S17, Ep7 Sir Ranulph Fiennes on adventure, fertility and living up to his father's memory

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1:16Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger. Because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day, and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Sir Ronald Fiennes is one of the greatest British explorers of all time. He is a mountain climber, Arctic skier, desert runner, best-selling author, sought-after public speaker, and a notable fundraiser, raising almost 20 million pounds for charity.

2:04He was born in 1944, inheriting a baronet seat from his father, an army officer who had died in action in World War II. Fiennes spent the first 12 years of his life with his paternal grandmother's family in South Africa, before returning to England and attending, unhappily, Eton College. After failing to get into Sandhurst, he was eventually accepted for training by the SAS. He served in the British Army for eight years. His adventurous spirit has led him to complete some extraordinary feats of human endurance. He led the first north-south surface circumnavigation of the world, was the first person to cross Antarctica on foot and in 2003 ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents despite suffering a heart attack and undergoing a double coronary artery bypass just four months before.

3:00In May 2009 at the age of 65 he became the oldest Britain ever to summit Mount Everest. His new book, Climb Your Mountain, is out now. Now one year shy of his 80th birthday, I find myself truly honoured to sit opposite this astonishing individual. But I'm also a bit nervous because in a previous interview, Sir Ranulf admitted, I'm not introspective and find it awkward having to dig within myself to produce replies to journalistic questions about motivation. So Ranul Fiennes, I accept that challenge and welcome to How to Fail. Thank you very much. Indeed, definitely my first podcast ever. Well, this is so exciting because as someone who epitomizes so many firsts, I'm extremely touched that How to Fail is your first podcast.

3:52Thank you. No, not at all. Thanks for asking me. It's actually 19.8 million, as we've got up to, for different charities. And each expedition probably has a sponsor to make it possible financially. And the sponsor, whether it's James Dyson or Excel or whatever, will decide which charity to go for. Interesting. £19.8 million though. Are you proud of that? Yeah. Well, we hope for more, of course, as things go on. But yeah, we're definitely proud of it. but we realized that it wouldn't have happened because in the 60s and 70s, we did expeditions with nothing like that. But the patron was pretty much always not, he didn't always agree, but Prince Charles was the patron of most of the expeditions.

4:42You'd have to go to Highgrove or whatever and explain to him what the next expedition was about. Otherwise, he wasn't going to agree just off the cuff like that. And on one expedition, we were at Highgrove with him, and he suddenly said, and who are we going to raise money for on this next one? And I said, so, we're trying to beat other people like the Norwegians for that record, you know, if we don't raise money. And he said, oh, hell, you know, I wouldn't be your patron if you're not raising money. And I said, well, who for? He said, well, I'll let you know. And about two months later, he said multiple sclerosis that he chose.

5:23And we got 4.2 million for that one. And from then on, every time we went on an expedition, and we've raised it up to nearly 20 million, just because of his one comment on that day. How fascinating. You mentioned two things there, both the charitable causes, raising money, but your competitive spirit. How competitive do you think you are? Well, I hope not so competitive that we do stupid things to beat them. Them being the Norwegians. Is it always the Norwegians? Well, we've found that they are very, very good at snow and ice obstacles sort of thing. So we study where they've failed on previous expeditions.

6:04And we don't call them rivals. We call them enemy in order to make sure our blokes do better. You mentioned there that you studied the Norwegians' failures to acquire data about what to do differently. How much do you study your own failures? We talk about it a lot. We all talk about failures because that's key to success, getting it right. We learned to follow the example of the Norwegians. And where they failed, we initially started thinking of another way of getting through that risk, if you can't get around it. And that just didn't work. So we plotted and took a great deal of time. And my first wife was an advocate of this, of not trying to find another way of doing the risk, but definitely finding a way around the risk.

6:54So not taking it. And that was a way of helping not to fail. Can I ask which for you is worse, extreme cold or extreme heat? Definitely extreme heat. We always take Antistan because if it's a hot expedition, or search for a lost city, or going through the Sahara on the way around the world or somewhere, so on hot expeditions, plus in the army, I was in a very hot country, Oman, fighting the communists in the 1968-69 period. And yeah, the hot expeditions, it's very, very difficult to keep cool. It's not difficult to keep warm in the cold. You just put extra clothes on. The great saying is, you know, it's not the fault of the cold.

7:40It's the fault of your clothing, your fault. There are so many questions I want to ask you. Before we get on to Ginny, your late wife, and all of your expeditions that you did together, I wonder if you could tell us the story of chopping off your own frostbitten fingers yeah I mean I've always and one has to be honest over the sort of thing not even consider taking on to my team somebody who's got frostbite damage because if they've got it it's going to get quicker back to being very bad sort of thing and the hands and the feet and sometimes less important things like the nose and the ears and so on, get very bad frostbite if you make a brief mistake in the wrong area at the wrong time.

