Mark Agnew
From left: Crispin Agnew (my dad), Ronnie Faux and Mark Agnew (me)
Ronald 'Ronnie' Faux was The Times 'extreme leisure correspondent'
Ronald 'Ronnie' Faux blazed a trail for adventure sports media with his coverage in The Times during the 1970s and 1980s. He passed away aged 88 this month.
There is a lovely and fitting obituary to Ronnie in The Times today, which extensively quotes my 2019 interview with him. If you would like to listen to the full interview you can hear it on The Adventure Trail podcast here and read The Times article here.
Listen to my interview with Ronnie Faux - here
Ronnie worked as the Scottish corresponded for The Times in the 1970s, when he received an unexpected phone call. The Army asked if he would like to cover their preparation for an upcoming Everest expedition. As Ronnie was covering Scottish politics and North Sea oil at the time, he jumped at the chance of covering a more exciting topic. During the preparation, Ronnie did more than just write, and seemed to excel in the hardship of the Lake District training, so was asked to accompany the expedition to the Himalayas.
This is where he met my dad, Crispin Agnew. My dad was one of the climbers on the 1976 Everest expedition.
Enquire about a talk from Mark Agnew today
The expedition was fraught with excitement. Two SAS officers, Michael 'Bronco' Lane and John 'Brummie' Stokes, summitted, but did not return from the peak. When a search party ventured up the next day, they expected to find their comrades dead. Miraculously, they had survived a night in the death zone. The team created a series of pulleys and removed the frostbitten SAS officers from the mountain back to safety.
Michael 'Bronco' Lane and John 'Brummie' Stokes.
Naturally, this made for great news. But in the days before Wi-Fi at Everest base camp, the next task for Ronnie was relaying it to The Times in London. He wrote it by hand and gave it to a "Nepalese messenger chap who put them in a fork stick and trotted off to Katmandu where the army organised some sort of radio connection to London".
This was a turning point in Ronnie's career. He was 41 at the time. He went back to Everest in 1978, to cover the first ascent of Everest without oxygen, completed by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler. He returned again in 1986 to cover the British attempt of the mountain by the northeast ridge.
Seeing the interest in his stories, Ronnie proposed a new beat at The Times covering 14 different sports such as mountaineer, sailing, caving and flying. He spent several years as the "extreme leisure correspondent". The job afforded him all sorts of adventures, including sailing in the Pacific and flying with the Red Arrows.
Ronnie went on to author several books, including Soldiers on Everest which detailed the 1976 story, Messner's biography and a book about sailing on the West Coast of Scotland.
I owe a great deal to Ronnie.
Between 2017 and 2021, I had a dream job. Similar to Ronnie, I was the Outdoor & Extreme Sports editor for the South China Morning Post. Through the role, I interviewed countless fascinating adventurers, including Ronnie, and adventure athletes. It gave me the opportunity to travel - I was flown to Nepal and ran an ultramarathon in the shadow of the Annapurna range.
The very nature of hearing and seeing these incredible stories expanded my own understanding of what humans are capable of. The role of covering adventurers inspired me, in part, to become an adventurer myself.
Media is a feedback loop - my beat existed because readers were interested enough to followed adventure sport, and adventure sport was interesting because the media covered it. That loop was started by Ronnie, who pioneered adventure in the mainstream media. It ceased to be covered as one off historic events like the first people to climber Everest, and became a sport and lifestyle worth following regularly.
Without the work of Ronnie Faux, my work would never have existed.
Ronnie was born on November 8, 1935 and died on July 16, 2024, aged 88. He is survived by his wife Frances, and two daughters.