How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S17, Ep7 Sir Ranulph Fiennes on adventure, fertility and living up to his father's memory

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

TW: infertilityYou wait years for one globally renowned adventurer to come onto How To Fail, and then two appear in the same season! First it was Bear Grylls and now it's the turn of his mentor, Sir Ranulph Fiennes. I spoil you, I really do.Sir Ranulph is one of the greatest British explorers - a man who has raised millions of pounds for charity through his exploits, which include the first north-south surface circumnavigation of the world, crossing Antarctica on foot and running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents despite suffering a heart attack and undergoing a double coronary artery bypass just four months before. He is also the oldest Briton ever to summit Mount Everest.He joins me to talk about failing to follow in his late father's footsteps by flunking the Sandurst admission, his competitive drive, the dangers of solo expeditions and - in one especially memorable passage - the time he sawed off his own frostbitten fingers (those of a squeamish disposition may want to skip that bit). And, in a particularly moving exchange, we talk about his inability to have a child with his late wife, Ginny despite several rounds of IVF and a desire to adopt. Regular listeners will know how passionate I am about bringing converstaions around fertility to the fore. It is very rare to hear men talk about it and I'm so grateful to Ranulph for opening up to me. Spoiler alert - there is a happy ending in that Ranulph now has a teenage daughter with his second wife.--Ranulph Fiennes' latest book, Climb Your Mountain: Everyday Lessons from an Extraordinary Life, is out now and available to purchase here.--You can donate to one of Sir Ranulph's favourite charities, Marie Curie, here.--How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted and produced by Elizabeth Day. To contact us, email [e-mail]--Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayHow To Fail @howtofailpod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello 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 Ranulph 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. He was born in 1944, inheriting a baronetcy 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. In May 2009, at the age of 65, he became the oldest Briton 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.

Sir Ranulf finds 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 epitomises so many firsts, I'm extremely touched that How to Fail is your first podcast. Thank 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 pounds, 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 realised that it wouldn't have happened because in the 60s and 70s, we did expeditions with no, 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. You'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,

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 you know 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 he said, well, I'll let you know. And about two months later, he said multiple sclerosis that he chose. And 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 who is it always the norwegians, 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. And 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. So 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 anti-stan 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 some whatever. 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, it's the fault of your clothing, your fault. There are so many questions I want to ask you. Before we get onto 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 this sort of thing, not even considered 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. So 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, 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 nilas, 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. For 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 live bits have the nerve ends in your fingers. So five months waiting, each time the dead bit touches 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 getting irritable. And so she said because she often used to cut the hooves back because they get too long on abedinangus 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 so she'd move the clippers into the dead out a bit and she said why not do that with your fingers and anyway we bought a black and deco workbench to hold it steady and a fret saw well actually it's called something else so it's much thinner it's very very thin jenny bought me cups of coffee and so on that 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. I 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. 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 the Gordon Highlanders. Dad was Scott Scraze. When 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 as fantastically lovely and so on. And I took her out. Her father didn't like me. Her mum was lovely and did go home with my mum. out her father didn't like me her mum was lovely and did got on with my mum 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. Goodness. And then he came round. 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 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'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 the sandhurst. So my dream of becoming a colonel was considerably lessened. Which 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 important and I had a legacy for my South African grandmum 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 in the Scots Grey's my father's

regiment when I did get into it not as a colonel from not Sanurst, she decided that because I've 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. We 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 Greys, 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 grades for canoeing and climbing in the summer in winter time in bavaria cross-country skiing langlau skiing and so jenny when we got married said why don't we you and i started 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 one and two, BBC one and two. 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. We will go for big, big records. The BBC will make films. Sponsors will clamour. 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 to cross 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, Amundsen, Manson. No, never crossed the entire continent of Antarctica, which is bigger than America, and 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. She 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. I'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 and 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 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 cows, generally giving them all names. And I used to talk to them up in the cow shed. And 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. 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 pyjama 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 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. And 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 eyes. 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 my fear my phobia it'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. Michael 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. 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. Luckily, 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. And 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, the doctor. And I felt much better within an hour or so. And I agreed to carry on. But basically, if one of us had done it, it would soon be successful. Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest? This is a time of great foreboding. These words supposedly uttered by a king

over 800 years ago. These words supposedly uttered by a king over 800 years ago set in motion a chain of gruesome events and sparked cult-like devotion across the world. I'm Matt Lewis. Join us as we unwrap the enigma and get to the heart of what really happened to Thomas Beckett by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. from History Hit.

Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, historian and host of a new chapter of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. Join me and world-leading experts every week as we explore the incredible real-life history that inspires the locations, the characters, and the storylines of Assassin's Creed. Listen and follow Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm going to come back onto 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. My 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 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. Yeah, 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 Greys 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 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. And 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 Greys.

So A-levels were absolutely vital. Winchester, unfortunately, didn't get to San Andreas I'd never go to be a colonel of the Scots Grays so A levels were absolutely vital. Winchester unfortunately didn't work because although there was a thing called founder's kin meaning that the Tussle and Wickham finds founded Winchester and you got founder's kin which meant you could have free which is good because mum didn't have any you know wherewithal at that time but because 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 to 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 mum he's not going to get A-levels I'm afraid we've tried very hard but if you sent him to Davis's in Brighton people who go there they will come away with their A-levels for sure. And I'm not at all proud of having broken their record. And so, you know, I had to do the other thing. Rather than face failure, there was one last resort to get to the regiment. And that was to accept a short service commission from the cadet school at Mons, not Scientist.

But that would only give you eight years in the army and you probably wouldn't make beyond captain. But I thought only give you eight years in the army, and you probably wouldn't make beyond captain. But I thought, well, I'll do it that way. And I'll crash through that rule. And I'll get through anyway, to being in the regiment. And then when I'm in the regiment, I'll get somehow up to the top and beat all the guys who'd been to Sandhurst of my age. That was my plot to beat failure. And it just didn't work because I couldn't do that at all. to beat failure and it just didn't work because I couldn't do that at all and I enjoyed being in the regiment in Germany during the Cold War with tanks and doing the adventure training and so on but one was in tanks always learning to retreat from the border at a time when nuclear stuff was

being talked about so I'm afraid my one thing I wanted in life, I did eventually fail to get to Colonel of the Scots Greys. And I wanted to, I suppose you could say, find combat like my dad had. At that stage, did you feel you'd let your father down? Yes, I did. And what do you think he'd say to you now? Do you think he'd be proud of you now, given everything that you've achieved? I never hypothesise because it leads to getting either too pessimistic or too optimistic. So I try to steer in the middle.

I think he'd be extremely proud of you, Ran. Well, it's very kind of you to say so. It's a hypothesis, but there you go. I'll know when I get up to wherever he is. Yes, you will. What a beautiful idea. Your second failure was your failure to climb Everest twice before you finally managed it on the third attempt.

So you have a lifelong fear of heights. Is that right? Yes. I mean, at school, when I came to England, I still had it. A wonderful guy called Mike Denny was a specialist in climbing Eton's buildings at night. Well, you had to do it by night because you can't do it by day. And for some reason, I got to meet Mike Denny, and he got taken on his number two on climbs,

including with another guy called O. One night we were caught on school hall and had to flee. Mike was caught, sadly, and that was the end of him with climbing. I therefore became the number one climber, or stegophilist, as they're called, at Eden. The one unclimbed building was Lupton's Tower, which had two towers, And the new guy who came my number two, Hugh Pryor, who's also still alive, he'd spent many years as a bush pilot.

And two years ago, we had our 50th anniversary for climbing Lupton's Tower by night. And we went there and looked at it and no way would I try climbing that nowadays. But we did the first ascent of Lupton's Tower. You always put something on top, like a lavatory seat or whatever. And on that occasion, we used, you know you have tailcoats, black tailcoats at Eton as a uniform. Well, we had to put something up, and he had got too big after four years, and so he got rid of his tailcoat and took on a bigger one. Right.

And so the smaller one had become excess. We put it up on the top of Lupton's Tower. And at the bottom, as you always do, you have cherry brandy to recognise success. And while we were drinking it, he said, Christ. And he remembered that he hadn't taken his name out of his suit. Oh, no. So I said, well, I he remembered he hadn't taken his name out of his suit. Oh, no. So I said, well, I'm not going up again. So poor old Hugh had to go up by himself,

rather than me facing, you know, because it was his fault. Yes, he climbed it twice. He climbed it twice. A great guy. At the Roger Graphical Society, we had a reunion, the three of us, after 50 years not meeting up. We took a photograph of it, the three of us shaking hands. And Hugh said, why not send it to the editor of the Eton magazine? I said, because it would encourage the current Etonians to be doing that sort of thing. But we sent it anyway, and they actually used it.

