John and Marie Christine Ridgway: 50 years of living dangerously

The Wandering Albatross - woodcut, 1837. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
John and Marie Christine Ridgway sailed around the world in 2003-4 to raise international awareness of the plight of the albatross: 19 out of 22 species are threatened with extinction. 

"I love the whole idea that maybe, riding the westerlies, albatrosses circle the globe every two years or so, living for eighty years or more, quite independent of man." John Ridgway, 1996.

John and Marie Christine Ridgway: 
fifty years of 

living dangerously

Book-cover blurbs, manipulatively edited to highlight the kindest bits of reviews, do not usually make for inspiring reading. So it is refreshing when you come across one that is witty, vivid, and original. Here’s what the novelist Len Deighton wrote for the back cover of one book by the Ridgway family, Then We Sailed Away (1996): 

“Don’t do it. Don’t abandon the cats, the garden and your beloved home to sail round the world with your family and your daughter’s boyfriend. Don’t be battered to despair in a shrieking October gale before reaching the grey wastes of the North Atlantic. Don’t have your pocket picked in a Bolivian prison yard. Don’t finish a long day chopping your way through the Andes jungle, infested with fleas, devastated by diarrhoea, with your pack-horse running with blood from the nightly attacks of vampire bats, only to find a large tarantula in your bedding…” 

“Don’t do any of that stuff,” Deighton continues, “because John Ridgway, a resourceful adventurer with an amazing writing talent, has done it for you.” 

If that doesn’t pique your interest, I’m not sure what would. 

I know nothing about sailing, nor have I met any of the Ridgways, so this post is entirely based on a few of their books. Ever since I stumbled across a book called Amazon Journey (an expedition from the source of the river in the high Andes to its mouth in the Atlantic) in the late 1980s, the Ridgways have haunted my imagination. 

John Ridgway is someone who might have looked more at home in an earlier century, when the world’s wild places were still uncharted and inaccessible, before the tentacles of Google Maps started creeping into every forgotten dusty town and unvisited island, exposing all corners of the planet to the camera. He also sounds like one of those people for whom the phrase ‘good in a crisis’ was invented, and for people like this, when a crisis is not available, you have to go looking for one. 

After Amazon Journey, I read Road to Elizabeth (and re-read it several times), and then Marie Christine Ridgway’s No Place for a Woman. The places, journeys, and events described in these books are so far outside and beyond the experience of the average British family, and the images so powerful, that (for me at any rate) a walk in exposed country can trigger a ‘memory’ of marching across the empty Altiplano, and wooded hillsides can create pictures of the Ridgways hacking through 5,000 feet of precipitous, spidery thicket down to the Apurimac river. Even a gale blowing up the English Channel can recall Marie Christine’s terrifying account of battling through the Minch in mountainous December seas. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

A Force 9 gale in the North Atlantic: fairly ordinary weather 
for the Ridgways

I have never come across anyone else who has read these books, and only second-hand copies are available on Amazon, which suggests they are out of print. John Ridgway has an MBE, but never seems to be listed in those (fatuous) lists of ‘top 20 British adventurers’ that even respectable newspapers feature from time to time. His Wikipedia entry is surprisingly short. I found just one vintage ATV documentary on YouTube about the Ridgways, tracking their competition in the 1977-78 Whitbread Round the World race (worth a watch, more on this programme later in this post), but that was about it. Mentioning John Ridgway to friends brings the response (if I’m lucky) of ‘oh, yes, he rowed across the Atlantic with Chay Blyth’. Which is true (92 days at sea, 3,000 miles in an open boat in 1966, through two hurricanes), but this improbable voyage of endurance was the opening salvo in an extraordinary life dedicated to the spirit of adventure. 

To recap, John Ridgway has, apart from writing 11 books, sailed non-stop around the world, then navigated it a further two times, been the first to cross a Patagonian ice cap, tracked the Amazon river from its source in the high Andes to its mouth in Brazil, sailed all over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, survived hurricanes at sea, calving icebergs, extreme altitude sickness, and dangerous rapids. He has been lost in uncharted tropical forest, evaded Shining Path terrorists, and - perhaps the hardest test – survived being repeatedly cooped up in yachts with other people for months on end, without privacy and in all weathers. Sometimes he has been accompanied by Marie Christine and their daughters, sometimes other sailors and explorers, sometimes he has gone alone. 

