John Ridgway

John Ridgway0:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

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It's likely that our castaway would find nothing too difficult in being banished to a desert island. He's a man renowned for his sense of adventure. In 1966, along with Chay Blythe, he rowed across the Atlantic. In 1968, he sailed single-handed to Brazil. And in 1970, he canoed down the Amazon, and twice sailed round the world in his catch.

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His latest adventure took him to the mountains of Peru and gained him a new daughter. He is John Ridgway.

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John, have you ever been on a desert island?

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I don't think I've spent long on one. I've been on islands where it didn't rain for seven years, that sort of thing. Would it be banished to a desert island?

John Ridgway1:04

What it really is.

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I'm one of those people who I found as I got older I like to do things exactly how I want to do them, and you find that hard to find in the modern world a a chance of doing it on your own. And I think I'd look forward to it.

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And to begin with I'd certainly enjoy it.

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After a while I think I'd get fed up with it.

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Of course, you you wouldn't have m much problem, would you, I I imagine, surviving. I mean, you know how to build yourself shelter, you know how to get yourself food and and water and that sort of thing. Yes, I think that's the interesting part. It's once you've got to a certain point of uh luxury that that's when it would pull. I think the struggle building the thing would be good. When you've been on your various adventures round the world, has music played any part in them? I mean, have you taken tapes along with you, or do you sing a song when you're in the middle of an ocean, or whistle, or whatever? Yes, you remember songs that you sang on

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making the first crossing of an ice cap in Chile. There's a jet plane that's leaving soon, you know, that that sort of thing remains in your memory for many years. But most of the things I've done, we haven't really been able to carry any form of reproduced music.

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Let's have a a first choice of music for the Desertown then.

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Well, music really for me is inspiration and I think the

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Early part of inspiration in my life after paying born in Sandhurst was joining the Parachute Regiment.

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and finding that this was where anything was possible.

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And so I will always remember really the Ride of the Valkyries, which is the regimental march.

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There was the band and drums of the first and second battalions of the Parachute Regiment playing the regimental march.

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John Ridgway, what about your background? In fact, you're an adopter child, weren't you? Yes, that's right. And I think perhaps that's given me the the s spur to want to be on my own and

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Go on various adventures. What were the circumstances of your adoption?

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Well, I think it was something to do with a nurse and a sailor.

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Then very fortunately these people must have come along a row of cots and picked this particular one out, which.

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Take me some time really to realize the tremendous opportunity that they gave me. Did you ever try and find your real parents in later life?

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No, I have walked past Somerset House and faltered once or twice, but um

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I didn't think I would.

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Were you always, from the very beginning, an adventurous child? Were you a daring child?

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Frightened probably I think. Really? I'm I'm frightened of the dark, I think. I know I'm frightened of the dark.

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I think it's that which i is an endless source of challenge. What did you want to be when you were a child growing up? I mean, did you always want to be a soldier or? For some reason it was wartime. I I wanted to be the captain of a destroyer, but felt

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You know, I couldn't ever really be as.

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And as school days went on it was clear that the exams were out of my reach, I think.

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I don't think I ever saw the point of school, really, and I wish I'd paid more attention now. You just wanted to leave school, that was the ambition of you. I wanted to leave school and I went off to sea. I did go off to sea. I left school at just seventeen. And joined the Merchant Navy? Yes, and then didn't like the small, very small confined space on it.

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I glad I didn't stay at sea, really. I enjoyed that short part to look back on, but I didn't enjoy pacing a very small bit of deck.

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And what about the armor then? How did that come into your life?

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I had to have a job.

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I admired the rain coats worn by the officers. You know, they're sort of trench coat things. Unfortunately mine never fitted. I never got satisfaction in that particular line.

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and I had my national service brought forward.

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And somehow got into Sandhurst.

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I was very, very lucky. I must have picked the chap on a weak moment, I think. I'm sure I did. I shouldn't really have ever got in. I was very underconfident. That seems strange, actually. I mean, being this o underconfident man, frightened of the dark, who joins a parachute regiment. I think that's why you do it, though. I think I think it's the feeling of insecurity.

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Which draws you on. Perhaps if I'd had a more steady background I would have been a more steady sort of person.

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Let's have another choice of record, John.

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Well, I'd like to have uh the main theme of Lawrence of Arabia because I always dreamed, I think, in those days, in the early sixties, that I might become Lawrence of Arabia. And it's uh a lovely piece of music, it's a sort of the spirit and the dream of anything's possible again.

