Mike and Fiona Thornewill MBE: The First Married Couple to Reach Both the North and South Poles

Mike Thornewill was only a boy when he first heard the name Robert Falcon Scott. He was captivated by the stories his father told him of the British Antarctic explorer. Stories of bravery, leadership, adventure, sacrifice and heroic failure. Stories that would leave a deeper mark on the six-year-old than his father could ever have imagined. And over a century after Scott perished on his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole, Mike and his wife Fiona proudly hold the crown of being the first married couple to reach both the North and South Poles, with Fiona also being the first British woman to reach the latter (alongside Scott himself as the first British male). 

“It just seemed like something other people did,” Mike, a former policeman in the Nottinghamshire Police Force, tells me. “After growing up with those stories, it just got shelved as a pipe dream.” And understandably so, with expeditions to the North or South Poles likely to set you back at least £35,000 and £50,000 respectively. “It’s something only the really wealthy can do,” he continues, “or people that can ally themselves to a charity.”

But the couple, who were both born and raised in Nottingham (Fiona in Southwell and Mike in Arnold), took their first steps to realising that dream at a 1997 reading of Captain Scott’s diaries at the Royal Geographical Society in London. “I accidentally set off my personal alarm, and everyone stared at me,” Fiona remembers, laughing. “And Princess Anne was in the audience!” But the event had a profound effect on the pair: “I just thought, ‘you know what, let’s do an expedition. I’ve always wanted to do one, and for Fiona it was a case of ‘let me get this out my system.’”

It was at that time that Alex Hibbert, a climbing partner of Mike’s, became terminally ill with leukemia. His death in 1997, aged just 32, sparked an interest in fundraising for Alex’s cause by way of undertaking a polar expedition to Spitzbergen. The first person to add their name as a sponsor was Princess Anne. 

That tough traverse of Spitzbergen, an island of the Svalbard archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, marked their first foray into the world of polar exploration. “It was an incredible experience,” Fiona recollects, “I don’t think our guide expected us to stick to it. It was cold, and we got stuck in blizzards. But he definitely changed his tone towards us.” 

Sharing a curry following the conclusion of that ten-day journey, they realised that Spitzbergen had given them a taste of something they wanted much more of. “Mike told me that no British woman had ever been to the South Pole, and maybe it could be me,” Fiona explains. “I told him that if he raised the money, I’d take on the challenge. And that’s where it all began.”

Loss is something that seemingly drives both Mike and Fiona to push themselves to the physical and mental limits, living every minute of every day to the fullest. As well as the death of his friend Alex, Mike lost his father to cancer at the young age of 45, while Fiona’s first husband and childhood sweetheart Bill tragically died in a road traffic accident in 1991. It was the cause of his father’s death that inspired Mike into selecting a charity partner for their expedition to the South Pole. “We had to raise £68,000, and we didn’t have money,” he explains, “So we went into collaboration with Marie Curie cancer care. The idea was to do something useful with the expedition, as well as getting what we wanted to achieve personally out of it.” It took two years, but they hit their fundraising target, securing the support of almost 600 individuals, companies and organisations along the way. “Standing on the start line felt like the biggest achievement, because most of the hurdles you have to face come before that,” Mike remembers. “You think ‘wow, I’ve actually got to the start line!’ It’s almost easier after that.” 

But the expedition was far from straightforward. Battling forty knot winds and temperatures of -35 degrees Celsius, they were forced to overcome a series of issues during their 966-mile trek. Pulling 200lb sleds loaded with food and equipment, they suffered from weight loss and frostbite, with Mike badly damaging his right knee in the process. But on 4 January 2000, they became both the first married couple to reach the South Pole, and Fiona the first British woman.

“It’s still quite hard to believe that we actually did it, even though we have plenty of photographs to prove it!” Mike laughs. “I just felt a sense of great internal contentment. It’s not a quick high, like when you buy a beautiful car and the novelty wears off. The feeling stays with you because you’ve put so much into it.” Fiona continues, “It’s relief, it’s joy, it’s pride…and definitely a bit of girl power. It was hard to take in that I was the first British woman to have ever done this.” 

