.
LONDON, England / The Sunday Times / Life & Style / Men / May 24, 2009
The action man who once took a saw to his frostbitten hands
has just scaled Everest at 65 but finds domesticity
a bit of a challenge
He has been called incorrigible, indefatigable and just plain daft. At the time of life when most of us would be enjoying the benefits of a free bus pass, old age pensioner Ranulph Fiennes has made it third time lucky in his attempts to scale the world’s highest mountain.
He achieved this feat despite having had a heart attack, triple bypass surgery, prostate cancer treatment and a previous attempt stopped by a critical angina attack at 28,000ft.
But then for a man who cut off the ends of his own fingers in his garden shed with a Black & Decker saw – deliberately (because they were dying of frostbite incurred pulling his sledge out of the Arctic Ocean) – it’s just a rather good day at the office.
The biggest challenge in the improbable life of the 65-year-old Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, who relatively recently became a father for the first time, is changing nappies: “It’s a different mindset,” he has admitted.
See earlier TIMES report
British adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. AP
Domesticity is hardly the major suit of a man who has been round the globe, pole to pole, without leaving its surface, walked across Antarctica and run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, all because he couldn’t think of another way to make a living.
A craggy-faced, blunt-speaking man of aristocratic lineage, Fiennes (“Ran” to his friends) is a flourishing example of a style of British eccentric the world has long thought extinct, a rarer breed than the Abderdeen Angus cattle on his Exmoor farm. In the course of an extraordinary lifetime he has raised nearly £20m for medical charities, and at the same time made himself a wealthy man from books and lectures about his death-defying exploits.
Not everyone has always been impressed, however. When he and fellow adventurer Mike Stroud had to be rescued, starving and frostbitten, from the edge of Antarctica, Anne Robinson described the exploit as a “tiresome and unnecessary risk”, and asked: “Does it not strike you as odd that in order to help one group of physically challenged individuals [in this case multiple sclerosis sufferers] two previously fit human beings must nearly cripple themselves to death?”
Had she not been a kindred spirit, Ginny, his first wife, might have agreed, at least at the time she emerged from the bathroom shouting, “What is this?” when the top of one of her husband’s frostbitten toes had come off in the tub and he’d left it sitting on the side.
For all his charitable endeavour, the real reason for Fiennes’s unremitting challenges to the natural world – and his own body – is it is not so much what he does, as who he is.
Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, was born on March 7, 1944, only weeks after the death of his father, also called Ranulph, at the battle of Monte Cassino. He was brought up by his mother, who told him stories about her dashing officer husband. The family moved to South Africa after the war but came back when Fiennes was 12, to send him to Eton. Despite a morbid fear of heights – which haunts him to this day, provoking him time and again to challenge it – he joined in the illicit sport of roof climbing: “It was always at night, so you couldn’t see the drops.”
Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Royal Scots Greys, but lacked the necessary A-levels to get into Sandhurst. Based in Germany, he got bored with peacetime drill and trained as an army ski instructor and canoeist, which meant he spent three months each year in the Bavarian Alps and another three on the Rhine and the Danube.
Inevitably he drifted into the danger-seeking ranks of the SAS, specialising in explosives. But he went too far in demonstrating the skills the army taught him when he used them on an ugly dam, built by producers of the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle, in the Wiltshire village of Castle Combe. He was fined and thrown out of the SAS, then seconded to Oman where the sultan was facing a communist rebellion. While there he became fascinated with the beautiful Dhofur region and its legend of a lost frankincense-trading city called Ubar.
Back in civvy street, he immediately linked up again with Virginia “Ginny” Pepper, his childhood sweetheart whom he had known since she was nine and he was 12. Ginny, cut from the same cloth, was organising an expedition up the White Nile by hovercraft. Fiennes signed up straight away.
Realising there was more scope for the outdoor skills he had acquired than his explosives knowledge, he led a parachute-dropped expedition down a Norwegian glacier the next year and followed that by joining Ginny in an epic river transnavigation of British Columbia. By then they were already married, both serving in the Territorial Army and working in pubs to make ends meet while they dreamt up ever more exotic and challenging expeditions.
It was Ginny who over seven years planned and organised the exploit that would make her husband’s name: the 1979-82 Transglobe Expedition. Fiennes and fellow former SAS comrade Charles Burton set out from Greenwich on a 52,000-mile journey by land and sea that would make them the first people to have reached both poles by land.
Ginny was base leader, responsible for communications, and was awarded the Polar Medal for her work on low-frequency radio transmission for the British Antarctic Survey.
But the pair were equally in love with the parched deserts, particularly Oman. Despite having bought a farm on Exmoor – Fiennes’s books about his adventures were selling well – they also organised four expeditions to Oman to find Ubar, dubbed by TE Lawrence as the “Atlantis of the sands”. Finally, in 1992, helped by photography from the space shuttle, they located the ruins in a collapsed limestone cavern almost underneath their base camp.
The following year, Fiennes teamed up with Stroud for their 90-day trudge across Antarctica that so incensed Robinson. In 2000 an attempt to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole failed when his sledges crashed through thin ice. Fishing them out with his hands caused the frostbite that ended up in the garden shed amputation of the ends of four fingers and half his thumb.