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That's the main theme from Lawrence of Arabia from the soundtrack of that film. John your life changed in nineteen sixty six when you rode the Atlantic with with Chave Lyth. What decided you to do that, to to embark on that adventure?

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I suppose going to see Lawrence Arabia a lot of times. Really? How many times do you go to see it? Many, many times.

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I think that it was inexpensive, looking back. The boat cost about a hundred and seventy pounds, and it was a straightforward, clean thing to do, which would take only three months or so.

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And it was a challenge.

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was always looking for some sort of a challenge. By that time I'd been out of the army and forced back with poverty back into it again, I was very lucky to get back into it.

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But I always felt after that that if I could keep my elbows into my sides and keep balanced.

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I would be ready to go if an opportunity came.

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And this was certainly an opportunity for me. What in fact decided on the on that particular adventure about rowing across the Atlantic? It goes back to a chap called Manry, who sailed the Atlantic in a very small boat. And I heard on the radio that someone was thinking of doing a rowing trip across the Atlantic.

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I'd been in the Merchant Navy, I'd got O-level in navigation, and I thought, I think I could do that. I've always felt that.

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I would get there in the end. I'm not necessarily going to get there very quickly, but I always felt that if I had to crawl along, I'd get there in the end, and it it just appealed to my sense of

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The possible. What decided you on the choice of your partner, Chay Blyth?

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I couldn't get anybody else.

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No, that's not true, Jay. No, I've never regretted it.

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I've never regretted him coming, I must say, mister I was very, very lucky there. What did he teach you in being uh confined in that boat with another man for Well, he and I already knew each other for about seven years. We'd done long distance canoe races together.

John Ridgway9:02

Well

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I think it was just a reinforcement of what I'd found by being in the parachute regiment.

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was that no matter how bad it was, it was quite likely you were going to win in the end. Just that marginal little whisker of extra effort that makes you win rather than lose.

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And I definitely learnt that with the Parish Regiment, and he's a great example of it. This adventure changed your life. I mean, you you came from being just a soldier to being a a national celebrity. Did you enjoy that happening to you? I've always felt a bit of a fraud. Really? There's nothing like the life that I lead.

John Ridgway9:28

But

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I live as far away as Munich or the Pyrenees from here.

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It's uh three miles from the road, fifty miles from the railway. You have to get there by boat.

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And so this kind of thing I find uh uneasy, really. Let's have another choice of record.

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Well, funnily enough, this is Fool on the Hill really for the words more than the music.

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But uh I did decide eventually to go and live up there and start a an adventure Scotland about twenty years ago, yes. Which is in the north west tip of Sutherland, isn't it? That's right, the just the north western corner of Scotland.

John Ridgway10:08

Our adventure screen.

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And it was a pretty risky thing at the time. And this song was going just at that time, and the words I like to think that the words might turn out to be right. A lot of people thought they weren't going to be right.

Speaker 410:28

Day after day

Speaker 410:32

Alone on a hill

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The man with the foolish grin Is keeping perfectly still

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Nobody wants to know him, they can see that he's just a f ⁇

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And he never gives an answer, but the fool on the hill Sees the sun going down and the others

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As Beatles and Fool on the Hill.

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John, your latest adventure has been set down in a book called Road to Elizabeth. It's in fact an account of a a visit to Peru.

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What was the purpose of the trip in the first place? Well, fifteen years ago I'd led the first expedition from the furthest source of the Amazon to the mouth.

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and in the most inaccessible part of the river I found this little jungle fortress which was very similar.

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Swiss Family Robinson type of life to the life that I lead up in Scotland.

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I was immediately drawn to this half Indian, half Norwegian man, Abel Berg.

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who believed that the most tranquil people in the world were the campas from the very deepest jungle, and the least tranquil people were Europeans.

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And I always wanted to go back there. His son, Elvin, who was twenty two then.

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We were in a terrible state when we arrived there. The man put us on scales, and he said, Until you weigh several kilos more you can't go on.

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And his son took us on, and certainly saved our lives.

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Because that was the first time we actually started to go on the river. It was a very dangerous place. And he was in the forward end of the canoe as we went hurtling down these rapids and we didn't really have much control on ourselves. So that was the first time.

John Ridgway12:14

So that was the

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And uh I then had to

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Think, how can I get back to see him fifteen years later? My daughter just finished school, and I thought, this is an.

John Ridgway12:23

Which is much

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funny kind of finishing school if you like, but it'll be a big change from Gordonston where she'd been.

