by Ben Fogle
In many ways, Eddie the Eagle was merely following the centuries-old recipe created by our rich history of explorers who specialized in that plucky derring-do, have-a-go attitude. As a tiny island nation we have produced some of the world’s greatest explorers and adventurers; but what defines many of the great English expeditions is failure. We take on a challenge knowing that it is doomed to fail but press on regardless. Shackleton, Scott, Fawcett, Mallory … the long list of heroic failures seems to define a unique kind of Englishness. Is that dogged determination in the face of adversity part of the romance, the danger and exhilaration of treading the fine line between success and failure? A little like our sport and even our weather, we appear to have an inevitable resignation to being doomed to failure.
This admiration of failure goes hand in hand with the fact that we have never been particularly good at celebrating success. I’m not sure if it’s pessimism, guilt or jealousy, but we have a strange relationship with high achievement. We often describe it as tall-poppy syndrome, the phenomenon whereby we will root for individuals until their stem – success – becomes too tall, and then we cut them down to size.
As an island nation, more used to looking to the horizon to ward off invaders, England took a surprisingly long time to use her maritime expertise to explore the world beyond our borders. Portugal and Spain were pioneers in undertaking voyages in the so-called Age of Discovery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They established vast and enviably wealthy empires, prompting England – in a race against France and the Netherlands – to sail forth to claim colonies and set up trade networks of their own in the Americas and in Asia. Then, in the sixteenth century, along came Sir Francis Drake, Sir Martin Frobisher and Anthony Jenkinson, and the English adventurer was born, ushering in an era of investigation around the globe which has had a lasting effect on the society in which we live today. Explorers raised anchor and set off with an ambitious to-do list. They were determined to discover new lands, to further scientific enquiry, to bring home new mineral and agricultural resources, to map the world in greater detail – and to make a name (and fortune) for themselves. The dangers were real; the adventure exhilarating. Such hazardous missions were open to all social classes. A roll call of the best-known explorers shows that few survived to reminisce about their forays in pipe and slippers. They leave a colourful legacy of heroes, perilous challenges and mysteries …
Arguably our earliest pioneer was Captain James Cook. He was born in 1728 in a small village near Middlesbrough, the son of a farm worker. One of the few naval captains to rise through the ranks, Cook’s achievements are pretty impressive. Between 1763 and 1767 he was responsible for charting the complex coastline of Newfoundland aboard HMS Grenville. On an expedition commissioned by the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, he commanded HMS Endeavour to witness the transit of Venus across the sun – a rare event visible only in the southern hemisphere – sailing to Tahiti via Cape Horn. Once the astronomer, Charles Green, had made his observations they sailed on to New Zealand and then became the first Europeans to navigate the length of Australia’s east coast. Cook claimed the region for Britain and named it New South Wales.
In 1772, a year after his return home, Cook set out on a second voyage to look for the southern continent. They nearly succeeded but had to return before discovering it because of the extreme cold. For his final voyage, he set out to discover the fabled North-West Passage, which the world’s navigators and cartographers presumed was the link between the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean. He was unsuccessful and ended up landing on Hawaii, where he was stabbed by an islander and died on 14 February 1779. Despite a lifetime of success, his untimely death seems to me to mark the beginning of the era of heroic failures.
While Cook circumnavigated the globe, nearly a century later a new generation of explorers would begin a new land grab for some of the last unexplored corners of the planet, the polar regions.
I took on my own ocean in 2005 when I teamed up with the double Olympic gold rowing champion James Cracknell to row the Atlantic. Ocean-rowing is a peculiarly English occupation that has escalated in popularity over the last decade. Goodness knows why. Rowing a tiny 21ft boat made of plywood and stuck together with glue nearly 3,500 miles across the Atlantic has to count as the most miserable seven weeks of my life.
