RETIRED ship's radio officer Felix Owen of Collingbourne Ducis has celebrated his 100th birthday following a perilous maritime and flying career in which he nearly lost his life on a number of occasions.

Mr Owen, who celebrated his centenary with a party at West Farm House retirement home, spent most of his life living at Ilford in Essex, although he was born in Carshalton in Surrey, one of nine children.

He moved to Collingbourne Ducis to live at West End Farmhouse and be nearer one of his daughters, Margaret Allcorn, who lives in the village.

At the age of 17 he obtained a first class certificate of proficiency in radiotelegraphy and is proud of the fact that the equipment he trained on is now a museum piece.

Throughout the Twenties and Thirties he travelled the world as radio officer in the Merchant Navy and still remembers his many adventures.

In 1928 he nearly lost his life on a voyage to West Africa where he set out alone in a small canoe to investigate the local coastline and was pursued "by angry natives hurling spears from their large war canoe".

In 1932, while on a stop-over in Buenos Aires, Argentina, he was bitten by a rabid dog and had to receive daily injections of anti-rabies serum. He survived to become the father of five children.

He was too young for service in the First World War and too old to be called up in the Second World War, in which he volunteered to fly with the RAF's Ferry Command as a civilian radio officer transporting planes built in Canada across the Atlantic to the UK, a perilous operation not only because of enemy action but also because of the risks of the long journey across the Arctic via Alaska and Greenland. Many of his ferry command colleagues perished.

He later worked as publicity manager for a marine instrument manufacturing company until retiring...or that was what his family thought.

However at the age of 69 Mr Owen sat a re-test to get his Radiotelegraphy Certificate back and went back to sea with the Merchant Navy.

His daughter Mrs Allcorn said: "He remains fiercely independent, a characteristic which has stood him in good stead throughout his life particularly after the death of his wife in 1983."

Mr Owen continues to enjoy a lifelong interest in poetry and literature and still loves to have his family around him. He has seven grandchildren.