‘I took 555k cigarettes on an expedition for bribes’
Sir Ranulph Fiennes tells John Wright how he saved money by sleeping in his car
Sir Ranulph ‘Ran’ Fiennes OBE, 78, is an explorer and writer. He has crossed both Polar ice caps on foot, climbed Mount Everest at the age of 65 and circumnavigated the world along its polar axis – a 52,000 mile journey that has never been repeated. Today he is based in Exmoor.
HOW DID YOUR CHILDHOOD INFLUENCE YOUR ATTITUDE TO MONEY?
I was born in Windsor, after my father was killed in the war, and grew up in South Africa with my mother and three sisters. At 12 we came back to England without much money to a cottage in Lodsworth, West Sussex.
I really wanted to be like my father, who’d commanded the Royal Scots Greys regiment, but it meant going to Sandhurst College which required A-levels that I didn’t get, despite going to a crammer.
At Eton I made do with £4 a term, which I spent on chocolate. I was pretty good at not spending much.
WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST JOB?
As a teenager I wanted with a friend to do the first canoe journey across Norway.
A two-seater canoe cost £86 (£1,540 today), so at 16 during Eton’s summer holidays I worked, making £86 cleaning double-decker Southdown buses in Midhurst, then cleaning the polo people’s dishes at the Angel Hotel. After they’d played they didn’t drink all their wine; so I’d fill a jug with leftover wine and have it with my dinner.
We got to Norway and on the second day we hit a rapid and the canoe was wrecked.
ARE YOU A SAVER OR A SPENDER? I try to save. If I’m giving a lecture in London’s West End and the client isn’t paying for accommodation, I’d park the old Mondeo Estate (badly scratched, unfortunately, which attracts police attention) in residents’ parking spots near the Royal Albert Hall.
I have a very comfortable Lilo in the back. One hotel near there for B&B is £290, so you’re saving a lot. I haven’t done that since 2019 because I’ve learnt you can always get the lecture clients to accommodate you.
HAVE YOU INVESTED IN PROPERTY?
In the 1980s with my late wife, thanks to my getting a job with a rich American oilman (Armand Hammer who ran Occidental Petroleum) I had for the first time since Army pay a bit of income, and we were able to leave the Earl’s Court basement for Exmoor to start a farm.
It was an unlived-in stone house: no electricity, sewerage or telephone poles. You couldn’t hear or see humanity in any direction, which was great.
It cost £58,000 [£145,000 today] and we got a mortgage off my mother. It included 70 acres of farming land, and Ginny started with two Aberdeen Angus and 12 black Welsh mountain sheep.
I was Hammer’s west European gofer (vice-president of public relations); on top of my £40,000 a year salary [£100,000 today] he allowed me three months with pay doing expeditions. But it wasn’t a good job. That year [1988] the Piper Alpha oil platform exploded and more than 160 people were killed.
DO YOU INVEST?
I buy shares every now and again in things like BP. I’d only go for a risk factor of four, and I’ve never been disappointed by them.
I’m thinking of buying AstraZeneca. And Dunelm I’d go for: at the moment they’re having a bad run and I’m pretty sure that that would be a good time to buy.
DOES MONEY MAKE YOU HAPPY? Lack of money would make me unhappy, but I usually don’t go for luxury.
When you come back from a trip you get paid by newspapers and television for coverage of film and photographs you take.
But I learnt to never have a bank account or a cheque book with me on expeditions, so you cannot be tempted to spend anything.
HAVE YOU DONE LUCRATIVE TELEVISION ADVERTS?
All the time – we do whatever our sponsors want in providing photos of our expeditions with romantic backgrounds, even if it’s advertising underwear in minus 50.
Best paid was for Clarks Desert Boots about 30 years ago, with the photographs taken in Jordan, near Petra ruins. They paid £800 [£1,600 today].
Then they wanted me to do them in the Asian jungle, but they couldn’t afford it. So they made me do it in Wales and persuaded a load of Gurkhas from the Aldershot regiment to act as porters.
WHAT ARE THE BEST AND WORST THINGS YOU’VE BOUGHT? Worst, some skis that were useless. Best, I once bought a German car secondhand, although I believe if you’re British you should buy British. So I use Land Rovers now, which I think are the best four-wheel drive anywhere. They were our sponsor when we took five Land Rovers looking for a lost city in Arabia.
HAVE YOU BEEN RIPPED OFF?
I don’t think I have because I think ripper-offers go for people who look as if they’ve got something to rip off; whereas with expeditions my rule is “never pay anybody anything for anything at any time”. We have 100pc sponsorship for all expeditions.
HAVE YOU ENCOUNTERED A NOVEL APPROACH TO MONEY? When we went down the Sahara, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast we had 555,000 Marlboro cigarettes, and used them instead of coloured beads or money. If you came to a border post that said they were closed (meaning they wanted some money) you’d give them cigarettes. That was a three-year expedition. When the ship got back to the Thames only 18,000 were left. Customs took them off us.
YOUR EXPEDITIONS RAISE MONEY FOR CHARITY. DO YOU KEEP ANY FOR YOURSELF?
No. We raise money for whichever charity the expedition sponsor chooses. In the 1970s I went to Buckingham Palace to see Prince (now King) Charles, our long-time patron, to brief him on the next expedition.
He said: “And on this expedition who are we raising money for?” I told him we didn’t raise money on expeditions. He said: “Oh hell, I’ve been patron on the understanding that we would be. If I’m going to carry on, you’ll have to raise money for UK charities.” Since that comment by Prince Charles, thanks to the generosity of the British public, we’ve raised £18.9m.
DID THE SULTAN OF OMAN ONCE SPONSOR YOU?
He paid £120,000 to help an expedition provided we would fly the Omani flag if we got to the Pole. It paid for a supply aircraft in New Zealand.
HAS YOUR FALLING THROUGH POLAR ICE MADE YOU AN INSURANCE OR SECURITY RISK? No. I was once threatened by criminals who didn’t like a book I’d written so I had to tell James Dyson that the Dyson Antarctic Expedition couldn’t take place because my wife on Exmoor might get attacked while I’m away for two months.
I’d been to the police for her protection, but they said the taxpayer wouldn’t pay them to do that. James said: “Don’t worry. I’ll provide two ex-SAS officers from my staff.”
HOW MUCH HAVE YOU MADE IN BOOK ROYALTIES? In 52 years I’ve written 26 books, and all up I’ve made £40,000 to £50,000 a year from royalties. The first was in 1970
[A Talent for Trouble].
We were doing an expedition in the Nile and my late wife Ginny decided we should write about it. So she went to London to see George Greenfield, literary agent for the top expedition guidebooks, without asking me because I was un-contactable in Egypt.
She went wearing a mini-skirt and fell down the stairs in Holborn Tube; and when she turned up at his office with one leg covered in blood he couldn’t say no.
Climb Your Mountain by Sir Ranulph Fiennes is out now (Quercus, £20), and his one-man show, Living Dangerously, is now touring the UK; sirranulphfiennes.co.uk