These were not lavishly funded expeditions, carefully scripted and narrowly focused, but explorations that seem to have been inspired by a passion for pure adventure, for its own sake. The planning was done, of course, but a sense of impatience and spontaneity is present in all the books, together with the feeling that the outcome might turn out to be entirely different from the original plan. 

The journey described in Road to Elizabeth is perhaps the the most striking example of this: John, Marie Christine, and Rebecca set out for South America to meet an old friend, Elvin Berg, who had been farming coffee deep in the Peruvian backwoods. After discovering that this friend had been murdered by terrorists, they located his daughter, Elizabeth, by slipping into the government-designated ‘emergency zone’, then decided to adopt her, eventually bringing her home to Scotland. 

These strenuous, exhilarating and risky expeditions were undertaken as ‘holidays’ from the Ridgways’ day job running their School of Adventure at Ardmore, in the remote wilderness on the farthest edge of North West Scotland. The school, founded over 50 years ago by John and Marie Christine Ridgway with little money, no house, no electricity (for 18 years), and a good deal of pioneering hard labour, became was a success and has attracted 20,000 visitors. It is now run by their daughter Rebecca, whose C.V. includes being the first woman to kayak round Cape Horn. 

Exciting lives, however, do not necessarily make for exciting reading, as the thousands of (usually) predictable and pedestrian travel blogs plodding around the internet make plain. Anybody with a bit of cash can travel, some travel far and dangerously, and almost all of them will try to write about it, but it is surprising how few can do so without boring their readers. 

The writing – both John’s and Marie Christine’s (I have not yet read Rebecca’s book) – is unfussy, unsentimental, driven briskly along by a sense of needing to get to the next place and keep to the plan, but they draw you into the emotional and visual landscapes of their many journeys, so you’re left with the illusion that you made the trip yourself. The tone is quite dry, avoiding the temptation to become confessional or self-consciously ‘hilarious’; you’re left to read between the lines and picture it for yourself – and the imagined scenarios can sometimes be pretty funny as well as unnerving. 

Perhaps the big difference lies in their ability to notice precise physical details about the journeys – wild animals, birds, trees, and flowers (always carefully named), landscape and its effect on mood, bouts of illness, snatches of conversation, endless tins of sardines, strange smells, stranger people - and to remember and convey how this felt and what else was happening when they noticed them: the physical reality of a remembered experience. 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Nothofagus obliqua - one of 36 species of nothofagus, a southern-hemisphere beech, observed frequently during the Ridgways' voyage along the coast of Chile in 1996.

John Ridgway has written that sometime during the extreme rigours of his original expedition rowing across the Atlantic, he found himself “deeply impressed by the permanence and the simplicity of the challenge posed by sea and sky. The artificial preoccupations of the world in which most people live were even more remote from my mind than from my body.” 

The decision to start the adventure school came from this - he wanted others to experience the immersion in the natural world that has become difficult for many people to experience. Apart from being exciting to read, the Ridgways’ books act as a gentle reminder that there is still a lot of wildness out there.

Photo: © Channel Light Vessel

*** *** ***

'Round the World with Ridgway': an ATV documentary available on YouTube

If you thought that reality TV was a new genre, watching this is something of of a revelation. Made way back in 1977-78, this film records most of the voyage made by English Rose VI in the Whitbread Round the World Race. 

With a crew of 13, skippered by John Ridgway with Marie Christine, it captures daily life on board the boat: the high spirits and grim humour, the setbacks and the exhilaration. It also documents the inevitable personality clashes, simmering tensions, and tempests that blow up among people living and working under pressure at close quarters (a living space of 10 feet by nine!) for months. All of this is exacerbated by the constant awareness of the camera crew recording everything. 

The film doesn’t show any of the crew in a particularly flattering light, and in that respect it foreshadows the reality programmes of recent years. But to balance this, there’s an impressive storm and unnervingly beautiful footage of sailing past crystal icebergs in the south Atlantic. 

Near the end of the film, there’s an odd time-warp scene where the crew are relaxing below deck, eating sandwiches, listening to the news on the radio, lost in their own thoughts. This informal, placid moment looks deceptively contemporary, like something that happened last week, but the voice on the radio is reporting the Amoco Cadiz oil spill, and a printing dispute at The Times. It is mid-March, 1978. 

Producer: Richard Creasey
Cameraman: Roger Deakins

Round the World with Ridgway documentary

Books mentioned in the article – available on order from the Ridgways' website and second-hand from Amazon. 

Amazon Journey (Hodder & Stoughton, 1972) by John Ridgway

Expedition to the source of the Amazon, and the voyage down it to the sea.

