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FIRST OVERLAND NEWSLETTER 34The latest news of the 'First Overland' DVD, based on Antony Barrington-Brown's original film footage of the 1955 Oxford & Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition from London to Singapore. |
Never let the facts spoil a good story... we look at how sloppy reporting may distort history. We'll see how The Companion Book Club ran "plumb outta road!", and visit The Nairn Bus Story again. And there's plenty more travellers' tales, including 10-thousand miles in a Minivan.
It's always interesting to open my Inbox and see where I'll be sending the next DVD to. Australia and the USA have been the favourite destinations (after the UK, of course), with 114 and 132 copies respectively. Canada is next with 27, followed by Germany and the Netherlands with 23 each. At the other end of the scale are more exotic (?) countries with just one — Botswana, the Channel Islands, Estonia, Oman, Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates. It's good to know that the exploits of the 'First Overland Team' are still delighting people all around the world.
And I can usually tell if a magazine has been published in some country, mentioning the Expedition and the book or DVD. For instance, in the space of 4 days in July I received 3 orders from Finland. I asked the third orderer, Pasi Sateri, why the sudden interest? He said that the Finnish edition of [Land Rover's] 'Onelife' magazine had just recently arrived, with the story of the Millionth Discovery trip to Beijing. It also mentioned the website for the book and DVD, which is much appreciated — thanks, LR.
But on the subject of magazines.....
When you earn your living by writing factual material, there must always be a little bell going off in your mind — is what I've just written totally accurate? And if it isn't, will someone in years to come take it as accurate just because it's in print?
I always get that little bell when I'm writing a script, or preparing a Newsletter like this — have I made a boo-boo that will lead someone astray in the future? And, being a responsible person (and not a tabloid journalist!), I hope I treble-check before writing, and will always correct any errors that do come to light... whether I originally wrote them or not.
So it's in that spirit that I turn to the May 2nd 2012 issue of Auto Express magazine, and a 3-page spread about the arrival of the Millionth Discovery celebratory journey to China. 2 months before, their reporter Jack Rix put the finishing touches to the car as it came off the line in Solihull — he appears in the photo to be fitting the front grille surround. Then he drove the car on its final stage — the last few miles to its destination at the Bird's Nest Stadium in Beijing.
Land Rover were very clever with this project — China is now a very important market for them, and driving the Millionth Disco overland to the Beijing Motor Show was a sure-fire way of getting a lot of column inches which reflected its rugged pedigree — the more so because they involved motoring journalists throughout. As I reported in Newsletter 33, they even added a Series 1 Station Wagon for the European stretch of the journey in homage to the original OxCam 'First Overland' Expedition.
OK, so there was a little poetic licence in the Press Releases — in order to justify Beijing as the final destination, we were encouraged to believe that was the original intention to go there. It wasn't — Adrian Cowell first suggested Hong Kong (because of his upbringing there), but Tim Slessor soon scotched that idea as being unrealistic in the international politics of the 1950s. He suggested that Singapore was a much better idea, mainly because of the 'longest journey' aspect. So China was only the destination for a few hours, and never Beijing. A bit naughty of Land Rover... but perhaps a justifiable 'inaccuracy' in the overall planning of the Millionth trip.
But by the time it arrived in Auto Express, very subtle re-writing had (I'm sure quite inadvertently) changed the emphasis. With a couple of BB's original 1955 pictures, a callout box summarised the original expedition. To quote:
In the Footsteps of Overland pioneers
In 1955, six students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities set out in two Series 1 Land Rovers on The Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition – now known as the First Overland Expedition.
The students set off from London's Hyde Park and intended to end up in Beijing, but were forced to change their destination to Singapore for political reasons. In total, they took six months and six days, covering 18,000 miles in all. And it was the first time this route had been completed entirely by car.
The trip inspired a BBC documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough, which can still be found on YouTube.