Whereas the uninitiated might see the Antarctic as a barren white landscape, the couple are quick to explain how much natural beauty the area contains. “The sky is the deepest cobalt blue – it’s like walking through a snow-shaker,” Mike recounts. “The ice crystals in the air, with the sun shining through them, look like specks of silver dust twinkling like a myriad of tiny diamonds… It’s the closest you’ll ever get to walking on another planet.” Fiona continues, “Sights like that last forever in your mind.” 

While that might have been the zenith of most people’s life achievements, Mike and Fiona weren’t content. “Reaching the South Pole satisfied a lifetime ambition that I never truly thought would happen,” Mike remarks, “but Fiona said, ‘wouldn’t it be great to do the double and go to the North Pole too?’ To be honest, that hadn’t really been in my equation.”

Having learnt a lot about fundraising, the couple managed to raise the required £56,000 in only six months, and less than a year after becoming the first married couple to conquer the South Pole, they repeated the feat 12,440 miles away in the North Pole, adding another Guinness World Record to their growing collection. 

The Thornewill’s exploits deservedly earned them media attention, and a flurry of press interviews followed their return to the UK, making the return to ‘normality’ even more bizarre. “We went on Good Morning, got interviewed by the BBC and all that sort of thing, but it just felt like I’d been taken out of the jungle and dropped into civilisation,” Fiona explains. “Everything seems so fast. Cars that are going at 30mph feel like they’re going twice that speed,” Mike adds. “You get used to seeing things being so slow and methodical, and that business hits you. It’s a weird feeling at first.”

As well as the physical implications, the end of a journey as intense as those to the Polar Regions can have a psychological impact too. “Fiona had a bit of a low after the North Pole expedition,” says Mike. “I just felt like I hadn’t been pushed to my limit,” Fiona admits. 

That limit would be reached in even more dramatic circumstances, when Fiona decided that she was going to attempt the South Pole again, this time solo and unsupported. “If you met Fiona you would say she’s a party girl who likes to wear posh frocks, socialize, drink wine and have a good time,” Mike tells me, “But there’s this other side to her that, when she decides to press the button, is so physically and mentally strong, as well as incredibly determined.”

During all of their adventures, the couple continued with their daily working lives. Mike saved his overtime and holidays, while Fiona fitted her intensive training schedule around her job in Nottingham. “I’d either run or cycle to work and back, which was 22 miles a day,” she explains. On top of that, Fiona had to prepare her body to pull a 130kg sled – the equivalent of a fully loaded washing machine – with everything she’d need for the trek, embarking on a regime of pulling a truck tire back and forth along the same stretch of path for hours on end. “It’s a mind-numbing exercise. You can do a mile-an-hour if you’re lucky,” she recalls. “I’d do that same journey day after day, and every time I stopped I’d tell myself that this was the difference between winners and losers.”

But for all she had prepared herself physically, Fiona’s solo journey was plagued by technical difficulties that hit her soon after her expedition had begun: “My phone failed after ten days, so I had no communication with the outside world,” she recalls. The technological failure meant that, for 31 days, she was alone in one of the most remote places on Earth with no contact with the outside world, and Mike only being able to track her progress through the Argos beacon GPS tracker fitted to her sled. 

While that vital link to her loved ones might have been catastrophic to others, Mike explains how his wife coped with that sense of solitude: “There are two types of loneliness: there’s loneliness of the soul, where you’re not feeling loved or wanted. But if you’ve got that love and support in your life, you’re not lonely. You’re just physically separated,” he tells me. “It was interesting reading Fiona’s diary afterwards and seeing how she talked to herself,” he continues. “It’s not a difficult read as you might expect. It’s a journey of happiness. It’s a joy to read.” Fiona even admits that the loss of her communication channels might have even enhanced the experience: “Would I have left England if I’d known that, after ten days, I’d have had no communication? No,” she reveals. “To be honest, it actually made the journey richer. I was able to say that I did it solely on my own.”