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And so we set off to try and find him, not realizing that this awful Khmer Rouge Maoist guerrilla war was going on in this very valley.

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And just before we set off the Norwegian side of the family said they desperately wanted to hear some news, because they they were beginning to fear the worst.

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And when we arrived out there it was much worse than we thought it was going to be. You discovered, of course, that he'd been killed by these terrorists. Yes, after a couple of months out there, we'd trained ourselves for a whole month.

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To go without mules and without guides, which is what we'd done in 1970, we'd used mules and guides.

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And we had to get into the red zone of the emergency through the back door, otherwise we couldn't have got in. The police and army would have stopped us.

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So I followed this route from nineteen seventy and it took a couple of weeks to get in there.

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and after one thing and another we arrived at a place where thirty six houses had just been burned down by the gorillas.

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And we irrefutably found that my friend had been uh very brutally murdered and burned to death. And it was a very, very low time for us. It became sort of an obsession to try and find him, really. And then by an extraordinary circumstance, you you went to a village and discovered his daughter in this village.

John Ridgway13:42

Nim red

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Yes, I fell ill some distance away from this front line area and um

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long, long way away from where she'd been born, and some Indians said that they remembered the Burg family they only made one journey out a year with their coffee crop.

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And uh they said, By the way, do you know that Elvin's daughter is here? and uh

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From feeling terribly ill, you know, the stair rods of rain coming down are streaming cold.

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Suddenly like a bolt of lightning, this sort of uh

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Belief that my friend's flesh and blood was actually here in this village.

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And you decided eventually to to adopt her? W was that suggested to you by by Yes, uh we came into this little mud hut and there was this little creature sitting cross legged on the floor.

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And I said, That's Elvin. I could straightway see that Elvin in her face.

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In these things you get very close to people on the rowing and such like.

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And I just felt, you know, I shouldn't let my mate down. I thought, gosh, if this was the other way round, who would look after Rebecca?

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And I thought I I must do something for her. We just came to the point where we said, Well, we must give her a present and my wife took off a ring from her grandmother, and my daughter took off her confirmation necklace and we hung it round her neck.

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And then suddenly

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There was a sort of a translation from a a teacher who was there.

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who said uh they're asking if you'll adopt her, because uh she's no father, her mother's a long way from here and she's just pining away.

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And the grandparents were terribly old in being hunted by the gorillas'cause he was a sort of village official.

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And there were the three of us, my wife.

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And my daughter, Rebecca.

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You've got to believe something in life I've spent

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20 years believing that the the main problem of too many people in the world.

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So twenty years of study in contraception, if you like.

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And we only had one child, and my

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My wife would like to have had more children, I know, and

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Here was someone who was already existing, who.

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was just a a born refugee, and had no chance at all of going anywhere. And this coincided just when my daughter was finished school and was going to start her own life, so if ever we were going to

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take someone on, uh it was now. But it was out of the blue, it wasn't you know, it was just like a bolt from heaven, really.

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Another choice of record, please, John.

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Well, life goes up and down, and one of the very lowest points of my life was in Auckland on the Whitbread Round the World race. The

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Crew had mutinied and walked off, probably with very good cause. And it looked as if perhaps Mary Christine and I would have to sail the yacht back from Auckland on our own. Mary Christine is your wife. Yes, that's right. And um along the quay came two ex-instructors and they just turned up at just my very lowest moment. They wanted to come.

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And they had the record uh Mullovkin Tyre, which is very close to where we live, and uh I don't know, I was practically in tears when I heard it.

Speaker 417:02

Mull of Kentucky, only strolling in from the sea. My desire is always to be all of Guinness.

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Port McCartney and the Mullachin Tyre.

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John, let's go back to this new daughter of yours, Elizabeth. She's now in England with her authority. In Scotland, she's up in Ardmore.

John Ridgway17:33

Yeah, yeah.

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Doesn't speak the language, of course. Must be like a a creature from another planet, I would imagine. Yes, we don't share any word of a common language. The closest I can say was that uh

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I was with someone who was in China recently, giving a presentation for business there, and he said.

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Surrounded by people who spoke only Chinese and Chinese writing, and until they actually spoke English, you totally lost. And that's how.

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I think she is at the moment.

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She has one or two words of Spanish, but

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There's not much point in speaking Spanish because when she goes to school there the it'll just be Scottish, which is another language again.

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Being a doctor yourself, of course, you must be looking particularly carefully at at how she's reacting. Yes, I am. Uh superficially she seems to be adapting very, very well.

