Hello!, October 17, 1998
Interview by Ian Woodward
Photos by Adrian Houston

An in-depth interview with the "world's greatest living explorer" and his exceptional wife at their Exmoor home

You have to be something of an explorer yourself to track down the hone of the man hailed by the Guiness Book of Records as the "world's greatest living explorer", the intrepid and seemingly incurable adventurer who has thundered up the Nile by hovercraft, tramped through blistering deserts and staggered 1,350 mile across the Antarctic pulling his own sledge.

When Sir Ranulph Fiennes gives you directions for his Exmoor farm - where his wife, Ginny, Lady Fiennes, maintains a flock of Welsh Mountain sheep, 200 Aberdeen Angus cattle and numerous ducks, hens and guinea-fowl - you don't realise just how remote the place is. Unitl, that is, you make the trek up over bracken-and-heather-quilted Dunkery Beacon, where wild ponies and red deer graze and where the novel Lorna Doone was set.

The Fiennes' lifestyle is rugged and they are both incredibly fit, with not a spare ounce of flesh on either on them, which explains why Sir Ranulph, 54, has now written a book entitled Fit for Life, due out later this month.

Although he hasn't worked hard to achieve fitness, being an on-and-off smoker, a chocoholic and a glutton for gooey cakes, when he was 49, army tests showed his fitness to be "in line with that of a 21-year-old top athlete in peak form".

"I'm not a Jane Fonda or a professor in nutrition," insists the explorer, who became the first man to cross both polar ice-caps in his Transglobe top-to-bottom circumnavigation of the earth in 1982. "I'm just someone who has had to keep very physically fit in order to do a job. Along the way, I've come across fitness-inducing things which work for me and work for those who come on my expeditions.

"Most people know that to be healthy they should be doing various things and not doing various things, such as not smoking, but the trouble is that taking exercise is basically unpleasant for the vast majority of us. Eating healthily is also a hell of a bore.

"So there must be a happy medium so that life can be pleasant while you're working on keeping fit. The sort of fitness I'm talking about means that if you do what my book says, you can be in the top two per cent of fit people in the UK well into your 60s without too much difficulty."

Does Ginny share his level of fitness? He peers from the window towards a far-distant field where his wife of 28 years is tending some cattle. "Well, she smokes despite my protestations, and yet she is very fit. She has a low heart rate and she doesn't look her age," says Sir Ranulph. "She's a farmer, so she's obviously much fitter than someone in a sedentary job. She works very hard all day, and very often much of the night, with the cattle that she looks after on the moors."

The Fiennes are an amazing couple. They have known each other since he was 12 and she was nine, when their families were neighbours in a Sussex village. Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes, OBE [Officer of the British Empire], Hon DSc [Honoury Doctor of Science], third baronet of Banbury, holder of the Livingstone Gold Medal, says that the former Virginia Pepper is his one and only love.

Their lives have been totally interlinked. Ran, as he is affectionately known, was so deeply in love with Ginny when he was a 21-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys, that he used to climb her school roof for secret meetings.

"Her father, who sometimes liked me and sometimes didn't, had us followed, but we married in 1970 when I was 26 and Ginny was 23," recalls Sir Ranulph. "Ginny's the single most important thing in my life. The expeditions, projects and farm would lose their point without her. She's not only my wife, but a sister and friend."

Ginny was once asked about the key to their relationship and why they got on so well. She did not give it a moment's thought. "Probably because he's away all the time," she said with stark simplicity.

Sir Ranulph's expeditions can take him from home for anything from three to six months, though his last trip in 1996 - an attempt to walk solo and unsupported across Antarctica - lasted only a month after he got kidney stones and returned home in agony.

"I'm not the sort to throw myself on the floor and burst into tears each time he sets off on one of his expeditions," says Ginny. "I married Ran knowing what he's like and what he does. I just keep extremely busy. And because I've been on polar expeditions with him, I can relate to what he's doing."

"Ginny's accompanied me on six major expeditions," explains Sir Ranulph. "She was the first woman to be awarded the Polar Medal, which the Queen presented to her, and she was the first woman to be voted into the hitherto all-male Antarctic Club."

"She is, and was, a very strong character, he says, "and to have someone to rely on 100 per cent - and you can only rely on your wife like that - is a great advantage."

Did he get to know Ginny on these expeditions in a way he might not otherwise have done under normal marital circumstances?

"Professor Anthony Clare, the psychiatrist, once asked me that question. Well, I don't think it did reveal more about us because in a group like that you know you've got support automatically and that you're not going to have everybody else ganging up on you."

Ask Sir Ranulph why he goes on expeditions and he replies simply: "Because it is my job. It's the way I make my income." But at the core of everything he does is probably the desire to emulate the father he never knew, a distinguished army officer who won the DSO [Distinguished Service Order] in North Africa and was killed in southern Italy four months before his son's birth in March 1944.

"He was highly thought of," says Sir Ranulph. who was named after him. "I don't really know if we were alike, except that he loved to travel to way-out places, as I do. Not long after I was born we moved to South Africa with my paternal grandmother.