What makes it so English? Well, the slowness and monotony have an appeal a little like that of cricket; the challenge itself is both eccentric and utterly pointless; and it is far from glamorous or sexy. In many ways, ocean-rowing epitomizes so many English traits. There’s a certain ‘because-it’s-there’ feeling to the whole enterprise.
So why did I choose to do it? Well, I think my Englishness played a part.
Growing up, I relished the stories of those great earlier explorers and pioneers. A particular favourite was Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who was born in 1868 in Plymouth, Devon. He led two expeditions to the Antarctic. On the Discovery expedition in 1901–4 he broke a new southern record by reaching latitude 82°S and discovered the Polar Plateau. Then in 1910 he set off for the Terra Nova Expedition, which was to end infamously in tragedy. He reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 a month after Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition. They perished on the return journey having missed a meeting point with the dog teams. Temperatures suddenly dropped to -40°C as they trudged northwards.
In a farewell letter to Sir Edgar Speyer, treasurer of the fund raised to finance the expedition, and dated 16 March 1912, Scott wondered whether he had missed the meeting point and fought the growing suspicion that he had in fact been abandoned by the dog teams: ‘We very nearly came through, and it’s a pity to have missed it, but lately I have felt that we have overshot our mark. No-one is to blame and I hope no attempt will be made to suggest that we had lacked support.’
On the same day, one of his companions, Laurence Oates, who had become frostbitten and who had gangrene, voluntarily left the tent and walked to his death. Scott wrote down Oates’s last words, some of the most famous ever recorded: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ If ever there was an English way of dying, surely that was it?
I was always taken by the tragic tale of Captain Scott, so perhaps it is no surprise that when I finally got a chance to take part in a race to the South Pole, once again James Cracknell and I teamed up for an escapade which I recounted in The Accidental Adventurer. In a gratifyingly English outcome, we were pipped to the finish by the Norwegian team, by the tiny margin of four hours. Heroic failures to the last.
Born around the same time as Scott was another plucky Englishman, George Herbert Leigh Mallory. He took part in three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s. First was the 1921 reconnaissance expedition, which reached 22,500 feet (6,900m) on the North Col. In the second, a year later, the team including Mallory got to 27,320 feet (8,320m) but could not summit. But it was his 1924 summit attempt with climbing partner Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine that is most deeply shrouded in mystery. Both men disappeared as they attempted to become the first to stand on top of the world. They were last seen about 245 vertical metres from the summit. The fate of the climbers remained a mystery until 1 May 1999, when a research expedition sponsored by the BBC to find the climbers’ bodies came across Mallory’s corpse at 26,755 feet (8,155m). Irvine’s body remains somewhere up there. Did they reach the top? The subject remains one of intense speculation and continuing research. Whatever the answer, Mallory and Irvine only added to the public’s enduring love of the heroic failure.
When you’re going into the unknown, it’s quite possible that you’ll disappear and, if you’re English, the odds are that bit shorter. Perhaps one of the greatest explorer mysteries is that of Lieutenant Colonel Percival ‘Percy’ Harrison Fawcett, born in 1867 in Torquay, Devon.
His upbringing was about as English as you could get. He was educated at Newton Abbot Proprietary College; in 1886, he joined the Royal Artillery and was stationed in Ceylon (as it then was). He st
udied mapmaking and surveying and joined the Royal Geographical Society. Military life bored him and after a spell working undercover for the British Secret Service in North Africa, he received a commission from the RGS to use his surveying skills to settle a border dispute between Bolivia and Brazil. He arrived in La Paz in June 1907, aged thirty-nine. Fantastic stories started to trickle back to London. He claimed to have shot a giant 62ft anaconda, as well as many other animals unknown to zoologists – including a ‘cat-like’ dog and a giant poisonous Apazauca spider. He made seven expeditions through the jungle and his adventures became the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. After volunteering to serve in the First World War he returned to South America with his eldest son, Jack, in 1925. Before the war, he’d heard local legends about a lost city called ‘Z’, somewhere in the Brazilian jungle. It became an obsession. He was convinced the city existed in the Mato Grosso region and he, his son and Jack’s best friend, the heroically named Raleigh Rimell, plunged into the jungle. They were never seen again. Percy left instructions with his wife that, if they should disappear, no one should come after them; but ever since hundreds of expeditions have taken place with the sole purpose of locating this true English heroic failure.
