John Berry was born in Liverpool, England in 1941, but for most of the war years lived in Rugby, Warwickshire, where his father was part of the team building the first jet engine.
After the war the family move to Ipswich, Suffolk, a port town on the Rivers Orwell. It was here that John developed an unrequited love of the sea and sailing ships.
John has two brothers, one of whom now lives in Alaska, the other in Melbourne, Australia.
As a teenager, John was into cycling, sailing, archaeology, and geology. He was part of a school tam that excavated every summer at the Romano-British side of Combretovium, near Baylham Mill, Suffolk. He also took some very long cycle rides throughout East Anglia and across England to Chester (250 miles in one day).
John won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and moved to Philadelphia at the age of 18, graduating in three years with a degree in Geology and within a hair’s breath of another in Anthropology. He then moved to New York to study Oceanography and Geophysics and Columbia University.
During his first two summers in the USA John toured as much of it as he could, at first hitchhiking and then, when that became too risky, on a 150 cc Honda motorcycle, on which he rose 11,000 miles in 6 weeks. The second summer he toured mainly by bus.
After graduation, John worked on Ice Station T-3 (See article for Professional Surveyor) a manned tabular iceberg in the Artic Ocean, then located near 83° 50′ N, 165° W.
John married Arlene Jordan on Feb 29, 1964; when he finished his master’s degree they moved first to England and then to Kitwe, Zambia (see Expeditions and Zambian Stories), where John worked as an exploration geologist on the Copperbelt.
