The other great traveller whose books I had studied and whose journeys I had long coveted was not acquainted with hot deserts at all, for he specialised in the world’s coldest places. In Antarctica and on the shifting sea-ice of the Arctic Ocean, Wally Herbert’s great journeys were, through the 1950s and 1960s, the stuff of polar travellers’ dreams, especially his 1968/69 first true crossing of the Arctic Ocean. On this expedition a news reporter in his radio base camp overheard Wally describe his expedition’s London committee, a group including the most senior polar men in the Establishment at that time, as people who ‘didn’t know what the bloody hell they were talking about’. As a result, thirty years after his monumental success in the Arctic, Wally had still not been honoured in any way, unlike a number of his direct contemporaries, including Chris Bonington, the mountaineer, and Robin Knox-Johnston, the sailor.
For three years I conducted a fierce correspondence with the Cabinet Office and the relevant civil honours bureaucrats. But Wally’s file was clearly blacked, and I got nowhere fast. Eventually, after obtaining letters of admiration for Wally’s pioneering achievements from all over the world, the Cabinet Office agreed that Wally should be knighted. He died in 2007, our greatest polar traveller since Scott.
Early that autumn, Mike Kobold phoned from Austria to say he had traced the ex-Nazi policeman who had murdered the mother of Derek Jacobs, as well as some 200 other women. Since neither the Secret Hunters nor the Nazi-hunting services of Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna, who had helped us in our Nazi search for over a year, had been able to trace the man, I was amazed at Mike’s announcement. Nevertheless I flew out to meet him at Frankfurt Airport, close to his German home, the following day.
16
Heart Attack
Mike Kobold had trained with the German Traffic Police driving department and as we sped from Frankfurt to Vienna he frequently exceeded 150 mph in his Audi. My feet pressed hard against the footwell, as Mike chattered amiably. I began to understand why Germany produced so many Schumacher-class speedmasters.
Simon Wiesenthal, Mike informed me, had identified the Nazi we were after – Michael Weingärtner – who had never been punished, nor indeed had the vast majority of individuals who had perpetrated acts of cruelty or murder in the name of Hitler. Weingärtner had, according to Wiesenthal’s researchers, fled Germany in the sixties, soon after Adolf Eichmann’s hanging in Israel and, like many of his ilk, had found sanctuary in Austria. Our discreet enquiries had revealed that he was living in the suburbs of Wels, a prosperous town near Vienna. We drove to Wels and parked close to the house. We both wore suits and carried briefcases. Mike led me up a path through a well-tended garden and knocked on the front door. A small grey-haired woman with tight features stared at us with hostility, if not menace. Mike explained that we had just flown from New York to follow up our newspaper’s story about Weingärtner’s part in the Wallern Death March of April 1945. We had heard that Weingärtner had somehow saved the lives of three women from murder by his colleagues. Would he please corroborate this?
Frau Weingärtner, for she could be no other, disappeared for a few minutes. An angry male voice sounded from within. Then she returned and told Mike that her husband was watching the F1 Grand Prix, that Michael Schumacher was winning, that it was a Sunday, that we had not deigned to make an appointment and that we should leave their home at once. The door slammed.
We had come a long way, if not from New York, and we conferred on the doorstep. We agreed to wait in the car until the Grand Prix ended. The Audi’s radio duly announced that Schumacher had won the event so, assuming that Weingärtner would now be in as good a mood as we would ever be likely to find him, we again knocked on his door. Weingärtner himself answered this time.
He was no bigger than his wife and as unremarkable-looking. His face was certainly hard and his manner ice-cold, but, at first, his tone was polite enough.
‘May we come in?’ Mike asked.
Weingärtner ignored this. ‘You say that I saved the women’s lives.’ He made a slight shrugging motion. ‘Na. Ya. I did my best for them. They were difficult times for us.’
‘So,’ Mike countered, ‘you would disagree with these US 5th Army records resulting from interrogations of the surviving women?’ Mike produced a file from his case. ‘As you can see, they say that, of the 3,000 women killed or allowed to die on the march, you were personally the killer of at least 200 women, mostly teenage girls, whose photographs are shown here.’ Mike pointed at line upon line of women’s mugshots.
Weingärtner then clammed up. ‘I killed nobody,’ he said, and slammed the door in our faces. After a minute, his wife poked her head out and said firmly, ‘Das ist alles.’ So ended our attempt at being foot-in-the-door investigative journalists and I was left wondering about such people as Weingärtner who are still to be traced all over the world today, individuals who have caused agony and misery and committed mass murder. To my mind there can be no date nor age beyond which a person guilty of mass murder should become immune to justice. Mike and I sent details of Michael Weingärtner’s address to Simon Wiesenthal’s office and I subsequently gave talks on our search for the Wallern Death March murderers to groups of Holocaust survivors in Britain. The book about Derek Jacobs and his quest, The Secret Hunters, was published in 2001.
