Upon our return from Northern Ireland, we settled back into barracks life with damning ease. Training exercises and routine duties were pretty dull after South Armagh. We did the traditional army officer runs up to London on the weekends, which was great for a party, but I was getting restless. With the exception of Northern Ireland, this was a peacetime army, and I hadn’t joined up for a peaceful time.
I could already see the future mapped out for me. A new job every eighteen months, competing with my peers on the greasy pole of army promotions. I might make colonel if I was lucky.
My motivation then, as now, was mainly based on outcome: I wanted to achieve things. This desire to achieve, allied with impatience (something I have long struggled to control), often led to impetuous behaviour.
So it was, during morning tea on a wintry, wet January in 1990, in our officers’ mess in Aldershot. My eyes fell on the cover of an old copy of the Sunday Times Magazine. I stopped short, looking at one of the most startling and evocative photographs I had ever seen. Gold prospectors in Brazil, thousands of them. They were covered in mud, swarming like ants into a deep hole and carrying bags of golden dirt out on their shoulders. The photograph was taken by the famous photographer Sebastiao Salgado at a gold rush in a place called Serra Pelada.
This was largest gold rush of modern times and one of the biggest ever. The dirt was so fabulously rich you didn’t measure the gold grade in grams per tonne like at Dolaucothi (10 grams per tonne being the ore) or even in ounces per tonne like in the Australian gold rushes (2 ounces per tonne being a good grade in hard rock). At Serra Pelada you could actually measure the gold in percentages (2 per cent gold would be 20,000 grams in one tonne, worth $770,000!).
In that mess full of lounging and bored officers, I felt the old spark rising. The Paras had given me the robust self-confidence to go out and do things that I might have considered too risky in the past.
I held up the magazine. ‘This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to join this gold rush in South America and make my fortune,’ I said.
‘Oh yeah? You wouldn’t last five minutes out there, Jim,’ my friend Simon Haslam said. ‘The locals would have your bollocks straight off, you’d be strung up, sodomised by every fucker in the entire jungle and forced into white slavery till you died of malaria.’
‘Thanks for that, Simon. And screw you. You lot can stay here and guard the frigging barracks. I’m going to do it.’
All the enthusiasm of my geology studies and Dolaucothi had come alive again. I wanted to get out there and find some of that gold, with the chance to get rich. Also influencing this decision was a trip I had taken a year earlier, during leave from the army. I had travelled to South Africa to look at some of the geology and mines; this was an interest that had been fed by my ongoing reading of mining-related books. While there I visited Johannesburg and trekked around the museums in that city, learning about the history of the most productive gold-mining region in the world. The men who had built this industry – the Randlords: Beit, Rhodes, Robinson and others – had become immensely wealthy on the back of cheap black labour and favourable geology. At the town of Kimberley I viewed the nowderelict massive pit in the middle of town, the ‘Big Hole’, the site of the greatest diamond rush in history, and my interest in finding diamonds developed.
There was no internet back in 1990. I researched the Serra Pelada gold rush in journals in various libraries and discovered that South America was a place full of small-scale mining. Gold, diamonds, emeralds and a host of other minerals were still being discovered in the remote jungles of South America, with some big money being made – and lost. There were plenty of new areas to explore and find your fortune. The idea turned into an obsession. I scoured the bookshops of London to research South America and made up my mind.
Despite my investigations, there was limited information available regarding these events in far-off lands. So my mindset was (and still is): if you want to do something, you have to get off your arse and go and do it. Sure, the locals might try to flay me alive, as Haslam suggested, but then again they might not. All of the historic gold rushes I had read about were full of foreigners trying their luck – why not me?
First up, I had to resign my hard-won commission. I went to the adjutant to seek permission from the CO to leave the army. The adjutant was Andy Bale, of waiter-beating fame. As well as being mad he also had a reputation as the rudest man in the British Army.
‘What the fuck do you want, Richards?’ he inquired.
‘I want to see the CO please, Andy.’
‘Why?’ He lingered on the word ominously as he continued working.
‘I want to resign my commission and join a gold rush in South America.’ Suddenly I was not feeling quite as flash as when I was bragging about this plan to my younger colleagues.
‘Fuck off,’ said Andy without looking up.
I fucked off.
Later I managed to collar the CO at lunch in the mess and got the ball rolling. In truth there was little they could do. My three-year short-service commission had only another couple of months to run, and I was not renewing. But I think Bale just liked telling people to fuck off.