What I'm querying is "forced to change their destination to Singapore for political reasons" — to me that suggests that they were already well on their way to Beijing when things changed, and they got the maps of South East Asia out to find an alternative. We know that not to be correct on both the Beijing and 'change' scores, and denies the excellent pre-planning that the team made before they set out — they knew exactly where they were aiming for, even if they didn't 100% know how they would get there. And am I being ultra-picky when I query that they "set off from London's Hyde Park"? They did not — their departure point was The Grenadier pub in Belgravia... OK, it's near Hyde Park, but to give the impression that they set off from the Park itself is not true.
And naturally I bridled at the YouTube reference, fearing a rip-off merchant had been at work. Well, I'm pleased to say that there's none of my edit up there... but neither is there anything narrated by Sir David Attenborough! Most of the material there now is based on the 13-minute version of BB's original footage that was edited for Rover's own publicity purposes, almost certainly by Pathé (who did most of Rover's film work, and supplied BB with his film). It was recently re-released to the press as part of the Millionth Discovery event, and has now found its way to YouTube. But it's already been widely available, and appears on the 'Best of Land Rover (Volume 1)' DVD which is available from the Heritage Motor Museum at Gaydon.
To me it's fascinating because of the different selection of pics from BB's footage — there are images in there that I didn't have access to because they weren't included in the BBC 'Travellers' Tales' edit. And it's not Sir David — probably Bob Danvers Walker, or one of those other wonderfully-plummy artists that were the 'voice' of the British newsreels in the 50s and 60s.
What is on YouTube is a special mini-feature, recently made for the Millionth Disco promotion, and including some of the Pathé footage, and recent interviews by Tim and Pat Murphy. Satisfyingly, but strangely (in the light of this being an official Land Rover production, and what appeared in the press releases), the very first thing they do is to scotch the Hong Kong matter. It's a nice little piece, and I thoroughtly recommend it — there's some spectacular footage of Discoveries going off-road as well. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfi18NxBwbk.
And where does Sir David Attenborough fit in to this (apart from commissioning the original BBC programmes, and so bankrolling the whole expedition?) Well, he does appear very early in the BBC4 'Timeshift' programme that was produced to mark the 50th Anniversary of 'First Overland' in 2005... but he's not the narrator all the way through. That programme was pirated and may still be out there on the web, although a search for "First Overland" + "David Attenborough" doesn't reveal it on YouTube. I'm glad it's difficult to find — I've said before that it was a travesty, and demonstrates the difference between the 1955 'one channel' BBC, and the modern multi-channel version. David Attenborough could do things properly and carefully, with a member of the Expedition alongside to keep the edit on track — BBC4, having done some admittedly good interviews with Pat, Tim and BB (but I understand taken all day to do it), then passed them on to an editor, along with the same dub of the original film that I had, and said "put some pictures with that." So we got a mish-mash of images, scatter-gunned across the programme with no regard at all for geography or chronology. We got the cars driving between the bulldozers on the 'surveyor's trace' road in Takua Pa, immediately followed by a road in northern India, and so on.
And because it was on the same tape, there was even some footage right near the beginning from a subsequent expedition that Tim and BB did a couple of years later — we saw some visually exciting images of saffron-robed monks in a river procession that was nothing to do with the Far Eastern Expedition. Worst still from a Land-Rover rivet-counter's point of view, they did that journey in a Series 2... a model that didn't exist in 1955!
But it was on the BBC, so it must have been right!
Maybe I'm being far too picky, and should just sit back and enjoy the TV experience, and the magazine articles... and be thankful that 'FO' is mentioned at all. I'll just say, though, that if you want the true story of 'First Overland', then this is the place to find it.......... perhaps!
For many of us (me included) it's the Companion Book Club's re-printing of the original 'First Overland' book that we remember. I did a great deal to bring the story to a wide audience — indeed, if my father hadn't been a club member, I'd probably never have read Tim's words and seen BB's photos, and there would have been a lot of differences in my life over half a century on. Incidentally, BB told me that 'FO' was the only Companion book to be published with that greeny-blue cover, so it's always easy to spot in secondhand bookshops.