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But there are little things. She'll never say her own name. I don't know if that is because.

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She was called Lisbet in the jungle and.

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She could well think, I think, at seven, that perhaps this is all a dream and she's shortly going to go back there. But she's never yet said her name.

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We've never seen her cry. She doesn't cry at all. So she's

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Very within herself.

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Very, very tough person. I mean she'll bite you or whatever. And she's tireless runner, which is very suitable for our world.

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But we took her to a swimming pool in London recently.

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And I was apprehensive about it. Mary Christine, who comes from a more settled background really, thought that she would swim but I remembered myself going to a swimming pool at school unable to swim, and that echoing noise and the splashing.

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And uh too frightened really and she wouldn't go near it. I knew just what she was thinking. Let's have another record, John, please.

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Well, there was another bad period in my life, about five years of um back trouble, which is shared by so many people.

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This was five or six years ago and I was at a low ebb and uh it coincided with Chariots of Fire and I've always looked to music for inspiration.

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And it certainly helped me through this and uh I thought, you know, I will come out the other side and I have.

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Themes from Chariots of Fire composed, arranged, produced and performed by Vangelis.

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John, you've circumnavigated the globe twice now in your catch. Do you have any plans to do it again in the future? Well, the boat sits there at the bottom of the croft, you know, it's like a magic carpet. I've always dreamed of it like that. I can get on there and go anywhere.

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On the face of the earth.

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And I suppose with uh Lisbeth with us now, I'm trying to persuade the family that it would be good to go on another trip, but we all suffer from seasickness. I found that absolutely amazing. You've been twice round the world, right? And and you're seasick, you don't like sailing and such?

John Ridgway20:55

Yeah.

John Ridgway21:02

My setting is.

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I've never really wanted to concentrate on any particular thing.

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I like the sailing, but I've.

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Also loved crossing ice caps and rivers and mountains and the Himalayas and

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I wouldn't say that I think greatly about sailing or any particular thing. I never wanted to become too intense on anything.

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Let's talk about the seasickness. I mean, it fascinates me because I'm I'm dreadfully seasick and I'm totally incapacitated. I mean, how do you, in fact, do you get through that point and are you able to work?

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Well with a modern stoogeron pill I don't become incapacitated, but I have found that after say

John Ridgway21:32

Well with a m

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A hundred and ninety days there's been a change of wind.

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And I've felt terribly sick. I haven't got entirely over it. But that's the negative side of it. The positive side, of course, is the

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The wonder of sailing right round the planet without stopping. In the middle years of my life I did that with another person from the school, Andy Briggs.

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And it it was just a wonderful thing to do. It was really making one big heap of the chips, that uh Kipling thing, you know, and chancing it all on one throw of pitch and task'cause the boat wasn't insured.

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And uh I think finding all those wind systems, the doldrums, the albatrosses, the whales, and then coming back into that lonely sea lock again, having seen the land only twice

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understanding mortality, I think. I'm not eighteen any more. Although I wish I was. Was the world larger than you thought it was? You went round it. No smaller. Much smaller. Much smaller. To do it nonstop

John Ridgway22:38

And round smaller animals.

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I think that's all there is to the entire planet.

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It isn't such a long time, seven months, really. Do you have a favourite ocean?

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The Southern Ocean, yes, yeah, I it's terribly sad leaving it last time. There's no trace there of of mankind.

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And you're accompanied by these huge whales and massive widow maker seas and

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Albatross is with twelve-foot wingspan.

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Expect

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Icebergs. You know, I've been stuck in the icebergs there on the Whitbread race which caused the mutiny.

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But uh

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Wonderful desolate place. Like Lawrence of Arabia, really, that romantic sweeping sound and thirteen thousand miles. Hm. I love it there.

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Another choice of record, please, John. Well, this would be uh a national anthem. This is the Marseillaise. I can only hum, you know, I'm not very musical. But in the non-grey days of my life, and this was one time, five months having seen no land, we'd just gone through two weeks of fog, homesick after Christmas, out into the glittering sun a thousand miles from Cape Horn.

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Huge waves on this magnificent boat, with my friend asleep down below.

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great black top ragged clouds and I thought

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This is it. There is no more in life than this. This is the absolute ultimate. And the master days I'd be humming that away to myself on deck.

