Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 30:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1983.

Speaker 30:11

And the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes0:29

This week, our castaway is the soldier, traveller, and writer Captain Siranal Fiennes.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes0:36

Or travelling and adventure, Rhana, are in your blood, because a late seventeenth century ancestor, Celia Fiennes, wrote some excellent and still useful travel diaries.

Presenter0:46

Yes, that's Celia Fynes who was the origin of the nursery rhyme, which nowadays is there was a fine lady from Bambury Cross. It used to be Fynes' Lady, but that got sort of

Sir Ranulph Fiennes0:57

Going to

Presenter0:58

Yeah. Chain.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes0:59

And of course both your grandfather and father had adventurous military careers.

Presenter1:05

Yes, my grandfather was not in anybody's army. He was in the Mantes in Canada. He was a trapper for furs in the Northwest Territories. He joined Cecil Rhodes in Basuto Land, where he got a whole regiment lost in the too far east towards the African coast. And finally he ended up as governor of the Seychelles on the Leeward Islands.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes1:08

Okay.

Presenter1:27

and he got a a great number of military medals without ever joining an army. My father was in the Royal Scots Greys. He commanded them at the Battle of Alamein, and was finally killed just by Monte Cassino in Italy. Before you were born? Three months before I was born, yes.

Presenter1:44

Changing the subject, how much does music mean?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes1:46

Yeah.

Presenter1:46

Yeah.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes1:46

Yeah. Uh

Presenter1:47

Not very much, to be honest, right. Music is something which I hear a tune in the background, and whether it's jazz or classical or pop or whatever, if it's a nice tune I like it, and if it isn't I don't. Do you sing?

Presenter1:58

Very out of tune, but I do enjoy singing. Yeah. What was your plan in choosing this miserable alliance of eight records?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes2:05

was to take to your island.

Presenter2:07

I think sort of thinking back over one's life, little bits of music fit in and remind you of different parts of your life. And I do think that the particular eight that I've chosen have a sort of connection with different parts or different countries. Where do we start? Well, back in 1946, when my father was killed, my mother went to South Africa with her four children, I was the youngest, because my father's mother was in fact from South Africa, she's of a Prussian family, and she wanted to go back and die out there. So she took my mother and all of us, although she was 83 when she went out there, and built a house down in a place called Constantia by the Tokai Woods. And we stayed there, in fact, nine years until she died. And the tune of a a recent film on television, The Flame Trees of Thika, has got some music which does remind me in a way of the early days down in Tokai.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes4:01

The theme to the television series The Flame Trees of Thica.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes4:05

Oran you came back from South Africa, went to Eton,

Sir Ranulph Fiennes4:09

Then you decided to go into the army.

Presenter4:11

Uh

Presenter4:12

Yes, I wanted to do other things as well, but most things you needed A levels and uh at Eton I couldn't get A levels, so I got removed to a Crammer's down in Brighton and Hove, where I was, you know, trying to get A levels in French and German mainly, and I failed despite two years of trying, and so I couldn't go to Sandhurst because you require A levels for that. So I went to a short service commission, a place called Mons Cadet School, and uh went into the Scots Grays from there. Was that your father's regiment? Yes, it was. In fact, I I left them in nineteen seventy one, the day that they got amalgamated with the Welsh regiment. Now it was a tank regiment. Did tanks appeal to you? In fact, no. Tanks

Sir Ranulph Fiennes4:54

Did not appeal to me remotely. So you transferred to the Special Air Service, the SAS?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes5:00

where you became a specialist.

Presenter5:01

Well, I didn't last very long with them. Unfortunately, there was a matter of some explosives. Rex Harrison was making a film in Castle Coombe, which is a pretty village down in the West Country. And one night there were some sort of explosions, and we got not exactly caught, but our car had a very old car which wouldn't start without a tow. And the police got hold of this car and its number plate, and they got hold of me, and I got fined very heavily and was removed from that regiment back to tanks again, which was a fairly heavy penalty.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes5:35

You just spent a night in jail, I believe.

Presenter5:37

Yes, but it was Chippenham jail, very comfortable jail. Let's have another record before we talk about your further adventures. Well, the Scotts Greys became quite famous from a record called Amazing Grace which they played. They start hitting the the pop charts. And a later record which I particularly like is The Blue Bonnets and the Drum Prelude which ties in the pipes and the drums quite strongly.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes6:59

Wonderful sound the moused pipes and drums of the Scottish regiments.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes7:04

Now Ren, you left the British Army and joined the armed forces of the Sultan Ewman. What was

Presenter7:09

What's going on out there?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes7:10

Yeah.

