Sir Ranulph Fiennes on life as the ‘world’s greatest adventurer’
Few things faze adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes – except bringing up a ‘tweenage’ daughter. Julia Llewellyn Smith reports
Everything about Sir Ranulph Fiennes smacks of romance. Unsurprising, really, for the man declared by the Guinness Book of Records as “the world’s greatest living explorer”: the first person to conquer both poles, a discoverer of lost biblical cities, and the oldest Brit to ascend Everest.
In this colourful vein, the story of his love affair with his first wife, Ginny, who died of stomach cancer in 2004, sits perfectly.
The pair first met when he was 12 and she was nine. “Though I did not take her out until she was 13,” he recalls. “Her father disliked me very much, he thought she was far too young to be involved with me, so he made her a ward of the court and I couldn’t see her legally.
“He put Securicor upon her because he thought we were secretly meeting, which was correct – in fact all that only encouraged us,” he recalls. “Then he sent her to Barcelona, because there was no extradition treaty then, so she spent two years teaching there, which worried me tremendously because of all the Spanish young men.”
They married as soon as she was legally free at 21. But now, aged 73, remarried and with a daughter, Elizabeth (he and Ginny endured 17 unsuccessful years of IVF), Fiennes is starting to reconsider his actions.
“My daughter is coming on 12 and for the first time I sympathise with my father-in-law. I think how dreadful I was; I never did then. It makes me think you really ought to see every side of every viewpoint. I’m going to be worried about Elizabeth as she gets older. I can’t make her a ward because the law no longer allows it, so I’m going to have to put up with it.
“Luckily,” he adds, “she’s into ponies and we live in the middle of the countryside… that’s probably a good thing.” Fiennes’s patrician features crease with anxiety.
We’re sitting far from the family home in Cheshire, in a hotel bar near Olympia, where a besuited Fiennes has just given a talk to a 100-strong audience of every age and background. He looks extraordinarily well for a septuagenarian who’s survived two heart attacks and prostate cancer, and lives with type-2 diabetes. “And three days ago I had a back operation, two hours under general anaesthetic,” he says nonchalantly.
“The next day I did a lecture at the
Savoy, though I didn’t ask the crowd what they thought about it. The next I spoke at
London Zoo.”
The surgery is the second Fiennes has endured in less than a year. Crippling back pain forced him to abandon his climb of Aconcagua in the Andes last January, part of his Global Reach Challenge in aid of the Marie Curie charity, which aims to reach both poles and the peak of every continent’s highest mountain.
Doctors initially forbade Fiennes from resuming the climbs, but now he is set to return to Argentina, where a rival for this record has recently been set, “so everything has had to be expedited. I’m not allowed to talk about it, because it upsets the sponsors,” he says.
I’ve met Fiennes before and then, as now, was struck by how financial concerns seem to bother him far more than physical discomfort. But then this is the man who, on returning from the North Pole in 2000, sawed off the five frostbitten digits of his left hand in the shed of his Exmoor farm.
“It sounds worse than it was,” he shrugs, surveying the stumps. “The doctors wouldn’t [amputate] for five months for medical reasons, but trying not to touch anything – because that was agonising – for all that time was very hard and, according to Ginny, I was very irritable. So she thought, why not do what she did to cattle’s hooves when something hurt or bled, and cut off the dead skin?
“We bought a vice and a Black & Decker microsaw and put them in the barn,” he recounts. “The thumb took me five hours over two days, Ginny brought me cups of coffee. When it was done, I didn’t want to throw my fingers away so I kept them in a tin in my desk. They’re still there.”
He must eventually slow down but, for now, he is less preoccupied with his body failing him than the notion of his conference gigs drying up. “It’s best to be pessimistic, you have to accept that ageism, like racism and sexism, definitely exists in people’s minds,” he adds.
If short of work, surely he could pick up some lucrative Bear Gryllstype telly gigs? “I’ve turned down that type of show – Dancing on Ice, celebrity jungle. Radio I’m fine with, but to be recognised in the street would be the end. My wife hates that sort of thing,” he says.
On our last encounter, Fiennes came across as far more intimidated by his wife Louise, who’s 24 years his junior and whom he married a year after Ginny’s death, than any feat of derring-do, telling me nervously he was forbidden to discuss his family.
Now, however, he chats happily about his daughter’s ambitions to be a vet and Louise’s horse-breeding business, implying – somewhat disingenuously – that he can’t retire while it needs funding. “Hopefully, the semen will start selling to rich Arabs,” he says wryly.
Ginny organised his expeditions and accompanied many of them; nowadays, domestic life seems more daunting to Fiennes than, for example, completing the Marathon des Sables (he’s the oldest Brit to have succeeded). He doesn’t use the internet, and fumbles for ages in his briefcase before retrieving his ancient Nokia.
“I still haven’t learned to take pictures on it, but my wife said ‘You must learn to read texts’, so I do, but I’ve never sent one back.”
He’s baffled when I ask how he likes to have fun, eventually deciding it’s with a glass of red wine and some mixed nuts. “Then I go in the sitting room and watch the news and some of Elizabeth’s animated movies, and a little bit later Louise will switch on something that’s slightly more human.”
He claims to be unaware about the brouhaha surrounding explorer Benedict Allen’s disappearance last year in Papua New Guinea, which led
‘I had an operation three days ago… and gave a lecture at the Savoy the next day’
to accusations of “selfishness” to his wife and three children, but – Fiennes says – no one’s ever said the same to him. “At least not to my face. Louise is very patient, she and daughter put up with it, no problem at all.” Doesn’t he worry about leaving Elizabeth without a dad – not least since his own father died in action during the Second World War, four months before he was born?
“It’s true I never had a father, but I had a wonderful mum, and Elizabeth has a wonderful mum, and it’s wonderful to watch the interaction between them. So I can’t see it would be a problem…” he tails off.
“Well, that’s the way you think if you never had a dad,” he sighs.
He isn’t much of a disciplinarian, recalling one occasion on which he “plucked up courage and said ‘Don’t do that,’ and Elizabeth’s answer was, ‘Daddy, shut up.’ So I haven’t tried that again.”
He grins. “It wasn’t like that in my mum’s day when you’d have had a slap, bedroom curtains drawn, no supper.” Expeditions aside, the world’s greatest living explorer has another title – being an utter softie.