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Our castaway, today is John Ridgeway. John, let's tell and talk about Ardenmore, where you live now, and and the adventure school that you've had up there for twenty years now, isn't it, or more? What was the purpose of the adventure school? How did it start? Initially I wanted to live there, I suppose, on a desert island. But

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I'd been to Sandhurst and I'd rowed across the Atlantic, and people turned to me a little bit, I found, for some form of inspiration.

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And so I I tried to work out

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What were my basic principles in life? And I thought perhaps self-reliance, positive thinking, and trying to leave people and things a bit better than you found them.

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And I then translated that into the school, which I've always kept entirely, really, to myself. I suppose we could have become a charitable trust or something.

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But that way I'd have lost control of it ultimately.

Speaker 425:58

Hmm.

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And so I just wanted to interpret my own feelings into what I was doing.

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And I've kept it like that now for, well, nearly twenty years.

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Well, I suppose we're best known for taking adult what we would call businessmen, because the average adult would think, well, if a businessman goes, then anybody could go. But in fact, we get a a wide range of people from twelve years to seventy years, different courses at different times of the year, but only for seven months of the year.

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And we keep the other five months either for going on expeditions or planning for them. But I mean, the people who come up there, I mean, what are they looking for? I think with the adults

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It's a complete change of life from the work and from the family so that the person is alone. Really, he doesn't have to say what he does and people don't know him.

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And it's a very active time because a lot of these people, if they're left to their own resources, will try and ring up the office.

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I think they are seeking some sort of a a break where they can consider what they're going to do next. That certainly happened with some. With the children, coming for two weeks there again it's an entirely new life. You might be fatty, piggy, inky at school, but you just come down that track as John Smith or Jane Smith. And you meet up with nineteen other people from all over Europe, and you have to become part of a group. The course is a success if the group comes together and carries out those three principles, particularly of leaving people and things better than they found them, I think.

Presenter27:36

Another choice of record, John, please.

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The next uh music is from Queen, and it's Is This the World We Created? And I think of this really.

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when we were in Peru, and I wake up in the mornings and I try to think that their people are still there as they were when we left and not to forget that.

Speaker 327:55

Oh is this the world we created? We made it all our own. Is this the world we devastated?

Speaker 328:07

Right to the moon, if there's a god in the sky Looking down, but can you think of what we've done?

Speaker 328:17

To the world that he created.

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Well

Presenter28:25

Is this the world we created? My Queen.

Presenter28:28

John, what about the future then? Because looking at at the catalogue of stuff you've done, I mean, it would seem to me there are very few adventures left.

Presenter28:35

Short of visiting the moon.

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Well, there's a lot for me to do. I think it uh the adventures are to make me think, really.

Presenter28:43

I've had to talk about the past on this programme, but I've never been one who liked thinking about the past at all. I've always concentrated on looking into the future and trying to find a sort of a fourth dimension, which I've often found while running, because it's so monotonous, that I I get an idea.

Presenter28:59

And I think the future really immediately will be Lisbet from Peru.

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Just bring her into the family, just making her part of adopt someone, which I felt I owed.

John Ridgway29:08

Okay.

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But she just might be something exceptional. If she was Madame Curie, she wasn't going to find it where she was, and it'd be wonderful if she could go back to Peru and perhaps help people in that awful condition they're out there.

Presenter29:31

Final choice of record, please, John. This would be the one I'd take with me, which would be just piano music, really. I like space and uncluttered tables and thinking is the main thing, and and I'd have Claire Delune.

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Claire Lune and the pianist was Pascal Roger.

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John, you've already answered the question about which uh record, in fact, you'd take onto the Desert Island, given that seven of them are swept away, and it's it's that one, wasn't it? That's right. Instead of them. What about the book? You've got Shakespeare and you've got the Bible, the complete basic works of Shakespeare on the island.

John Ridgway30:56

That's right.

John Ridgway31:01

Okay.

Presenter31:03

A book apart from those two? I'd take Wind in the Willows. Uh I was at school where it was written. But uh it's particularly because uh

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Old Toad there, he's going along in this gypsy caravan, you know, and uh he thinks he's the very bees knees and

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He hears this car coming in the distance, and his caravan is swept into the ditch, and he's lying in the dust, and the car goes by.

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This hypnotic look in his eyes going poop, poop, poop.

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And life's been like that a lot for me, and I'd never like to forget it.

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And what about the luxury object? I think again, to keep the morale up, I would want good shaving gear. I'd like to shave beautifully every morning and come out when the bell went.

John Ridgway31:37

Yeah.

Presenter31:46

John Ridgeway, thank you very much indeed. Thank you.

John Ridgway31:55

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