Also includes a strangely fascinating and detailed appendix, listing equipment, clothes and medical kit taken on the expedition – old fashioned puttees (there are instructions about how to put them on) are apparently effective for keeping snakes, ants, dirt, and worse from entering your boots. 

Road to Elizabeth (Gollancz, 1986) by John Ridgway

Extraordinary story of how an expedition to the Peruvian Andes led, via challenging terrain, danger, tragic news, illness, terrorist threats, and some happy coincidences, to the child who became the family's adopted daughter.

  

No Place for a Woman (Gollancz, 1991)  by Marie Christine Ridgway

My advice would be to read Marie Christine’s book after Road to Elizabeth. It offers a different and fascinating perspective on the couple’s story and how Elizabeth (now known as Isso) settled in Scotland after Peru (as well as nerve-racking accounts of exploring Patagonian ice in rubber dinghies). 

Then We Sailed Away (Little, Brown, 1996) by John, Marie Christine, and Rebecca Ridgway

John, Marie Christine, Rebecca and Isso on an odyssey in English Rose VI around the Caribbean, Galapagos, Marquesas, Chile coast, Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica, and home via Tristan da Cunha, Brazil, and the North Atlantic. Written jointly by John, Marie Christine and Rebecca, it is particularly interesting on wildlife and plants found along the way.

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

(Photo: DickDaniels/Wikimedia Commons)

The beautiful Red-tailed Tropic bird

Other books  

A Fighting Chance (Paul Hamlyn, 1966) by John Ridgway and Chay Blyth

Journey to Ardmore (Hodder & Stoughton, 1971) by John Ridgway  

Cockleshell Journey (Hodder & Stoughton, 1974) by John Ridgway 

Gino Watkins (OUP, 1974) by John Ridgway

Storm Passage (Hodder & Stoughton, 1975) by John Ridgway 

Round the World with Ridgway (Heinemann, 1978) by John and Marie Christine Ridgway 

Round the World Non-Stop (Patrick Stephens, 1985) by John Ridgway and Andy Briggs 

Flood Tide (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988) by John Ridgway

Something Amazing (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993) by Rebecca Ridgway 

*More information about the books: 

http://www.johnridgway.co.uk/books.html

*For the School of Adventure at Ardmore, click here: Ridgway Adventure

Why has the BBC buried 'The Roads to Freedom'?

Why has the BBC buried The Roads to Freedom?

The series still exists intact - so why can't we watch it?  [Updated 14.7.22 - see below]

Michael Bryant as Mathieu Delarue in The Roads to Freedom. David Turner, who dramatised the series, called the character of Mathieu “the Hamlet of our age.” This is a rare photo: it is almost as impossible to find photos of the cast in their roles as it is to watch the series. Photo: Channel Light Vessel

“It’s relevant to every generation, but it’s especially applicable to young people.” Michael Bryant, 1970. 

IMPORTANT UPDATE July 14, 2022: Well, it seems they have finally given in! BBC4 is to broadcast the Roads to Freedom on July 27 at 10.05. Why only now, 46 years since it was last shown? It is over seven years since I wrote this blog article (very hurriedly, in a fit of frustration), and it has been attracting comments ever since. And for far longer - decades - people who watched the series in the 1970s have been writing to the BBC asking when it will be available to see again. No reply was ever given, to my knowledge, and the BBC's reluctance remained a mystery. Over the past couple of months, DVDs of the series have been popping up on the internet. I have now seen it, and can confirm that it has stood the test of time remarkably well. It is excellent news that Roads to Freedom is now available for everyone, though I'm still intrigued to know what took them so long, and why nobody was allowed to know why.

* * * 

If you’re under 50, you may not know that the BBC dramatised Jean-Paul Sartre’s trilogy of novels, The Roads to Freedom, so you won’t realise that you missed the best series the BBC ever made.

You certainly won’t have seen it, because the BBC won’t allow you to.

It is has not been shown on television since 1976, it is not on DVD, not available as a box set, not on YouTube, Netflix, or anywhere else. The mystery is why - and why the BBC won’t tell us why.

I’ll come back to this strange story, but first:

Why is the BBC’s adaptation of The Roads to Freedom important?

Jean-Paul Sartre’s three novels, (published 1945-49 as Les Chemins de La Liberté) focus on a philosophy teacher, Mathieu Delarue, and his group of bohemian friends in Paris just before the Second World War and into the Nazi occupation. Mathieu’s aim is to defend his personal and intellectual freedom, resisting all forms of commitment to people, politics or action. 