My last day in barracks was spent handing back all of my kit. I called in on the company quartermaster.
‘Hello sir, I heard you were leaving,’ said the quartermaster in a welcoming tone. ‘Where are you off to?’
‘I’m going to South America to make my fortune in a gold rush, Q.’
‘You stand more chance on the fucking dole, sir.’
Always nice to get a vote of confidence from the sergeants’ mess.
My own confidence, though, was good. During the last three years I had led my platoon through tours of Cyprus and the USA, and faced down the IRA on active service in Northern Ireland. The army had taught me I could mentally and physically overcome whatever obstacles were in my way. Most importantly, I had also gained self-belief. With my gold rush plans, I now just had to beware the pitfalls of self-delusion.
When you leave the army, you can choose a short course of study by way of resettlement. So for two weeks I attended a Spanish language school at Earls Court in London. In 1990, air travel was a lot more expensive than it is today. I planned to get a free military flight to Belize in Central America. From there I would move south through the Spanish-speaking regions, picking up the language and some mining skills along the way as I headed to Brazil. Once in Brazil I could switch to learning Portuguese, which was a modest step from a start in Spanish.
I chose to get my army pension allowance paid out in a lump sum. This was my grubstake money that would get me to the goldfields, buy some equipment and start me off. That’s what pension money is for, right?
But one problem was troubling me – my girlfriend, Sarah, a student at the nearby University of Surrey. Sarah was in the OTC at London, as I had been, and was something of an intrepid type herself. She had tumbling brown hair and a sunny temperament; her girl-next-door looks were made all the more attractive by a husky voice and a hint of vulnerability.
She was upset by my plans and didn’t completely buy into my idea, but was such a trooper that she still supported me. Sarah’s father, on the other hand, seemed to think my gold-rush plan was a terrific idea. Squadron Leader Symes was in the RAF and was handily the head of the RAF station at Brize Norton. Indeed, with enthusiasm he assisted me in getting the free oneway flight out of Brize Norton on the regular RAF milk run to Belize in Central America, just to help me on my way.
With my personal savings and pension payout, I thought I should have enough money to last me for about four months. I hoped by then I would be into paydirt. As I had learned from the tales of the California gold rush, I wanted to travel ultra-light and not weigh myself down with loads of kit before I got there. Dollars were more portable than equipment, and I could always buy some gear when required. My preparations for the trip were made easier by following the old maxim: take half the luggage and twice the money.
At least I stuck to the half the luggage part. I was keen to melt into the background and not appear like a tourist or backpacker. That’s hard when you look Anglo-Saxon, but carrying a western-style backpack would have been a dead giveaway.
I bought a robust nylon bag about the size of a small briefcase. I took no spare clothing and instead planned to wash my garments each night and wear them again the following morning, as they would soon dry in the hot climate.
Preventing mosquito bites was critical if I was to avoid malaria. I had a long-sleeved cotton shirt and thin loose cotton pants; everything was cotton to prevent heat rash. A thin woollen pullover for chilly nights could provide warmth, even if damp. I had a strong pair of comfortable sandals.
Into the bag went my trusty geological compass, with attached mirror for shaving. I sawed my toothbrush in half to save on weight. Everything was pared down to the absolute minimum. The ITM maps were first class and I had one of Central and northern South America.
My medical kit included water purification tablets, antiseptic, malaria drugs and antibiotics. I also packed mosquito repellent, a facecloth for a towel, shaving kit, small Maglite torch (with spare bulb), full-brimmed hat, polarised sunglasses, a small fine mesh mosquito net and a water bottle.
I carried my limited funds in a moneybelt as cash and traveller’s cheques (international ATMs didn’t exist in 1990); I took $2,000 all up. I had my passport with spare photos for visas. For company I had a diary and a Spanish grammar book. The total weight of my baggage was 3 kilograms, 1 kilogram of which was water. This was what I was going to conquer South America with; it was gold-rush lite.
The water was critical. This was before the days of ubiquitous plastic bottled water, so you needed to carry enough to tide you over to the next clean and trustworthy refill spot. You also did not want to skimp on drinking freely in the hot climate or you could soon run into real trouble.
I was justifiably concerned about malaria and so I had paid a visit to the London School of Tropical Medicine library in central London. The literature contained so many contradictory points of view that I came to the conclusion (rightly, as it turned out) that you are better off during extended stays not to take any prophylactic (preventative) drugs for malaria at all, especially as different malarial strains have varying resistance to drugs that change with location and time and the side effects could be nasty.
