Survival expert Ray Mears: ‘We Britons need to toughen up’

{"text":[[{"start":5.745,"text":"There is one thing I’m not worried about before meeting Ray Mears: finding him. Mears is Britain’s king of bushcraft. He wrote the book on how to “find anything in the wild”, by tracking broken twigs and other clues. He will find me, as surely as a Harry Kane pass."}],[{"start":21.031,"text":"Yet as I wait at Amberley station in Sussex, there is no trace. A pensioner, a child in Halloween pyjamas, a pack of walkers come and go; where is Mears? Perhaps I’ve found my hidden talent: an ability to put the master off my trail."}],[{"start":35.872,"text":"Eventually a well-worn Land Rover Defender drives up. Mears, 62, smiles out of the window with the polite apology of a Boy Scout. His face is familiar from his two decades presenting TV shows such as Ray Mears’ Extreme Survival. His focus now is teaching: he declares his outfit “the oldest bushcraft company in the world” and himself “probably the oldest bushcraft instructor”."}],[{"start":59.6,"text":"We are meeting because Britain is preparing. The government has told citizens to stock up on food and water. Storms, floods, wildfires, cyber attacks and Russian menace have created a new sense of insecurity. Military planners worry that however many tins of emergency baked beans the country buys, fundamentally it has lost its bottle."}],[{"start":81.62,"text":"For Mears, this is vindication of sorts. He gave survival training to British soldiers. He tried as hard as anyone to show Britons the value of resilience."}],[{"start":89.472,"text":"Today he despairs of a generation “who can’t change a tyre”. I am one of them. Yet given the many threats to Britain, I wonder: is changing a tyre the place to start?"}],[{"start":99.697,"text":"I have suggested a pre-lunch walk to place Mears in his element. He plays to type. He drives us, following his nose, to the car park. The entry sign announces a maximum height of two metres. “Very often those signs are wrong,” he says, parking safely outside. Once on a country path, he says he uses an app to identify plants, but he can also tell when it errs."}],[{"start":122.924,"text":"The South Downs are the most benign landscape imaginable. I could still probably starve here. Mears, of course, wouldn’t. “I’ve already seen fire and food,” he says, soft-spoken but certain of himself. “In the [mid-1990s] Bosnia campaign, in Sarajevo, people were eating that lichen . . . Whenever you’re near water, you’re going to be near food.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":146.17,"text":"He points to stinging nettles — “that will fill your stomach” — and feeds me the flesh of a rosehip, which is surprisingly sweet."}],[{"start":154.436,"text":"How long would it take him to make fire now? “If I had a knife and a bit of nylon cord, I could make fire in 10 minutes.” Can I learn these skills? “Anyone can. They’re our birthright!”"}],[{"start":166.856,"text":"If I were on the run, should I just eat everything and hope? “No, you have to have a plan.” Today my plan is to go to the local pub. Mears seems happy outdoors. Militaries, he tells me, have worked out that someone can survive on 500 calories a day for six weeks if they conserve their energy. He signals a greater reed mace: the roots of 20 of these would just about suffice for a day. I’m glad the apocalypse will have vegan options. Still, it’s not the most promising menu for Lunch with the FT."}],[{"start":199.68,"text":"Mears points to cow parsley on the ground. “This is edible — it’s in the carrot family.” Oh good. “But it looks like hemlock.” The pub it is then."}],[{"start":208.109,"text":"“I don’t feel we’ve earned it,” says Mears, as we enter the elegantly refurbished Black Horse. We jointly choose a table in the corner. Such shared decisions mark modern life. Mears, however, emphasises self-reliance."}],[{"start":226.22,"text":"“Top executives . . . people at the very top — once every couple of years, they should do a solo canoe trip. Because when you’re on your own in the real wilderness, you make every decision for yourself.” A solo trip “removes hesitation. You start to believe in your ability to make a decision.”"}],[{"start":240.398,"text":"I decide for myself on risotto plus cavolo nero. Mears orders venison with fries. He dismisses the idea that the meat has a strong flavour: “If you hang it for no more than four days, you can’t tell it from beef.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":254.36,"text":"His interest in bushcraft began as an only child in Purley, south of London. Aged eight, he decided to go out camping to look for foxes. His judo teacher, who had fought in what was then Burma, told him, “‘You don’t need any equipment, we didn’t have any in the war’ . . . That’s when the door really opened.”"}],[{"start":273.658,"text":"Judo was the basis for his study of bushcraft. “The philosophy of judo is maximise efficiency and minimise effort, but also it’s about working as a society to help each other. In judo, you work as a community to create a champion.” Judo also taught him to be relaxed in dangerous situations; during a helicopter crash in 2005, that gave him “something to concentrate on rather than fear”."}],[{"start":298.28,"text":"“I’ve never really fitted in, but I’m not unhappy about that. One of the most important things in life is to be a freethinker . . . Everyone wants to be part of the herd. I don’t. I’d rather be outside, but I’ll watch over the herd.”"