The perspective shifts constantly between characters, especially in the second book, creating a mosaic of simultaneous individual experiences of people preoccupied with the details of their own lives, in denial and powerless in the face of oncoming disaster.

Almost unfilmable, you might think. But it worked perfectly, thanks to inspired direction by James Cellan Jones, and David Turner’s intelligent dramatisation. Then there was Michael Bryant’s superb portrayal of Mathieu (a part he seemed born to play), and unforgettable contributions from Georgia Brown (Lola), Daniel Massey (Daniel), Rosemary Leach (Marcelle), Alison Fiske (Ivich), Anthony Higgins (Boris), and many more.

The first episode of The Roads to Freedom was broadcast on Sunday, October 4, 1970. The series was repeated on TV once, in 1976, and then vanished for 36 years until a one-off screening at the BFI in 2012.  Since 2012, silence has returned. 

Every actor was convincing, every role came alive; there was no such thing as a ‘minor character’ in the series. This reflected the idea in Sartre’s novels that everyone experiences themselves as centrally important.

In terms of direction, screenplay, and acting, The Roads to Freedom was highly original. The series seemed to capture the feel of life in Paris at the end of the 1930s, and having watched it, you felt you had lived through it. Everyone will have different memories of the series, but when in Paris I can’t avoid thinking of Mathieu, running round the city trying to borrow money for his girlfriend’s abortion, avoiding joining the Communist Party, analysing the depths of his own inauthenticity while watching strippers in dark nightclubs. 

The haunting voice of Georgia Brown singing the theme “La Route est Dure”- melancholy, melodramatic, deep and smoky - was the soul of the whole series for many viewers (link at the end of this post).

The BBC seemed to be proud of the series in early October 1970, putting Michael Bryant’s Mathieu on the cover. Inside, the actor is quoted saying that The Roads to Freedom “is relevant to every generation, but it’s especially applicable to young people.” How sad that the young people of 2015 do not have the chance to see it for themselves. 

Sartre’s novels are largely concerned with what his characters are thinking, and the BBC’s The Roads to Freedom is one of very few TV dramas to treat the stream of consciousness seriously and naturally: instead of having the actors speak their thoughts aloud, we hear monologues spoken by the relevant actor in the background, while the character goes about his or her business. 

This contrasts with the highly artificial convention, still followed in almost all films and television dramas, of actors speaking aloud even when they are alone. On the whole, real people don’t do this, and it always looks particularly absurd when the character is supposed to be in danger.

Sartre in 1950, looking remarkably similar to Michael Bryant as Mathieu on the cover of the Radio Times (previous pic). Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The ‘lost’ work of dramatic art that wasn’t actually lost

For many years, whenever the question of what happened to The Roads to Freedom cropped up on internet forums, somebody would speculate either that the BBC had wiped the tapes, or that only a few episodes had survived. 

In the absence of any denial, or any information at all, from the BBC (despite enquiries from the public over several decades), this depressing rumour was widely accepted as true - until 2012. Then, in May 2012, the BFI (British Film Institute) screened the whole 13-episode series in London on May 12 and 13.

In one sense this was fantastic news: the tapes had not been wiped at all, far from it - the entire series had survived. The BFI theatre was apparently packed out both days. But while enormous credit is due to the BFI for showing it, it leaves unanswered the question of why it is not available to all of us. Many people did not hear about the screening in time (I was one of them), others would not have been able to go.

Perhaps more importantly, the people who did attend would mainly have been those who remembered the original series from the 1970s. Younger people – the people who have been denied access to this work of art – would not even have known why the screening was an important event. Which seems ironic in view of Michael Bryant’s opinion (quoted in the Radio Times, October 1970) that “It’s relevant to every generation, but it’s especially applicable to young people.” David Turner, who adapted the novels for the screen, called the character of Mathieu “the Hamlet of our age - Hamlet with a social conscience”.

The series is not simply a period piece; it addresses universal themes and had a profound, lifelong effect on the young people who saw it in the 1970s. What a shame that the young people of 2015 are not even aware the series exists, when the moral questions and personal dilemmas it illustrates are just as relevant today - possibly more so. 

(Photo:Wikimedia Commons) 

I would like to be able to show you photos of the rest of the cast in their Roads to Freedom roles, but none are available (why, I wonder?). So here’s a picture of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in front of the Balzac statue in Montparnasse, Paris, date unknown, but it looks like the late 1930s.

