SIR RANULPH FIENNES
THE WORLD'S GREATEST LIVING EXPLORER
"It is a truism to say that the dog is largely what his master makes of him: he can be savage and dangerous, untrustworthy, cringing and fearful; or he can be faithful and loyal, courageous and the best of companions and allies.”
Sir Ranulph Fiennes
Sir Ranulph Fiennes has spent his life in pursuit of extreme adventure in some of the most ambitious private expeditions ever undertaken. His achievements are lengthy and in
1984 the Guinness Book of Records named him the “world’s greatest living explorer.”
Sir Ranulph was due to be visiting our shores to share his tales of epic adventures and explorations, when Coronovirus hit and the world as we know it was put into a spin.
His talk, “An Evening with the World’s Greatest Living Explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes” has since been delayed and we will let you know as soon as a new date is scheduled, but it will be a treat for any adventurer or simply anyone looking for a motivational and entertaining night out. So to whet your appetite here's a bit about the man behind the accolades.
It seems strange that the person who Sir Ranulph wished to emulate was a person he would never meet, his father. Sir Ranulph was born in England in 1944, at the end of the war which claimed the life of his father just four months before he was born. However his mother kept his memory alive with stories of his exploits as an officer in the British army and that became Ranulph’s goal, to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“My father had been killed in the war 4 months before I was born. I was brought up with stories of his endeavours and I was inspired by him more than anything else… I wanted to do what he did, I wanted to become the commanding officer of the regiment.”
Ranulph spent his early childhood in South Africa, where his mother had moved with the family to avoid the bombing of WWII and they did not return to England until he was 12 years old. Sir Ranulph, or Ran to his friends, talks about his school years with much humour, and also to highlight where motivation can develop. His lack of academic success and the roadblocks he experienced along the way, meant he had to find other ways to achieve his goal, which at the time was to become an officer in the British army, just like his father.
“In his days you didn’t need A levels to get a commission. I was not designed to get A levels. The only thing I could do was get a short service commission, 3 years as an officer and a further 5 years. After 8 years you get chucked out as the rules do not allow you to stay in any longer.”
He served the first 5 years in the British army, stationed in Germany during the cold war, before applying for the SAS. His stories about those days in the SAS are fascinating and funny, including the story of being thrown out of the SAS for his part in a “public spirited gesture” of helping a friend blow up a bridge in a protest against 20th Century Fox. He explains how he came to have so much explosives to do the job.
“I was at an explosive course in Hereford at the time, and at the end of each day I had quite a lot of explosives left over. Rather than hand it back I thought it would be nice to keep it.”
Fortunately for Ran, this all happened in 1967, before the rise of the IRA. If it had been a year later he would have likely served more than 7 years in jail.
But it was his stint in the army in the Sultan of Oman in the late 60’s early 70’s that his love of travelling to remote places really developed. After three years in Oman, Sir Ranulf left the army and returned to England.
“The only thing I could do was to do what I had been doing in the cold war in Germany, teaching Scottish soldiers to canoe and climb to stop them getting bored, which they did cause the Soviet army never bothered to attack.”
"I had just completed and Army explosives course, where you learn to blow up as much as possible with as little as possible. And I was pretty good at it."
Upon his return to England, Ranulph, with no formal “education” as such, had to think outside the box.
“I lacked in “exam intelligence” which meant I had to go into something that requires looking very carefully at a problem, working out where the difficulties of the problem are, and attacking it from that side with the right people.”
He married his childhood sweetheart, Virginia Pepper in
1970, who he credits with many of the expedition ideas. Together they launched a series of record breaking expeditions that kept them ahead of their international rivals for three decades. For Virginia’s support and involvement in the many expeditions she became the first woman to be awarded the Polar Medal for “outstanding service to British Polar exploration and research.”
Virginia had the same love of adventure as Sir Ranulf and one of their first expeditions together was to find the Lost City of Ubar, which the Queen of Sheba had built thousands of years before.
“My greatest achievement, the one that took the longest, was to find the Lost City of Incense in the greatest desert in the world. So for 26 years, after 8 separate expeditions we found the Lost City. It is now the biggest excavation works in Arabia.” A lot can be said there about perseverance.
Virginia passed away in 2004 from cancer, aged just 56 years old and
Sir Ranulf met and married Louise Millington and had a daughter and step-son from his marriage to Louise.
The expeditions that Sir Ranulf has led (of which there are numerous) were varied and diverse but his interest in the Arctic and Antarctic regions was inspired by the need to follow the sponsorship. He explains, that without media coverage there is no sponsorship and the media were interested in the “cold” places.
This led to the expedition to circumnavigate their way around the world from top to bottom, a feat they completed between 1978 and 1982. This route had never been done before and has never been achieved since!
For many expeditions you can study what the person before you has done and see where they have gone wrong, but for many of Sir Ranulph’s expeditions, he went to places where no one had been before. For this he explains the need to have the right people on board.
“Maybe you wake up in the morning and you look out of the tent and you see inbetween the two cliffs, everything is rumbled and full of holes. You want someone who is an expert at doing that type of project. So you take that particular person with you.”
Some of his other achievements, which are extensive and at times seemingly impossible or equally foolish. He has been to the top of the highest mountain, traversed from the north to the south pole, and run seven marathons in 7 days in 7 countries. However each year, despite the challenges, Sir Ranulf has found another expedition to challenge his need for adventure.
