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which led to the leaders being caned and the gangs disbanded.
    After prep school, Ranulph went to Eton, where he was bullied and made thoroughly miserable. It is interesting to consider the old myth that the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. The implication is of fair play and teamwork, but there may be another truth underlying the idea. Boys’ private schools can be hellish places, but those who survive them are rarely worried by any other difficulty in later life.
    At Eton, he made the boxing team and learned to love history. He was thrilled at news of Edmund Hillary’s expedition to the South Pole. At sixteen, he was diagnosed with rheumatic fever and told to rest for six months. He spent part of that golden spring and summer learning to make explosives in a gardener’s shed at home.
    Back at school, he moved up to light-heavyweight boxing and he and a friend began to climb the school buildings at night, despite thethreat of expulsion for anyone caught. One night they successfully left a toilet seat and a trash-can lid on the summit of the school hall, but on another occasion they were discovered sitting on a roof. Ranulph got away without being caught, but his friend was found and questioned by the headmaster. As it turned out, the head had been a keen climber in his youth and was more interested in their methods than in punishment.
    After Eton, Ranulph joined the Royal Scots Greys tank regiment in 1963. He trained in Germany on seventy-ton Centurions. At six feet two, he had grown to the point where he could box in the heavyweight division. He also joined the cross-country running team and the ski team and formed a canoe club. Under his supervision, the men would regularly paddle a hundred miles a day. To Scots, his name was pronounced “Feens,” and they described it as “Mr. Feens’s Concentration Camp.”
    From the Scots Greys, he applied to join the Special Air Service. To prepare, he trained alone in the Brecon Beacons and took a parachuting course. The highest peak in the Brecons is Pen-y-Fan, and one part of the training was to run up and down it three times in eight hours. Another unusual part of SAS training was planning and carrying out a bank raid in Hereford. To his great embarrassment, he managed to leave the plans in an Italian restaurant. They were handed to the police and the plans reported in newspapers around the country. Despite that incident, Fiennes passed the famously harsh training and specialized in demolitions.
    His career with the SAS came to an abrupt end in 1966. A friend of his told him about a film set in Castle Combe, Wiltshire. Twentieth Century-Fox was about to begin shooting Doctor Dolittle and had built sets and a twenty-foot-high concrete dam in the area, ruining the peace of an ancient English village. Fiennes agreed to help destroy the dam and also to tip off an ex-SAS man named Gareth Jones, who had become a journalist. Instead, Gareth Jones told the Daily Mirror, and they called the police. With explosives and detonators, Fiennes went in darkness to Castle Combe, unaware that policecars were waiting for him. His own car was an ancient and unreliable Jaguar, which he parked nearby and then walked in across the fields.

    Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid
    Unseen, he and two friends laid explosive charges as well as gasoline flares on timers to lure away the film company’s security men. As they lit the fuses, the night was shattered by police with dogs. The dam was destroyed in the explosion that followed, but the trap had been sprung.
    Interestingly, Fiennes had been trained to avoid exactly this sort of capture. He submerged himself in the river and made his way in darkness back to his waiting car. However, it wouldn’t start so he was stuck. Things were not looking good for the escape when a police car came up and parked next to it. Trying to brazen it out, Fiennes asked the policemen if they would help him start his