8:24So it's very much available, and you have to learn to know exactly what the dangers of frostbite are. And if you don't succeed, then as I didn't succeed on one particular expedition, and that wasn't falling into a crevasse in Antarctica, it was falling into the sea through broken ice. I tried crossing it and it turned out to be nylas, which is a type of black ice, which is dicey. So your frostbitten fingers was when you went into this black ice. And didn't a doctor say to you when you returned, you've got to leave them, you've just got to leave them before I can amputate them? For five months.

9:03For five months. Well, yeah, I mean, not just frostbite. If you have your fingers damaged sort of thing, then the dead bits stuck on the end of the live bits and the the live bits have the nerve ends in your fingers so five months waiting each time the dead bit touches the end of the things is very painful and Ginny said I was getting very irritable and that anyway she was shorthanded on the farm and didn't get too much sympathy getting irritable which I was yeah getting irritable and And so she said, because she often used to cut the hooves back because they get too long on Abedin Angus bulls and so on, if she hadn't got far enough away from the live part of the hoof, it would sort of kick around and so on.

9:50So she'd move the clippers into the dead out of it. And she said, why not do that with your fingers? And anyway, we bought a Black & Decker workbench to hold it steady and a fret saw. Well, actually, it's called a something else saw. It's much thinner. It's very, very thin. Jenny bought me cups of coffee and so on. That one, the thumb took two and a half days because of the big, thick bone in the middle sort of thing. Oh, my God. But I have to say that the physics lady on Bristol in the hospital said I'd done a good job. Did she? Yeah. You are extraordinary. You've kept them, haven't you, the tips of your fingers and your thumb?

10:31I did keep them because of mice. I had them in the centre drawer of my office. I couldn't throw them away. I'd had them for over 60 years. Yes. After a bit, one of them disappeared. And Joyce said it was mice. So I put them in a yellow Kodak film can and kept them that way. And I think I've still got them somewhere, yeah. Okay. I want to ask you about Ginny. And I will also ask you about your wife now. And you've got a 17-year-old daughter called Elizabeth, great name. but there's so much that I loved about yours and Ginny's story that you met as children she lived next door didn't she well when I was about one I got taken because my dad died four months before I was born and I was taken by his mum my granny who was South African Cape Town and when her son my father had died her other elder son had died in the first world war with Gordon Highlanders Dad was Scots Graze.

11:28When both her sons were dead, she wanted to go back in her 80s to die with her family back in Cape Town. So being a bossy granny, she took my mum and three elder sisters and me, aged about one, out to South Africa. And then when she died, after I think about 10 years, mum wanted to go back with the rest of us to England. So I would have been about 12 when I got to UK. She settled in Sussex in a cottage. and the next door neighbors on the other side of the river, you could hear their generator going in those days. They had a daughter of nine. So she was three years younger than me. And she's the first time I thought of a girl.

12:08She was fantastically lovely and so on. And I took her out. Her father didn't like me. Her mom was lovely and did. Got on with my mom. But dad eventually made her into a ward of court so that she couldn't see me legally. that made it very difficult because we had to meet up surreptitiously as it were security corps was involved and nothing serious you know but the father rang up when i was in the army maybe i was 17 or 18 and told the colonel of my regiment that one of his officers was hounding his daughter the colonel didn't mind at all but sort of expressed sympathy dad didn't actually speak to us until five years after we got married.

12:53Goodness. And then he came around. But I have to say, now that I've got a daughter of 17, I can see his point. And so we were, I suppose, what you call childhood sweethearts. Yes. And before I had to go to the Arab army for two and a half years, I proposed in our local town of Midhurst in a minivan, not very romantic circumstances. I thought I'd better get engaged before going away for two years because there were all sorts of other boys in the area who were keen on her. So we got married within a month of my getting back from this army. She had no money. I'd not passed into Sandhurst, so my dream of becoming a colonel was considerably lessened.

13:40Which we'll come on to, I promise. Okay. So yes, I got married to Ginny when I was 24 and she was 21. And we neither had really history of what you call A-levels. So getting an income was very important. And I had a legacy for my South African grandmom of 8 ,000 quid. We got a basement flat in Earl's Court. You could hear the rumble of the tube train. Ginny decided that we could do what I had been doing in the the Scots Graves, my father's regiment, when I did get into it, not as a colonel from not Sandhurst, she decided that because I'd been doing what the army called adventure training, because we at that time, rather like Ukraine at the moment, people forget this, you know, they're too young to remember it.