}],[{"start":311.96,"text":"Was he bullied? He looks around, evasively. He is a private man. But later on, he gives me a hint: “If you’re taking children camping when they’re young, always get them to bring a pal, so they’re not alone when they go back to school. They have somebody else that they’ve shared the experience with. Otherwise, they get isolated.”"}],[{"start":330.44,"text":"Mears wanted to join the marines, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough. He tried working in the City of London — in a job so dull that he says he doesn’t even remember what it was. He found a way to make bushcraft his job. The 1980s were marked by Sylvester Stallone’s first Rambo films. “I had to play the macho thing down to validate interest in the subject.”"}],[{"start":350,"text":"Some of his TV series showed him visiting indigenous peoples. “We searched out the last elders . . . Most of them have now passed on.” Their knowledge enriched his own. In the Arctic, he showed how to sleep out in -30C, making tea out of pine needles and sleeping in a balaclava. In the Kalahari, he made string from wild sisal."}],[{"start":369.048,"text":"Britons are unlikely to need to make string. But “those trained in bushcraft will easily adapt in a survival situation. Bear in mind that YouTube won’t be available.” Recently Mears has started teaching simple ways of making fire — “in case the proverbial hits the fan”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":383.806,"text":"“The elephant in the room is: what are we preparing for?” He wants a “grown-up conversation” about “armed confrontation with a nation with a serious military”. The UK should learn from Finland, he says. “Their message is: don’t come here, we’ll kill you.”"}],[{"start":398.88,"text":"Finland has a sense of national unity, and enough nuclear-resistant shelters for most of its citizens. It also has a reserve military of 900,000 people. “Reservists are more interesting than full-time soldiers.” The Ukraine war shows that “people with financial ability, people with drone skills — they’re what makes the difference”, says Mears."}],[{"start":418.6,"text":"“Patrick Sanders, who is the former head of the [British] army, said very clearly, real wars are won by civilians. They’re not won by the small peacetime armies, they’re won by the civilians you bring into the army when you need them. That’s true.”"}],[{"start":427.96,"text":"Right now, Britain has “a whole raft of young people who don’t get a challenge at a point of their lives when they desperately need it.” Like Finland, “we should have national service and we should make it enjoyable”. (British military figures are split on national service, which would be costly and change the identity of our forces.)"}],[{"start":447.52,"text":"“My view is: don’t get [recruits] to polish boots until they’ve done everything else, because then they do it willingly. Let them wear their trainers, but teach them to shoot, to navigate, to take care of themselves, to follow orders, to give orders, to hone their drone skills.”"}],[{"start":462.92,"text":"We talk about stockpiles: a lot of water, a radio, light “because when the lights go out, people have accidents”. Ultimately, though, preparedness is not about baked beans: “It’s a willingness to not give in.”"}],[{"start":474.863,"text":"Mears once told Swedish fighter pilots that it wasn’t scouting tricks that bring you home: “It’s the determination that nothing will stop you.” Even with basic fire-making techniques, “you don’t make fire until you believe you can.”"}],[{"start":492.5,"text":"As for Britain, “we need to make [our nation] harder . . . You can put a tea cosy round it later on, but we need to toughen up.” He has a forthcoming speaking tour titled “Be the Rock”."}],[{"start":498.05,"text":"The problem, I suggest, is how this fits with the other things that society has decided are important: empathy, individualism, a respect for difference. “I have no problem with that. I’m not talking about toughness where everyone has to conform. This is a different sort of toughness.”"}],[{"start":513.72,"text":"He recalls when a macho man and a seemingly weaker woman took one of his courses. The woman collected so much food that she could share some with the man. “Everybody has their worth; that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t all be tough.”"}],[{"start":525.734,"text":"Today two-thirds of people on Mears’ courses are men. But “if you have women on courses, then guys behave themselves and it’s better. And women are really good at bushcraft. They’re not trying to prove anything.”"}],[{"start":537.46,"text":"The mushroom risotto is excellent. We’re a couple of hours in, and Mears hasn’t even touched his phone. It sits undisturbed in his rucksack."}],[{"start":546.533,"text":"I ask him how he sees his impact. “Bushcraft now exists as a thing. I’m not sure the bushcraft I see is what I believe in,” he says, an oblique reference to the survivalists on today’s TV. “You get this weird Mad Max version.”"}],[{"start":561.62,"text":"One adventurer, Ed Stafford, marooned himself on an island with no clothes, food or tools. “It’s all contrived. If somebody wants to do a naked thing, they can come up to Lapland with us and see how they cope at -40C. The problem is there’s always somebody who wants to stand in front of a camera and become famous.”"