Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy six, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway this week is a soldier and one of Britain's most celebrated explorers, Lieutenant Colonel John Blashford Snell.

Presenter0:37

John, on your expeditions, or at any time in your life, have you ever had to experience prolonged loneliness? No, I don't think I have. Or I've been lonely for short times, but never really for prolonged periods. What would you be happiest to have got away from?

Presenter0:51

Well, I I think paperwork mostly because the paper jungle of exploration uh is considerable. How important is music in your life?

Presenter1:00

I think perhaps I'd like it to be more important than it really is. My mother was a great singer. My father played the organ and the violin. My grandmother played the piano, and I used to play the drum, but that made the Saint Bernard howl, and I was forbidden.

Presenter1:14

play the drum and I was sent to a choir school at Tenbury Wells instead, where I used to play poker in the back row. Did you sing at all?

Presenter1:21

Well, I tried to.

Presenter1:23

Did you have any plan in choosing these eight records? Are they nostalgic, great music? Well, first of all, I wanted them to bring back very happy memories and stirring memories and moving memories of events in my life, but also, of course, to inspire me, because some of the music that I associate with my past life has been very inspiring. It may not sound like it, but it certainly has. What's the first one you've chosen? From Zorba the Greek. It reminds me of Paphos, where our first expedition was held underwater, where we were looking for the lost port of Paphos. And it reminds me of a little restaurant on the quayside where you got wine and a dancing pelican. And it was a jolly sort of scene where you could watch the sunset and listen to this wonderful, rather potted, but nevertheless very wonderful Greek music.

Presenter2:37

The Zorber, the Greek theme, from the soundtrack of the film. Let's go straight on to your next record. What's that?

Presenter2:44

Many of my expeditions have been uh in deserts, and recently I've served in the desert of Oman.

Presenter2:50

And I think that the uh music that you hear in the theme tune of the film Lawrence Arabia epitomizes the desert.

Presenter3:26

The Lawrence of Arabia theme played by Ron Goodwin and his orchestra. John, you're a Jerseyman, I believe.

Presenter3:31

Well, by domicile, yes. I was actually born in England, but or my real home is Jersey, and my father came from Jersey, and all my attachments are there.

Presenter3:39

You were educated at Victoria College, Jesse. You decided to go into the army. Do you come from an army family?

Presenter3:45

My father was an army padre, and my godfather was in the army, and the rest of my distant relatives were really sailors. I suppose Jersey is a natural place for explorers, because it's a small island, and people tended to be outward-looking, and many of them indeed became sailors. You formed a private army when you were about fourteen? Yes, this was in England. I was a little, before I was fourteen. I became very worried that Hitler was going to invade Herefordshire, and therefore I decided that I hadn't got much faith in the Home Guard, and I decided to form from the girls and boys of the choir a defensive force. And we did, in fact, fight many successful campaigns, mostly against the scrumpers. And in fact, we even had a piece of artillery, which was mounted on an invalid cannon, with which I eventually shot our gardener.

Presenter4:30

Scrumpers, people who were raiding the orchards. Yes, they were. It was really a very good battle, but unfortunately we damaged the church roof, which cost me an awful lot of pocket money. Oh, dear. You joined the territorials while you were still at school. Yes, my father soon recognised that I my vocation was not the church and I should be put somewhere where my destructive habits could be used to the full full force. And in due course you went to Sandhurst. What branch of the army did you work for?

Presenter4:52

Well, I reckon if I wanted to be an explorer, I wanted to be someone who was involved with conquering obstacles, and the one people that do that are the Royal Engineers. And so I tried very hard to get into the Sappers, and uh perhaps foolishly they accepted me, and I never looked back. Where was your first posting?

Presenter5:06

Cyprus to a field squadron which was on active service, and I had.

Speaker 15:07

Do uh

Presenter5:11

For three and a half years Glorus service, the first part of which was playing Cowboys and Indians chasing Colonel Grieves.

Presenter5:18

You did some exploration in the Libyan desert. You nearly died of thirst once, I know. And and you found many relics of of the wartime campaign. Yes, we did. We we we were far south in the Sahara when we came across probably the most southerly battlefield of the Libyan campaign of the Long Range Desert Group and had some extraordinary experiences. And we found the ruins of vehicles and graves where members of that illustrious force had fought to the end against the Italian forces. And they were still there to this day, almost untouched from the the moment it had happened in the nineteen forties. And after your three or four years in the Mediterranean area you were posted to a a junior leaders' regiment. What's that?