Further technical difficulties, including the loss of both her primary and backup stoves, made for a gruelling conclusion to her solo expedition. Unable to melt ice for use as drinking water or to hydrate her dehydrated food, she was forced to rely on a technique they’d prepared in an emergency scenario. By filling a plastic bag full of ice and placing it above her tent, where the temperature was slightly higher in the 24-hour sunlight, she was able to melt just enough to have a cup of water. That would have to be enough to sustain her for the last 49 miles of her journey, which she did with just a sleepless three-hour rest in-between. “I skied for 24 miles, put my tent up, but I couldn’t sleep, so at 3am decided to carry on,” she remembers. “After another nineteen miles I was really thirsty. I desperately needed water. But I kept telling myself I could do it.”

To make matters worse, the GPS tracker on her sled failed just three miles short of the Pole. “She was obviously struggling,” Mike says, “So we thought she’d collapsed. We didn’t even know if she’d made it.” But after reaching the South Pole, she was able to contact her mum to let her know she was safe. Mike, who was also in the Antarctic in a supporting role, was overcome with relief, “Walking in and giving my wife a hug was the highest moment of my life.”

Fiona had taken enough provisions for 65 days, and the pair had planned for a journey of 60, with an ideal schedule of 55. As a couple, their trek to the South Pole had taken 61 days, but Fiona was having to carry all of the additional equipment, as well as having to do all of the camp work herself. Liv Arnesen, a Norweigen Olympic cross-country skier and the first woman to do the journey solo, managed to complete the journey in only 50 days in 1994. Fiona had managed to do it in just 41. 

“It was partly to see if I could push myself to my upper limits,” Fiona recounts. “But also partly in dedication to my first husband, Bill. He’d been cheated of his life, so to feel like I was making the most out of mine spurred me on. I felt like I’d done it for him as well as for Mike.”

The couple now have 31 Polar expeditions between them, having taken a series of first-timers out to both the North and South Poles as guides. During this time they became the first people to walk across Great Slave Lake, as well as the first to make a complete crossing of Great Bear Lake. Mike has also led a blind person and three deaf people to the North Pole, as well as guiding the youngest ever person (at the time) to the South Pole. “I’ve always enjoyed taking people who think they can’t do it, and showing that they actually can,” Mike says with pride. “More than half of the people we’ve taken are female. A lot of them have been women who have had children and want to show their kids what they can achieve.” 

Mike and Fiona have two children of their own, and face a very different daily challenge of home-schooling them during the ongoing pandemic, meaning they don’t have a lot of free time to recollect on their adventures. “We haven’t spoken about it to anybody for quite a while, and in a way it’s nice to think about it again,” Mike reminisces. “It rekindles those emotions again.”

With the history of British exploration dominated by expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, both successful and unsuccessful, heroic and foolhardy, I ask Mike and Fiona whether they consider themselves part of the same club as people like Shackleton, Franklin, Ross, or Mike’s hero, Scott. “We’re just normal people, so I personally don’t put myself up there,” Mike says with sincerity. “But Fiona can after her solo expedition. So much was made of Scott for being the first British man, and there’s a bit of inequality that less is made of the first British female. For that expedition, she is up there.”

In terms of the future, the pair say that they would like to focus on inspiring and supporting their two sons with whatever they choose to do in life. “I feel very content, and don’t feel like I need to prove anything,” Mike says. “But I would love to do one last South Pole expedition. The problem is that you need to find four people with £45,000 each to make it happen. I’m fundraised out – we’ve raised just under £350,000, and it really psychologically tires you. I just can’t do it anymore. That would be my last big expedition.”

But for Fiona, whose last great adventure came with climbing the The Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite, California to celebrate her fiftieth birthday in 2015 (accidentally breaking the speed record in the process), her ambitions have all been achieved. “I don’t think I really have anything left that I want to do. I feel satisfied,” she tells me, before adding, with a wry smile, “Although I have talked about rowing the Atlantic…”

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