Robin Hanbury-Tenison
As our meeting draws to a close, Robin Hanbury-Tenison leaves the Traveller’s Club in a buoyant mood. He’s just about to have his head x-rayed – not because he’s injured himself, but because he’s soon to become a work of modern art. It’s clearly a source of great amusement for him. There’s an artist out there, he tells me, who x-rays the heads of famous people and then turns them into portraits. “It’s supposed to say something about them,” he says.
We’ve been chatting in one of the morning rooms of this grand early-19th-century house because I, too, am supposed to ‘say something’ about Robin Hanbury-Tenison. The problem, of course, is where to start. Before delving into the past, a quick snapshot of the present reveals more than enough material for several chapters of biography.
He’s certainly a busy man. In the past year or so, he has completely revised his Oxford Book of Exploration and published another volume of his autobiography, Worlds Within: Reflections in the Sand. He’s about to climb on the publicity treadmill for his latest book, Seventy Great Journeys in History, and has just completed a lecture tour of the Pacific that took in a visit to the Pitcairn Islands, home to the world’s most remote community. And today he’s meeting with the new Albanian ambassador to discuss his next expedition over lunch.
Hiking, horses and hovercraft
Hanbury-Tenison has always been a busy man. Over the past 50 years, he has led or taken part in more than 30 geographical expeditions. He can’t tell you exactly how many, because, as he says, it “depends what you call an expedition”. However, what’s certain is that during that time he has compiled a CV that would take most people several lifetimes to acquire. As I comb through it, I find medals, awards, fellowships, honorary degrees, council memberships, directorships and, of course, an OBE. He describes himself as an “explorer, conservationist, broadcaster, film maker, author, lecturer, campaigner, farmer”.
To save time, I ask him to complete the following sentence: “Robin Hanbury-Tenison was the first to…”. His answer is staggering. In 1957, he became the first to travel overland from London to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He completed the first land crossing of South America at its widest point in 1958, followed in 1964–65 by the first river crossing of South America from north to south. There was the first (and only) hovercraft navigation of the Orinoco and the first ride on horseback of the length of the Great Wall of China. Some of these were a direct result of looking at an atlas while up at Oxford and wondering what great expeditions there were left to do. As he says in Joanna Vestey’s book, Faces of Exploration, “That was all fairly silly stuff, although we were given an award by the RGS for it.”
There are other less obviously adventurous but more scientific expeditions. Of these, probably the most significant was the Royal Geographical Society’s largest to date, when Hanbury-Tenison led some 115 scientists into the rainforests of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. This field research, and his accompanying book, Mulu: The Rainforest, are widely credited with having started the international concern for the rainforest. Hanbury-Tenison remembers with real affection his “extremely happy times in the interior of Borneo. In 1976, while doing the recce to find the site for the RGS expedition that became Mulu, I travelled between the Tinjar and Rejang rivers along a route not followed by a European since Tom Harrison did it in 1936. I was accompanied for a week by four Penan boys who were completely at home in unexplored rainforest and just happy to have an excuse to travel through it – with me.”
The “with me” is important. He may be 70 this year, but he still has the air of a man who can’t quite believe his luck. He remains wide-eyed with amazement at the diversity of the planet he has spent his life roaming and is genuinely overwhelmed by the experiences he has had with the indigenous peoples of the world. So while some commentators maintain that he’s content to be seen in St James’s sporting his trademark smart grey suit, there is no disguising that he is at his happiest either on horseback or in the jungle, or preferably both. As with his hero, Wilfred Thesiger, Hanbury-Tenison finds that traditional forms of transport intensify the experience of exploration. “On foot with a pack you see nothing but your feet,” he says. “In a car, you are insulated from the real world. But on a horse, you have an intelligent animal doing all of the work and most of the thinking, leaving you free to look and listen, to communicate with those you meet.”
Controversial causes
Interaction with some of the remotest peoples on the planet is a thread woven through the fabric of Hanbury-Tenison’s career. In 1969, he helped to found the lobby group Survival International, which has become “the lone sane voice of indigenous people, uncontaminated by outside pressures”. Initially, Survival was treated with scepticism by academics and ‘realists’, who claimed that progress was unstoppable. “We were seen as trying to stop the clock, to create human zoos,” he says.