14:27We in the West were really threatened by the Warsaw Pact army, much bigger than our own European army, waiting for them to attack from East Germany border to West Germany, in tank regiments like the Scots Graze, you're sitting on the border waiting for them to attack. So when they didn't attack, the Glaswegian soldiers in my Scottish regiment got bored and started beating each other up in the NAFI instead. Adventure training took their minds off it, and I was made the adventure training officer in the Scots Graze for canoeing and climbing in the summer, in wintertime in Bavaria, cross-country skiing, Langlau skiing.

15:05And so Ginny, when we got married, said, why don't we, you and I, start an adventure training exercise and we'll make an income? And I said, well, because when I was doing it in the army, the taxpayer paid. They're not going to pay for us. And Ginny said, yes, they will if we do it the correct way. Back in those days, you could only watch in England ITV 1 and 2, BBC 1 and 2. And Peak Viewing, one of the major films on Saturday nights, was called the World About Us series. And it was normally great records that people were trying to break. She said, so we will concentrate not on little journeys up the Thames to find a new butterfly.

15:45We'll go for big, big records. The BBC will make films. Sponsors will clamor. What a clever woman. And to cut a long story short, that worked. But she sent me to libraries normally to find out the best route if you're going across Antarctica or whatever. and I can remember going to look at Antarctica and the Arctic and found that Antarctica was bigger than America, but nobody had ever crossed it by any route. Not Scott, Shackleton, Hammonson, Nansen. No, never crossed the entire continent of Antarctica, which is bigger than America, particularly without support. So I went home and I told Jenny that one of her ideas to do the first journey around earth really wasn't practical at all.

16:29She got quite annoyed. So I sort of went back to the library, worked out a sort of way of doing it. And from then on, it worked. Her plot, that's how finance... And that basic rule was never pay a penny to anybody for anything. Sponsorship must be 100%. And it sounds like she shared your adventurous spirit as well. I mean, that you had this extraordinary thing in common. She did identify risks and work out how to do them, find a completely different place, not a different way of getting over the problem. So in that way, yes, what you say is correct. Can I ask you about something? I don't know whether you've been asked about it before, but I ask this from a very personal place, because I read that you and Ginny did 17 years of fertility treatment, and then sought to adopt and were told you couldn't because you weren't financially stable.

17:23I'm someone who has had 12 years of fertility treatment unsuccessfully. And so I can imagine a bit of your pain at that point. It's very rare to hear men talk about it. And I wonder if I could ask you about what that experience was like. Well, we did the IVF thing for 17 years, Ginny and me, and they couldn't find anything wrong with either of us. And if they couldn't find what was wrong, they couldn't put it right. So eventually, after 17 years or 20 years or whatever, we decided that we would adopt. But we were told we couldn't adopt because we had no predictable income, which we didn't. And then we waited a little bit longer.

18:06And I luckily got a job with an American oil guy who had sponsored an expedition. And so I did have a predictable income. But by then I was over 40. so you couldn't adopt. So we gave up. I'm so sorry. And I'm also sorry that Ginny very sadly died after you had, I think, 40 years of marriage together. Yeah, about 36, I think. Yeah. But we'd long been attached before. Of course. Yeah, that was immensely sad. And I found that I was just useless. I couldn't do anything, couldn't do a damn thing. And for a year or so on the farm, I used to go up to the cars, generally give them all names. I used to talk to them up in the car shed.

18:52And it was a useless waste of time as a person. So eventually, I decided to kick out of it and try to deal with vertigo. I thought, why don't I try and attack vertigo? I dealt with spiders, which is my other, what do you call it? Your phobia. Phobia, yeah. but I dealt with spiders because back in South Africa when I was about seven or eight in the morning I used to go into mum's room and draw her curtains before I went to school and one morning a big South African spider dropped down the curtains into my pajama back and bit me and that I think is what set that phobia off because by the time I arrived in England I was frightened even of stupid little British spiders but then when I got to Arabia to join the Arab army I was confronted one day by being flown into where all the six Land Rovers of the reconnaissance platoon, which I was going to be the boss of for two and a half years, were all sitting waiting to look at their next Brit boss, who would be in charge of doing stupid things and they're getting killed for two and a half years.

19:59And they all sort of were staring at me. They had a fire with the goat and the important new guest gets the eyes. So you have to look as if it's happy eating the goat's and they're all staring at me. And typically a wolf spider, 11 inch legs, hairy sort of thing, rather like the camel spider, came across my trousers as we were sitting around the fire. And I know that I would have screamed and smashed it, but I was more frightened of losing their respect than I was of the spider. And for the next two years, they were everywhere in and out of your sleeping bag and they never bit you. So I lost my fear, my phobia.