Presenter5:57

Well, you may well ask. In fact, at Dover, the Royal Engineers have the Junior Leaders Regiment, which is designed to train very tough, very fit, selected young men to be future warrant officers and NCOs in the Corps. And these are training to be professional obstacle breakers. So this sort of theory of exploration and engineering goes hand in hand because the sapper is indeed at war the whole time. He's either at war against nature or perhaps against men in less peaceful times. But there we teach the boys to overcome obstacles, be it swamps or mountains or deserts or whatever, before they go on to man service at the age of eighteen.

Presenter6:35

Let's have another record, Don. What shall we have now?

Presenter6:38

Well, when I was young I became involved with the church, because my father, of course, was the local parson, and he had a new device after the war, which was a sort of loud speaker connected to a grammophone on the church roof, and it was my job at ten minutes before matins to go in and put on bow bells to summon the faithful to prayer.

Presenter6:57

And those who were hard of hearing could sit in the front pew and they had a strange device that they inserted in their right lug hole and and this would sort of turn them on with bow bells. And one day for a wager with a rather wicked girl who sang on the Decani side I slipped in a record called He Played His Ukulele as the Ship Went Down. And the result was that all the old ladies coming up the road to church were jogging happily and then I turned it over full volume to the deaf in the front rank and really it was most extraordinary. Father was sitting in the in the in in the sort of uh pulpit watching this and suddenly the entire front part of the church began to bounce up and down and you would like to hear that

Speaker 37:35

Yeah.

Speaker 37:36

Own a wireless to the crew, Do the best that you can do She's only short for half a crown, So I'll be out of pocket when the ship goes down The captain answered, Holy gee, It's all up with the Nancy Lee You're all right, but what about me? I shall wet my ukulele when the ship goes down

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell7:58

Oh well that's your fault

Presenter8:07

Ambrose and his orchestra. Well, getting back to your career, in 1963, you were appointed instructor at Sandhurst with responsibility for organising adventure training. You launched expeditions all over the world. Yes, we did. And continued to sort some out for yourself. You went on several to Ethiopia, I believe. Yes, we went on a number with cadets from the military academy and from Dartmouth and Cranmore. And it was tremendous because you were sending these youngsters out all over the world for the betterment of their character and you hoped the least possible detriment to British overseas interests, which wasn't easy. And many of the expeditions we actually went on, and some I even took my wife. On the first one to Ethiopia, you failed to find Osgood's swamp rat.

Presenter8:48

Yes, this was an extraordinarily rare mammal that the Natural History Branch of the British Museum had tasked us to seek out. And I can't tell you the agony of the months in the long wet grass of the swamps in Ethiopia, the mountains, the swirling mists, the snakes, the hostile natives, and so on, the number of traps that were laid each day, and eventually we came back to Britain and said, heads held low, I'm sorry, we failed. And a very delightful white-coated, bearded scientist smiled and looked at me over his hornlin glasses, and he said, Judo, that's most interesting. He said, After you'd gone, I looked it up. It didn't exist at all. It was a complete myth.

Presenter9:23

Then you led the British Trans America Expedition driving from Alaska to Cape Horn. How many thousand miles is that? Well, according to the the the clock on the vehicles it was seventeen thousand and eighteen. Wow, that's quite a drive. And that was done, of course, by a very large team, of which I was the leader, mainly concerned with the central portion.

Speaker 19:34

Wow, that's quite a drive.

Presenter9:41

This meant going across the Darien Gap. Tell me about the Darien Gap. The Darian Gap is three hundred miles of the most unpleasant jungle in the world, and a Gurkha sergeant whom I had with me said that he reckoned it was that, and I think he was an expert. It's swamp, it's dense tropical jungle, a hundred and fifty feet high, it's full of mosquitoes and snakes and funny little pigs called peccary that chase you.

Presenter10:01

Uh it's got um possibilities of one or two hostile people, although uh we only had I think seven Colombians who were killed in an ambush, which was probably quite minor for that sort of thing.

Presenter10:11

Uh but the Colombians and the Panamanians are sisters marvelously. What was your rate of progress through the gap?

Presenter10:17

I suppose we made about three miles a day. We had a lot of breakdowns, everything combined against us, the rains were late in stopping. We had just one hundred days to get across, and I think we made it by eight hours.

Presenter10:31

Some of us still have ideas that exploring means two or three Europeans travelling in litters with a column of native bearers carrying stores on their heads, but it's got a lot more sophisticated than that, hasn't it?