But Hanbury-Tenison thinks differently. He believes that the modern view is to respect societies that are rich and powerful even if their empires are short lived. Peoples whose cultures have endured for millennia as a result of their harmonious relationship with the environment are brushed aside and left vulnerable to those in temporary power. Through Survival, he has helped them find a voice. “But it wasn’t until the tribal people themselves started to take control of their own affairs that global consciousness began to change,” he says. On Survival’s behalf, he has led numerous overseas missions, from visiting Indian tribes as a guest of the Brazilian government in 1971 to visiting the Bushmen of the Kalahari last year.
His involvement in the affairs of indigenous culture hasn’t always won Hanbury-Tenison friends. His recent article in the Times Literary Supplement about rock art in Australia has drawn howls of indignation from two academics at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. In a joint letter to the TLS, they accuse Hanbury-Tenison of displaying “unbridled amateur fervour” in his commentary on the so-called Bradshaw paintings of the Kimberley region of the northwest. The letter goes on to dismiss him as an “amateur rock-art enthusiast” and signs off by pointing out that Hanbury-Tenison’s opinions are “amateur musings masquerading as scholarly, informed and objective truth”.
His reply is as witty as their letter is repetitive. It starts: “I am delighted if my amateur musings have sparked interest in a subject which, as the Australian academics themselves admit, has not been made sufficiently accessible to the public – by them.” He goes on to ask what would have happened if Charles Darwin had been told to “stick to medicine and theology” (his university subjects), before reminding them that art is something to celebrate rather than an excuse to tie oneself up in “excruciating knots of political correctness”.
Whether it’s in defence of the rainforest or indigenous peoples, Hanbury-Tenison is at his most dogged when going in to bat for what everyone else thinks is a hopeless case. By his own admission, he’s a “sucker for lost causes”, a characteristic that was to land him in the hot seat when he became chief executive of the British Field Sports Society (later the Countryside Alliance). In essence, it was a pro-hunting PR job, and one he fully expected would make him the “most unpopular person in Britain”.
It was a poisoned chalice from the start, as Hanbury-Tenison was sure at the time that the next Labour government would ban hunting and whoever was in charge of the BFSS would be blamed and subsequently shown the door. Nonetheless he was able to achieve (in his first ever ‘proper’ job) a number of successes on their behalf, including the 1997 Hyde Park Rally and the 1998 Countryside March, which, with a total of more than 300,000 participants, was then the largest ever peaceful protest
held in London.
In a farewell speech to his staff three years after having taken up the post, he lived up to his own definition of himself as “a modest person under an immodest exterior” by claiming to have done “bugger all”, but that “somebody has to take the credit, and I’m good at that, so it might as well be me”.
Exploration and the future
As the nature of geography changes to meet the challenges of global environmental issues, there is an ongoing and unruly public debate about the nature of exploring – what the word means in the 21st century, and to whom it can be applied. As the letters pages of Geographical have made clear, it’s a hot topic, and one that you’d expect a grizzled old establishment warhorse such as Hanbury-Tenison to hold reactionary views on. But his take on the subject is refreshingly modern. “Anyone can and should call themselves an explorer if what they are doing is seeking to understand and change the world in some arduous physical way,” he says. “What doesn’t count is just doing physically challenging things for their own sake. That’s sport.” But surely he doesn’t hold polar adventure, mountaineering and the like in contempt? When pushed on this he says: “Some of it’s fine, some even admirable, but when it claims to be exploring it’s neither.”
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Hanbury-Tenison refuses to live in the past and is passionate in his belief that now, rather than the days of Victorian Imperialist expansion, is the Golden Age of Exploration. “I’ve been saying this for a long time,” he says. “It means that at last we are beginning to realise how little we really know about our planet and how it works. There is a desperate urgency to explore and understand every corner before it is destroyed. That way we might perhaps save it and ourselves.”
In 1982, the Sunday Times described Hanbury-Tenison as “the greatest explorer of the past 20 years”, a tag that has followed him around ever since. It has now passed into tradition that interviewers ask him how this accolade sits with him and, for the record, he always says that he’s comfortable with it, largely because he has been associated with great causes such as indigenous peoples and the rainforest. “Those are what matter to me.”
But the Sunday Times quotation is nearly a quarter of a century old, so I ask him who he’d pass this honour on to, confidently expecting a diplomatic deflection of the question. But his answer is emphatic: “Those exploring the remaining unknowns.” He lists them like nominees at an award ceremony. “The canopy (Andrew Mitchell), caves (Andy Eavis) and the ocean depths (Bob Ballard).” He goes on to elaborate on the importance of the pioneering work of these modern-day explorers, but what is interesting is that Hanbury-Tenison should put the environment before the person. Maybe it’s typical of a man who has always put the environment first.