It was better to have a few different malarial drugs on you, in case you came down with the parasite. You could then self-treat depending on local advice and diagnosis, if available, using trusted drugs from home rather than the local, possibly counterfeit equivalent.
The Paras doctor, Paul Cain, assisted and advised me well. He also administered every conceivable immunisation jab.
I procured a Guatemalan visa and an American visa, which could come in handy if I had a medical emergency.
Last of all, I paid a visit to London Zoo, to sketch and memorise the poisonous snakes and spiders I might encounter in the South American jungles. Despite this idea being good in theory, the venomous animals were so numerous that I gave up and decided just to avoid all of these creatures wherever possible.
I felt well prepared and had tried to think of and cover most contingencies. This also helped my confidence a bit: as the army saying goes, ‘Prior preparation and planning prevents piss poor performance’.
Before I left, I spent a few days with my parents, who were mystified by my plan. My mother was always supportive of whatever Jane and Aileen, my sisters, or I did, but Dad, who had been relieved when I’d joined the army, found all his old worries about me returned.
My father, Stephen Richards, was one of seven children born on a remote farm in Mid Wales. He was a bright child, winning a scholarship to the regional grammar school, and from there he gained a place to study medicine at Guys Hospital, London. It was a remarkable achievement for someone from such a humble background. He went on to become one of the country’s leading ear, nose and throat surgeons and was quite brilliant in his field.
A childhood infection had left Dad deaf in one ear, leading to his interest in medicine. This example of turning a negative into a positive was something I understood from an early age.
My mother, Dorothy, was also a qualified doctor, in an era of few women doctors. As we grew up, she practised medicine part time, and for a large part of her life she worked running women’s health clinics in disadvantaged areas in the Welsh valleys. With Dad working very long hours, my upbringing was influenced more by Mum than Dad. She was an ever-supporting and loving influence for my two sisters and me, which added to my confidence as a child.
Dad was happiest at our family holiday cottage in the hills near Llangurig, the highest village in Mid Wales. He bought me a shotgun when I was thirteen, which I used to shoot rabbits. I would gut and skin them, and my sisters would cook them, feeding the family in the process. Fishing was also a passion, tickling trout with my hands or spearing them under torchlight. Dad and I got on best when we shared our common love of the outdoors, and we had some great times together.
Despite this, my relationship with my father could have been better. His inspired brilliance was no match for my teenage wilfulness, and at some point Dad realised that he had little influence over me.
But my father had an ace up his sleeve: his youngest brother, Wyn Richards, to whom he was close. Dad packed me off on school holidays to my Uncle Wyn’s farm in Mid Wales, and I spent carefree summers hanging out with my cousin Heather and her attractive female friends, helping on the farm.
I already liked my Uncle Wyn. During an earlier encounter, at age nine, I had decided to give him a test. I had instigated the demolition of an old stone toilet behind the farmhouse, recruiting my young cousins to help. When Wyn caught us, he surprised me. He gave us a disapproving look, took us to a muddy field and helped us to build a small structure from mud and stone.
He didn’t get angry, which is what I had expected (and probably wanted). Wyn simply spent his time with me, showing me how to build something rather than destroy it. It was a lesson I have never forgotten.
Wyn was, and is, a truly remarkable man. He can make, mend or fix anything and is a superb carpenter, apiarist and farmer. He also has a wonderful way with children; as a kid I thought he possessed the combined wisdom of humanity. Along with my own parents, Wyn gave me two valuable things that helped me to avoid some of the traps and people that lay ahead: my moral compass, and my values.
I was a fortunate child indeed.
On 9 March 1990, I was ready to leave on my gold rush. I spent my last night in the UK with Sarah at her parents’ house near RAF Brize Norton. I felt bad about leaving her. She felt bad about me going. It was a dismal evening.
I promised her that, somehow, I would get enough money together to visit her in Florida (Sarah had a summer job lined up at Disney World).
‘But if you do find someone else, I’ll understand,’ I said.
She cried, and I felt like a rat.
At 4 a.m. Sarah drove me in silence to the departure terminal at RAF Brize Norton. She came with me to the check-in counter, offered me her cheek, which I kissed, and then she turned around and walked out; she didn’t look back.
Two hours later I took off on an RAF DC10 aircraft, headed for Belize in Central America. Alone. I felt exhilarated, apprehensive and sad all at the same time. It was just me and my plan versus, well, everyone else.
