Ray Mears - Survival Master

Ray Mears
Born 7 February 1964 (age 48)
Kenley, London
Known for Bushcraft and survival techniques.

It was his school judo teacher Kingsley who fired his imagination and encouraged him to look at the world in a different way. Ray found Kingsley to be a wonderful man. He had fought behind enemy lines in Burma during the Second World War, and taught Ray to challenge conventional wisdom and practices. "You don't need equipment, you need knowledge to survive in the wild", he would tell him. "Maximum efficiency from minimum effort", was another of his themes. These simple principles have been enshrined in Ray's Bushcraft philosophy, in both his writing and his teaching.

Digesting every scrap of information relating to survival that he could find in his local library, Ray soon began to learn skills that had not been employed on the North Downs for perhaps as long as ten thousand years. Since those early days Ray has expanded his horizons, literally travelling the World many times over. Conversing in the universal language of Bushcraft, he has won the friendship of many of the Earth's first Nations, and has been privileged enough to accompany them while hunting, tracking, and searching for wild plants for food and medicine.