We’ve been chatting in one of the morning rooms of this grand early-19th-century house because I, too, am supposed to ‘say something’ about Robin Hanbury-Tenison. The problem, of course, is where to start. Before delving into the past, a quick snapshot of the present reveals more than enough material for several chapters of biography.
He’s certainly a busy man. In the past year or so, he has completely revised his Oxford Book of Exploration and published another volume of his autobiography, Worlds Within: Reflections in the Sand. He’s about to climb on the publicity treadmill for his latest book, Seventy Great Journeys in History, and has just completed a lecture tour of the Pacific that took in a visit to the Pitcairn Islands, home to the world’s most remote community. And today he’s meeting with the new Albanian ambassador to discuss his next expedition over lunch.
Hiking, horses and hovercraft
Hanbury-Tenison has always been a busy man. Over the past 50 years, he has led or taken part in more than 30 geographical expeditions. He can’t tell you exactly how many, because, as he says, it “depends what you call an expedition”. However, what’s certain is that during that time he has compiled a CV that would take most people several lifetimes to acquire. As I comb through it, I find medals, awards, fellowships, honorary degrees, council memberships, directorships and, of course, an OBE. He describes himself as an “explorer, conservationist, broadcaster, film maker, author, lecturer, campaigner, farmer”.
To save time, I ask him to complete the following sentence: “Robin Hanbury-Tenison was the first to…”. His answer is staggering. In 1957, he became the first to travel overland from London to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He completed the first land crossing of South America at its widest point in 1958, followed in 1964–65 by the first river crossing of South America from north to south. There was the first (and only) hovercraft navigation of the Orinoco and the first ride on horseback of the length of the Great Wall of China. Some of these were a direct result of looking at an atlas while up at Oxford and wondering what great expeditions there were left to do. As he says in Joanna Vestey’s book, Faces of Exploration, “That was all fairly silly stuff, although we were given an award by the RGS for it.”
There are other less obviously adventurous but more scientific expeditions. Of these, probably the most significant was the Royal Geographical Society’s largest to date, when Hanbury-Tenison led some 115 scientists into the rainforests of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. This field research, and his accompanying book, Mulu: The Rainforest, are widely credited with having started the international concern for the rainforest. Hanbury-Tenison remembers with real affection his “extremely happy times in the interior of Borneo. In 1976, while doing the recce to find the site for the RGS expedition that became Mulu, I travelled between the Tinjar and Rejang rivers along a route not followed by a European since Tom Harrison did it in 1936. I was accompanied for a week by four Penan boys who were completely at home in unexplored rainforest and just happy to have an excuse to travel through it – with me.”
The “with me” is important. He may be 70 this year, but he still has the air of a man who can’t quite believe his luck. He remains wide-eyed with amazement at the diversity of the planet he has spent his life roaming and is genuinely overwhelmed by the experiences he has had with the indigenous peoples of the world. So while some commentators maintain that he’s content to be seen in St James’s sporting his trademark smart grey suit, there is no disguising that he is at his happiest either on horseback or in the jungle, or preferably both. As with his hero, Wilfred Thesiger, Hanbury-Tenison finds that traditional forms of transport intensify the experience of exploration. “On foot with a pack you see nothing but your feet,” he says. “In a car, you are insulated from the real world. But on a horse, you have an intelligent animal doing all of the work and most of the thinking, leaving you free to look and listen, to communicate with those you meet.”
Controversial causes
Interaction with some of the remotest peoples on the planet is a thread woven through the fabric of Hanbury-Tenison’s career. In 1969, he helped to found the lobby group Survival International, which has become “the lone sane voice of indigenous people, uncontaminated by outside pressures”. Initially, Survival was treated with scepticism by academics and ‘realists’, who claimed that progress was unstoppable. “We were seen as trying to stop the clock, to create human zoos,” he says.
But Hanbury-Tenison thinks differently. He believes that the modern view is to respect societies that are rich and powerful even if their empires are short lived. Peoples whose cultures have endured for millennia as a result of their harmonious relationship with the environment are brushed aside and left vulnerable to those in temporary power. Through Survival, he has helped them find a voice. “But it wasn’t until the tribal people themselves started to take control of their own affairs that global consciousness began to change,” he says. On Survival’s behalf, he has led numerous overseas missions, from visiting Indian tribes as a guest of the Brazilian government in 1971 to visiting the Bushmen of the Kalahari last year.
