Ronnie Faux

Stan Abbott pays tribute to a writer, mountaineer and adventurer

Ronnie Faux – writer, mountaineer and adventurer, born Burnley 1935, died Carlisle July 17, 2024

I first met Ronnie Faux more than 40 years ago, when he pitched up at hang gliding’s American Cup international tournament in the Yorkshire Dales and introduced himself as the Adventure Sports Correspondent for The Times. I had never imagined that they might have such a person.

Stan Abbott is an author and journalist and Chair of the OWPG

Over subsequent decades I learned that there were few perilous activities that Ronnie wouldn’t tackle, and often more than once: three ascents close to the summit of Everest; two Cresta Runs; flying with the Red Arrows; taking the controls of Concorde; playing elephant polo; deep sea diving, caving, or riding powerful motorbikes and flying his fast microlight at Kirkbride airfield, both until well in his 70s.

photo: Dr Gavin Young

Although Ronnie was 88, the very last thing I expected him to do was to die… and so it was with great shock that I learned that he had added precisely that unwelcome event to his extraordinary list of lifetime achievements. When I then learned that it was an event as prosaic as a fall on a night-time loo trip in an unfamiliar house that had precipitated his death, it did nothing to alleviate my sadness. For Ronnie was not just an adventurer, mountaineer and a pioneer of bringing adventure sports “to the people”, but also a thoroughly nice bloke and a good friend.

I vividly recall flying over Helvellyn with him in his shared Piper Cherokee one crisp winter’s day, and casually asking if he’d ever climbed the Old Man of Hoy. I should have known better – in typically understated Ronnie style, he replied: “just the twice.”

The Old Man of Hoy (photo: Ronald Turnbull)

He went on to describe his second ascent of this hugely challenging 137-metre sea stack in Orkney. Ahead of Ronnie’s roped party was the first ever Irish ascent of the Old Man and its crumbly sandstone. But things were not going wholly to plan, he recalled, as the leader’s trousers had fallen down and he had to finish the ascent with them caught around his ankles.

“What began to intrigue me as a journalist waiting in the discomfort of Everest base camp for this high level conundrum to be resolved [the mountain’s first ascent without oxygen] was the nature of a man who made his living only a crampon-point away from a lonely and violent death and who pushed both himself and the art of climbing to greater and greater extremes.” – Ronnie Faux, from his biography of Reinhold Messner

It is, as they say, all in the telling, and Ronnie was the consummate storyteller: I struggled to contain my laughter and had to hand back my temporary control of the plane to its pilot. His other laugh-out-loud tales included one from when he was a young reporter on the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, despatched with a photographer to follow up a story about neighbours who had complained about a stripper whose act included a large python. The stripper, said Ronnie, explained how she fed dead rodents to the snake, whose bowel movements then occurred at monthly intervals. Out of respect for her neighbours, the stripper suggested they ascend to her attic for the photography and Ronnie then followed up the narrow stairs beneath stripper and snake.

A large python (Wikimedia Commons: by Mokele at English Wikipedia)

 “It was then that I had this sensation of someone having poured a bucket of warm porridge, over my head,” said Ronnie, who remains the only person I have ever known to have been pooed on by a python.

Or there was the embarrassing tale of how he, then The Times’s Yachting Correspondent, borrowed a cabin cruiser on Loch Ness, and left his wife Frances at the tiller under instructions to “aim for the headland with the trees on”, while he answered a call of nature below deck. “I suddenly realised there were trees rushing past on both sides of the boat and, just as I stood up to shout to Frances, we ran aground and the toilet seat rose to smack me on the backside.”

But his exploits on behalf of The Times began in 1976, when he was invited to train with an Army team that was planning an assault on the south face of Everest. Ronnie accompanied the subsequent assault by Brummie Stokes and Bronco Lane as far as 20,000ft and witnessed their survival against the odds in snow hole at 28,000ft. One of Ronnie’s subsequent Everest climbs was with Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler on their successful first ascent without oxygen.

He acquired his adventure sports brief with The Times under Harold Evans’s short editorship and, after that great man departed, he seemed to join a merry-go-round of improbable job titles, always hoping Murdoch and Co might eventually bite the bullet and offer him a hefty pay-off.

When a neighbour asked me if I could help her source speakers for Keswick Lecture Society, I immediately thought of Ronnie, who promptly recoiled in horror: standing up to address 200 people was far too hazardous for him. For, despite his courage in the face of Nature, he was a shy man, more at home in smaller groups or teams, or with family or friends.

Ronnie Faux climbing solo on Needle Ridge, Great Gable (officially graded V Diff, but most people think the polished first pitch is harder than that) Photo: Steve Goodwin

When I first knew Ronnie and Frances, they lived in Temple Sowerby, in the Eden Valley, in a house called, for obvious reasons, Mountain View. A seagoing yacht stood outside, almost as tall as the house. They then moved to a beautiful old farmhouse in Mungrisdale, on the flanks of Skiddaw, before returning to the Eden Valley, at Langwathby, a year ago. They were followers of both Keswick Film Society and the town’s annual film festival, while Frances was and is a talented musician and singer. He also leaves two daughters and four grandchildren.

Ronnie’s example to us is that one should absolutely seize the moment, for – when the adrenaline is switched off and focus incomplete – the most mundane event can bring us down. Ronnie’s fall, combined with his being on blood thinners for a heart condition, caused an irreversible bleed on the brain and this prompts me to warn others I know who are such medication to take extra care against head injuries – and to beware strange houses after dark.