before disappearing without trace.

Coincidentally, the day I started reading the review copy of Walking The Amazon, a two-part documentary popped up on TV. If you have watched the documentary, you have only seen half the story: it's all action and no content (but it was worth watching).
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On her kidney, her kidney, was a bird’s eye view of Sydney! ..
BPF song, ‘The Much Tattooed Lady’

Hobbs was thirty years a Fleet Air Arm aviator and for many years ran the Fleet Air Arm museum. It would be difficult to find anyone better qualified to write up the high noon of Britain’s naval air power, the Fleet Air Arm’s Annus Mirabilis 1944-5 when the Royal Navy fielded, far-flung off the coast of the Japanese Empire, the largest fighting fleet it has ever put to sea.

By the end of 1944 the Royal Navy had expanded to a total strength of 800,000 including Royal Marines (about 10%) and WRNS. If discharges and casualties are included, that means that close on a million people had worn those uniforms in World War II. The hugely successful management of such an expansion says something remarkable about the pre-war Officers and senior ratings including the many recalled to service from civilian life, and particularly about the Dartmouth process - Admiral Twiss, released from Japanese confinement as a Lieutenant, when asked how it was, is supposed to have remarked to the effect that after Dartmouth it wasn’t so bad. By 1945 the thousands of wartime reinforcements had produced Commanding Officers of ships, submarines and particularly Fleet Air Arm squadrons; the Branch had suffered appalling attrition through the early carrier losses and in combat and accidents. By the end of the war 14 out of the 31 FAA squadrons in the BPF were commanded by RNVRs. 15 COs were RN ‘Air’ Branch and only two were career naval officers.
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The RN only took about two thousand National Servicemen per year but was oceans more popular as a choice than the Army; this meant the RN could pick and choose. We should remember that ‘Join the Navy and See the World’ was a pretty fair boast in the days before the Boeing 707, even if what some of the RN NS saw was Korea, through a Firefly’s gunsight.

Two of my (regular) contemporaries - one eventually a Commander, the other a Captain - started as National Servicemen. One of my recent neighbours had spent his NS time in an Admiralty ’fishing vessel’ in the Baltic scribbling down Russian. But about 500 a year were brought in as Stokers, which was a 1950s shortage category.

In 1955 Perris had just failed his first year as an electrical engineering student. This meant two things. One, a brown envelope calling him up as his deferment had lapsed; two, his entry qualifications for further education mean that he was possibly commissionable.

He has now published his experiences, a polished version of a work written for his own amusement some years ago. He takes us through basic training (including ploughing an Interview Board for a commission) and on into the Reserve Fleet and an aircraft carrier from which he escaped into submarines (thus missing the Suez adventure), before emerging two years older, perhaps wiser, but no richer having invested enthusiastically in the drinks trade at home, in the Baltic and in the Mediterranean.
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