I got to give them full marks. How wonderful. Yeah. But wait, so were you fearful of heights then when you were climbing not at night no okay you couldn't see you couldn't see down interesting but during the day but yeah i wouldn't climb by the day at all i see and later getting into the sas jumping out of airplanes they specialized in quite low jumping. The guy who, wonderful fellow, who was teaching that sort of thing to the SAS. We used him later on an expedition in Norway, jumping onto a high plateau.

I've forgotten his name at the moment. Anyway, he was a wonderful bloke. And he doing the stuff from Hereford and Limston and so on, said, you must keep your eyes open as you're jumping out. Well, I couldn't. And I realised that he couldn't see whether you kept them open or not. And therefore, once the parachute opened, yeah, you could open your eyes. It's that thing of living alongside fear again, being the true bravery.

It's fascinating to hear. So Everest, for someone like you, is it just the thing that you have to do? When I made the decision that I would, after all, try and move out of the desolate when Ginny had died, at that point I decided what would really be meaningful to go for is to lose the other one, vertigo, having lost spiders. But the year before Ginny died, my black friend from Cape Town, who I'd done various things with, he basically hadn't climbed Everest from the difficult side. He was the first black man to climb Everest from the Himalayan side, Nepal, yeah. And he wanted to be the first from both sides.

So he asked me, and I said, look, I would do anything with you, but not climbing. I've got vertigo. And he understood. We used to call it Valani. I then called him back when I decided I'd go for Everest to lose my other phobia and said, I've changed my mind. Is it too late? Have you got it?

And he said, no, the sponsor that would sponsor it for 200,000 pounds, it would cost. If a white South African comes up with me a black South African their company called Harmony would show considerable harmony when they take over you know independence so everyone would be happy so he Vellani agreed that we would go together which we did and he actually did get to the top on his way down he got hypoxia and it had to be helped by the Sherpas. I got to within 300 meters at the top and then couldn't really go any further because I got not heart attack, but an angina attack. And I'd had all the problems. And because I was carrying glycerine trinitrate, which anyone who's had a stroke always carries with them, I knew that I had these pills on me somewhere

when 300 metres from the summit at 29,000 feet, I got the angina attack. I tried to search for the GTN tablets. I eventually found them. You've got a big cylinder. You've got the thing over your face. You've got a different coat than normal with lots of pockets. So when I found them, I took them from the bottle.

Anyway, got back with Sherpa help down to the base camp doctor. And he said, can I see your pills? And I gave him the bottle. He said, no, the pills, because it was empty. And I said, well, I took the pills, obviously. And he said, well, yeah, but there were 80 inside here and you're allowed a maximum of two so I Guinness Book of Records sort of um you say you did you achieved one record just not the one

that you set out to achieve you could you could put it that way if you're generous but I then heard from the charity who was covering that that despite failure, they'd made over two million pounds. Amazing. So they said, you know, try again from the easy side. On that attempt, did you feel close to Ginny on the mountain? Yes, definitely. And did you lose your fear of heights on that attempt? No, I didn't. But I then was told by the charity that if I did a second attempt, even if it failed as well, you know, people would be giving money. So the 2005 was the first one. By 2008, I was ready to do a second attempt,

but not from the Tibetan side, from the other Nepal side. Did it, and I got again to within four hours of the summit. And then this time, you know, I really felt weak. And again, I failed. And again, this time they made over 2 million. And I'm not saying who it was, but they said, look, if you do it again, we will make probably over 4 million because you are now in 2009 2009 an old age pensioner.

Yes. So if you do it, you'll be the first OAP. So I thought, well, why not? And again, on the easy side from Nepal, but this time there was a big difference. This time I had a Sherpa, a wonderful guy called Tundu Sherpa, who didn't treat you like they all do, like a tourist. He watches you and only you very carefully, tells you what you're doing wrong, et cetera.

And I have to say, it was dead easy. What were you doing wrong? I'm confrontational with Mike Stroud, as you were saying earlier on, and I like to keep up with the person. So I keep up and they think maybe they're going too slow or something and they go faster. And by the time you get up there, you're knackered as hell. Those first two failed attempts, was it agonizing?