Presenter10:42

Oh, it has, indeed. I mean, today it is very much scientific exploration. You can't have one man with all the knowledge in his head to solve all the problems. And so what we've developed, of course, are servicemen and civilians who have the administrative expertise and scientists who need to get into these very remote areas and solve the problems. And if you can bring the two things together, as our organization, the Scientific Exploration Society, has done.

Presenter11:04

Then, in fact, you've got a marvellous team, but sometimes, of course, it has to be a fairly large team.

Presenter11:09

We've got to record four now. What's that to be?

Presenter11:12

Well, when we marched out of the Darien Gap on Saint George's Day, appropriately, in nineteen seventy two, the sappers who had been leading this assault and cutting through this awful jungle broke into song, and they sung one of our marching songs in the Corps, which is called Hurrah for the CRE.

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell11:28

Good morning, Mr. Stevens, and windy lunching night, hurrah for the city of

Speaker 111:29

Stephen's time with

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell11:36

We are working

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell11:48

Fastering game, hey, fast filling game, hey, fast.

Presenter11:54

Hurrah for the CRE, played and sung by the band of the Corps of Royal Engineers.

Presenter11:59

Nineteen seventy four was the centenary of HM Stanley's Trans-Africa Expedition, in which he crossed the continent from east to west following the Congo River. You decided to make the same trip, despite the fact that only a third of the members of Stanley's expedition survived, so you knew it was going to be a rough one.

Presenter12:17

Yes, we did. We knew we would have casualties, but there was tremendous scientific work to be done in this vast country, which of course is the size of Western Europe. How many casualties did you have? Well, the senior medical officer worked out that we had about 50%, a little over actually, which works out at around about 70 men and women. But of course, a casualty is defined as somebody who is seriously ill for more than 24 hours. And I'm very happy to say that by a miracle nobody was actually killed. How many boats did you lose? We lost two. One was gobbled up by a hippopotamus that was left behind looking rather perplexed and having eaten an inflatable boat was suffering from a disastrous attack of wind. And another one was caught up under some trees and disappeared over a waterfall. This must have been quite a moment when you came out into the Atlantic after how long?

Speaker 112:50

Have you

Presenter13:03

It uh took us just over three and a half months. It had taken Stanley nine hundred and ninety nine days. How much portrait did you have to do? We only ported for a few miles, and in fact on most of the river some of the boats, although not all of them, were actually on the water. It was two thousand seven hundred miles long.

Presenter13:19

And it was extraordinary. It was really was a river that that went on flowing forever. And when we got on to the Atlantic and the Army Padre held his service and cassock and surplus, it was an extraordinary moving ceremony, with the water underneath our hulls no longer tugging and pulling at us, but absolutely placid. And there in the sunset we put up an improvised cross and we had a ten minute Thanksgiving service, which frightened the life out of the Ziawar because they couldn't understand English, and they were quite convinced that we were taking them out to sacrifice them.

Presenter13:47

On a less serious note, there is one record that reminds you of that Zaire expedition that you've chosen as one of your eight.

Presenter13:54

Yes, well we we've always taken girls on expeditions and we had on the Zy River a very attractive and very talented girl called Pamela Baker who was my personal assistant.

Presenter14:04

And as personal assistant, she was responsible not only for interpreting all the various different languages we came across, but also for selecting the music for playing in TAC HQ, as we called the small headquarters. And we had a little cassette player and she selected a number of records, and one of which was called Skybird by Neil Diamond. And it reminded me not only of this enormous river flowing on, ignorant of everything that was happening around it, but also of the vital Skybird that linked us to the outside world, and that was the Army Air Corps Beaver, which used to come in and drop the whiskey and the cigarettes and all the vital necessities.

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell14:39

Sky Burn, make yourself

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell14:45

And every heart will know of the tale.

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell14:53

And him for the finest charm.

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell14:59

Songbird, make your tune!

Lt-Colonel John Blashford-Snell15:04

Or none may sing it just as you

Presenter15:08

Neil Diamond singing Skybird. Now since the Zaire expedition you've been looking for a lost tribe of Scotsmen in Panama. Yes. We were looking for little Glaswegians from Socky Hall Street uh in the jungles of Diamond. But this in fact

Presenter15:22

Was based on many stories that came back going right back to the Scots colony of New Caledonia, which was established in 1699 on the Caribbean coast of Panama. When we got there, the extraordinary thing was there they were. But they weren't white Glaswegians. They were, in fact, albinos, a most extraordinary concentration of them. And our American doctor who was with us on the expedition, even he was taken in for a short time, but he in the end understood that they were albinos. But they did look like little Glaswegians. You're busting some very glamorous legends, aren't you?

