Addicted to Adventure: Between Rocks and Cold Places

ORIGINS

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

MOTHER TERESA

AN INTERESTING LIFE?

I was born in 1935 in Batu Gajah, Malaya – now Malaysia, although then a British colony – where my father managed a rubber plantation some twenty miles from Kuantan on the east coast. Memories of my early childhood remain vivid to this day: sitting on my father’s shoulders one evening, surveying the perimeter of the estate; ‘coolies’ rushing from the factory shed to stop me from poking a stick at a cobra coiled on the road; diagonal grooves cut in the rubber trees, dripping latex sap into a cup set low on their trunks. And I have flashbacks of our house, inside and out, and of my dear Amah, a sort of Chinese nanny, who looked after me.

I was only six when, together with my twelve-year-old sister Rosamond, I was sent by plane to stay with cousins in Australia, as our education was not going well in Malaya. It was 1941, and in those days of piston-engine aircraft it took us three days to fly from Singapore to Adelaide. There were stops in Indonesia and then Darwin, where we overslept and nearly missed the connection because no one thought to wake us. My father was not best pleased when he discovered that the Prince and Princess of Siam (now Thailand) had been boarded at the last minute, which meant that I had to sit on Rosamond’s knee throughout the long flight; nor, as she told me recently, was my sister.

Later, my mother came to Australia, intending to return with us to Malaya. While she was there, however, the Japanese invaded Malaya. To everyone’s surprise the invasion had started in the far north of the country, avoiding the guns of Singapore pointing south out to sea. In their lightning sweep down the Malay Peninsular the Japanese had chanced upon my father who had returned, loyally, from Kuantan to pay his workers. He and the Forestry Commission officer were sitting outside the small factory when the Japanese encountered them, and having no use for prisoners the invaders marched the men into the trees, shot them, and moved on.

My father was believed dead and the Japanese were in control of Malaya but my mother, sister and I had already moved from Adelaide to Perth. We had crossed the country by train and I remember buying boomerangs from a group of Aborigines along the way, although I never learned to throw them properly. In Perth, a family took pity on us and invited us to stay at their farm up country. There I shared a room with the four sons of the house and they, tough nuts all, taught me how to aim and fire a rifle, and also how not to aim, as I tried at first with the gun on my nose.

My mother was desperate to get us all back to England, yet with little money and very few other resources it seemed we might be stranded in Australia. In the end we returned to Adelaide in 1942, boarded a cargo vessel, and sailed via the Panama Canal and so up to New York where we joined a convoy to cross the Atlantic. During the passage two of the convoy’s ships were sunk by U-boats. This must have put the remaining ships’ passengers on edge but, oblivious to the fears of others, myself and another boy used to march around the decks imitating the wail that the siren sounded to warn of attack. I also recall eating as much butter as possible; we knew that there was rationing in Britain long before we made landfall in Bristol in early 1943.

Back in England we stayed with aunts (my mother’s sisters). Money remained very tight until my mother was able to sell an orchard, which my father had bought in Essex before the war, and buy a small house in Chislehurst, south of London. There, when the doodlebugs (V1 rockets) came over, we used to shelter in the cupboard under the stairs. We would hear their engine noise, then came that ominous silence, and then the explosion. I am not sure whether the later V2 rockets were better or worse: there was no engine noise so you only knew one had arrived when you heard the detonation.

Prep school and beyond

I was sent as a boarder to Carn Brae, a prep school in Bromley where every morning we formed a queue, stated whether or not our bowels had opened, and were then given a spoonful of malt. After Carn Brae, aged thirteen, I went to Bradfield College near Reading; I had won a classics exhibition and this helped a little towards the fees. Bradfield was typical of most public schools of the era. Fagging and caning, which we considered perfectly acceptable but both of which are generally frowned upon today, were part of school life. The headmaster had been highly decorated in the First World War and partly because of that an unspoken, subconscious ethos of toughness and challenge underpinned life at Bradfield.

The day started with a cold shower (when I was a prefect I would try and stay in longer than anyone else as an example), and there was cross-country running and boxing, for which I was in the team. I became deputy head boy and captain of football. I loved it all.