Sort of seeing the summit and not being able to make it? On the first time with the angina attack, I knew I would die if I didn't. So it was, you know, nothing mental. It was no longer a struggle. I wanted to go down. Right. Because I had to accept that illness or whatever you want to call angina. On the next time, I had in between 2005 and 2008 been offered by Britain's most wonderful remover of vertigo called Kenton Coole and his

friend Ian Parnell. They were a wonderful couple. So in that three-year period, or longer actually, I did a lot of weekends. And by then, I had married again. And Louise and baby Elizabeth came out to, what's the name of the village below, the Eiger. The north face of the Eiger is called Nordwand, meaning North Wall. But the Germans call it Mordwand, meaning Death Wall, because 55 people in the 1950s, top climbers from all over the world, died on it. And it's sheer, 6,000 feet, not like everest everest we discovered by then didn't have any true vertigo testers because the track up which is a rope the whole way if you look down you haven't got a steep cliff you've got a white slope right big difference yes the vertigo yeah anyway Kenton and Ian managed over that period

to get me to get up the north face of the Eiger which really is vertiginous and only when I could see them did I completely lose the vertigo if there was a bend and you look up and they've disappeared over a rock or something then it sort came back. And on what's known as the Traverse of the Gods, you have to look down. The main thing is very obvious. Don't ever look down and don't let yourself think down, which, you know, this is what you've got to think all the time.

And so my attempt to lose the fear and therefore not fail and keep on failing. By the time I did the 2009 go, not only was I with Tundu Sherpa, I have to say, sadly, he did die the next year, avalanche. Oh, no, I'm so sorry. He's a wonderful bloke, and he got me up to the top. Oh, my goodness. But even at the top of the Eiger, the north face of the Eiger,

I knew that I hadn't really lost it. Some years after that, Louise, we had gutters at the house with leaves which were going in them. And we got a ladder and I got about halfway up and it wobbled. So I came down again and I held the ladder and let Louise remove the leaves. Wow, what an image the oldest Briton to summit Everest and then not be able to get up a ladder I think it's so wonderful that you share that and that people hear it and that they hear how your courage exists alongside what it is to be a flawed human. So thank you. Not at all. I think the answer is when the wimpish voice comes into your head uninvited, oh dear, I can't do this.

Just banish it. Learn how to banish it. Tell it to... Sod off. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned Louise and your daughter, Elizabeth. What's it like being a father?

Well, I don't know what it's like being father to some people but to my lovely daughter Elizabeth and Louise is the most wonderful caring thoughtful mum that you could possibly have so with a lovely daughter and a lovely wife I'm very very lucky and she was for many years Elizabeth Elizabeth, wanting to be a vet. I think that's seven years training. And she, about a year or two ago, began to get fascinated with zoology. So I think now she'll probably go for zoological training at A-levels. There was a fantastic documentary film made about you called Explorer.

I haven't seen that. It's beautiful. Oh, right. And in it, Ginny's sister is interviewed and she says, when Ginny knew that she was dying, she said, I want Ran to move on, to marry again and to have a child. He wants that more than anything. And I thought that that was one of the

purest expressions of love I've ever heard that someone would love you that much that that's what they wanted for you yeah and Ginny's sister we'd see her fairly often she now lives in Romania and she's got lots of pussycats well I like her already right, she was a close sister to Ginny. And I was incredibly lucky. And the word luck and lucky comes into a lot of successes that we've had. Yes. And Shackleton always said, he called it provi, Irish, providence or luck. He used to say, never forget that if you succeed, you've had luck, good luck instead of bad luck. So don't put everything down to your own cleverness.

Remember, luck comes into it. And Ginny agreed with that. Before we get on to your third and final failure, can I ask you, what is the closest you believe you have come to death? death? I think when I had the heart attack, I was out for three days and nights in the NHS Bristol heart place. And we've raised money for them since then, which is a bit selfish choice of charity. When you were out for those three days, did you have any near-death experiences? Did you see the tunnel of light or hear any voices no that's exactly right I was brought up in South Africa the Anglican faith and heaven and all that sort of stuff but when I came to eventually after three days nights and taken off the life support machines and so on

and Ginny was in the room sort of thing it was that was a year before she died actually so things changed pretty quickly I woke up and Jenny said you had a heart attack three days ago and I couldn't remember a damn thing I still can't nothing can't remember any pain or suddenly you know falling over or whatever no can't remember it are you fearful of dying not since then no because I did really die as far as, you know, the mentality is concerned. And it was nothingness, complete nothingness, like when you're asleep in a very good sleep. Therefore, you know, I'm not worried about dying. You mentioned your Anglican faith.