My next biography was going to be a very different sort of undertaking. In 1980, when I reached the South Pole Scott-Amundsen Base for the first time, I spent four days there. I helped the inmates with the dishwashing in their canteen and chatted to many of the overwintering scientists. It was interesting to hear their views on various explorers, including Captain Robert Falcon Scott, after whom their polar base was half named. They mentioned to me that the previous year an Englishman named Roland Huntford had published a new book on Scott. Apparently, they said, the whole story about Scott the polar hero was merely old Brit imperialist propaganda which this Huntford guy’s book ruthlessly exposed. I meant to buy this book on returning home, but I forgot.
Then, in the mid-1980s, I was reminded about it from an unexpected source – Mrs Raisa Gorbachev, to whom Ginny and I were making a presentation in Moscow on behalf of Dr Hammer. She told me that Stalin had much admired Scott, who had been awarded various Soviet honours, but that more recently Scott had been exposed as a mere fool. I bought the Huntford book and watched a seven-hour ITV documentary film based on it. Both contained much information that my own experiences by then made me find questionable, although I found book and film good entertainment value. The book read like an exciting novel and, not being well versed in polar history at the time, I was impressed by its lengthy acknowledgments and lists of references.
Later, after Mike Stroud and I manhauled across the Antarctic continent in 1993, I saw the ITV film again and this time it rang a very different bell. There were huge inaccuracies and they stemmed from Huntford’s book. Over the next decade I read all the books that I could find about Scott, some 112 in all, and I became slowly aware of the magnitude of the change wrought to Scott’s reputation by Huntford’s book which had by 2003 become the generally accepted view of the explorer. Huntford himself was considered the world’s number one polar biographer, although he had never been near either Pole, and his books were treated as reliable history. His fabricated version of Scott would be difficult to expose.
I was not alone in my dismay at the injustice done to Scott. Britain’s most senior polar explorer, Sir Vivian Fuchs, dismissed Huntford’s book: ‘This is one man’s interpretation and his inexperience of the conditions he is writing about clearly makes him incompetent to judge them.’
I determined to instigate my own research and reach my own conclusions which were that Huntford had skewed history in his vendetta against Scott and his championing of Amundsen. At least with polar experience on my side I could reinvestigate the facts and contribute something towards restoring historical reality.
As work on my Scott biography was coming to an end I knew I needed a complete break and ch
ange of activity. Out of the blue I phoned Mike Stroud and suggested we get involved in another expedition. He was however too busy in Southampton to spare the three months an average expedition would take. His counter-suggestion was that we run seven marathons on each of the world’s seven continents in seven days. This was an idea originally proposed by Mary Gadams, his American team-mate on a previous Eco-Challenge race, but she had not managed to get the enterprise off the ground. The idea appealed to me enormously and Mike and I set about getting the sponsorship and logistics in place while training seriously for the running. We would need to start in Antarctica and it would be good to aim to finish by joining an official marathon run somewhere like New York. It was only a case of connecting it all up.
The day after I finished the final corrections to the text of my Scott biography I was due to give a talk to a convention in Dunblane, so I told Ginny I would see her the following morning and I drove to Bristol Airport, arriving at the departure desk of the no-frills airline, Go, in good time. I boarded the aircraft and settled down to read a magazine. I can remember nothing that happened from that moment for the next three days and nights.
Apparently not more than a few minutes before take off I collapsed noiselessly and was dragged into the aisle, where a passenger with medical training gave me instant mouth-to-mouth cardiac resuscitation. The pilot called the fire service, and the fire engine accelerated across the tarmac to drop off two firemen recently trained in the use of the mobile defibrillator which they carried on board. They applied a powerful 200-joule DC electric shock which passed right across my chest to depolarise every cell in my heart. This caused my natural pacemaker to recover and my heart was once more a regularly beating pump. Deeply unconscious, I was then rushed to a waiting ambulance. Twice more on the journey to Bristol’s Royal Infirmary and three more times in the Accident & Emergency unit I lapsed back into fibrillation. The stabilising drugs I was given proved ineffective but the doctors managed in due course to stabilise my condition. Fearful however that I would have further attacks, they sent me to surgery. Within just two hours of my initial collapse, I was on cardiac bypass with a machine artificially pumping and refrigerating my blood.
A consultant cardiologist, Dr Tim Cripps, commented to me much later, ‘Out of the hundred thousand people a year in the UK who have a cardiac arrest, the first and only warning they get is the attack itself and only very few are lucky enough to be near a defibrillator and someone who knows how to use it.’ After treating me to some examples of others who had not been so lucky, he went on, ‘When you arrived in our ICU you were measured at 4 points on the Glasgow Coma Scale. The lowest the scale goes is Level 3, which Richard Hammond of Top Gear achieved after his car crash at 260 mph.’
Dr Cripps called the senior Bristol cardiac surgeon, Gianni Angelini, who subsequently wrote:
On arrival RF had a coronary angiography which showed the presence of a large thrombus (blood clot) blocking the left anterior descending and the intermediary arteries, two of the most important arteries of the heart.
