Simon Murray is one of Britain’s most successful businessmen working in East Asia. But he spent the 1960s fighting for the French Foreign Legion in the Algerian War of Independence. He talks exclusively to Martial Edge about the realities of war and the Legion’s occasionally brutal way of life.

Simon Murray is a name more associated in business circles with big time global businesses. For the past four decades, he has been prolific in pivotal roles on the board of some of the world’s largest companies and organizations, including Jardine Matheson and Deutsche Bank. He is currently the non-executive chairman of Vodaphone PLC. But before he took to a life of big business, Simon Murray admired Nelson and craved for a life devoted to traveling the globe.

Born in Leicester in 1940, Murray joined the French Foreign Legion in 1960 where he rose to the rank of Chief Corporal. He would leave the Legion in 1965 after fighting in the Algerian battle for independence. In 1978, Murray published a book based on his time in the Foreign Legion called ‘Legionnaire: An Englishman in the French Foreign Legion’, which was adapted into a film in 2002.

His wife, Jennifer Murray, was the first woman to fly around the world in a helicopter and in 2006, Simon Murray became the oldest man to reach the South Pole unsupported at the age of 63.

Martial Edge: Simon, judging by the extraordinary life that you have led, where would you say this determination and drive for success comes from?

Simon Murray: I think I’ve always been opportunistic. When an opportunity comes up, I cease it. When I was 18, I was walking through the port in Rotterdam and I saw people queuing up to get jobs on ships. Two days later I was on a steamer traveling to South America and around the Caribbean. I was there for 10 months. That is a very opportunistic start.

I was brought up on books, not television, and I remember reading about the explorers, and books by Conrad and the Victorian novelists. We had our heroes in those days. They weren’t like people like (David) Beckham, they were people like Nelson. They would talk about going out and seeing the four corners of the world.

Martial Edge: A lot of our readers will want to know about your time in the French Foreign Legion. You served from 1960 to 1965. How did someone, born in Leicester, end up joining the French Foreign Legion?

Simon Murray: When I came back from my boat trip, I was working in a job which I didn’t like at all, and there was a girl I quite liked and she quite liked me but not enough. I was really in a rut. Then I read one day that the French were fighting this war in Algeria, and when I was on a ferry boat from Dover to Calais on my way to France, I signed up on a whim and a week later, there I was for five years off to Algeria. It was all very opportunistic.

Martial Edge: Was it ever an ambition of yours to join?

Simon Murray: Not at all. Last year, I went up to the Everest base camp, which is quite a slog for a 67 year old, all because a friend of mine said that he was going and asked whether I would like to join him. And with regards to the South Pole, it was through my wife who took advice from a guide who came over to stay with us. He and I then started saying ‘why don’t we go?’ then it suddenly built from nowhere into a pretty big deal.

Martial Edge: You strike me as someone who likes a challenge.

Simon Murray: I think if someone was to say to me ‘you can’t do that,’ then I think that would spur me on to say, ‘I think I can.’ I was once the patron of a team who was participating in a marathon, a 160 mile run across the Moroccan desert. I was the sponsor and I was watching these poor devils running through the sand on the fifth day and they looked absolutely knackered, and a friend of mine said, ‘Simon, you would have been able to do that during your Legion days, but you couldn’t do it now.’ Then I thought, ‘what do you mean I can’t do it now?’ So on my 60^th birthday, I found myself running across the Moroccan desert.

Martial Edge: How do you keep so active for someone in their 60s?

Simon Murray: Well, some people are energetic, and don’t get bored. Some people are bored by the time they’re 50. What keeps their interests high and energy levels up is an interesting subject.

The source of a man’s energy has got something to do with your character. The source of a man’s energy can be anything. Hate is a great source of energy, so is love. Fear is a wonderful source of energy. Have you ever been chased by a tiger or a lion? Well, I’ve been chased by a lion and it gives you a wonderful source of energy, but I was on a horse at the time. All of these things form the complexities that motivate us. You know how it is when you meet someone with lots of energy, and then someone with no energy, and the reasons are hard to pinpoint. It’s a very long and deep and interesting subject.

Martial Edge: Once you had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, what was your day to day role, and was it what you expected it to be?