Presenter7:10

Well, I didn't actually leave the British forces. The officers in Oman are either British or Pakistani or they were, and we were either mercenaries or we were seconded, and I was in fact uh seconded, which meant I was still in the British army, but lent to them for two and a half years.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes7:25

Yes.

Presenter7:25

The problem was that the people from Aden, who'd been trained in Odessa and in Peking, were coming over in increasing numbers over the border and were altering the religion of the people of Dofar from Muslim, which they always had been, to Marxist, which was the new religion. And so we were trying to stop this unsuccessfully because we lost all the mountainside and we ended up, certainly by the second year I was out there, with nothing but a short strip. And during that period it was interesting, but it was also fairly hectic and we could only move by night. I had about thirty Arabs with me and about sixteen machine guns and we used to try to escape after an engagement very, very quickly because we were outnumbered. And I watched a film recently called Harry's Game where there's a a lilting sort of song which ties in with this poor fellow who's stuck in a land where he's very much a loner and very much a loser and it rather reminds me of that time.

Speaker 48:25

For your church young

Speaker 48:30

And young I sing

Sir Ranulph Fiennes8:54

The theme from Harry's game, sung by Clanad.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes8:59

In the British Army who've done a great deal of um adventure.

Presenter9:02

For training.

Presenter9:03

Yes, that's the military name for any type of sports taken on by people in Kharki. They call it adventure training. And the regiment I was in was pretty keen on hunting and shooting and fishing, which I wasn't keen on. And I was lucky enough, therefore, not to have lots of other officers who wanted to take the other sorts of sports which I was keen on, like boxing and canoeing and mountaineering and cross-country skiing. So I was able during the summer to plan adventure training down rivers in Europe with different Scottish soldiers, each of whom purchased personally a quarter of a canoe. So I had about thirty-two really good Scotsmen, tough blokes, who owned a quarter of each of the canoes. And so we would go down various rivers and in the winter we would do the cross country skiing, which is competitive against the various other regiments and Germans and Canadians and so on as well. And then you took a hoppercraft up the Nile?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes9:52

Then to British Columbia, to a virtually unexplored area, including a valley where a number of headless corpses had been found rather mysteriously. Did you crack that, Miss?

Presenter10:02

Well, it wasn't unexplored. When we were there, we didn't actually see any other people for sometimes months at a time. But it's part of Canada, and all of Canada is explored. The headless situation started in 1912 with three gold trappers who went into the valley called the Nahani Valley, South Nahani Valley, to look for gold or whatever. And later by a Manti, they were found, two of them with their heads missing. And so it began to acquire a reputation. The policemen, being logical, reckoned that the heads or the skulls being round were probably blown away by the wind, or the local grizzly bears had a partiality for skulls rather than the rest of the body. Then two years later, a man called Jorgensen, who was Scandinavian, his body was found upriver by the Flat River, and his skull was also missing, and he had a rifle which had a full charge inside it, and his gold was still there. So this did begin to look mysterious. Of the various people who, since those first headless bodies were found, who have disappeared in there,

Presenter11:03

The link that we found to be more common than the fact their skulls were missing was that they were burnt, which went for one of the three original people whose clothes were burnt. But apart from that we found nothing new. We found no solutions.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes11:17

A complete mystery.

Presenter11:18

As far as we were concerned, yes, and as far as the Monty files in the area are concerned also. It's time we had another record.

Presenter11:25

Well, Roy, I think that the army experience with various sports and then the earlier expeditions developed slowly but surely a sort of internal competitive urge. And I think for me, expeditions is all about competition, not with other people, but with yourself and with the elements. And I think the.

