THE Lake District boyhood of a remarkable war hero has been revealed in a riveting new biography.

The incredible death-defying adventures of Freddy Spencer Chapman, who was raised a South Lakeland vicarage and attended Sedbergh School, are told by the former BBC foreign correspondent Brian Moynahan in the book Jungle Soldier.

Chapman, who was brought up as an orphan with his brother in Lindale vicarage, became fascinated by danger during solitary rambles across the fells, which inspired him to become an arctic explorer, Himalayan climber and naturalist.

His ability to survive in arduous terrain and conditions prepared him for his dangerous role as one of the British Army’s deadliest guerillas in Malaya.

With two ‘associates’, Chapman is credited in one 14-day period with blowing up eight trains, destroying 40 vehicles and killling 500 enemy soldiers.

The Japanese immediately deployed a regiment to search for what they believed to be 200 Australian commandos.

Later the fall of Singapore left Chapman stranded and he had to hold out behind enemy lines, cut off from supplies, shelter or contact with British forces for 1,226 days.

Chapman, who bore an amazing resemblance to the actor Roger Moore, would have made James Bond envious with his amazing resourcefulness.

Relentlessly hunted by the Japanese army - and once captured by them for a few hours - Chapman suffered an amazing range of diseases, including typhus, pneumonia, blackwater fever, cerebral malaria and dengue fever, before being evacuated on a submarine in May 1945.

Amazingly, while battling against these life-threatening illnesses and keeping one step ahead of the Japanese, Chapman still managed to pursue his inerest as a naturalist, collecting seeds for the gardens at Kew and making field notes on exotic birds.

After the war, he married Faith Townson the WAAF liaison officer who arranged his evacuation from Malaya.

In 1949, Chapman wrote his own account of his Malaya years, The Jungle Is Neutral, which won a Sunday Times literary award.

Later, the Bishop of Coventry, who had been a chaplain at Sedbergh in Chapman’s day, helped him become appointed as headmaster of St Andrew’s College in Grahamstown, South Africa, a leading public school.

By the 1960s, Chapman was back in England where he became warden of Wantage Hall, the oldest residential hall at Reading Univeristy. Later he began suffering debilitating ill-health and bouts of melancholy.

On August 8, 1971, after writing a note to his wife, thanking her for ‘25 years of great happiness’, he shot himself.

*Jungle Soldier by Brian Moynahan is published by Quercus at £18.99.