Ann Daniels

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 January 2007

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Polar explorer Ann Daniels. Before she was 30, she hadn't so much as walked with a rucksack and had no experience of navigating with a compass. Then her husband saw a newspaper advert seeking ordinary women to join an all-women relay to the North Pole. Ann was successful and since then she has walked to both Poles, become a Polar guide and now has her sights set on being the first British woman to walk solo to the North Pole - an endeavour she'll attempt for the second time this March.

While she is on her expeditions, the life she leaves behind is also far from routine - she is a mother to four children including triplets. She has met some criticism for leaving her children for long periods, but she responds by saying that they are her inspiration - she wants to demonstrate to them how to live life to the full.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics Book: The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard Luxury: A bar of soap

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My cast away this week is the Polar Explorer and Daniels as part of the first British all-women teams to walk to both the South and North
0:35.1	Poles, she's made history, enduring freezing temperatures as low as minus 50, and seeing
0:41.2	some of her fellow travellers collapse with Frostbite and Gangrene.
0:45.0	There have of course been brave and stoic explorers who've battled the same chilling pass.
0:50.0	What makes her achievement all the more extraordinary is that she set off on that first adventure,
0:55.5	leaving her young triplets at home. My children, she says, were my inspiration for everything I've done,
1:01.5	and when things got difficult difficult I would chant their names
1:04.3	coupled with that is her very normal background. She's about as far from the
1:09.4	toff looking for a spot of adventure as you can possibly get.
1:13.0	Brought up by hard-working parents in the terraces of Bradford.
1:16.5	She was one of five children and hadn't even carried a rucksack till she was 30.
1:21.5	And understanding why is of course the difficult
1:26.1	bit for the rest of us. I know you will have been asked this question a
1:28.8	million times but it does remain relevant. Why do you do it? I've always believed that you should
1:34.2	challenge yourself and do something extraordinary and then a newspaper
1:39.7	advert came up that was an advert for ordering women to apply for the North Pole and so I applied
1:47.4	sent 75 pound off and thought I'd be on crime watch having lost all my money.
1:52.6	So you thought it was some sort of scam?
1:54.0	I thought there was a chance that you would have been horribly taken in.
1:56.7	I thought there was a chance.
	...

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