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In order to keep its members' interest, the Club sent out a newsletter with each mailing, promoting its forthcoming titles. The October 1958 issue featured 'First Overland' in great detail, including a centre spread written by Tim. I regret that I can't remember how I came by these images, and who sent them to me... please forgive me! If it was you, then please let me know, and I'll give you a credit. |
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If you want to see a higher-resolution copy, then there's a 3.64MB PDF version if you click here. |
In the last Newsletter, I featured an item from 'Saudi Aramco World', originally published July/August 1981 (but still visible online). It was a review of 'The Nairn Way' by John M. Munro and Martin Love, and it's generated some more interest.
Brian Arthur Robinson wrote from Essex to ask what eventually happened to the Nairn Buses — sorry, Brian... I can't help you there. But Philip Bridgen wrote from New Zealand to say:
I was very interested to read the article you referred to in the latest First Overland newsletter from Aramco News, about the Nairn Transport Company. The definitive account of the Company’s history is the book 'Nairn Bus to Baghdad' by Tullet, JW, publisjhed by AH & AW Reed, Wellington NZ (1968)
The book was written in cooperation with Gerald Nairn, one of the two Nairn brothers, who was then living in retirement in New Plymouth, NZ. Gerald lived to a good age, because he was living in Blenheim NZ by the late 1980s, just a block away from where I then lived! As 'Nairn Bus' relates, the Nairn brothers were born and grew up in Blenheim, where their father was a prominent doctor. Dr Nairn was one of the first car owners in Marlborough, and also had a Douglas motorcycle, which the brothers learned to ride. When the Great War broke out, the brothers enlisted in the NZ Army and went to Egypt with their unit, as part of the 1st NZEF, i.e. not the British Army as the Aramco article states.
My mother-in-law also grew up in Blenheim. She was about a decade younger than the Nairn boys, but remembered their escapades with their father’s motorcycle and cars very well, when I asked her about the Nairns after reading the book and discovering the connection with Blenheim.
And then Tom Bache (the Land-Rover Series One Club's USA Representative) sent me a picture of an advert for the American coachbuilders Alexander Wolfington & Son, together with a quote from a website devoted to the trade in America:
 | A large number of bodies were built by Wolfington, including the famous Nairn Transport Company buses that ferried mail, freight, soldiers and oil workers between Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad. Two New Zealand brothers, Gerald and Norman Nairn, founded a weekly bus freight and mail service between Haifa, Israel and Beirut, Lebanon in 1922. A similar Baghdad, Iraq to Damascus, Syria route was instituted on October of 1923, and soon afterwards the two circuits were combined, creating a 715-mile-long Beirut via Damascus to Baghdad service. The Nairn’s first vehicles were 7-passenger Cadillac and Buick sedans, but the capacities of the vehicles were easily exceeded and when the frequency of the trips increased, a search for more suitable vehicles commenced. In 1925 Norman Nairn ordered a number of Six-Wheel bus chassis and commissioned Alexander Wolfington & Son to build them specially-built bodies, with first-class accommodations for 16 passengers, and enough space for 2 tons of freight and luggage. The coaches featured comfortable, high-backed seats and a two-place driver’s compartment which enabled the buses to drive non-stop through the night, reducing the 24 hour journey to less than 20 hours. Equipped with an 8-speed gearbox and a 110hp 6-cylinder Continental engine, the Nairn coaches had a top speed of 55 mph. The $17,500 vehicles weighed seven tons and could carry 1¼ tons of luggage on the roof. The Nairn coaches were equipped with huge Westinghouse shock absorbers as well as Woods projector beam headlight as were a surprising number of other Safeways. In 1927 Iraq’s King Faisal declared the Nairn Safeway Saloon Coach ‘The Babylon’. |
The entire (and long) story is here
Still stories come in of how 'FO' inspired others to make their own expeditions. After receiving a copy of the DVD, Sam Purvis wrote:
I first heard of FO when someone lent me the book while I was prepping my SIIA 88" for a trip to Nepal, a few years ago now! Some words and photos can be found at www.dollarsandchocolate.co.uk. Despite feeling after returning that I had finally got old Land Rovers out of my system, the bug inevitably and quickly returned and I now run around in a 1950 S1 80"!
