Sir Ian Rankin, Bt
Apocalyptic author, financier and inventor who kept up a rich family tradition of eccentricity
SIR IAN RANKIN, 4th Bt, who has died aged 87, was an inventor and financier, and author of Doomsday Just Ahead, in which he confidently predicted in 2004 that civilisation would be wiped out in 30 years’ time, when the “Earth flips over on its axis”.
According to the publisher’s blurb the book, “drawing on evidence from several disciplines, and examples from five continents”, set out to “completely reshape the history of our planet” in a way that would “divide the scientific world”.
The centre of Rankin’s argument was the contention that there is no such thing as gravity, so the Earth can flip over, and that the Sun is not the centre of the solar system, but is revolving round a yet undiscovered black hole.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, Rankin maintained, was inadequate to explain evidence of past catastrophes that had hit the Earth. The fact that the frozen remains of mammoths have shown that there were flowers in the beasts’ stomachs when they died was evidence, he argued, of “pole shifts” when the Earth moved rapidly on its axis.
More radically, he claimed that human civilisation had reached current levels of cultural and technological sophistication many times before – and on each occasion had been obliterated by a pole shift.
“I strongly believe that we are heading for disaster,” Rankin told The Daily Telegraph’s Judith Woods. “If you are lying on a beach in your bikini, you will suddenly find yourself feeling rather cold at the North Pole. And the associated dramatic weather movements will see humans and animals blown about and crushed to pieces.”
Following publication, Rankin admitted that he was looking forward to causing a “bit of a fray”, but conceded, disarmingly, that the scientific world might choose to ignore his theories – as indeed, in general, it did.
The older of two sons, Ian Niall Rankin was born on December 19 1932 into a family rich in eccentricity. His father, Lt-colonel Niall Rankin, was a Scots Guards officer in the Emergency Reserve, a keen ornithologist and photographer and the grandson of the first Rankin baronet, a Conservative politician and shipowner who died in 1870, leaving £15 million – a huge fortune at the time.
Ian’s grandfather, Lt-col Sir Reginald Rankin, 2nd Bt, was a traveller and big-game hunter who survived being frozen to sleep in the Andes, shot the largest snow leopard on record in India and searched for the extinct giant sloth in Chile.
Meanwhile his uncle, Sir Hugh Rankin, 3rd Bt, was described in his Telegraph obituary in 1988 as “variously a riveter’s mate in a Belfast shipyard; a trooper in the cavalry; a sheep shearer in Western Australia and runner-up in the All Britain Sheep Judging Competition; president of the British Moslem Society and vicepresident of the World’s Buddhist Association; and a campaigner for ‘an independent Red Republic of all Scotland, excluding Orkneys and Shetland’ ”.
Ian’s mother, the former Lady Jean Dalrymple, came from less outlandish stock. She was the elder daughter of the 12th Earl of Stair, and for some 40 years from 1947 served as a Woman of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother).
In 1937, when Ian was four, his parents bought the House of Treshnish at Calgary on the Isle of Mull, an estate of 1,900 acres, which came with a 320-acre chain of uninhabited islands. While he was growing up on the island, his mother would regularly disappear for weeks to London, while his father (who in 1935 had won the International Wild Life Photography Award of the Year, presented to him by Hermann Goering), frittered away the substantial fortune he had inherited on ill-advised bird conservation projects that, as Ian put it, “disappeared into the sea”.
Ian was educated at Eton, where his contemporary, the future counterculture seer John Michell, remembered him as “an independentminded boy, always in trouble with the authorities”.
The school routine was enlivened for Ian, however, by visits to Windsor Castle to take tea with his mother. He recalled how during one of these outings the pair had seen “a little figure bent over a case of medals. My mother immediately went over, took the man’s hand and curtsied. But, as a joke, he simultaneously curtsied back – and they toppled over. As they were rolling across the floor, I realised the little man was George VI.” Rankin went on to read PPE at Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1956 he found himself dispatched to Budapest to show solidarity with the Hungarian Uprising and narrowly missed death when a bullet pierced the car in which he was fleeing the invading Russian army. Knowing that he would have to earn a living, on his return he wrote articles for The Observer and the
before becoming an advertising copywriter for Yardley and Elizabeth Arden.
His career as an inventor took off in the early 1960s after “a man came into my office and said, ‘Do you want to make a lot of money?’ I said, ‘Of course’ … He took me to a shop in High Holborn which sold car seat-belts, which were very unusual in those days. He said, ‘This is the future. Can you design a better one than this?’ So I did.”
Rankin’s design was rejected by manufacturers, so he set about making it himself: “My belt was featured as a best buy in Which? magazine and it made me more money than I’ve ever made since.” Less successful was his “microbike”, a miniature motorcycle that failed to catch on.
In the 1970s Rankin joined the investment world and was, variously, chairman of Slumberfleece, a textile firm, of a company that ran greyhound stadiums and of an optical business. In the 1980s he founded his own company, I N Rankin Oil, and travelled the world looking for hydrocarbons.
It was this experience, and seeing the geology of the Earth’s crust, that sparked the interest in the solar system that would lead him to write his book.
In his entry in Debrett’s People of Today, Rankin, who inherited the family baronetcy on the death of his uncle in 1988, listed his recreations as shooting and yachting, and his clubs as “Royal Yacht Sqdn, Pratt’s, Car Clamp Recovery, White’s”.
Another favourite occupation at weekends was touring the country in a red London bus – adapted in the 1970s as a travelling home for the family, with six bunks on the top floor – taking care to avoid low bridges.
Rankin had a great fondness for India – whether searching for the “Fifth Gospel” in the Hemis monastery at Ladakh; cultivating Indian holy men (including discredited ones); or attempting to levitate, among other spiritual pursuits.
At one stage his wish was to have his ashes sprinkled in the Ganges, before he decided that his final resting place would be the island of Lunga off the coast of Mull, which had been in the family.
He married first, in 1959 (dissolved 1967), Alexandra, daughter of Admiral Sir Laurence Durlacher, KCB, OBE, DSC, and secondly, in 1980 (dissolved 1998), June, daughter of Captain Thomas Marsham-townshend.
In 2013 when he was married for a third time, to the acclaimed interior designer Prue Lane Fox, he announced the news in an advertisement which read: “They will no longer be living in sin, but in London and Hampshire.” She survives him with a son and daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second.
His eldest son, Gavin Niall Rankin, born in 1962, succeeds in the baronetcy.
Sir Ian Rankin, 4th Bt, born December 19 1932, died November 10 2020