He was fully anaesthetised, artificially ventilated and taken at once to the operating theatre. I was informed at my home and when I arrived was told it was quite bad . . . The situation was so urgent that we decided to go ahead and open his chest even prior to the arrival of the perfusion team . . . Two bypass grafts were performed, one using an artery called the internal mammary artery, which is behind the breastbone, the other a long segment of vein from the leg. There was serious concern about his neurological state since we didn’t know the extent and duration of his cardiac arrest at the airport and thereafter. He was kept sedated for 24 hours . . . Then woken up . . . From then on it became rather difficult to manage him, since he virtually refused any analgesia, saying he did not have a great deal of pain. And that he wanted the tubes and lines removed as soon as possible because he had to walk up and down the corridor. He was discharged five days after surgery.
Ginny had sat by my bedside day and night and watched my tube-fed, artificially ticking body, blood-smeared in places, lying in front of her for more than three days. Every now and again a nurse would enter and thump my knee or foot for a reaction. None came. This could not have been a good time for Ginny. When I eventually came to, we kissed as best we could and she told me that I had had a heart attack. It took a while to work out what she was saying and where I was. My chest had been opened up from top to bottom and later sewn up with silver wire, the knots of which I can still feel jutting proud just beneath my skin.
Leaning on Ginny’s shoulder, once the pipes and tubes had all been removed from various places, I managed to walk a few paces but felt extremely sore. Ginny drove me home the next day and put me to bed with strict instructions not to move. I asked for chocolate, but she said I was never to eat chocolate again.
Why, we both wondered, had I had this attack at all? Some years later Mike Stroud wrote about my attack and his opinion of it in his book Survival of the Fittest.
Ran smoked enthusiastically earlier in life and never paid much attention to ‘healthy’ aspects of his diet. Furthermore, he probably has an inherited metabolic predisposition for heart problems. In many, this would have been recognised from their family history – a mother or father having a heart attack at an early age. In Ran’s case, however, this could have been missed. He knew his mother had a healthy heart to great age but his father’s medical potential was unknown (he died young in the Second World War). Ran’s cumulative risk factors simply overcame even his level of physical-fitness protection. Of course, the newspapers had a field day, for the story of Ran’s heart attack was of great appeal. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the epitome of continued vigorous activity in middle age, declared various columnists, had clearly been overdoing it. This annoyed me intensely. I immediately rang the hospital intensive-care unit to send best wishes to Ran and his wife Ginny. She must have been incredibly distressed, and she now faced a future without the man who had matured from childhood sweetheart into a husband and longstanding expedition partner. But although concern for them both was uppermost in my mind, I have to admit that, for me, Ran’s condition also raised practical issues, because with Ran in a coma in intensive care, all thought and planning that had gone into our seven marathons project seemed to have come to nought. This did not, however, reckon with Ran’s resilience. On the fourth day after his surgery he rang me.
‘Mike?’
I immediately recognised his voice.
‘Ran, how are you? How’s Ginny? How’s – ’ My flurry of surprise was swiftly interrupted.
‘Mike, I can’t chat for long but I’m fine. Don’t cancel anything for now.’
I guessed immediately what he was referring to but I needed to be absolutely certain.
‘You mean the marathons?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been told there was a little damage so I don’t see—’
‘What? You mean your doctors say it’s okay?’ I interrupted.
‘No, no,’ he responded, whispering. ‘I haven’t asked them yet.’
Our conversation ran on for a couple more minutes but at the end I was clear. Ran was in cloud-cuckoo-land and his specialist would soon bring him down to earth.
Then five days later he rang again.
‘How’s it going? When will you be home?’ I started.
‘Oh, very soon,’ he came back, a slight laugh in his voice. ‘I’m just walking off the moor.’
When it came to confessing my future marathon intentions, I had hopes that my surgeon Professor Angelini would be sympathetic. After all, he still held the Italian 800 metres record. However I decided to approach the topic cautiously. Here is his account of his response:
I saw RF in my office for the usual post-operative check-up and he told me it was his intention to run a marathon. He asked my opinion and I said, as much as I liked running myself, I have never had a patient who had asked me a question like can I run a marathon after a heart operation. I told him he probably could, given the fact
that his coronaries were now pretty well sorted out. However I would advise him not to run in a competitive fashion. What he failed to tell me was that his intention was to run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Something which I would strongly advise not to do!
Meanwhile, the cardiologist, Dr Tim Cripps, decided that his colleague, Dr David Smith in Exeter, would be best qualified to decide whether or not I should be allowed to try to run a marathon, since he knew a lot more about sports cardiology. David, who was a frequent running partner and good friend to both Mike Stroud and myself and had been my team leader on the Moroccan Eco-Challenge, checked my post-operative angiograms with care and said it would be okay to run non-competitively provided I kept my heart rate low.
For my own part, I decided to see if the sponsors of our marathon project, Land Rover, would be prepared to postpone everything for a year. They were then owned by Ford who decided that postponement was not on the cards. I must teach myself to run again in three and a half months. The bottom line, I decided, was to give it a go and if I couldn’t do it, Mike would have to go solo.
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 26