After school came National Service in the Royal Marines from 1953–1955. The commando course took place on bleak Dartmoor and then it was out to Egypt, guarding the Canal zone. Next we were off to Malta on a destroyer with our commanding officer, Colonel Tailyour, who later became Commandant General, Royal Marines. He had us raid a deserted North African fishing village, manned for the exercise by a Guards battalion. The Navy landed us short of the beach, as usual, so we had to wade ashore, carrying our rifles high. A machine gun opened up, but in a raid speed is of the essence so we ignored it and ran swiftly on into the village. We crossed a beach ‘under fire’, moved quickly down the mole and ‘blew up’ the lighthouse at the far end. On the way back we ignored a signpost which looked as if it had been turned around, an old trick, and met up with the returning landing craft.

Towards the end of my time in Malta we were offered the choice between taking a parachute course or a cliff leader’s course when we returned to the UK. I chose rock climbing and was trained in Cornwall and North Wales by the Royal Marines, first in Tricouni nailed boots to learn good climbing technique, and then in boots with grippy, Vibram rubber soles. No protecting running belays, just long run-outs of the climbing rope: those were the days, and I have never looked back. Climbing had become my hobby and a challenge, for life.

In the 1950s, officers in the Royal Marines (it was different in the army) could only sign on for either two or twenty-two years. During my schooldays at Bradfield I had become a committed Christian, and the feeling that I was probably ‘meant’ to be ordained was the main reason behind me not signing on for life in the Royal Marines.

After National Service I went to Cambridge. I read history and then archaeology and anthropology, I played football for Jesus College and was an active member of the college and university Christian Unions. Immediately before I began my final year I became certain of my vocation: I received what I felt was a definite call to be ordained as a ‘pastor and teacher’ within the Church of England when a passage I was reading in the Letter to the Ephesians lit up for me personally, and a book I was reading confirmed, personally, the Church of England aspect. I have always been grateful for these definite callings, as in another sense I was not a ‘natural’.

Ordination and chaplaincy

For various reasons my ordination training was deferred, so I worked for a year in London at the Mayflower Family Centre in Canning Town: rough, docklands territory with its fair share of gangland shootouts. David Sheppard, the England batsman who later became Bishop of Liverpool, was the warden and a commanding figure of whom I was a little in awe. My role, under an incredible character named George Burton, focused largely on the teenagers’ youth club. Burton had been brought up in Glasgow’s Gorbals area and, prior to his dramatic conversion to Christ, he had served in the Palestine Police, ideal experience for heading up the youth work in the East End.

Three years at Oak Hill Theological College led to my ordination in Salisbury Cathedral followed by a brief spell as a curate at St John’s Church in Weymouth, in Dorset. As well as my church duties, I discovered here the unclimbed limestone cliffs of Lulworth and Portland. As this is a book about adventure, suffice to say that for the next 10 years or so I enjoyed almost exclusive development of those cliffs and eventually wrote up the Lulworth and Portland sections for the Climbers’ Club Dorset climbing guide of 1977.

After what may have been the church’s shortest ever curacy, a mere eighteen months, Mike Whinney, the warden of the Cambridge University Mission in Bermondsey, needed an ordained Boys’ Club Leader and I returned to youth work in London, spending three happy years at the CUM as it was called, in Bermondsey. It was hard work but I loved it, challenging as it was in its own right, and it became obvious to me that this downtown youth work was really more my vocation. And here I met and married Kate, who was a ward sister on the male surgical ward at University College Hospital. We met in a field at Woolacombe, North Devon – in those days youth clubs used to run large tented camps under canvas by the seaside for the boys and girls of the club. In spite of running my car into the back of her beloved VW Beetle, we were married in Bermondsey, and then together we crossed the Thames to North London and the Oxford Kilburn Club, where I took over as warden.

In Cockney Bermondsey there had been a strong community spirit: not so in Kilburn, where the original terraced houses were being demolished and replaced by high-rise flats. It proved another challenging three years, featuring a drunken right-hander that knocked back my front teeth after I asked a man not to pee against our club’s front door. On the bright side, at CUM we would take groups of boys on climbing weekends in North Wales, and at Kilburn I took groups climbing and camping to Portland. Such trips were occasional but I am encouraged to have heard since that some of the boys recall them as high points in their lives.

Then came an offer I could not refuse: chaplain and outdoor pursuits master at St David’s College in Llandudno. The school took boys who were dyslexic or otherwise struggling with conventional education and focused on sport, the arts and practical subjects in addition to the academic side. I was employed to take the boys mountain walking, climbing and skiing, and the Sunday services were my domain, as was teaching religious education. As a teacher I did not excel; I had more success building Royal Marines-type assault courses in the school grounds. We also made several new rock climbing routes on the Great Ormes’ Hornby Crags, one of which ended up with me shooting down the cliff. All three protecting runners pulled out and I was only stopped a foot or two before hitting the ground when the rope became tangled around the second’s body. He had, until then, been snoozing quietly on the belay ledge. It did not prevent us from going back another day to complete the climb, but I have never ceased to remind my second, Denis, of the incident ever since as a joke between us.

So we made a number of new routes here and on other cliffs on the Ormes. I suppose part of the motivation was that the lads now found something they could do well and gained confidence. Another challenge we undertook for instance was at the end of summer terms when the exams were over and done with, after bivying for the night at the top of Snowdon, or at the other end of the Carneddau depending on which way round we were doing it, we would traverse the sixteen 3000-foot peaks of Snowdonia in a day; it was exacting but a wonderful experience, and I have lost count of the number of times we did it.

I also trained boys here for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. One boy, Richard Wallis, achieved his Gold Award. This had taken quite a bit of organising, especially the final expedition, as I had to organise relays of boys in school time to accompany him day and night over the four days (he was not allowed to walk the mountains or camp on his own for safety reasons). When we went to Buckingham Palace for Richard to receive his Gold Award, I was put in charge of one of the groups. The Duke of Edinburgh came round to see the candidates and give the Awards, and stopped ‘Why are you here?’ he asked. ‘Well, I am a climber, Your Royal Highness’, I replied. ‘Yes but why are you here’. I had forgotten I was wearing my clerical collar. He moved swiftly on. So typical of me to talk at cross purposes with the Duke of Edinburgh, the only time I was ever likely to go to the Palace.

After eight years at St David’s we made a family move to Scotland where I worked as chief instructor at the Carnoch Outdoor Centre in Glencoe. Many of the centre’s activities were taught at a fairly basic level, but from time to time throughout the year we ran more advanced courses in rock, snow and ice climbing, plus mountaineering, canoeing, skiing and sailing. I held a Mountaineering Instructor Certificate from my time at St David’s, but now managed to add to that a British Canoe Union Senior Instructor (Sea) and a British Association of Snowsport Instructors Level 2, as it is termed now.

Around that time Kate and I bought Faraway, a former Admiralty pilot cutter converted to a gaff-rigged ketch. It was a choice between this old wooden boat full of character and a slightly more expensive, reasonably modern Albin Vega glassfibre boat. My wife went for the character. So, by now in our forties, and learning mainly from books, we began to sail on the west coast of Scotland. The family expedition we made to Northern Ireland was a big undertaking for us in those days. There were seven of us and two of the children had to sleep under the cockpit cover when we were at anchor.

After three years or so in Scotland, in 1980 I was appointed chaplain at Kingham Hill School on the Oxford-Gloucester border. A Christian foundation, the school had been set up by Charles Baring Young towards the end of the nineteenth century for ‘those in boarding need’ and many of its pupils came from broken homes. Pupils such as these were obviously ripe for outdoor pursuits, so as well as running the chapel services and teaching religious education, I made skiing, windsurfing and sailing part of the activities. I also organised a few parachute jumps and have to say that parachuting is one of the most frightening things I have ever tried. Again, I built Marines-type assault courses (Health and Safety would have gone mad), and I joined the Combined Cadet Force, founding and running a commando section, which I am pleased to say often won the interschools competitions at Longmoor.

By the time I got there the school was just beginning to charge fees for those who could afford it, but there was a huge bursary fund for those who could not. The Kingham Hill Trust had just liquidated £1.5 million to refurbish the school, while still attempting to maintain the same sort of emphasis, ‘for those in boarding need’. Some pupils were referred by local authorities, although some of these were a bit too hot to handle and did not last the pace in a boarding school environment. They could be anything from sons of Service families to those with dyslexia, with a strong emphasis on broken homes and single parent families.

Coming from some years working with youth in tough areas such as the East End and Kilburn (even worse), I identified easily with these boys and especially the ‘baddies’. To be honest they seemed to love ‘the Rev’, perhaps because of the activities I was bringing them, and I got on famously with them, never calling them by their proper names (an East End habit), which they seemed to enjoy. They also enjoyed my Wednesday ‘stories to make a point’ in chapel, although you had to be quick with the point after the story before the feet began to shuffle. One Sunday service I climbed up into the rafters past the small statue of the founder and fell off onto the rope as an example of faith. Of course both schools were boys only; I would have been hopeless with girls, having no real experience of working with them in the past, and feeling that not many would have enjoyed my rather tough, hearty approach (but I could be wrong!).

When we sold our house in Scotland we bought a ‘proper’ boat, a 33-foot Westerly Discus, but a combination of the children finding other things to do and Kate’s seasickness meant that I began to use the boat more and more for the school. I took the boys sailing, first to the Channel Isles and France and then to the Azores. In 1986, two years after the Azores, we marked the school’s centenary with our ‘First School Across the Atlantic and Back’ voyage. We set off on a major expedition every two years – some are recounted later in the book – and in the intervening years we made our Channel Isles’ trips.

Retirement into action

After twelve years at Kingham I was asked to leave. Maybe I was a little too independent. Or perhaps my teaching had let me down: I had, under the eyes of a school inspector who had sat in on a class one morning, given a pretty disastrous lesson to a class of the younger boys (the younger lads were never my strong suit in any case).

In 1992, having been jettisoned into early retirement, we decided to head back up to Scotland. Kate, who had been the district nurse for the West Highland region in the late 1970s (and being Irish was Celtic anyway so had instant rapport), was very keen to return. We had already bought a small stone cottage up there – small was all we could afford, having bought the boat – and I continued planning the ‘First School Group to Sail Round the World’ voyage with some of Kingham’s school leavers. The chairman of governors was dead set against the school being involved but I was, finally, allowed to use Kingham Hill’s name. Fortunately the trip was a huge success, with two of the lads staying on the whole way round and changing two at six or seven places round the world.

Our circumnavigation included Antarctica, but it had taken three months to get there and it would take another three to get back. However, you could sail to the Arctic and back in the same summer, and so after the circumnavigation I began my Tilman-type expeditions to Greenland and Arctic Canada: combining sailing with climbing from the boat.

To earn money towards the boat’s upkeep I had been ski instructing during the winters in France. Early one season there was an urgent phone call from my daughter-in-law; Anna, our adopted daughter, was in intensive care at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. During the Vietnam War, Kate and I had adopted Peter and Anna, two mixed race American-Vietnamese children from Danang orphanage where, it was rumoured, there were sometimes five to a cot. We already had two children of our own and their new brother and sister fitted in seamlessly; then two years later Rachel was born.

Just before Christmas Anna had caught a severe dose of flu and, complicated by recurring lupus, which is very difficult to treat, she became unconscious. Her condition worsened and, ultimately, Kate had to make the decision to allow her life support machines to be turned off. Agonising as it was, as a former nurse Kate was better equipped than the rest of the family to make such a decision. Anna was buried in the town cemetery. All this cost us dear; as someone said at the time, ‘They were a close-knit family’.

At times like these there is never any answer to the question ‘Why?’ We cannot be told or expect to know everything in this life. We returned home, saddened, but determined to take up life again. Indeed life must go on, and later that summer I embarked on a fresh expedition – I would sail to the Arctic with a party of climbers who would attempt to scale the 900-metre wall of Sandersons Hope.

This sparked a pattern of Arctic summer expeditions and, to fund the boat, winter ski instructing. Then in 2002 a new means of earning a crust presented itself: I was offered the job of paid skipper delivering a friend’s boat from Cape Canaveral to Scotland (see ‘Mutiny’ on the Palandra, here).

When two years later, wintering alone in Arctic Greenland, I lost the first Dodo’s Delight to fire (see Prologue, here), my son David said, ‘You’ll just have to come back and start again’, and of course he was right. The insurers, Yachtsure, played absolutely straight and paid out for total loss. I was therefore able to look for a replacement boat and, having considered one or two other options, decided to replace like with like, tracking down another Discus near Plymouth. As the original Dodo was now under the water in Greenland, the Register of British Shipping allowed me to transfer her name: Dodo’s Delight lived again.

It took around three years to bring the Discus up to the standard I wanted. She had some osmosis¹ but two layers of tough, epoxy resin added as a replacement would, I hoped, strengthen the hull, and my son David – a boatbuilder until he took up making musical instruments – built a solid cuddy (deck shelter). All this time I was unable to sail my own boat, but I had opportunities to help others sail theirs, and to earn some cash towards the refit by taking part in adventures recounted later, which at least compensated. We would soon be ready to go.

While the boat was being fettled I had been in Bavaria, Germany, teaching downhill skiing, ski touring and mountaineering to groups of British soldiers. During a downhill session on the Fellhorn, the group had gone ahead and I tried something on