Simon Murray: Not really. I think the English had this romantic notion of it being all about camels across the desert but it was nothing like that at all. It was really rigorous training. It is different to something like the US Marines or the SAS because when you join them you are amongst your own people. In Algeria, I was on the moon. There were no telephones. I don’t think I made a telephone call for four and a half years.

I was the only Englishman in my barracks, and I was the only Englishman in my regiment for the first two years. All the training, the climbing up ropes and jumping over cliffs, is pretty similar in all the other tough military outlets. But what is significantly different about the Foreign Legion is that you are very, very solo. In the beginning you feel like a loner – no one can talk to you, no one went to the same school as you. That’s how it was with me. But I think it’s very different now. I think the British represent about 8 percent of the Legion, maybe a bit more.

The day to day operations were very tough. The day would begin at 2 o’clock in the morning. You’d find yourself in the middle of nowhere, then you’d march through marshlands for about 15 miles or so which would probably take a couple of hours, then you’d get on a truck which would take you somewhere for another two hours, then you’d walk for another 10 miles. So you’d be in a completely different place to where you started at 2 o’clock the previous night.

Then you’d spend a day looking over a valley to find any movement, and you would begin to search. You’d be dropped from a helicopter at the bottom of the valley and then you would have to walk from the top in a line looking amongst the bushes and the rocks. Then you’d walk another ten miles at the end of the day. This would last about three months at a time. They’d take you to the base camp on the coast, you would do guard duty, have nights off, go into town and then you’d be off again to a different part of the country.

You’d be out for about six days at a time in the mountains, come back to an advanced base camp for a day, eat some food, get washed up, then you’d be off for another six days carrying your rations, and that was the routine.

Martial Edge: You were very young at the time – how did you take to living in that kind of environment with such an intensity of training?

Simon Murray: I was 19 years old and it is amazing what you will do if you have no choice. If you imagine the guys in the trenches in the First World War who were the same age, with people bombing them all the time and having to live with rats and so on, they survived because they had no choice. If there was an open door that they could have walked out of then I’m sure they would have.

I saw a television program the other day on the Foreign Legion which featured volunteers undergoing intensive Legion training, and if they didn’t like it, they could ring a bell and they would be sent home. I think if we had a bell in the Foreign Legion we would have been ringing it every night. We had no choice. You just have to keep going.

When you’re 19 you can be quite stubborn about things…

Martial Edge: Did you ever confront death?

Simon Murray: I’ve had people shooting at me. The nearest was when I was on a mountain top, just behind where all the action was taking place. There was a regular army regiment who were having a bit of a bad time with machine gun fire. We had been in the mountains for six days and we were just coming back. We had about two miles to go before we rendezvoused with our trucks, and we were picked up by helicopters and dropped around this gorge. We were waiting to go into action. I was eating the last crumbs of a tin of sardines that I had, and there was a Greek soldier next to me and suddenly there were bullets all around us from machine guns. We were obviously in view, although we thought we were out of view. We rolled back down the hill, and he was dead and I was alive.

That was pretty close.

I think Winston Churchill said that the most exhilarating experience in life is to be shot at and missed. He was probably right.

Interview with Bob Spour Director and founder of SAS Survival, Bob has served extensively in the military spending many years with the SAS. During the course of serving with the latter he saw action in number of different theatres. Bob is a highly qualified and well respected Martial Arts Instructor spending many years instructing Self Protection and Thai Boxing, and is the Chief Instructor to the Phraya Pichai Muay Thai Camps International.

Martial Edge: The French Foreign Legion is widely regarded for not only its tough physical challenges, but also its psychological challenges. As a Legionnaire, what methods did they use to make you mentally stronger?

Simon Murray: I think you’re right about the psychological side which is what I mentioned before. They start by breaking you down to the one common element. Some of these guys were quite tough, particularly in my day. There was a lot of brutality which, to some extent, I feel was unnecessary, and yet when I reflect back on some of the characters I was with, they probably did need some sort of discipline because they weren’t going to listen to anything else.

So they broke you down to a common element. They were always singing songs, chanting ‘Legion! Legion!’ We felt different, and they blended us into a very good, fully formed team. We did a lot for each other in combat. We did more for each other in combat than we did back at the barracks.