The last took two days because, “it was thicker”. His doctor had insisted he wait five months to let new flesh grow below the necrotising ends but Fiennes couldn’t stand it: “I was walking around with these horrible-looking digits. You can’t touch anything, if you do it’s unbearable. I thought, ‘Why not just get rid of the mummified bits?’”
It seemed his body was finally protesting it had had enough when, sitting on an easyJet plane at Bristol airport in 2003, he suffered a mammoth heart attack. Triple bypass surgery saved his life. Fiennes’s way of saying thanks was to enter the Land Rover 7x7x7 Challenge to raise money for the British Heart Foundation. On successive days he ran full-length marathons in Patagonia, the Falklands, Sydney, Singapore, London, Cairo and New York.
He collapsed and needed oxygen after Singapore, but recovered enough “after a cup of tea” to complete the last two, though he now admits the whole thing was “a stupid idea”. His success was shattered by the diagnosis, on the day after he returned home, of Ginny’s stomach cancer. She died three months later.
In his grief, he threw himself into a lecture tour around the country, which included Cheshire where the adventurer who hates his own company met Louise Millington, a horse trainer 22 years his junior. They were married in 2005 and Fiennes’s first child, Elizabeth, was born a year later.
His new wife probably knows better than to try to stop him, even if it means her duties go further than most, including running round base camp at Everest on his first climb in 2005, making sure he had his heart pills with him.
Within two years he was tackling his fear of heights by climbing the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland, one of the most dangerous ascents in the Alps. He was back on Everest a year later, once again to be stymied, this time by bad weather. He swore he would never go back, which probably made this year’s attempt inevitable. Fiennes said he returned because by not making the top he only made £2.6m for
Marie Curie Cancer Care instead of £3m.
Having been a British flag carrier in so many extreme situations, those who wrap themselves in it have tried to co-opt him. His 2005 Everest expedition was part-sponsored by Paul Sykes, the multi-millionaire who once bankrolled the United Kingdom Independence party, but Fiennes has so far shied away from the suggestion he stand for UKIP.
It might all have been so different: back in the 1970s he made it to an audition to find a replacement for Sean Connery as James Bond. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the movie mogul, rejected him because his hands were too big and he “looked like a farmer”.
Fiennes made it onto the screen this year, along with John Simpson, the BBC journalist, and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the round-the-world yachtsman, in a series where they each tried to do the other’s job. There were dangers lurking there too, Knox-Johnston recalled: “Ranulph and I were told we could not light a Primus stove unless we were supervised.” Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.
Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.
He has been called incorrigible, indefatigable and just plain daft. At the time of life when most of us would be enjoying the benefits of a free bus pass, old age pensioner Ranulph Fiennes has made it third time lucky in his attempts to scale the world’s highest mountain.
He achieved this feat despite having had a heart attack, triple bypass surgery, prostate cancer treatment and a previous attempt stopped by a critical angina attack at 28,000ft.
But then for a man who cut off the ends of his own fingers in his garden shed with a Black & Decker saw – deliberately (because they were dying of frostbite incurred pulling his sledge out of the Arctic Ocean) – it’s just a rather good day at the office.
The biggest challenge in the improbable life of the 65-year-old Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, who relatively recently became a father for the first time, is changing nappies: “It’s a different mindset,” he has admitted.
See earlier TIMES report
British adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. AP
Domesticity is hardly the major suit of a man who has been round the globe, pole to pole, without leaving its surface, walked across Antarctica and run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, all because he couldn’t think of another way to make a living.
A craggy-faced, blunt-speaking man of aristocratic lineage, Fiennes (“Ran” to his friends) is a flourishing example of a style of British eccentric the world has long thought extinct, a rarer breed than the Abderdeen Angus cattle on his Exmoor farm. In the course of an extraordinary lifetime he has raised nearly £20m for medical charities, and at the same time made himself a wealthy man from books and lectures about his death-defying exploits.
Not everyone has always been impressed, however. When he and fellow adventurer Mike Stroud had to be rescued, starving and frostbitten, from the edge of Antarctica, Anne Robinson described the exploit as a “tiresome and unnecessary risk”, and asked: “Does it not strike you as odd that in order to help one group of physically challenged individuals [in this case multiple sclerosis sufferers] two previously fit human beings must nearly cripple themselves to death?”
Had she not been a kindred spirit, Ginny, his first wife, might have agreed, at least at the time she emerged from the bathroom shouting, “What is this?” when the top of one of her husband’s frostbitten toes had come off in the tub and he’d left it sitting on the side.
For all his charitable endeavour, the real reason for Fiennes’s unremitting challenges to the natural world – and his own body – is it is not so much what he does, as who he is.
Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, was born on March 7, 1944, only weeks after the death of his father, also called Ranulph, at the battle of Monte Cassino. He was brought up by his mother, who told him stories about her dashing officer husband. The family moved to South Africa after the war but came back when Fiennes was 12, to send him to Eton. Despite a morbid fear of heights – which haunts him to this day, provoking him time and again to challenge it – he joined in the illicit sport of roof climbing: “It was always at night, so you couldn’t see the drops.”