Do you believe that you will be reunited with your father, with Ginny, with your grandfather? Well, as I said earlier, I don't hypothesise. So I don't really know whether that will be the case or not, to be honest. Your third failure is failing for 21 years in an on-off search to find the lost city of frankincense. I had never heard of the lost city of frankincense. It's in Oman, isn't it? And as coincidence would have it, I'm going to Oman next week for the first time ever.

Right. Well, enjoy it and go and have a look at our lost city. I absolutely will. I want you to tell me all about it. Well, when I was serving in that area in the army with my Land Rovers, I was responsible for finding the way the Soviets were getting their arms into Muscat. And the Dahedoba track was the one for a long time. We used to ambush it in the desert so that if they came in with their camels and Spargen weapons and that sort of thing, we would catch them, the Soviets. And I had 30 men. We had two machine guns in each Land Rover. And they had about 4,000 people in their army, people who had very largely been changed

from Islam to Marxism. What I had to do, according to our boss in Sulala, the capital of Dhofar, was to look further north into the great sand deserts. And in the sand deserts north of the flat, Nedged as it was called, that was only 15 miles going south from the ocean. You've got mountains stretching right across. And those people who'd been changed, mountain people from the Yemen, were the forefront of the attack. And those were the people we, with only about 300 armed people, including my recce platoon, were trying to stop

coming over the border. We knew that if we managed to keep them from killing our Sultan for one year or so, in 1968, at the end of that period, the Shah of Persia would send in 6,000 people, better than 300, to help the Sultan. The SAS would come in from the United Kingdom. Jordan would send their air force and the people from the Yemen would then fail. But that key period when we, that's nine of us, me and Patrick Book, a friend of mine from the other sister regiment of my regiment, went out there having learned Arabic in Beaconsfield. We basically had to hold it at that time. And while we were doing that, one of the informers from the Bedou tribe in the desert where, as I say, I had to go to find the weapons.

The Bedouin said, look, you are only out with us in Oman for two and a half years. That was the posting from the British army. And we know that you love us and Oman, which is true. And if you come back, Baheid, that was my name out there, I personally, Nashran bin Sultan, one of the only people who know where the lost city of frankincense of the Queen of Sheba is in the bottom of the dune area. And I will show you. So you've got to come back. Okay, this is amazing. So the lost city of frankincense, it was an actual place where it was a huge trading city, wasn't it? It was full of

extraordinary wealth. Well, huge. There was nowhere else in the Great Desert so huge, actually. The city was the size of a football field. But in the flat desert, you could see it for 30 or 40 miles if the weather was right. And so, yeah, it was a huge city on the southern end of 900 miles of Saudi desert with very little water. In Shissa, there was one place where a meteorite had opened up water. And when I was looking for Russian weapons in 1968, I found Shissa right at the bottom end. And the further north you go with water, the less you've got to go further up to get to the export of frankincense. Right. Yeah.

And about 25 camels in a camel train carrying bags full of frankincense, which in those days, if they could get it up to Jerusalem and the Roman Empire, it was costing much more than gold. Gosh. So for the Queen of Sheba from Ethiopia to colonize south oman was very sensible and by the time i was out there incense had lost its value but when i did get back out there as a civilian explorer later after i'd left the arab army with jenny she soon learned to speak arabic she did articles for woman's own and so on as a sheikh's wife I mean a nominal wife of course and in 72 she was speaking good Arabic and she was really keen on us finding the lost city of Arabia so over 21 years of many expeditions we went back eight times to search for the lost city

with Nashran's help and we always usedissa, where there was the meteorite site, as the base camp from which Jenny and me and the team, using Yuri Zarin's, the top archaeologist from Florida in that area, and his team from Florida University, using them, Jenny and sometimes me as well, would go out and look for the lost city, sometimes hundreds of miles into the desert from Shusur. So it was a bit upsetting when we found the lost city in Shusur. When you found it, although you felt that it had been a failure up till that point, and then it was a shame that it was at the base camp, but did you celebrate?

We celebrated in a huge way us and all the americans from the university and yuri we celebrated in the tent secretly with red wine yes omani's were pretty much neither they weren't sort of strict sheer or sunny they were abadi and therefore much more gentle in what they could or couldn't do. But I won't go into what we did to let them down, even now, many years later. Oh, gosh, that makes me so happy that you found it. And I can't wait to visit it. Two more questions before I let you go, Ran.

