The woman boat driver captured with 14 servicemen by Iranian forces said that she loved her job because she could do it as well as a man.

Faye Turney, 26, is one of a dozen women who drive the Royal Navy’s small but nimble rigid inflatable boats (RIBs).

“I absolutely love my job because we’re all so close-knit,” she told a local newspaper last year. “You can’t sit back just because you’re a girl. I love the satisfaction of being able to walk away from a job and know that I’ve coped and completed the task just as well as a man would have done it.” Leading Seaman Turney always knew that she might be sent to war if she joined the Navy. “My parents made sure I was under no illusions that I could, and can, go to war at any time,” she told the BBC on HMS Cornwall last week. “That’s a choice I made.

“Sometimes it can be a bit of a cruise being in the Navy, but you’ve got to have it in the back of your head that sometimes you may be called upon and, when you are, you have got to get on with it.”

After leaving the Royal Navy training base HMS Raleigh in Torpoint, Cornwall, she was appointed to serve in HMS Dryad naval base in Portsmouth. Eight years later she became a leading seaman. A sea survival specialist, she has a duty to maintain safety equipment, towing gear and rigging.

Leading Seaman Turney, whose maiden name was Boswell, was married in 2002 in Oxon, Shropshire. Her husband, Adam, who is also a naval boatman, is looking after their three-year-old daughter, Molly, at their home in Plymouth.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry said that the leading seaman had been given complete privacy. “Definitely, all ethics have been observed,” it said.

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