Petty Officer Janet Riddell (Retd), Royal Navy

Leaving school, Janet was torn between joining the police or the Navy. She chose the Navy but only lasted a day. On arrival at HMS Raleigh, the sight of an ironing board in the messroom gave her second thoughts.

“When I saw that ironing board, it frightened the life out of me… Ironing? (was) something my mum did. She had always done my ironing for me. I thought, everybody else here can iron, I’m way behind.” Janet went home and went into office work instead until the age of 22 when she rejoined the Navy and was assigned to HMS Raleigh again.

Janet joined as a Writer, an administrative role encompassing Navy law, HR regulations, pay and much more. Her training was intense, with a 90% pass mark. “You could be a secretary to an admiral or a general… we had to know a lot to get through those exams.”

When Janet joined up, seamanship wasn’t part of the WRNS training. Once women were allowed to serve at sea, Janet joined HMS Westminster, one of just 16 women onboard. Over the next eight years, she worked across the globe: the Falklands, Sierra Leone, Hong Kong, Chile, Colombia and beyond.

By 2006, Janet became a Petty Officer and was deployed to Iraq as the Royal Navy representative at the American Camp Victory outside Baghdad. Her role involved “…big meetings with the American generals who were totally different to the British… one asked me to make a cup of coffee once, but I come from a council estate, and I'm not used to this posh coffee. He said, ‘Put half a cup of that coffee in there’. I thought, ‘That’s going to be a strong coffee.’ I didn’t think he meant in a percolator! So I gave it him and he nearly died. He never asked me for another coffee for a while after that… it certainly kept him awake for a while!”

Based in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces, bombing happened “all the time… one day I was outside the palace with my bestie, he was a Royal Engineer, and we didn’t have our body armour on, and there was really close mortars coming in. And we just held on to each other. We called it the Baghdad dance afterwards.”

Janet travelled weekly by helicopter between Camp Victory and the British camp in the international zone. On one ill-fated trip, the helicopter was hit, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. “We spun a little bit and came down with a massive thud.”

During the scramble to board a different helicopter, Janet landed heavily on her damaged knee – an injury that would end her Naval career. “…from that moment on, every time I walked, it was clicking in and out. It was awful, but I still had to do helicopter rides.”

Janet continued as best she could for another month, but her knee was “a complete mess”. She was sent to the UK to Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham and later medically discharged from the Navy. Despite years of operations, her knee never recovered. There came a point where amputation was the best option.

“At first, it was a bit of a shock, but… that same day I went back to work and said ‘Right, we're all going out for a drink. Let's all say goodbye to my leg!’… I decided to have a Guess the Weight of the Leg. We managed to raise £1700!”

Janet went back to sea with the help of Turn to Starboard which helps veterans learn how to sail. When asked if she had sailed before, Janet replied yes, not thinking about yachts. When it came to charts, she thought “I don't know how to do this, I'm HR!”

Janet persevered to complete a Coastal Skipper qualification with Turn to Starboard and she is now studying for her Yachtmaster’s qualification. In 2026 she will sail a leg of Full Circle with Turn to Starboard carrying the Invictus flag aboard Spirit of Falmouth, ahead of the games’ commencement in Birmingham in 2027.

“I’ve never looked back… They’re all veterans from all walks of life. They don’t discriminate… they don’t look at my disability. They look at me as a person… they’ve become my new veteran family.”