He worked as a crocodile hunter and cinema manager in ANZAC and later moved to China during the Sino-Japanese War, but had to escape via the Soviet Union during the height of the Stalinist purges. Yet immediately after that he ended up joining the RAF and being posted in Singapore, which was then invaded by the Japanese, and he ended up being sent to a POW camp after being caught after trying to escape via Indonesia. During his time in the POW camp, he learnt Chinese, jerryrigged a secret water boiler for tea, and built a secret radio. Following WW2 he was then made an OBE due to his exploits in SEA.
As if that wasn’t enough, he went back to school to study maths and Econ at LSE and ended up developing the epynomeous Phillips Curve that is the backbone of macroeconomics (and his coauthor won a Nobel for it since Phillip died before the recognition).