It continues to surprise me the astonishing rate at which we have generated great adventurers compared to the size of our nation. Take a look at the current generation of great English explorers: Colonel John Blashford-Snell, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Sir Chris Bonington, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Dame Ellen MacArthur, to name just a few. We are celebrated for our explorers, but I think somehow we tend to celebrate those who have a go and fail spectacularly rather than those who easily come out on top.
A. A. Gill wrote in his book The Angry Island: Hunting the English:
For the English, real character is built not by winners, but by losers. Anyone can be a good winner … It is in losing that the individual really discovers what they’re made of, and it was in coming a good second that the kernel of the truth in the lesson of sport lay, because winning a game of muddied oafs or flannelled fools is transiently unimportant, but being able to cope with failure and disappointment, to turn around the headlong impetus of adrenalin, effort, expectation and hope, and still shake hands with your opponent and pick up the bat or the boot the next day – that’s the proving and honing and the toughening of character.
We are perhaps the world leaders in heroic failure, and we’re actually happy with that.
CHAPTER FOUR
STRAWBERRIES AND CREAM
In my navy blue linen suit I felt positively bland amidst the riot of colour. Pink jackets with white braid, candy-striped jackets in yellow, purple and green, camouflage jackets, floral jackets, red school blazers, blue blazers, salmon-pink trousers, canary-yellow trousers and purple caps. One man wore luminous green trousers, below which could be seen one velvet orange shoe with yellow laces, the other shoe in velvet green with red laces. Some had eschewed colour for white loafers, white shirt, and cream-coloured trousers and jackets. Bowler hats, top hats, Panama hats and straw boaters competed alongside various sporting caps of every shade and hue imaginable.
There were W. G. Grace lookalikes with long beards and double-breasted white blazers alongside hipster toffs and moustachioed dandies with walking sticks and old rowing ties, old boys’ rowing hats in an equally garish cacophony of colours, and some older men in full naval uniforms. Everyone swigged merrily from champagne flutes or glasses of Pimm’s along the bustling banks of the Thames. Meanwhile, the competitors – tall, gangly young rowers – marched around in candy-striped Lycra and Henley tops in a rich palette of pastels. The women, in dresses that came below the knee, wore an assortment of hats in every shape and size, but alongside the rainbow of gentlemanly sartorial splendour, they all looked rather drab.
Once a year Henley-on-Thames plays host to the biggest rowing regatta in the world and arguably the poshest event in England. It is an A–Z gathering of every public schoolboy in the land.While Ascot is all about the ladies and their hats, Henley is about the gentlemen and their outlandish blazers and trousers. Rowing club colours on a blazer or cap are encouraged, as is the wearing of straw boaters. And here, in the colours of the blazer, is where English eccentricity comes into play. The pastel rainbow-striped blazer of the Cambridge Archetypals stands out a mile. Entitlement to wear it is legendary: you have to row in the Boat Race three times, get a third-class degree and have spent three nights in jail. Another exquisitely exclusive tale belongs to the chaps entitled to wear the Hampton Curtains blazers, tailored from brown burlap fabric adorned with lions and crests which was cut down from Hampton School’s Great Hall. Only ten of these garments exist, because they can only be worn by those who have won the triple crown of junior rowing – that is, the Schools Head of the River race, the National Schools Regatta and the Princess Elizabeth Plate at Henley.
Toffs have always had a soft spot for bright, garish colours. Only in England could the upper/middle-class penchant for wearing red trousers lead to the creation of a website, Look at my F****** Red Trousers, which is ‘a collection of photographs in celebration of the vibrant and burgeoning red-trousered communities of London and the home counties’. In some ways, I suppose, red trousers might arguably be seen as a part of our national dress – it definitely is for toffs, at any rate. Henley is the opportunity for the great and the good of the upper middle classes to show off their peacock-like plumage in all its multicoloured glory. If Skittles could be people, they would be Henley’s racegoers.