The wall of silence

Since the BFI screening in 2012 . . . nothing. Silence from the BBC. Not a whisper of a plan to release the series on DVD, or to repeat it on TV. This is not for want of enthusiastic pressure from viewers: there’s a discussion thread on Amazon, for example, that has been running since 2008 and is still the top thread in Amazon’s TV discussions, which must be some sort of record. (Thread now deleted)

The comments on the Amazon thread are passionate and eloquent - enough, you would think, to touch the most stony-hearted bureaucrat. One after another, people describe the huge impression the series made on them when they were teenagers, and person after person describes their frustration when letters and emails to the BBC are unanswered, or when they are repeatedly sent around in hopeless circles. 

“I would be prepared to purchase this at any price,” a poster declares in 2010.

“I watched Roads to Freedom in my teens and have never forgotten it,” says another.

And here is a writer disagreeing that the series appealed only to the élite: “My family is working class, but still me, mam and dad were glued to it. I was 13 and up to that point had never heard of Mr Sartre. Having watched this I read all his books and loved them.”

In 2010, Gareth H Richards offered to put up $10,000 to transfer the series to DVD. On 22 May, 2016, he confirmed that this amazing offer still stands. 

In 2012, James Cellan Jones, the director of Roads to Freedom, joined the Amazon discussion urging people to keep up the pressure on the BBC, which they did. 

Similar comments to the ones I have quoted above can be found on the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) reviews and comments for The Roads to Freedom. 

In November 2012, Peter Cox started a petition, which now has over 1,000 signatures. It is here: http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/bbc-s-roads-to-freedom-1970.html

In October 2012, I wrote to seven people who, at that time, seemed influential at the BBC:

(Lord) Chris Patten, Chair of the BBC Trust
George Entwistle, Director General of the BBC
Roly Keating, Director of Archive Content, BBC
Nicolas Brown, Director Drama Productions, BBC
Alan Yentob, Creative Director, BBC
Jeremy Paxman and Kirsty Wark, Newsnight, BBC.

I had one reply, from Chris Patten’s secretary, who (politely) told me that it was nothing to do with the Trust. The others? Not even an acknowledgement.

The incredible Georgia Brown, who played the nightclub singer Lola Montero, though this photo does not show her in the role. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Other people describe almost identical experiences, either of silence, or of being directed by the BFI to the BBC, who then fail to reply. One person was even told to “have a look on Amazon”. It’s insulting really.

So, BBC, what on earth is going on?

We are left with two questions. First, why has the series not been made available to viewers, and second, why does the BBC refuse to engage in any discussion about it, or reply to viewers’ enquiries?

We know now that the series exists in its entirety. People have wondered if there might be contractual problems related to the original actors. But many drama series from the 1960s and 1970s are now available as box sets and so on, so why would this only affect The Roads to Freedom?

Until the BBC breaks its deep omerta on the programme, we won’t have any idea. If we don’t know what the problem is, no solutions can be found. 

Which brings me back to the second question. The BBC, which I normally defend, seems to be hiding a significant work of art from the British people. It’s as if the National Gallery decided that we weren’t allowed to look at the Turners, and refused to say why. 

It’s the strange secrecy surrounding the fate of the series that is most baffling. Why was it impossible for people to get a straight answer from the BBC about whether the series still existed? Why was the rumour that the tapes had been wiped allowed to circulate unchallenged for decades?

As somebody wrote on the forums, “You’d think the BBC would be proud of it, wouldn’t you?”

La Route est Dure, to be sure.

© Josephine Gardiner 2015 

Daniel Massey played Daniel Sereno, a man tormented by guilt about his sexuality. 
Photo: Channel Light Vessel

Here is a great YouTube video of Georgia Brown (below) singing the theme 

(Many thanks to 'morganafan' for putting the video on YouTube)

The Heart of the Wood (poem)

Photo: © Channel Light Vessel

First post

I’m going to start this blog with an Irish poem I found a while ago somewhere in the recesses of the internet. It’s anonymous, and if I remember rightly, it’s a translation from the Gaelic. The poem’s artless purity certainly feels very old, a voice from a wild forested Ireland of centuries ago, though there is no date.  The defiant, passionate hope in it, especially the last line, is timeless. 


The Heart of the Wood

My hope and my love,
we will go for a while into the wood, 
scattering the dew,
where we will see the trout,
we will see the blackbird on its nest;
the deer and the buck calling,
the little bird that is sweetest singing on the branches;
the cuckoo on the top of the fresh green;
and death will never come near us for ever in the sweet wood. 

Anon.