Presenter15:56

What's your next trip?

Presenter15:58

Well, at the moment we're trying to develop new forms of equipment, particularly boats, to get up the rivers. We're working on inflatable jetcraft and so on. And I'm also very interested in New Guinea, which is an extremely difficult piece of country to explore. I hope to go back and help to excavate the colony and the city of Accla in the jungles of Panama. And naturally, one always hopes that the curtain on some of these political frontiers will lift just a little to allow one to creep under and get into places like Tibet. So you've got plenty laid on.

Presenter16:29

I reckon I've got forty years left and I'm thirty-nine now. Now, I think we ought to make it doubly clear, you did mention it just now, that in addition to all this, you've done your whack of soldiering. You had a spell in Northern Ireland, for example. Yes, we did indeed.

Presenter16:42

Record number six.

Presenter16:44

The Deco No. Six is an The New World uh symphony by Vorjak. And I think that this symphony is the complete epitome of exploration, the search, the quest. And after all, explorers are questioners. They are people who are looking for something. And I think this music epitomizes that.

Presenter17:57

Part of the first movement of Vorschak's New World Symphony, Ist van Koetisch conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter18:05

I don't think we need worry about you unduly on your desert island. Obviously you've got all the necessary skills, but have you any ideas on escaping?

Presenter18:14

Well, first of all, I think I should stay there for a little while, because otherwise I would do somebody out of a jolly good expedition to come and look for me. But, um.

Presenter18:20

Then I think I should definitely try to escape and get get back.

Presenter18:25

What about a small craft? Could you build one without tools?

Presenter18:28

Oh yes, I was on a beach the other day in the Caribbean, it was littered with plastic bottles and drums and tar and tubs and bottle tops. Quite frankly, you just pick up some of the flotsum and jetsum and float away on it.

Presenter18:40

Marvellous.

Presenter18:41

Let's go on to record number seven. Watch that.

Presenter18:44

Well many of my um sadder moments in life have been connected with Scotsmen. On the Blue Nile I lost one of my best friends, Corporal Ian MacLeod of the Black Watch, a very fine Scots regiment who was drowned with us and a soldier with whom I served for some years. And in Northern Ireland my Sergeant Major, who a man I greatly admired, Sergeant Major Ian Donald of the Royal Engineers, was killed in action in Aumagh and we went to get his body from the wreckage of the house where he was lying.

Presenter19:11

and as we carried it back in the dusk

Presenter19:14

uh to the waiting uh armoured car, the driver had uh an ordinary radio switched on very low.

Presenter19:21

And I always remember that that radio was playing the tune Amazing Grace, and so I think as a salute to all Scotsmen and very many of my friends who come from north of the border, I would like to hear that.

Presenter20:02

Amazing grace by the pipes and drums and military band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. And now your last disc. What's that?

Presenter20:11

My mother was um a very good singer, I thought, and on high days and holidays in the church she would sing Land of Hope and Glory.

Presenter20:19

And this still reminds me of the best of Britain, and whatever we hear about the pound and inflation and strikes, I still believe that this is very much the land of the mother of the free and frankly I would like to get back here, and so I believe that if I heard this on my desert island, it would inspire me to get on my flotsam and jetsum and escape and get back to Britain.

Presenter21:40

Land of Hope and Glory, conducted by Colin Davis at the last night of the proms.

Presenter21:45

If you could take only one discard of your eight, which would it be? It would be land of hope and glory.

Presenter21:50

And one luxury to take to the island with you.

Presenter21:53

Well, I would like to take my multi bladed penknife, but you tell me that's not a a luxury. I've seen it. It's a magnificent piece of craftsmanship, but it's not a luxury, John. Well, all sappers carry a jackknife, and if I can't take that, there are all sorts of inflatable things you can get on the market these days.

Speaker 122:01

Well

Presenter22:07

And I would have thought probably some sort of inflatable boat,'cause it would save me using the Flotsam and Jetson. I'm not going to pass an inflatable boat either. That's not a matter of fact. Well, then I've got something that really is a luxury, and that's a large bottle.

Speaker 122:15

Well then I'm

Presenter22:19

of malt, scotch, whisky, and you can get inflatable ones.

Presenter22:22

And you shall have a case. And one book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare, and big encyclopedias. Well, if I'm going to sit there for a few weeks while Rand Fiennes comes to look for me, I think I would need some poems, and undoubtedly I would take the complete works of Kipling. Right. And thank you, Lieutenant Colonel John Blashford Snill, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much, Ryan. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 122:55

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.