Presenter11:46

Competition really is summed up by a nice little record Chariots of Fire, which is the first film we saw when we got back from the last three year expedition.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes12:50

The opening theme from the film.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes12:52

Chariots of Fire

Sir Ranulph Fiennes12:54

Now you obtained sponsorship for these expeditions, and and sponsorship means food and keep, and they each provided material for a book.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes13:03

Um

Sir Ranulph Fiennes13:04

In nineteen seventy, Ran, you married your wife, Jinny, and one might have thought that she'd want you to calm down and get a nice, quiet job in an office. Instead of which she thought up the wildest scheme

Presenter13:16

For years for you. Yes, she was cooking one day and suddenly decided we must go round the world differently. We must do the journey round the polar axis. And uh I looked at this idea and we decided that it hadn't been done before and we soon realized that this was because the Antarctic and the Arctic both got in the way whatever route you took.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes13:35

Yeah, this

Presenter13:36

And one way or another, because we hadn't any money,

Presenter13:40

We took seven long years of full time work just to get the equipment together and and the sponsorship in order to be ready to leave in nineteen seventy nine.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes13:50

put up all along the route. Ship to be hired?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes13:54

How many sponsors did you get in your in your backup?

Presenter13:57

By the end of the seven years we had eighteen hundred sponsors from nineteen countries, and the whole effort had not cost a penny.

Presenter14:05

And you have Where did you start? Obviously we had to get an Office and a telephone Yeah. Well, you know, Into the

Sir Ranulph Fiennes14:11

Yeah.

Presenter14:11

That No, we don't like the word con. Nowadays the businessmen are hard-headed. Scrounging and conning doesn't play they want their pound of flesh, and I quite see why, otherwise they go bust. But the first thing you need is a telephone, and that's got to be free. And to get a free telephone, we sort of joined the territorial army, not just for a telephone, they have obviously training and things as well. This was in Sloan Square in the Duke of York's barracks. And from there, in an attic in 1972, we started the long haul. And for seven years, we worked without any pay. So did the people who joined us. And this meant working to earn a living, to pay the gas bill, at the weekends and in the evenings. So we had no family life, no entertainment for that period. Just one idea, which is to try to get going. Let's have another record before we start work on this marvellous expedition. Well, we went down to Antarctica to cross Antarctica, and for eight months we sat at 6,000 feet above sea level in a little hut, just four of us together. And there's a little song which sums up many of those days with outside temperatures at minus 138 degrees Fahrenheit, and that's by Elaine Page, a song called Memory.

Speaker 415:21

Memory all alone in the moonlight.

Speaker 415:28

I can smile at the all day.

Speaker 415:32

I was beautiful then.

Speaker 415:37

I remember the time I knew what happened as was.

Presenter15:41

I'm a new one.

Speaker 415:46

Let the memory

Sir Ranulph Fiennes15:53

Elaine Page singing Memory from Cat.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes15:57

Well, back to the story of the expedition ram.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes16:00

Imagination boggles it the number of decisions that would have to be made during that planning period. When you got on to the ice, for example, did you plan to use machines or dogs?

Presenter16:09

Well

Sir Ranulph Fiennes16:09

Both

Presenter16:10

We looked into this very carefully. Dogs were definitely preferable in the Arctic Ocean. Machines are not good in the Arctic Ocean. The rubble is too great. They won't get over it. They break. And in Antarctica it's very, very cold and machines won't start at minus fifty, minus sixty without an awful lot of problems and cold hands, whereas a dog at minus sixty will start same as if it's minus twenty. Learn to handle

Sir Ranulph Fiennes16:32

Little dog

Presenter16:32

Well, no. We decided that we would, despite all those advantages, take machines for the South and see what happened up in the North, maybe haul our own stuff. And uh we ended up without dogs because nowadays, unlike the great age of exploration sixty years ago when they didn't really worry about public opinion, nowadays if you've got dogs dying off left, right and centre, which they doubtless would do on a three-year expedition involving Antarctica and the Arctic in the same expedition. So for that reason and for rabies and political sides and administration, we didn't take dogs. And you had a one-day dentistry course. Well, I didn't, but Ollie Shepard, who was one of the expedition members who had been a beer salesman,

Presenter17:11

We had to train somebody up to be zoologist, glaciologist, geologist, doctor and dentist, and so Olly became all those things, including dentistry. How many people were to make the actual trip? Well, originally the plan was four, but uh one of our people during our training got frostbite and he dropped out. Then after the Antarctic crossing Ollie had to drop out, he had uh a family problem, and uh that left only two of us, um so it sort of got down to two. That was Charlie Burton and you? Yes, Charlie Burton and me and uh Ollie nearly did it but not quite. And your wife was the radio contact? Yes, my wife and Simon Grimes were in the forward polar bases manning the radio, which of course in the polar areas often is useless. You can have the best radios in the world and still not get through. Ten days at a time, all communications can be totally blocked out by auroral interference right across the high frequency band.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes18:05

Yeah.