But there’s a great camaraderie about it. When I was there, we numbered 25,000 with 52 nationalities. The Legion today is 8,000 with 156 nationalities. They have 197,000 applicants over the internet every year. They interview 5,000, and they take 500. So they’re pretty selective.

Martial Edge: There are myths surrounding the Legion as being particularly tough with regards to punishments. How bad was it and do they still carry out similar endurance tests today?

Simon Murray: I’m not too sure what methods they use these days, I think it’s far less brutal today than it was in my day. We were offshore in Algeria and there were a lot of things that used to go on that would not go on today.

We had a punishment where you would have your head shaved and you were forced to wear a metal helmet and a sack of rocks on your back with wire shoulder straps. Your boots would have no laces in them, so you could only shuffle about everywhere. There would be a man in the middle with a whistle and you would run round him like a circus horse. If he blew his whistle three times, you had to crawl. You would do that for a couple of hours, maybe twice a day.

Sometimes you’d be forced to dig a hole in the ground, like a grave, and you had to sleep in it. That was another punishment – the ‘water tomb.’ It was OK if it didn’t rain. If it rained, it was a bore.

Martial Edge: Do you think that some of the Legionnaires had a hard time dealing with this sort of punishment?

Simon Murray: Well, you get over it. It’s difficult… I think looking back on it, it doesn’t feel so bad. I don’t think they do anything like that today. I believe it’s all running around and jumping over things and keeping very fit, and far less of the brutality.

Legion life is a reflection on what is happening in Europe at the time. So in 1917, after the Russian Revolution, the Legion was full of Cossacks. In my day, the late 50s early 60s, a lot of our regiment were Germans. A lot of them had been Nazis or part of the Hitler Youth. They were pretty brutal, tough guys. And they were very rough on their own kind as well. In the barracks there was a lot of brutality. Soldiers were made to stand to attention and then beaten up, picked up, and then beaten up again. All of that stuff would not go on today.

Does it make good soldiers? I don’t think so, not at all. I think you can train an army without all of that stuff. The British Army is very much a 9 to 5 army, and they’re doing well in Iraq and they didn’t get beaten up. It seemed to be more of a tradition with the Legion. The word ‘discipline’ features in the motto, so it seemed that they had to be very tough. It was an aspect of the Foreign Legion which was very unattractive, but it was there.

French Foreign Legion

Martial Edge: You wrote a book about your time in the legion which was recently made into a film, called Simon: An English Legionairre which focused on the Legion’s fight in the Algerian battle for independence. Did the film get it right? How close was it to how you remember it?

Simon Murray: I think the book got it right, I think the film was a little bit Hollywood at the end. It was made on a very low budget and they tried very hard to get it right. They used very young actors which was probably a mistake. They didn’t have the maturity about them that we had, even though we were only 22 at the time we looked much more like 32 just because of the conditions that we were living under. The actors in this film were 22 but looked 18. And it was made on a shoestring of £3 million. It’s OK… I quite like it because I’m in it.

Martial Edge: You rose to the rank of Chief Corporal, and just when you were offered to attend the Officers School in France you turned it down. Had you had enough of the Legion by that point?

Simon Murray: As a Foreigner, I would never have got above Captain. I would have had to change my nationality which I would never do, and so I thought it was time to move on.

Martial Edge: Since leaving the Legion, you have been the former Assistant Director of Jardine Matheson in Hong Kong, Group MD of Huchison Whampoa, executive chairman of Deutsche Bank in its Asia Pacific Division, founder of Simon Murray & Associates and now you are the non-executive director of Vodaphone PLC. Are there parallels between your success in the Legion as a leader and these extraordinary achievements that you have had in business?

Simon Murray: I feel that I’ve just been wandering along a path. I think you exaggerate slightly when you say ‘extraordinary achievement’. Yes, it’s been different, I don’t think everybody goes my way, but I’ve enjoyed it. There’s a great saying that I like to pass on to any future generations which says, ‘Do not follow where the paths may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail…’ It makes things a little bit more exciting.

Author Profile: Ben Johnson

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Ben Johnson is the Chief Editor of Martial Edge. He has worked for the website since 2005. Click on Ben's profile to find out more information

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