The second vehicle on the Nepal trip was a Series 3 (ex-Army) Lightweight — a characterful model that was my daily transport for many years. And once you've got green blood in your veins, Sam, it never goes away.
I also had two emails from Jim Bates in Australia:
You might be interested to know that I had no idea of the 1st Overland trip until having a quiet chat with a local in my neighbourhood (North Carlton – inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia) about three months ago. Kath Sharpe, a sprightly mid 80's "young" lady, happened to mention to me that her late husband David and herself traveled overland from London to Calcutta in (of all things) a Bedford van in 1958. On expressing interest in learning more about their journey and in particular viewing some of their hundreds of slides they took during the trip, Kath revealed that the catalyst for their adventure had been a book written by one of six university graduates that had completed a road trip from London to Singapore a couple of years earlier. Kath then produced their original 1957 edition of 'the book', which she graciously loaned me and which I have subsequently devoured each word of. As a result I am now 'hooked'.
This Sunday a handful of our joint friends are gathering for afternoon tea to view Kath's slide show. I shall take your DVD along and pass it around the group for further viewing. Kath is particularly interested in the DVD of course and I am sure it will bring back very many pleasant memories of her early life with her equally adventurous late husband.
Alhough I am not really a Landrover enthusiast I can truly understand what motivates those who are. In the early 1970's, whilst in Papua New Guinea for 4 years, I had the experience of purchasing a G60 Nissan Patrol (affectionately referred to as being designed like a "brick shit-house on wheels"). This was my introduction to the 4 wheel drive off road experience and I absolutely loved it. The chap that convinced me to buy the machine was a Landrover enthusiast from way back. He took it for a test drive for me and convinced me that it would be a sensible purchase. For the next three years we went on numerous excursions into the foothills of the Sarawaged mountains just north of Lae on the north coast of PNG. When I returned to Melbourne the Nissan came with me and remained our sole family vehicle for some 17 years — an unusual sight in those days, parked outside our terrace house, just a couple of kilometres from the centre of Melbourne.
Jim then went on to tell of an un-nerving experience some time after he'd sold the Patrol. One Saturday evening he got a phone call from the senior sergeant in charge of the police station in Chiltern (a small country town north west of Melbourne).
My immediate reaction was that I must have been booked speeding through some country town in the G60's replacement, a somewhat more nimble Mazda 626 of the day (I doubt whether the Patrol would have ever reached within 10mph of a speed limit in the 17 years that I had her).
Needless to say this was not the point of the call, rather it was to to inquire whether I had ever owned a G60 Patrol with a factory hard top — a most distinguishing feature of my old vehicle. When I cautiously responded with a "yes",the sergeant then went on to explain that he had in fact bought the vehicle a few years ago and after a little routine maintenance had taken it on a 6-month trip across central Australia, the Birdsville Track etc. during which it had performed numerous river crossings and basically hadn't missed a beat during the entire journey.
You can imagine how pleased I felt knowing that the old Patrol had in fact escaped the crushing machine and had gone on to provide enjoyment for someone else after serving me so well for so long.
Please pass on my belated congratulations to Tim and the remaining members of the 'FO' group (only 56 years late). So sorry to hear that the group is slowly dwindling in size.
Enough of Nissans, and back to Land Rovers. I can certainly understand how pleased Jim felt about his car being saved from the crushing machine — incidentally, he's amused at us calling them 'cars', because in Australia and PNG they'd be known as 'trucks'. My beloved Range Rover Classic was delivered by its subsequent owner to a scrapyard where I can see it every day on my way into town. Some parts have gone, and it's officially been declared as 'Dismantled'... but there's enough of it still visible to upset me greatly. I've asked the scrapyard owner to throw a tarpaulin over it to hide it. He's not done so yet!