Presenter18:06

When did you start the expedition? We started the expedition on the second of september, nineteen seventy nine, when our patron Prince Charles took the ship from Greenwich, and from then it was three solid years. The first half do you Says that meant

Sir Ranulph Fiennes18:19

What, France, Spain, Africa, down to the Cape?

Presenter18:23

Yes, it was three months in the Sahara where we're doing zoological work, down into the drought zone, the Sakhal, and then the jungles of the Ivory Coast. Then the old girl, our ship, collected us and took us down the South Atlantic into the roaring forties, where we had some very rough seas over Christmas Day, 1979. And then eventually we made landfall or ice fall off Antarctica, where the troubles really started. And we spent a total of eight months sitting in cardboard houses waiting for the temperature to warm up to minus sixty before we could set out. Roaring Forties was very interesting, not only because of the ice mucking around, some of which were millions of tons the ice flows it was a time when I was very worried. I don't like the sea. And there's a

Presenter19:13

a record which we never heard until we got back, called Sailing, which reminds me very much of the Roaring Forties and what we felt like when we came out of the storms.

Speaker 419:28

I am sailing.

Speaker 419:32

Over again.

Speaker 419:36

Across the sea.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes19:53

Sailing by the Ships Company and Royal Marine Band of HMS Ark Royal.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes19:59

So to the South Pole. Now the South Pole is really quite heavily populated these days, isn't it?

Presenter20:05

Yes, there's um a dozen American scientists who spend the whole year there.

Presenter20:11

But because the only way of getting to the South Pole is on a very larger Hercules aircraft specially fitted with skis onto a specially kept ice runway about four hundred yards from the geographical South Pole, they can only be resupplied during a two-month period in any one year. So they have to bring in twelve new scientists to relieve the last lot, because otherwise they incline to go bonkers, and also enough stores for the whole of the year, because temperatures there drop down to minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. So there's there's always a dozen people sitting there inside a dome in which there are some huts which are heated. Well you had no aircraft, you had to slog across the ice for how many days?

Presenter20:53

We slogged across using these little motorbikes or skadoos which have a four inch lift ski at the front and little four inch wheels at the back driving a track for a total of seventy six days. We had periods when people were getting exposure. The the only in history previous crossing of Antarctica had used closed vehicles with um cabs which you can warm and that's what we had wanted but we couldn't use them because we didn't have enough air support to um drop that sort of fuel. So we used these little open vehicles and it was nearly our undoing. They're only six forty cc engines and they're not very powerful. We had to abandon sledges which broke halfway across on the iron hard sastrugi or ice ridges. We had great problems with the crevasses on the way down, particularly down the Scott Glacier. And lastly on the Ross Sea which is where Captain Scott and his men unfortunately died some seventy years ago. And you played a game of cricket at the South Pole as a sort of derisive gesture. When we were at the South Pole we did have a game of cricket, a ball game. Our dog which is a Jack Russell Terrier likes cricket and we had nothing to do for a day so we had a game.

Presenter21:58

Well, there you are, you were over the pole. Uh And going up up the other side.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes22:02

Yeah.

Presenter22:02

The road There, what, New Zealand?

Sir Ranulph Fiennes22:03

Zealand, Australia.

Presenter22:04

Yes, because when you're trying to get to the northern hemisphere and into the ice again up at the Arctic end, you can't get in there until the rivers which go up there, and we want to go up the Yukon. Well, the ice comes out of the Yukon May, June. So we had a period of waiting, and during that period, we visited Auckland and Sydney and Los Angeles and then Vancouver. Then after that, we moved into the Aleutian Islands, into the Bering Sea, and we said goodbye to the crew of the ship who dropped us overboard in two little rubber boats. And we went up the Yukon for 1,100 miles and then down the Mackenzie River into the North West Passage. The North West Passage was a total of some 5,000 miles, which we had to do in about a month. And there was only Charlie and me by then. The morale wasn't too good. Physical shape wasn't too good. And then finally, the sea froze, and we abandoned the boat and set out on skis. The conditions were too bad, so with the skis we abandoned them too and used snowshoes. And by the time we reached the edge of the Arctic Ocean, we were in a very bad physical shape, I think. And just as well, we had a period to

