Stan Brock
Former cowboy and wildlife television star who founded a charity providing free healthcare
STAN BROCK, who has died aged 82, was a British born adventurer who once managed the world’s largest cattle ranch, gained fame on American television as the anaconda-wrestling co-star of a popular television series, and founded the charity Remote Area Medical (RAM), a volunteer medical corps which provides free healthcare to poor communities.
The idea came to him as a 17-yearold living and working as a vaquero (cowboy), with the Wapishana Indians of the Amazon basin: “I got given a horse to ride called Kang, which, as I found out all too late, is the Brazilian word for devil,” he recalled. “I also discovered that he’d already killed two other cowboys, although that wasn’t until after he’d bolted headlong into a tree with me on top of him. All I can remember was waking up underneath it and being told by someone in the crowd that had gathered that the nearest doctor was a 26-day ride away. It was about then I came up with the idea for RAM.”
Setting up the organisation in 1985, having sold most of his possessions, Brock began trying to ensure better access to basic healthcare (and veterinary care for companion animals) for poor communities. What started as a plan to help poor countries such as Guyana, however, became a scheme benefiting some of the tens of millions of people (an estimated 12.2 per cent of the population) in the US who lack medical insurance.
The first RAM clinic in the US was held in May 1992 in Sneedville, Tennessee. Since then, RAM has brought its mobile medical clinics to nearly a million adults and children across the country, providing basic dental and medical care through a voluntary network of more than 120,000 qualified practitioners.
Though Brock continued RAM’S work elsewhere, with clinic “expeditions” to countries such as Haiti and the Philippines, an airambulance programme in Guyana and contributions to relief efforts for hurricane and earthquake victims, the focus of its work shifted to the US.
In July 2017, as Republican politicians in Washington bickered over the fate of Obamacare, and hundreds of desperate people queued for days outside a huge RAM clinic set up in a county fairground in Wise County, Tennessee, Brock expressed his frustration to The Daily Telegraph’s Nick Allen: “I just wish I could get President Trump to come and see this,” he said. “The people here are Mr Trump’s constituency, they’re his voters, and it drives me up the wall. If he saw what was happening I’m sure he’d do something about it. Unfortunately I can’t contact him because I don’t tweet.
“This organisation was designed to parachute into the most God-awful places. I expected to see stuff like this in South Sudan and Haiti, but it’s right here in the United States of America.”
Stanley Edmunde Brock was born on April 21 1936 in Preston, Lancashire, and grew up in the Uplands suburb of Swansea, where he enjoyed learning Welsh at school but not, as he put it, “having the hell bombed out of us during the Second World War”.
He was educated at Canford School, Dorset, but left aged 16 during the summer holidays, when he sailed out to British Guiana (now Guyana), on the northern coast of South America, where his father, a civil servant, had been posted.
On the three-week voyage over, he became fascinated with tales of the Amazon: “I met this crusty old settler. He told me stories about the rain forest. By the time the ship docked, I was ready to go out and see it for myself … So I escaped to the Brazilian border to be a cowboy, except there the cowboys were really Indians.”
He spent the next 15 years living on the Dadanawa Ranch, encompassing 4,000-square miles of rainforest and savannah in the Amazon basin, the largest tropical cattle ranch in the world – eventually becoming its manager.
He became fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and Wapishana, and survived malaria, dengue fever, wild animal attacks and “various encounters with longhorns and mustangs, all without the help of a doc”. On one occasion he contracted a potentially fatal flesheating bug after being bitten by a sand fly. “It was inconvenient,” he recalled, “but I got over it.”
He tamed several wild animals as pets, including a puma cub named Leemo, chronicling their adventures in two books Leemo, A True Story of a Man’s Friendship with a Mountain Lion (1967) and More about Leemo (1967). Sadly Leemo was killed by another pet, an ocelot he named Beano.
Along the way he discovered a new species of vampire bat, named after him, Vampyressa brocki:
In the mid-1960s he was spotted by a wildlife photographer from the US television network NBC. “They’d seen me lassoing and asked if I would like to go on a trip to Africa to catch some of the big animals there on horseback,” Brock recalled. “I said, ‘Hell, yes!’ ”
Tall and sinewy, with a ram-rod straight back, Brock ended up travelling the world, co-starring with Marlin Perkins on the wildlife conservation series, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, chasing jaguar on horseback, lassoing buffalo, wrangling wildebeest and becoming known as the “original crocodile hunter”.
The weekly series became one of the most popular television shows in the United States, with more than 32 million viewers, turning Brock into a celebrity. “I also starred in some very bad Hollywood movies, like Escape From Angola,” he recalled.
But he never forgot the Indians among whom he had lived in the Amazon, many of whom he had seen succumb to epidemics of western diseases to which they had no resistance and no traditional remedies.
While still working as a vaquero, Brock got a pilot’s licence and a small plane to bring medical care to the people that he worked with – and even the animals for which he cared. When he left South America in 1968 to join Wild Kingdom, he promised himself he would return one day with a volunteer medical corps.
After founding RAM, Brock spent much of his life flying from clinic to clinic, often piloting crucial supplies himself in a donated Second World War vintage cargo plane. “The need is massive,” he said. “We pick up everything from brain tumours to lung cancer to cervical cancer to breast cancer.”
But, he reflected, “We don’t need to be doing this in the world’s richest country. I would rather be back in Haiti, in India, in Africa, and where this organisation began, in the Amazon, than doing it here in the world’s richest country, but I don’t see this ending any time soon.”
Brock was instrumental in the introduction of a new law in Tennessee that enables medical professionals from other states to volunteer with clinics in Tennessee. Similar laws now exist in several other US states.
In 2009 The Independent reported: “Today Brock has no money, no income, and no bank account. He spends 365 days a year at the charity events, sleeping on a small rolled-up mat on the floor and living on a diet made up entirely of porridge and fresh fruit.”
Home was an abandoned Tennessee school house, with no heating or hot water, which he shared with a blind stray dog. “I don’t need the fancy lifestyle I had in the limelight,” he explained. “When I worked as a cowboy I used to roll a horse blanket on the ground and sleep on it. That’s how I live my life now and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Brock was the author of three books about his adventures, including Jungle Cowboy (1969), republished in 1999 as All the Cowboys were Indians.
He remained active until July when he told friends his days were numbered due to the prostate cancer with which he had been diagnosed 25 years ago.