20:38It's so interesting hearing you talk about fear, because I think that many people, when they read about you or they watch a documentary about you, would think that you don't experience fear because you appear phenomenally brave. But actually, it strikes me that fear is part of bravery. You never eliminate it. You just learn to live alongside it. I think that's a good way of putting it, yeah. Because you know you're wanting to succeed to beat the Norwegians at the next record. And you're not going to succeed by being too frightened of something. Yes. And my colleague of 30 years since Charlie Burton died, Dr.

21:17Michael Stroud, he agrees with that way of doing it. Two is, in our opinion, the best number to go. If you have three, you've got two more legs to break sort of thing. Yes. So two is ideal. And if one falls down or whatever, one can carry on. And I remember when Mike and I did seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Shortly after you'd had a heart attack. After I'd had it, yeah, that's right. And double bypass and so on. Mike showed how amazingly strong he was because after the first marathon was in Antarctica, the next day it was in South America. Then you had to fly to the next continent because we had seven different continents in only seven days.

22:03Luckily, British Airways could just about manage it as long as you caught the regular flight. So you only had five hours, including getting through customs into the new continent and getting out again. So Land Rover and British Airways helped immensely to cut down the time when you weren't actually running. But yeah, it was a very close thing. And I remember on the third one, which was in Australia, that's a continent. When we got to the finish, I was really completely knackered. The next day would be Singapore, very humid. And then that night flying to the next one in Europe. So yeah, I was getting very knackered.

22:37And when I got to the end of Singapore, I told the Times and ITV who were filming it, or maybe it was BBC, I can't remember. At the finishing post of that one, I said, I can't go anymore, I really can't. I got taken to an ambulance on a drip. But Mike Stroud was half an hour behind me and he was peeing blood and being sick. And when he got to the finish, he was told by the BBC bloke, ran has dropped out. He's in the ambulance over there. Mike said, he's not dropping out, and I'm not dropping out. And he came to the ambulance, and he gave me these pills. He's a doctor. And I felt much better within an hour or so, and I agreed to carry on.

23:18But basically, if one of us had done it, it would soon be successful.

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25:12I'm going to come back on to how you conquered your fear of heights because it pertains to your second failure. But I'm very aware that I'm just so fascinated by what you're saying that I might never get onto your failures at all. And then we won't have a podcast episode. So let me get onto your first failure, which is your failure to follow in the footsteps of the father you never met when you didn't get into Sandhurst. Will you explain to us how much your father guides you in your life? How much you wanted to make him proud, even though you hadn't ever met him? Well, he, having died four months before I was born, I learned all about him from my mum and my older sister.

25:54My older sister was 10 years older, and then the next one was eight, and the next one was still alive. She was five years older, Jill. And I learned from the sisters as well as mum about dad, and his dad as well, my granddad, who'd also died at about the same time his dad was killed. So I learned all about my dad, and I used to use the fact that he and my granddad were walking beside on the big, difficult expeditions, that they were right there. And I didn't want to let them down by being ashamed of me by giving up. That's how I, in my mind, fought the weak, wimpish voice coming in saying, you've got to stop, you're getting gangrene and all this sort of stuff.

26:37Yeah, it worked pretty well. So I used dad's and granddad's examples of what they'd done. particularly him doing so amazingly in the Second World War, wounded five times, commanding the tank regiment, the Scots Graves, at the Battle of Alamein, which is a vital battle. Later, after another wound, got back to being colonel again when the Eighth Army attacked from the bottom of Italy at Salerno. Again, he was commanding in that occasion. So I really wanted to be colonel of that regiment like he had. That was what I wanted, my one thing in life, basically from when I was small was to do that. So to fail to get to be colonel was a great thing in my life.

27:21And I did fail to get colonel because I'm not blaming South African standard of education, but being at four schools from the age of four to about 10 or 11. When we went to England, all of us. All my sisters did very well at universities and so on. And I went to try to get to Winchester College in order to get my A-levels, without which I wouldn't get to Sandhurst. And if I didn't get to Sandhurst, I'd never go to be a colonel of the Scots Graves. So A-levels were absolutely vital. Winchester, unfortunately, didn't work because although there was a thing called Founders' Kin, meaning that the Tussle and Wickham Fiennes founded Winchester.

28:05And you got Founders' Kin, which meant you could have free, which is good because mum didn't have any, you know, wherewithal at that time. But because there were so many, we were breeding like rabbits at that time. And so it became not economical for Winchester to do it. So then they added the fact that you'd have to get your common entrance exam passed to get into Winchester at a high level. and I couldn't. So what could I do? They said, well, go to somewhere where you don't have to have the high level of intelligence like Eton College. So went there instead. But after five years there, the housemaster told my mom, he's not going to get A-levels, I'm afraid.