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.
Over subsequent decades I learned that there were few perilous activities that Ronnie would not dare tackle, and often at least twice: three ascents close to the summit of Everest; two Cresta Runs; flying with the Red Arrows; taking the controls of Concorde; playing elephant polo; riding powerful motorbikes or flying his fast microlight at Kirkbride airfield, both until well in his 70s.
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, as – in typically understated Ronnie style – he replied “just the twice.”
He then went on to describe his second ascent of the 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.
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-based Telegraph and Argus and was 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.
“It was then I had this curious 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 yachting correspondent, borrowed a cabin cruiser on Loch Ness, and then 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.”
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 at the suggestion: standing up to address 200 people was far too hazardous for him. For, despite the derring-do, he was a shy man, more at home in smaller groups or teams, or with family or friends.
When I first knew Ronnie and Frances, they lived in Temple Sowerby in a house called, for obvious reasons, Mountain View. A large seagoing yacht stood outside, almost as tall as the house. They then moved to a beautiful old farmhouse in Mungrisdale and were followers of both Keswick Film Society and the annual film festival, while Frances was and is a talented musician and singer.
Last year they moved to Langwathby to be nearer to daughter Catherine, who runs an upholstery business in the village. Ronnie, who died a few days after a fall, also leaves a second daughter, Sarah, an ultrasonographer, and four grandchildren.
“He loved our new home and I’m very sad he didn’t have longer to enjoy it,” Frances told me.
- Stan Abbott is an author and journalist and splits his time between Stair, near Keswick, and Durham City.