Ken Coupland, from Lockerbie in Scotland, is eagerly awaiting Father Christmas. He bought a DVD, but it was intercepted from the postman by 'persons unknown', and spirited away in that 'secret place' where Chrissie Prezzies go to hide. He wrote:
Certainly looking forward to a boys night in with the telly and few beers!! Land Rover's... err.. yes, I've a screw loose upstairs for the Leaf springers. Bought my first, an 80", when I was 19, with my daily drive being a '59 SII which I bought back in 2000. Now that my daughter's grown up a bit, and the mortgage is nearly paid, I'm hoping to take Frank the SII on a trip to Africa, hence the DVD. I'm working on my de-mountable camper body, but I'm a wee bit off yet! Everybody has told me a SWB is the wrong vehicle for the job, and I should buy a LWB for the trip, but Frank's all I've got, so he's going. Anyway, I keep telling people, Oxford and Cambridge managed all their gear in 80"
Ken — enjoy the DVD (where you'll see that the OxCam vehicles were actually 86" wheelbase... a whole extra 6" of space!)... and please write up your travels with 'Frank' when you get back!
Finally, I had a brief note from Terry Oliver in Germany, offering info and pictures about his parents' two Land Rover trips to Australia in 1970 (London - Calcutta, Fremantle - Sydney) and 1973 (London - Bombay, Brisbane - Perth):
'First Overland' served as their 'Bible' in the preparations for both these trips. My father still remembers the vehicle, a LWB Searle Carawagon conversion, with great affection — he is now 100 hundred years old.
Terry — if your Dad's willing to share them, then we're more than willing to look at them in a future Newsletter.
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In the previous Newsletter I included this publicity picture of an intrepid overland Commer 'bus' which Cam Ford from New South Wales rode in as part of the 'Sundowners' fleet that he used to travel with. I said "That shot just creases me up — I wouldn't fancy attempting a trans-world trip in such a cramped vehicle, and dressed like that! At least they had solar toupees!" |
Cam has taken me to task, saying that 'Solar-powered wigs' are an novelty that they didn't have, but that 'Solar Topees' (oops!) had been given to them by one of their sponsors in good faith as part of a donation to the project, so they felt obliged to feature them prominently in the publicity. He said: Actually, we thought they were hilarious too, and once on our way, they were rapidly 'lost' or sold off to appreciative Indian bazaar merchants! And he makes the point that the publicity photo was taken in the dealer's showroom before they left, and they certainly didn't dress like that on the trip!
In October, there was a convention in Queensland for Sundowners' past passengers to celebrate the near-50th anniversary of that first trip. Cam and Di showed the 'FO' DVD — everyone appears to have been rendered totally amazed by it!
Cam also sent some pics of a later expedition in an even less spacious vehicle:
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After arriving in London in 1964 after the first overland trip, I worked for two or three years in the animation business before the overlanding bug bit me again. In early 1967 I set off in an 850cc Austin Minivan, driving down through Spain to Morocco and then east across North Africa, through Algeria, Tunisia and Libya to Egypt, then 1,000 km up the Nile to Aswan and back. Events were getting a little heated by that time, so I made an exit from Alexandria to Athens a few weeks before the 6-Day War broke out, and reached Greece just in time for the Colonels to stage their coup; marooning me on Crete for two weeks. Eventually I returned to England after covering 10,000 miles in 4 months. Incidentally, Cam tells me that he was accompanied on that trip by two American girls — I don't think we'll go into that any deeper, except to remark that it must have been pretty crowded in there! |
I think the coldest night of my life was spent in a Minivan — but that's another story! Cam sent some more lovely pics of the Minivan and the Commers — if there's a clamour to see them, I'll include them in the next Newsletter.
With all the very best for Christmas and the New Year,
GRAEME ALDOUS
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