Presenter23:10

four months, five months of permanent darkness, the polar winter, in which to recover. And it was following the nasty bit over the ice caps after the North West Passage that well, we were very thankful to arrive at all, because otherwise the expedition would have come to a grinding halt.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes23:26

One en envisages the ice cap as uh as fairly smooth, but it's not like that at all. It's r

Presenter23:32

Rough terrain, isn't it? The Ellesmere ice cap is very rough, and you have to keep dropping down into valleys, and the rock comes through. In places, you move underneath carving glaciers where waters cut away tunnels. And we were just going under one of these when Charlie slipped and cut his head open on some rock, which nearly stopped us in the middle of nowhere. And it's a country where there's nothing except sort of musk oxen, wolves, caribou, arctic hare, and so on.

Presenter24:00

We're very thankful indeed. There's a song um Beethoven's Pastoral No. Six, The Shepherd's Thanksgiving After the Storm.

Presenter24:08

Which was really how I felt when we got to the edge of the Arctic Ocean after that rather nasty part of the journey.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes25:16

The Shepherd's Hymn After the Storm from Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Carrier.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes25:24

So, on to the North Pole.

Presenter25:26

Yeah, we wintered for four or five months and the worry was that the Arctic Ocean, which was the next obstacle, had never been crossed in one year. It had been only crossed in fact once in history by Wally Herbert's team in the sixties and they had taken two years, sixteen months of crossing. By the now we'd spent over two years on this expedition. Stores were running down. We must do it in a year. We didn't know that it could be done in a year. So one of our answers to the problem was, well, what if we set out a month before any other expedition in the north has set out, early in February, when it's still pitch black and you've got temperatures in the minus sixties.

Presenter26:01

Instead of the normal time, which is mid-March, when the sun has come up and you're in what we call the banana belt, which is the minus forties. And so we did decide to set out early. The problem with early is that nobody's going to evacuate you. Once you set out in the darkness, nobody's going to land, not even a little ski plane. They've got to wait till the sun comes up. So we did. The two of us set out from Alert, which is the most northern inhabitation in the world, said goodbye to Ginny and left. And from then, in fact, we were on the moving sea for a total of seven months after that. And it was definitely the nastiest part of the expedition.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes26:35

What about the pole itself, Rand? Obviously there's no habitation. Is there a marker? Is there a

Presenter26:41

No. No, the the pool looks like anywhere else up there. It's just a jumble of ice. It can be open water steaming. It can be extremely noisy because the ice flows weighing millions of tons break up smaller ice, which you might be camping on. It's a hostile area.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes26:41

But there's no

Presenter26:56

And if you put a flag there when you get there, that flag within twenty four hours can be five miles away because all the ice is floating around over the top of the seabed. Right.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes27:08

Top and down the other side. Now that was when the ice began to break up.

Presenter27:13

Yes, we we had planned to get right the way across before the ice broke up. The ice breaks up because of the summer sun, the ultraviolet rays but we sort of failed and we got eventually to the North Pole. But there was no saying, you know, congratulating ourselves we're the first men in the world ever to reach both poles the hard way.

Presenter27:32

There wasn't time for that because we were very worried what was going to happen. We had about two weeks of travel, and yet we had a thousand miles of floating journey before we could get to where our old ship could possibly hope to get to us. And so we we did the best we could, but we only got about three hundred miles from the pole before we had to stop travelling, and after that we were at the mercy of the wind and the ice. You were on a flow? We were on a ever-diminishing flow, yes. It was breaking up, in other words. It was breaking up, it was extremely noisy, and uh it got very worrying. We sat together, the two of us, for ninety-nine days and nights, sometimes even going back north and sometimes heading towards Siberia. You were just floating. You could just keep tabs on where you were floating, you couldn't do anything about it, of course. You couldn't always keep tabs on that, because the theodolite which we used for seeing where we were, you use, of course, at midday when you get your longitude and latitude from the sun's altitude. But at midday, apart from six days out of ninety-nine days, one couldn't really get a proper shot of the sun, because it was invisible through the sea mist.