Following in his father’s footsteps, he joined the Royal Scots Greys, but lacked the necessary A-levels to get into Sandhurst. Based in Germany, he got bored with peacetime drill and trained as an army ski instructor and canoeist, which meant he spent three months each year in the Bavarian Alps and another three on the Rhine and the Danube.
Inevitably he drifted into the danger-seeking ranks of the SAS, specialising in explosives. But he went too far in demonstrating the skills the army taught him when he used them on an ugly dam, built by producers of the 1967 film Doctor Dolittle, in the Wiltshire village of Castle Combe. He was fined and thrown out of the SAS, then seconded to Oman where the sultan was facing a communist rebellion. While there he became fascinated with the beautiful Dhofur region and its legend of a lost frankincense-trading city called Ubar.
Back in civvy street, he immediately linked up again with Virginia “Ginny” Pepper, his childhood sweetheart whom he had known since she was nine and he was 12. Ginny, cut from the same cloth, was organising an expedition up the White Nile by hovercraft. Fiennes signed up straight away.
Realising there was more scope for the outdoor skills he had acquired than his explosives knowledge, he led a parachute-dropped expedition down a Norwegian glacier the next year and followed that by joining Ginny in an epic river transnavigation of British Columbia. By then they were already married, both serving in the Territorial Army and working in pubs to make ends meet while they dreamt up ever more exotic and challenging expeditions.
It was Ginny who over seven years planned and organised the exploit that would make her husband’s name: the 1979-82 Transglobe Expedition. Fiennes and fellow former SAS comrade Charles Burton set out from Greenwich on a 52,000-mile journey by land and sea that would make them the first people to have reached both poles by land.
Ginny was base leader, responsible for communications, and was awarded the Polar Medal for her work on low-frequency radio transmission for the British Antarctic Survey.
But the pair were equally in love with the parched deserts, particularly Oman. Despite having bought a farm on Exmoor – Fiennes’s books about his adventures were selling well – they also organised four expeditions to Oman to find Ubar, dubbed by TE Lawrence as the “Atlantis of the sands”. Finally, in 1992, helped by photography from the space shuttle, they located the ruins in a collapsed limestone cavern almost underneath their base camp.
The following year, Fiennes teamed up with Stroud for their 90-day trudge across Antarctica that so incensed Robinson. In 2000 an attempt to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole failed when his sledges crashed through thin ice. Fishing them out with his hands caused the frostbite that ended up in the garden shed amputation of the ends of four fingers and half his thumb.
The last took two days because, “it was thicker”. His doctor had insisted he wait five months to let new flesh grow below the necrotising ends but Fiennes couldn’t stand it: “I was walking around with these horrible-looking digits. You can’t touch anything, if you do it’s unbearable. I thought, ‘Why not just get rid of the mummified bits?’”
It seemed his body was finally protesting it had had enough when, sitting on an easyJet plane at Bristol airport in 2003, he suffered a mammoth heart attack. Triple bypass surgery saved his life. Fiennes’s way of saying thanks was to enter the Land Rover 7x7x7 Challenge to raise money for the British Heart Foundation. On successive days he ran full-length marathons in Patagonia, the Falklands, Sydney, Singapore, London, Cairo and New York.
He collapsed and needed oxygen after Singapore, but recovered enough “after a cup of tea” to complete the last two, though he now admits the whole thing was “a stupid idea”. His success was shattered by the diagnosis, on the day after he returned home, of Ginny’s stomach cancer. She died three months later.
In his grief, he threw himself into a lecture tour around the country, which included Cheshire where the adventurer who hates his own company met Louise Millington, a horse trainer 22 years his junior. They were married in 2005 and Fiennes’s first child, Elizabeth, was born a year later.
His new wife probably knows better than to try to stop him, even if it means her duties go further than most, including running round base camp at Everest on his first climb in 2005, making sure he had his heart pills with him.
Within two years he was tackling his fear of heights by climbing the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland, one of the most dangerous ascents in the Alps. He was back on Everest a year later, once again to be stymied, this time by bad weather. He swore he would never go back, which probably made this year’s attempt inevitable. Fiennes said he returned because by not making the top he only made £2.6m for Marie Curie Cancer Care instead of £3m.
Having been a British flag carrier in so many extreme situations, those who wrap themselves in it have tried to co-opt him. His 2005 Everest expedition was part-sponsored by Paul Sykes, the multi-millionaire who once bankrolled the United Kingdom Independence party, but Fiennes has so far shied away from the suggestion he stand for UKIP.
It might all have been so different: back in the 1970s he made it to an audition to find a replacement for Sean Connery as James Bond. Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, the movie mogul, rejected him because his hands were too big and he “looked like a farmer”.
Fiennes made it onto the screen this year, along with John Simpson, the BBC journalist, and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the round-the-world yachtsman, in a series where they each tried to do the other’s job. There were dangers lurking there too, Knox-Johnston recalled: “Ranulph and I were told we could not light a Primus stove unless we were supervised.” Oh brave new world, that has such people in it.
Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.