While the riverbanks hummed with thousands of spectators, the real action of course belonged to the Thames itself. The river had been divided into two sections: one side for the racing, the other for the spectators’ boats. Hundreds in every shape and size punted, rowed, paddled, steamed and motored up and down. Tiny wooden skiffs were overladen with blue-blazered passengers, all sipping on glasses of Chablis. Small skiffs had been converted into mobile picnic sites, and beautiful old craft glided elegantly along, laden with with impossibly posh-looking people sitting in wicker chairs. A beautiful old steamer puffed past in a huge plume of white vapour, a full brass band playing ‘God Save the Queen’. I passed two Canadian canoes lashed together with huge planks of wood onto which a table and chairs had been set for a full silver service lunch, complete with candlestick holders and wine bucket.
Nervous-looking crews rowed up the outside of the river alongside the flotilla of other vessels on their way to Temple Island, from where all the races start. All along the shore, thousands of cheering old boys plonked themselves down in deckchairs with livery that matched their jackets. Floating precariously along on tiny man-made islands were the course officials, marooned like posh Robinson Crusoes.
We had been invited as guests of Sir Steve Redgrave. If there is a sport that represents the very essence of Englishness, it must surely be rowing. And if there is a sportsman who defines stiff-upper-lipped Englishness, it is Sir Steve Redgrave. I have been fortunate to know Steve since I teamed up with his one-time rowing partner James Cracknell for the race to the South Pole and the hellish crossing of the Atlantic in a rowing boat.
After lunch we made our way back down the riverbank, picking our way through the crowds of rosy-cheeked men with overhanging bellies telling stories of their school days. ‘One of the privileges of being chairman is that I can send you out in the umpire boat,’ Sir Steve said before ushering us to a long, sleek skiff, umpire flag hanging limply from the stern.
The man in charge was none other than Sir Matthew Pinsent, the third of the Oarsmen Foursome and another English national treasure. Matt was wearing a blue rowing blazer with an Afghanistan Olympic tie that he had been given by the visiting Olympic squad. The last time I had seen him was in some half-finished hotel in the Russian winter resort of Sochi, where we were both working as commentators for the Winter Olympics.
Having boarded, we meandered our way upriver past the dozens of craft towards the start line. On one beautiful wooden
launch I noticed the familiar features of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent. His marvellous beard was twitching in the wind as our wake splashed against the side, nearly causing them to spill their drinks. I suppose the umpire boat had the river’s superiority.
Two miles further down the course we reached the start. The race was the 3.20 Fawley Challenge Cup between Gloucester Rowing Club and Malvern Preparatory School from the USA. Henley attracts teams from more than twenty-five countries, all in search of rowing glory. Joining us in the boat were the rowing coaches from the respective schools.
‘You can take photographs,’ explained Matt, ‘but you mustn’t communicate, talk, nor gesture to the teams.’
He stood at the front of the skiff in his blue rowing hat, red flag held aloft in his hand. ‘Attention, GO!’ The two four-man boats dipped their oars into the water and began to pull down the course.
The crowds roared their approval as the two rowing boats raced alongside one another. ‘Malvern!’ Matt shouted through the loud hailer. ‘MALVERN!’ he repeated, holding his flag to the right. They were veering to the left. There was a clash of oars as the boats came too close, but the rowers remained focused on the race, not missing a stroke as they continued past the halfway point, then alongside first the bandstands and then the stewards’ enclosure. I spotted the familiar faces of James Cracknell and Sir Steve keeping a close eye on the race. The boats slipped through the water towards the matriarch of rowing craft, the magnificent Gloriana, which cast a majestic shadow on the water and seemed to bestow a blessing on the whole occasion.