A Great British Eccentric

There are many ways you could describe Sir Ranulph Fiennes OBE: a great British eccentric; an elite SAS soldier; onetime potential successor to Sean Connery’s James Bond or, as the Guinness World Records does – as the “World’s Greatest Living Explorer”.

This April Sir Ranulph is hoping to reach the summit of Mount Everest and raise £3 million for Marie Curie Cancer Care. Sir Ranulph is going to be climbing with mountain guide Kenton Cool and high-altitude cameraman and medic Dr Rob Casserley.

This will be the second expedition in which Sir Ranulph has raised funds for the charity. March 2007 saw him bivouacked on a one-metre-wide, snow-encrusted ledge, on the north face of the Eiger. The climb raised £1.8 million for the Marie Curie Delivering Choice Programme.

Over his 63 years, Fiennes has built up an extraordinary CV. At the forefront of major expeditions since 1969, he was the first man to visit both the north and south poles by land and the first to cross the Antarctic on foot. The Transglobe Expedition saw Fiennes spend three years, from 1979 to 1982, circumnavigating the globe along a line of latitude that passes through both poles. In more recent years, he has run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days, and made an attempt to climb Everest.

His expeditions have raised in excess of £10m for charity to date.

It was an effort to pick himself up after the death of his first wife in 2004: climbing the Eiger gave him something to focus on. The tenacity and grit that he applies to all his expeditions, plus his ability to pick a great team, saw him achieve this goal last March. “I was starting again at the bottom of the ladder. So whatever I had done in the past, in the polar world, was useless,” says Fiennes. He spent two years training; first on climbing walls and then in Chamonix in the French Alps with team leader, Kenton Cool.

Fiennes is not a natural climber. He has lost half his fingers on his left hand to frostbite and undergone heart bypass surgery. He had no mountaineering experience and suffers from severe, panic-inducing vertigo.

“Horrific, hairy and exposed” is how Fiennes described the climb, which took five days to finish. He later added: “It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I really hate it when books, or anywhere else, use words like ‘terrifying’ because you are in grave danger of being accused of being melodramatic – so I steer clear of it. But in this particular case, it is totally apt; it is the sweaty horror that you do feel.”

The explorer currently lives in Somerset with his second wife Louise, stepson Alexander and daughter Elizabeth. The third cousin of Hollywood actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, his full name is Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE; or Ran to his friends.

Having lived in South Africa until he was 12, he returned to the UK and was educated at Eton. He then followed his father, who died in action in the Second World War before he was born, into the military.

After eight years of service; five of which were in the SAS, Fiennes found himself in need of a fulltime career. As he puts it himself: “26 is quite old to start out in life with no qualifications… I had no business connections and no sure idea of any particular goal.”

Inspiration came from Virginia (Ginny) Pepper, his childhood sweetheart and future wife; they remained married until her death in 2004.

On a whim, she visited George Greenfield, Britain’s bestknown literary agent for adventurers. Greenfield then commissioned Fiennes to write about his 1969 White Nile expedition, a journey done by mini-hovercraft.

Fiennes soon began giving expedition lectures; mostly, he recalls, in “town halls to ladies over 70”. It was Ginny who also pointed out that to be successful at expeditions, the team must be the first humans, not merely the first British, to get there. These beginnings were to set the blueprint for Fiennes’s career as a record-breaking explorer and best-selling writer.

Four years ago, Fiennes lost his mother, two of his three sisters and his first wife, Ginny, to cancer, over an 18-month period. “The period after Ginny died was a bad time for me; a very bad time indeed,” he says. “I’d been married happily for 36 years; I had known her since she was nine and I was 12, and I’d been taking her out since she was 13.

“When she wasn’t there, after the cancer, I desperately wanted not to succumb to weed and vegetate, and there was a grave danger of that. Many people die after their nearest and dearest die; if they are very close they just lose interest in life. I wanted something very sharp and very challenging, to try and snap out of it.

“The thing I feared worst was vertigo and it seemed to be a good challenge.” Fiennes teamed up with top UK climbers Kenton Cool and Ian Parnell, and decided to climb the Eiger to raise funds for Marie Curie Cancer Care.

“I don’t do emotion,” Fiennes warned when we first speak on the telephone during his climb last March. He may not “do emotion”, but he knows how to spin a dramatic tale. Perched on a three-foot-wide ledge, he relays accounts of rocks whistling past his helmet; how an ice-axe came careering down unexpectedly from above; how he is trying desperately not to look down; and how, at one point, Ian Parnell had slipped and fallen down the face. Terrifyingly, the north face has claimed the lives of more than 50 climbers.

By the fourth day of the climb Fiennes sounded exhausted. His voice began to belie his words as he described the horror of a very exposed section called “The Traverse of the Gods”. “Previously, there’s always been a slight bulge effect,” he said about the rocks that protrude from the face, disguising the sheer drop. “But that was just straight down to hell. Had I known that it was part of the thing, I don’t think I would have done it. I thought it was going to be just a more difficult version of the practice climbs I have been doing with Kenton around Chamonix and the Alps; not the nightmarish thing that it actually was. My policy of not looking down just wasn’t possible: I had to look down to find the next foothold because it is so totally vertical.”

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know, the title of Fiennes’s new book, was the Byronic epithet that Ginny’s father gave Fiennes when they were younger: and it seems unlikely that Fiennes has changed much since then. He cites his next goal as increasing the amount he has raised for charity to £15m.

But why risk his life by adventuring? Fiennes is succinct when he says that army training, lack of qualifications and the need to earn a living led him to do what he does best: live life beyond the limits.