Ain’t no mountain high enough for great explorer

Sir Ranulph Fiennes maintains that a lack of qualifications drove him on to climb Everest , circumnavigate the globe and walk to the South and North Poles
Fullers20 January 2016

Sir Ranulph Fiennes says the Royal Geographical Society in London is sending out “just as many expeditions today as it ever did”, and urged any youngsters with skills and an appetite for exploration to join it. But he claims he was personally driven to climb mountains, circumnavigate the globe, and walk to the South and North Poles by lack of qualifications.

“I didn’t have enough A-levels to do what I really wanted to do, which was to command my father’s regiment,” said the 70-year-old explorer. Born in 1944, shortly after his father died in the war, and subsequently raised in South Africa, he lacked the schooling to get into Sandhurst.

“The only place that would take me was Eton College,” he joked.

Although he eventually served in the army for eight years and was seconded to the SAS, Fiennes found his true calling in epic expeditions, beginning with a navigation of the White Nile by hovercraft in 1969.

Aged 65, he became the oldest Briton to climb Everest, and he remains the only man to have done this and also crossed both Poles.

“I’d be happy in the desert, but people only want to read about cold expeditions,” he said. He has raised £16.8m for charity and written many books about the discoveries from his trips, but claimed that “the charity work and the science are incidental to the main thrust of the expedition for me... if we have broken a record we have been trying to break for a long time, it’s very good.”

Sir Ranulph held the audience at the final Made of London event, at The Counting House on Cornhill, rapt with tales of derring-do and horror, but also quips. He sawed the tips of the fingers and thumb off his left hand after contracting frostbite on a solo Arctic expedition in 2000,

and in 2003 ran seven marathons in seven days in seven continents, three months after having a heart attack and double-bypass surgery.

He was also once mistaken for a terrorist while sleeping in an underground car park at Canary Wharf — he was seeking to persuade a property mogul to let him moor an ice-breaking ship outside for free — and in his SAS days attempted to blow up the “hideous” set of the 1967 film Doctor Doolittle.

Sir Ranulph admitted to a rivalry with Norwegian explorers after a Norwegian newspaper falsely claimed, back in the mid-Seventies, that his team had taken a prostitute on a polar expedition.

“We didn’t even take toothbrushes because they were too heavy,” he said, “and some things just aren’t feasible at -40C.”

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