}],[{"start":581.74,"text":"Bear Grylls, the UK’s best-known survival star, once had to apologise for sleeping in hotels during filming. Mears was the opposite. One of the “worst experiences” of his life was filming in Costa Rica, and finding himself booked into an ecolodge. Feeling out of place, he headed out into the jungle to spend the night alone. “I’m just a completely different person [from Grylls]. I don’t want anything to do with him.”"}],[{"start":605.9,"text":"At the same time, Mears feels he has been copied. “There are a lot of things in bushcraft that I invented, I don’t make a big deal out of it,” he says. “Now when I make discoveries, I keep quiet . . . There are people coming to the party who don’t bring a bottle.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":619.14,"text":"Secrecy comes easily to him. In 2010, he helped police hunt the murderer Raoul Moat. “There are a lot of things I’ve been involved with that are not in the public domain and never will be.”"}],[{"start":628.82,"text":"His training courses include a one-day walk in the woods in Sussex (£420 per person). He also takes people to Finland, Namibia and Scotland."}],[{"start":638.824,"text":"He is, however, disappointed that people don’t use the skills afterwards. “I hoped that more people would go into real wilderness and do real journeys. They don’t . . . Don’t just collect [skills] like a stamp collection. It’s the letter that’s important.”"}],[{"start":653.651,"text":"He complains that people don’t want to learn first aid because they don’t want the responsibility of being a first aider at work. He wishes they would share his reverence for nature. “When you’re on your own, the wildlife comes closer,” he says. “When you’re on your own in a canoe, a loon [an aquatic bird] will pop up beside you, but won’t come near you when there are two of you.”"}],[{"start":676.34,"text":"Some people “want to test themselves against nature. You’re always going to lose against nature. What you have to do is to learn to read nature, so you can work with her.” He wishes society could ban the disposable barbecues that cause wildfires, plant trees to stop flooding, and protect forests. “We need desperately to start to put nature first . . . We’re quite immature as a society.”"}],[{"start":699.262,"text":"He loves wolves, not least for their ability to control deer numbers. “When a wolf looks at you, it doesn’t look at you, it seems to look through you.” But he doesn’t support their reintroduction in Britain. “We’re not ready. We can’t live with the hen harrier and the golden eagle. So what right do we have to release another apex predator?”"}],[{"start":717.942,"text":"Mears has a kindly manner, but he keeps his guard up. His politics are also difficult to read. He prizes leadership. He admires Margaret Thatcher, even though his father, a printer at Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, was at the sharp end of her anti-union policies. He fumes at Donald Trump, but praises his militarisation of the US border and his designation of drug traffickers as terrorists. He trusts military veterans in politics when the evidence is mixed."}],[{"start":746.394,"text":"For the BBC programme Great Lives, he once chose the “decisive” German second world war general Erwin Rommel: “What he was very good at was making sure that soldiers at the front line knew what the general wanted.”"}],[{"start":759.689,"text":"Mears’ TV work has dried up since Covid, as streaming eats the industry. “I’ve put loads of ideas forward, but no one wants to make TV programmes. One of the best directors I’ve ever worked with — massively talented — walks dogs for a living . . . We’re watching the end of British documentary filmmaking.”"}],[{"start":778.78,"text":"The venison has hit the spot, although Mears would have cooked it differently — “butter-fried it, with a splash of Worcestershire sauce and a little bit of alcohol.” We order dessert. He pours custard over a fruit crumble the size of an elephant’s footprint."}],[{"start":792.31,"text":"I ask whether life feels like a success. He clenches up. “No. To do that, you have to look back. I never look back.” He hates the idea of getting old. I can’t imagine him retiring, I smile. His response mixes earnestness and defensiveness: “I could go back to my photography. I love photography.”"}],[{"start":812.38,"text":"What about a challenge, like walking the length of Africa? “I can’t see the reason for doing it. All the challenges like that have been done. I know that I could do it . . . If it’s easy, I get bored,” he says. “I want to know about the things along the way . . . Every tree or plant out there has got hidden uses.”"}],[{"start":828.554,"text":"I ask if Mears has a nightmare scenario, for which he is preparing. Does he imagine Britain at war? “I hope not . . . People think that Britain’s weak because we’re slow to anger. But by golly, when we get going, you want to stay out of the way. We’re a warrior nation, no one should ever forget that.”"}],[{"start":846.78,"text":"He references the football fan who fought back at terrorists in London’s Borough Market in 2017, shouting “I’m Millwall”. “We are a warrior nation. In times of crisis, I know that’s the case.”"}],[{"start":858.58,"text":"We walk out into the village, bathed in autumn sunshine, its thatched roofs as neat as Mears’ combed hair. It is a picture of a Britain that almost anybody would die for, and hopefully almost nobody will have to."}],[{"start":871.05,"text":"Henry Mance is the FT’s UK news editor"}],[{"start":874.15,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":888.82,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1794019628_5988.mp3"}