His involvement in the affairs of indigenous culture hasn’t always won Hanbury-Tenison friends. His recent article in the Times Literary Supplement about rock art in Australia has drawn howls of indignation from two academics at the Centre for Indigenous Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. In a joint letter to the TLS, they accuse Hanbury-Tenison of displaying “unbridled amateur fervour” in his commentary on the so-called Bradshaw paintings of the Kimberley region of the northwest. The letter goes on to dismiss him as an “amateur rock-art enthusiast” and signs off by pointing out that Hanbury-Tenison’s opinions are “amateur musings masquerading as scholarly, informed and objective truth”.
His reply is as witty as their letter is repetitive. It starts: “I am delighted if my amateur musings have sparked interest in a subject which, as the Australian academics themselves admit, has not been made sufficiently accessible to the public – by them.” He goes on to ask what would have happened if Charles Darwin had been told to “stick to medicine and theology” (his university subjects), before reminding them that art is something to celebrate rather than an excuse to tie oneself up in “excruciating knots of political correctness”.
Whether it’s in defence of the rainforest or indigenous peoples, Hanbury-Tenison is at his most dogged when going in to bat for what everyone else thinks is a hopeless case. By his own admission, he’s a “sucker for lost causes”, a characteristic that was to land him in the hot seat when he became chief executive of the British Field Sports Society (later the Countryside Alliance). In essence, it was a pro-hunting PR job, and one he fully expected would make him the “most unpopular person in Britain”.
It was a poisoned chalice from the start, as Hanbury-Tenison was sure at the time that the next Labour government would ban hunting and whoever was in charge of the BFSS would be blamed and subsequently shown the door. Nonetheless he was able to achieve (in his first ever ‘proper’ job) a number of successes on their behalf, including the 1997 Hyde Park Rally and the 1998 Countryside March, which, with a total of more than 300,000 participants, was then the largest ever peaceful protest
held in London.
In a farewell speech to his staff three years after having taken up the post, he lived up to his own definition of himself as “a modest person under an immodest exterior” by claiming to have done “bugger all”, but that “somebody has to take the credit, and I’m good at that, so it might as well be me”.
Exploration and the future
As the nature of geography changes to meet the challenges of global environmental issues, there is an ongoing and unruly public debate about the nature of exploring – what the word means in the 21st century, and to whom it can be applied. As the letters pages of Geographical have made clear, it’s a hot topic, and one that you’d expect a grizzled old establishment warhorse such as Hanbury-Tenison to hold reactionary views on. But his take on the subject is refreshingly modern. “Anyone can and should call themselves an explorer if what they are doing is seeking to understand and change the world in some arduous physical way,” he says. “What doesn’t count is just doing physically challenging things for their own sake. That’s sport.” But surely he doesn’t hold polar adventure, mountaineering and the like in contempt? When pushed on this he says: “Some of it’s fine, some even admirable, but when it claims to be exploring it’s neither.”
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Hanbury-Tenison refuses to live in the past and is passionate in his belief that now, rather than the days of Victorian Imperialist expansion, is the Golden Age of Exploration. “I’ve been saying this for a long time,” he says. “It means that at last we are beginning to realise how little we really know about our planet and how it works. There is a desperate urgency to explore and understand every corner before it is destroyed. That way we might perhaps save it and ourselves.”
In 1982, the Sunday Times described Hanbury-Tenison as “the greatest explorer of the past 20 years”, a tag that has followed him around ever since. It has now passed into tradition that interviewers ask him how this accolade sits with him and, for the record, he always says that he’s comfortable with it, largely because he has been associated with great causes such as indigenous peoples and the rainforest. “Those are what matter to me.”
But the Sunday Times quotation is nearly a quarter of a century old, so I ask him who he’d pass this honour on to, confidently expecting a diplomatic deflection of the question. But his answer is emphatic: “Those exploring the remaining unknowns.” He lists them like nominees at an award ceremony. “The canopy (Andrew Mitchell), caves (Andy Eavis) and the ocean depths (Bob Ballard).” He goes on to elaborate on the importance of the pioneering work of these modern-day explorers, but what is interesting is that Hanbury-Tenison should put the environment before the person. Maybe it’s typical of a man who has always put the environment first.
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