One is, you were considered for the role of James Bond, weren't you? I think 1970. It might be earlier than that. It might be in the 60s at that time the boss Broccoli and Guy Hamilton who's the director of the Bond films they were fed up with George Lazenby Lazenby was asking for much more money Broccoli said to hell with this what we'll do is we won't get an actor we'll get a guy who does Bond-type stuff, teach him to act, and save a lot of money. And so they got 200 people, Hamilton blokes,

who could be described as reasonable. And I got this letter, Ginny, oh, it must have been 1970, because it was when we were married, we just got married. So Ginny said, well, look, we're looking for making money. We hadn't started doing the expeditions. It was a year before we did the Nile. So I thought, okay, so we got a free ticket down to London and free accommodation for two weeks.

And 200 people were, what do you call it? Auditioned. That's the right word, yeah, auditioned. And I realized I wasn't going to get a bond, but it it got me down to London which we couldn't have afforded otherwise to see the PR department of the British army because they were looking at that stage for someone to lead the British Columbian expedition with Scott's Greys in 1971-72 so it all worked out perfectly but I didn't go down because of being looked at. I knew I wouldn't get the bit. But I got the free stuff. And I did get the job of leading the Great British

Columbian Expedition. What happened was they got me into the last six. I couldn't believe it. So I actually did, in the hotel that we were in, look in a mirror and try to do some Shakespeare stuff. I actually thought, golly. And when this last six people got to see Broccoli and Hamilton in this room where they were, and I remember going in there, you know, straightening my tie and all that. Broccoli said to Guy Hamilton, looking over his shoulder, he's on a sofa, Hamilton was standing behind him, I can remember it very well. And Broccoli looks over his shoulder at Hamilton and said, you can't have this bloke.

Look at his hands. They're like a farmer. And that was when I had proper hands. So no, to answer your question, I lost that to the tall fellow. Roger Moore. Roger Moore, that's right. Well, I think you would have been a very dashing Bond, hands and all. Well, that's very kind of you.

And acting runs in the family as well, doesn't it? Because you're related to Joseph and Rafe, Rafe and Joseph. They're cousins, aren't they? Rafe is the elder brother. Yes. And we shared great-grandfather. I see. Yeah, I've done a repeat of an expedition with Joe Fiennes when we did the Nile repeat. And he's a wonderful bloke but I'm pretty deaf in one yeah so when we were filming in the Land Rover Matt Dyess is the director of that company he would be saying funny jokes Joe Fiennes coming up with Joe Fiennes and in the movie I don't laugh and it looks as I've got no sense of humor not that I was deaf and couldn't hear it oh I this has been such a delight for me. Honestly, I've loved every second. And I wonder if I could end with a question about what you would like people to know.

So given your vast and unique experience of the world and all of these expeditions and adventures that you've been on, what do you think is the one thing that you would like people to know about life? About life, when you get to think about it, you've got to try and remember that you can think this way or that way. You can turn off thinking about something you don't like. For instance, people who get the Economist magazine, which tells you all about what's going on in South America and in most countries all over the world. You've got to realize that you're very, very lucky. The millions and millions, if not billions of people who are in a very bad way, not just Syria and Turkish earthquakes, but things like that all over the place. And if you live in a place like the UK,

like that all over the place. And if you live in a place like the UK, you're very, very lucky. Not so many fires and floods and or lack of water and so on, like even on Australia. You've got to think optimistically whenever you can. You can appear to be pessimistic so that sponsors don't expect too much. You've got to play the game. It's like too many cooks spoiled you know yes you look at it both ways look at it the best way possible and life will become a lot better for you no matter what the circumstances i love that so much saran all finds it's been an honor i'm deeply deeply touched that this is your first ever podcast interview i really enjoyed it. And I hope you did. And probably the last. I'm sorry. No, you're very kind and very nice. But I don't really have much thing about thinking about all these things from the past. I know. Well, you did say that you're not introspective. And I imagine that

is also part of your character. That's what enables you to do the things that you do. And so I appreciate it. And I appreciate you allowing me to ask you many questions. No, not at all. Thank you very much indeed. And if it can help my charities like Marie Curie, that would be great. Of course. I'll put a link in the show notes. You are always thinking of others.

Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. if you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist