The Observer

THOUGH women have seldom had much say in the matter, history owes a great deal to spouses who champion their husbands' interests while staying discreetly in the background. Ulysses would not have come to much without Penelope, rebutting suitors with a flick of her shuttle while her husband floundered between Circe and Sirens. And Wordsworth would surely have starved or frozen to death, deep in the Cumbrian fells, if both his wife and his sister had not devoted their lives to cooking his meals and washing his shirts. In pensive solitude, he wrote the poems; in the steamy chaos of the kitchen, his womenfolk made the poems possible.

Virginia (“Ginnie”) Fiennes was soundly in this tradition. As a 20th-century woman, she too could drive Land Rovers across British Columbia, hike across the desert and endure the temperatures of the Arctic and Antarctica. Indeed, it was often her idea to do so. But as the wife of perhaps the greatest and most eccentric modern explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, she preferred to leave the adventures, and the triumphs, mostly to him.

As his chief promoter, she made it her job to find the agents, the sponsorship and the boats, plan the routes, help pick the teams, and set up the radio communications necessary to keep track of her husband as he struggled through sandstorms or polar ice. He was sometimes away for years at a time; she grew used to sitting over a crackling, whining radio in some godforsaken spot, listening for the dull tap of Morse code that would tell her where he was. Orders from the explorers tended to be terse and peremptory. Told to have a Boston Whaler ready in 20 days at Inuvik, or light canoes waiting at Spitzbergen, Lady Fiennes snapped to it at once.

The most rigorous test of her organising powers was the Transglobe expedition of 1979-82, the first circumnavigation of the world along the polar axis. Typically, this was her idea. Her husband thought it “absurd” and “romantic rambling”; she called him pathetic for rejecting it just because it had never been done. Besides, in 1972, early in their marriage, they needed the money. He, though titled, had no income except what he could earn by lecturing about his travels. Why not undertake the most daring trip of all?

The planning and sponsor-finding took seven years. Lady Fiennes, the only woman in the team, had to learn not merely to be a wireless operator (when, according to her husband, her technical expertise was “nil”), but to set up radio masts in solid ice, and replace coaxial cables snapped by sheer cold or eaten by Arctic foxes. At the Ryvingen base in the Antarctic, her radio hut was made of cardboard and wooden floorboards she had dragged into place herself. She took comfort in cigarettes; one day, venturing out to check something, her Zippo lighter burned its cold metal shape into her thigh. The soup she cooked for the adventurers had to be hammered out of the bowls, and raw eggs, broken from the shell, bounced on the floor like golf balls.

Missing the Poles

As her husband often gently hinted in his accounts of their expeditions, Lady Fiennes was not cut out for this. She much preferred deserts to snows. Woman's Own magazine once commissioned her to live for two months as the nominal third wife of an Omani sheikh; this suited her much better, and she grew so fond of Arabia that she organised four expeditions to find the lost frankincense city of Ubar in Oman. Out in the desert, she could pick out half-vanished camel trails from cooking pots and saddles abandoned in the sand.

The Transglobe expedition, all 35,000 miles of it, was a huge physical challenge. Slightly built, Lady Fiennes could manage only two laps of a running track before she had to lie on the grass. She was scared of heights, and too claustrophobic to make snow tunnels to her radio huts. In the Antarctic, she thought she saw ghosts; in the Arctic, where her husband always slept with the window open, she took a hot-water bottle and endured the draught.

She had known him a long time, since he was 12 and she was nine. Their first expeditions had been down the Lod river in Sussex or through the nearby woods. Her father tried to separate her from the wild adventurer, but failed. Since her husband was impelled on these extraordinary journeys, she showed little emotion whenever he left. Her Jack Russell, Bothie, became her chief companion in the long absences. Even so, Lady Fiennes let Bothie go to both the South and the North Poles, the first dog ever to do so, while she stayed back at base. Bothie made his mark in the usual way, not far from the Union Jack.

In 1979, in South Africa, a baffled woman reporter asked her why she went on these expeditions in such a self-effacing way. She replied that she simply wished to be where her husband was. “I'm not here proving that a woman can do anything a man can,” she said. “Women are not as suited or better at doing anything that is normally done by men.” She added, “I'm not brave.” When her husband went on his latest half-crazy endurance test, running seven marathons in seven continents in seven days while recovering from a massive heart attack, she refused to tell him of her own cancer diagnosis in case it made him abandon his goal.