As you can imagine, a life full of adventure comes with some great “work stories”. One of the most extraordinary tales was during an expedition in 2000, to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole. When his sled fell through weak ice and he was forced to pull it out by hand, he suffered extreme frostbite to his fingers on his left hand forcing him to abandon the attempt. Upon return to the UK the doctors wanted him to wait several months before amputating the severely frostbitten fingers, however he became impatient with the pain.
“When I came back to the UK, they wouldn’t amputate my fingers for 5 months and my wife said I was getting irritable, so we bought a black and decker bench and a microsaw and in the garden shed, she bought me a cup of tea, and my thumb took me two days to cut off. The physiotherapist said I’d done a good job, but the surgeon was not happy.”
In 2007, despite experiencing ongoing heart issues he decided to climb the Eiger in an attempt to overcome his lifelong issues of vertigo.
“So I trained, because I couldn't climb. It’s 6000 feet of sheer rock face and in the first 300 feet I realised that I couldn't do it. But by then the charity cameras were filming it and I couldn't get out of it. It was horrific. When I got to the top I realised I hadn’t got rid of the vertigo and I decided I would never climb another mountain.”
However that did not put him off climbing the highest mountain in the world, Mt Everest. After two failed attempts climbing (2005 and 2008), in 2009, at age 65 he reached the top.
“I tried in 2005, not long after I had my first big heart attack. I did it from Tibet. On my last night when I was within 300m from the summit, I got a heart attack on the rope. I had glyceryl trinitrate in my pocket and I was by myself; it was pitch black and I was alone apart from my sherpa. I was trying to tell him I was about to die, you would think you would just take out the pills, unscrew the top and put the pills in your mouth but you've got these big mitts on, you’re holding onto a rope, its sheer, you’ve got ice,
“I go on expeditions for the same reason an estate agent sells houses – to pay the bills.”
“You must have your “prepared reaction” to things that go bad. You must have the right equipment for bad things happening with the weather, in the same way in a bank you have to have big reserves."
it’s in pitch black, it’s a very different situation. You’ve got an oxygen mask on, you’ve got clothing all over the place, it was three or four minutes before I could find the bottle, I’m then in a panic situation cause it felt like my stitches where they tie you up after a double bypass were being pulled apart. I took the pills and I foamed like a dog into this mask, but long story short, I survived.”
After visiting the doctor when he made it to the bottom the doctor asked where his pills were and he showed him the empty bottle. He had taken the whole lot, where he should have taken only two. He considers himself lucky to have survived that mistake.
Not deterred from his first effort Sir Ranulf had another failed attempt in 2008 from the Kathmandu side, before successfully reaching the summit in 2009. In doing so Sir Ranulf raised
6.3 million dollars for Marie Curie, a registered charitable organisation in the United Kingdom which provides care and support to people with terminal illnesses and their families, and became the eldest Brit to summit Mt Everest.
To say the man’s achievements are extraordinary, goes without saying. He has allowed his body to be used as a human experiment during and after expeditions, and each expedition has a charity and a science project attached. But for Sir Ranulf, to achieve this he needs sponsorship and for that he explains that “you have to maintain your lead over your known rivals at all times.” Maybe this is what motivates him? As he simply says.
“I was inspired by the necessity to make a living rather than by a previous explorer.”
Sir Ranulph’s life journeys have not been without its health challenges but he strongly believes age should not be seen as one of them.
“Just because you are older you don’t have to make that a reason for not doing the challenges you would otherwise want to do.”
The physical and mental preparation stays the same, it just differs slightly.
“Preparation mentally is learning from other people's mistakes. In terms of physically you have to find time to do something everyday. When you are 50 you go for a one hour run, when you are 60 it’s called a jog and when you are 70 it’s called a shuffle. But you still have to keep doing it.” So how does he deal with fear?
“Fear comes in so many shapes and sizes that no one strategy would not, in my honest opinion, be enough. So we hope first of all that we plan our expeditions with as less encounter with risk as possible, because if you don’t encounter risk you are more likely to break world records and succeed, where other people have run into risk and failed.
Firstly we plan it to avoid situations of fear, but nonetheless every now and then you do.
I’ve fallen into a deep crevasse in a situation where I wasn’t tied up to anything, just stuck by one ski stick between two ice walls with 200 feet beneath me. I was very very lucky to get out of that.”
Sir Ranulph believes that a person’s character should overweight their experience. He believes that you can’t teach character but you can teach skills.
“On one occassion out of 800 applicants I only took 2. One of them had never been on an expedition, he was a beer salesman in London, the other was a butcher in South Africa. Out of 800 these two, their characters were just perfect. When we put them into bad situations, a bad side of their characters did not appear, they were not egocentric, they were not sarcastic when they were feeling bad.”
Despite the best preparation, things will go wrong. So how does Sir Ranulph prepare for these situations?
“You must have your “prepared reaction” to things that go bad. You must have the right equipment for bad things happening with the weather, in the same way in a bank you have to have big reserves. So crisis that don't have reserves are the fault of the people at the top and in my case as leader of the expedition I am to blame if I am not ready for very bad weather at all times, you have to think pessimistically.” Sir Ranulph has also witnessed firsthand the effects of global warming.
“In the 1970’s I was making sledges a little bit waterproof in case there was some water on the way to the north pole. By the 1990’s I’m designing them like canoes because there is so much water.”
So you may wonder, at the age of 73, if there are any more adventures left for Sir Ranulph and whether retiring is an option. We’ll let him sign off in his own words... “Thinking about stopping is like thinking about dying.”
"There is no bad weather, just inappropriate clothing."