Presenter28:34

Well then what? The flow was getting too small? The flow was heading for the M I Z, the marginal ice zone, which scientists known as the pulverization zone, because ice gets diminished in the vortex between Greenland and Spitsbergen, where Fram Strait speeds the ice up to a hundred percent of the speed it was going before, and it's narrowed down. Three great ice-bearing currents from the Arctic meet in this narrow space, and the ice gets pulverized, and it's like going through a mincing machine. And we desperately wanted the ship to remove us from this area before we got into it, and they were trying very hard, but for three months they couldn't make it.

Presenter29:12

Well, eventually, after cracking the hull and having to weld it out on the ice, they were a very splendid crew. We were very lucky. Skipper from Northumberland they came from nine different countries. They were all volunteers, and they risked going over a hundred miles into the ice, and they shouldn't, because they weren't an ice breaker.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes29:27

Yeah.

Presenter29:28

And they sent a message we are only seventeen statute miles away, abandoned the flow. So we did abandon it and went over nylas, mush ice, porridge ice, and got to the ship. And it was, I think, for us the most wonderful moment was when we saw the masts of the ship over the horizon and knew that this three year sort of expedition was actually possible. Till then one could never say to yourself we might make it because always nature could get the upper hand of you tomorrow. How long did that seventeen miles over the mush ice take you? Well it should have taken about five or six hours if it had been normal ice but it wasn't. It was ice, water and porridge which you can't paddle a little canoe through and you can't walk on and it's continually moving and throwing up walls and it eventually took us something like eleven or twelve hours going at full speed.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes30:12

And it

Sir Ranulph Fiennes30:16

and then on to the ship, and after that fairly plain sailing.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes30:21

But, as your royal sponsor, the Prince of Wales said when you got back, mad but marvel

Presenter30:27

Well, he was a very good patron. I'm not sure I agree with him about the mad bit. I don't think any of us were were mad, but we were very happy.

Presenter30:35

If you're religious, one one would say God was very good to us, uh or otherwise we were very lucky. I wouldn't certainly want to do it again.

Presenter30:42

What's your last record round? This is just a little song which often sitting on the ice floe I suppose it got a little bit homesick.

Presenter30:49

and a little song called Annie's Song, James Galway, which I often thought of in my head over those months.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes31:57

Annie's song, played by James Galway. Well now, you're back, safe and sound. You've written a splendid book about this expedition, beautifully illustrated. What's it called, by the way? It's called To the Ends of the Earth. And you've been doing a great deal of lecturing. Now you've had to work very hard since you've been back, because owing to inflation and one thing and another, you found you owed a lot.

Presenter32:20

Lot of money when you got back.

Presenter32:21

Yeah, we owed nothing when we left, but when we got back again, the volunteers who had been looking after us in our absence for three years, the boss told me that there was a debt of one hundred and six thousand pounds, and he hadn't warned me before because it might be bad for my morale out on the ice. And I couldn't do anything about this debt because of writing the book. But one member of the team, when all the twenty-nine of them shot off naturally to their countries they'd come from, one of them said, Well, as far as I'm concerned, the expedition's over when the debt's paid and he stuck uh with my wife Jenny for eight or nine months and the two of them between them finally paid off the debt and you've got to sell a lot of T-shirts to make that sort of money.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes32:58

Uh

Presenter32:59

Right.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes32:59

Now, you've played us the eight record that you've chosen for your desert island, and I don't think you want to go to a desert island after that last expedition. One disk, if you could only take one.

Presenter33:10

That's a very difficult one. Whichever one I took I would get fed up with, as everybody does with every record. But

Presenter33:18

Despite that, um

Presenter33:21

Roy, I don't like making decisions unless I'm quite sure of the answer, and uh I would put a little bit of each of those eight onto one disc. Take that.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes33:30

But never mind. And one luxury that you'd take with you to a desert island, one thing of no practical use whatever.

Presenter33:37

Oh, I'd definitely know what I would take. I'd take a a tube of antisan, which is mosquito reliever. Anything that bites you, you dab some of this stuff on and it stops it itching. That would be the luxury I'd take. Right. And one book, you already have the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible. I think I'd take the Oxford Book of Quotations. I like quotations, and you can go on forever listening to them and trying to find a meaning to them.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes34:02

Right.

Presenter34:03

Yeah.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes34:03

And thank you, Sir Ranolph Fiennes, for letting us hear your choice of Desert Island discs. Thank you, Roy. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 334:35

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.