"It must have been very difficult for my mother: no man, and living in a foreign country with her mother-in-law. All the males in the family were dead. I had three sistters, so I was brought up in a matriarchy. We returned to England when I was 11 or 12 and I cried a lot when I went to prep school, but I soon got over that."

Things weren't as easy when he went to Eton, his father's old school. His pretty-boy looks got him bullied to the point where - he reveals for the first time - he contemplated suicide.

He says: "I was verbally bullied rather than physically bullied. I had had a cosseted upbringing and I was probably spoilt. I learnt that people can be nasty to one another, which, after my soft childhood in South Africa, was a great shock to the system. English public school is good at giving shocks to the system of wimpish boys.

"For the first year I had absolutely no idea how to deal with the bullying and it just made me grow more and more into myself and become very miserable. It got to the point where I thought the only way out was to jump over Windsor Bridge.

"And then, incredibly, miraculously, just before I put my terrible plan into action, I started boxing in a big way, and became the Eton light-heavyweight champion. I could now look after myself. The bullies backed off."

His schoolboy ambition was to command the Royal Scots Greys regiment, like his father, but he failed his A levels twice and so missed out on qualifying for officer training. "As it was, I spent eight years in the Army, after which the only thing I knew how to do was lead three 70-ton tanks in withdrawal - which doesn't exactly look good on a CV."

So, after leaving the army in 1970 with a "startling lack of qualifications", he found himself not knowing what to do with the rest of his life. And then a publisher offered him a £400 advance to write a book about a trip he had made up the Nile.

When it was published, he joined Fowles Literary Agency and went the rounds of dingy town halls, earning £25 a talk. Here, he decided, was a way he could survive: doing an expedition every summer then writing books like The Headless Valley and To The End of the Earth and lecturing about them during the winter.

That same year he married Ginny Pepper. The marriage had been a long time coming. His hazel eyes gleam when describing her. "Amazing woman," he says over and over again.

"I can remember quite vividly seeing Ginny for the first time. My family had just arrived from South Africa and moved into her area of Sussex. One day her brothers asked me round to play with their electric trains. And that's when I first saw Ginny. I was 12. To this day I can still see her big, sparkling blue eyes and her wicked smile. I thought she was very pretty from day one.

"As a teenager she wasn't keen on dances and all that sort of thing, and nor was I. It eventually got to the point where I wanted to be engaged to her, but I didn't want to be married. I thought being married was sort of being locked in a cage and should be put off.

"But I felt that our engagement would ensure that nobody else could lay claim to her and that I'd be able to keep her 'on hold' until some distant unknown day. Alas, after two years, she rumbled what I was up to and handed back the engagement ring and went up to Scotland to work for the National Trust where she met other eligible men.

"I then heard through the grapevines that she was having a serious affair and that this chap was about to pop the question. I dashed up there and proposed for the second time and said 'Look, if you say yes, we'll be married within a fortnight." So it was a bit of a shock to my mother and everybody else to be told that they had to arrange a wedding within two weeks."

The Fiennes celebrated their 28th wedding anniversary last month. But although they can smile about it now, the marriage got off to a tempestuous start. "Our honeymoon, a tour through Eastern Europe, was so difficult we nearly split up," says Sir Ranulph. "In fact, we fought for the first five years.

We were both very strong characters and compromise, the linchpin of any marriage, was extremely difficult to attain. We needed a maturing process before we could get to any state of bliss. Couples don't work hard enough at compromise, hence the high divorce rate. Thank God we worked at it.

"It helped tremenduously that we'd known each other for such a long time - it's now 42 years since we first met - and for that reason we had a mutual keenness to make our marriage work. It's survived this long because we've been through such a lot together, sometimes in life-threatening situations."

For the past 12 years they have shared a rambling mid-19th-century house built on a hillside of their farm, where they are aided and abetted by their two St. John's waterdogs Thule and Pingo.

"We wanted a place where we could get away from noise and 'neighbours from hell' as they call it on TV. It had been uninhabited for nearly three years when we found it and was in a dreadful state, with fungus and mouse and rat droppings everywhere," explains the explorer.

"We didn't have any electricity for the first nine years, just a smelly old generator. We knew it would be quiet here, and it is. The weather is appalling for much of the winter, with thick mists and driving rain - we love it. We couldn't be happier."

There has been only one blight on the marital landscape. "I regret not being able to have had a family... and yet there is no point in worrying about things that aren't meant to be. It's obviously been more of a sadness for Ginny because she has the normal maternal instincts, but I don't have those innate feelings so it hasn't been so bad for me.

"Anyway," he grins, "if people ask if we have any children, I say: 'Yes, approximately 200 of them.' Ginny's out in all weathers looking after her cows, each one of which has a name - which, to my mind, is not a good sign in terms of future beef sales."

Strangely, he has only once met his heart-throb actor cousin, Ralph Fiennes. "Judi Dench," he says, "once introduced him to us. He seems to be a really nice guy. I thought his Nazi in Schindler's List unbelievably convincing.

"When he was making The English Patient, he wrote me a note saying that on location he often thought of my Arab expedition, when, as Lawrence of Arabia had planned before me, I was searching for the lost city of Ubar in Oman."