Sprache wechseln
The 1955/56 Oxford & Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition—a milestone in overlanding history as inspirational today as it was 60 years ago.
We scroll back to 1955, Tim Slessor was one of a six-man team who pioneered the longest overland trip ever undertaken by a vehicle—London to Singapore. A journey that would take six months and cover over 14,000 miles through some of the most demanding terrain…quite an impossible undertaking. Luckily, they found support from The Rover Company, and from this trip, the most famous Land Rover expedition of the 50s-to-date has often been cited.
Today, aged 86, Tim is sitting opposite me in his beautiful cottage in Brittany, sipping Whisky Mac in front a blazing fire. He is just as much the live wire he has been throughout his fulfilled life and his passion for Land Rover is as strong now as it was when they returned from their monumental journey.
The following story summarises the epic journey, some of the challenges, surprises and pleasures they encountered en route. But it also underlines what can be achieved with what we today would consider a minimalistic approach to equipment and technology—after all, what is a 1955 Series I Land Rover compared to the latest cars in your local showroom? Not to mention the limited off-road experience of these six young men.
Over the last six decades, this journey has become an inspiration for countless adventurers who have followed in the footsteps of these pioneers. I hope that these pages will motivate you, the reader, to pick up a copy of Tim’s book, First Overland, and let its narrative encourage you to stop merely dreaming about the journey you would like to take…but instead to get up and go.
WELL, WHY NOT?
After all, no-one had done it before—though a few had tried. It would be one of the longest of all overland journeys: nearly halfway round the world, from the English Channel to Singapore.
They knew that some earlier overland drivers had made it all the way to India. But no-one had ever managed to go on from there. At Bombay or Calcutta, one had to take a ship. Nevertheless, maps (well, some of them) showed that a road had, once-upon-a-time, been bulldozed through the jungle hills between India and northern Burma. But that was during the war and, in the ten years since 1945, it seemed that the one-time strategic Ledo Road, nearly 200 miles of it, had been totally abandoned. Further, given that those frontier hills have the heaviest rainfall in the world (over 400 inches a year), it was probable that most of the road would have been long since washed away. But the fact was, so remote were those parts, that no-one really knew…
In fact, the problems began much earlier that that. As mere undergraduates, they had no money, no cars, no nothing.
Like much else in 1950’s Cambridge, the idea had its genesis late one evening over gas-ring coffee. Tim had gone along to a friend’s room for a nightcap; presently Adrian started dreaming—out loud. How about putting together an expedition to drive to Singapore? Crazy? Maybe. But why not? After all, no-one else had done it. They would be the first. So, they got out an atlas, roughed out a possible route, guessed at mileages, made plans, and talked long into the night.
And that, more or less, was how the expedition was born or, more accurately, how it was conceived. But, over the next few months, their planning had to give way to the business of swotting for their final exams. Nevertheless, even then, they knew that to have any chance they would need to raise some serious financial steam…and a team…and two cars. And that was just for starters.
In fact, the team came together almost before they knew it. First aboard was the cameraman: Antony Barrington Brown (always known as B.B.). He had graduated a few years earlier, and he already ran his own photo studio. Next up was Henry Nott: as secretary of the University Motor Club, it was natural that he became the expedition’s mechanic. Then there was Pat Murphy; with excellent French, passable German, and the prospect of a good Geography degree, he became the map man and visa-negotiating diplomat. Then one of them (B.B.?) had the bright idea of recruiting someone from Oxford: they reasoned that, if they ever got those two cars, they could have one painted light blue and the other dark blue. The resulting media interest would massively multiply their chances of getting sponsorship. So a posse was despatched to the Other Place: it returned with Nigel Newbery who, in time, became the quartermaster and second mechanic. Adrian, who, after all, had provided the initial spark, was already the “busyness manager”—cashier, accountant and secretary. Now, first with a letter and then a visit to Birmingham, he set about persuading the Rover Company that they were capable of pulling off a journey that was, according to some, quite impossible. But, as Adrian pointed out, if, against all the odds, they did make the first “overland to Singapore”, the publicity for Rover would be, well, considerable.
A week later, Rovers wrote (amazingly) to say that they understood the logic of Adrian’s proposal. Celebrations—and then some!
So now, with the glistening promise of two specially equipped Land Rovers, the expedition was up and running. Well, sort of…
First, B.B. was despatched to convince the BBC that the journey would made good TV programmes. A young producer called David Attenborough was partly persuaded. He arranged a £200 advance—enough to buy a wind-up 16 mm camera. He also gave them enough film to start them down the track. If all went well, more would follow. Then there was the possibility of a book; it was Tim’s job to chase after a publisher. Tim eventually landed a £250 advance. With these key elements in place they next approached a whole range of possible sponsors: Dunlop for tyres, Mobil for petrol, Burroughs Wellcome for “medicals”, Coleman Quick Lite for cookers, and over seventy others—for everything from tea-bags and a tape recorder to whiskey and an electric shaver.
On September 1st, 1955 they took off—literally. Silver Cities Airways, one of their sponsors, took some publicity photos and then flew them and their cars across the Channel. By the time they reached Paris a day later they found that they had become L’Expedition d’Oxford et Cambridge à l’Extréme Orient.
Two weeks later, they were in Istanbul. So far, so very good. Here, the cars were checked by the local Rover garage—before an eight-minute ferry ride over the Bosporus to the Asian shore. (Yes, they “allowed” themselves that one and only salt-water crossing.)
On landing in Asia, the expedition got out its dark glasses and suncream, put on a floppy hat, and decided to wear its shirt outside its trousers. Now, rather than driving directly east through Turkey to Persia (today’s Iran) they diverted south to Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. This was partly because B.B. wanted to photograph places like Ba’albek’s Temple of Jupiter, the magnificent but long-deserted Roman city of Apamea, the Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers (judged by some to be the most perfect castle ever built) and the enormous water wheel at Hama (it had been turning, on and off, for nearly 2,000 years). Then there were the pleasures and sights of Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus and Baghdad. (Yes, when one looks at those place names from today’s perspective, one is reminded rather sharply that their route through the Middle East belonged to a totally different age.)
By the time they had driven across 500 miles of desert from Damascus to Baghdad, the expedition had been on the road for nearly two months. Now, after a brief pause to catch their breath, it was north through another frontier and over the mountains to Tehran. There the local Rover agent welcomed them with the news that they were to demonstrate their vehicles to the Persian Army. So, after a long afternoon of low-gear driving up and down near-impossible slopes (and taking a general for a spin), they were more than merely pleased when they heard that an order had been placed for a hundred Land Rovers.
It was well over 1,000 lonely and mostly desert miles from Tehran to the border of Pakistan. Then, skirting the mountainous margins of southern Afghanistan, it was another 1,000 miles to Lahore, Pakistan’s cultural capital. On arrival, an English language newspaper heralded the expedition as “A Boat Race on Wheels” and, in reporting on the sizeable winches on the front of each vehicle, it said that the expedition was equipped with “two very powerful wenches”.
Next stop: Delhi. Then down the famous Grand Trunk Road to Calcutta. This, they had always reckoned, was where the nursery slopes ended and the expedition really began. So now, for ten days over Christmas, while kindly housed by Brooke Bond (the tea people, and another of their sponsors), they prepared for the Big Push. They gathered an armoury of crowbars, picks, shovels and machetes; put together a basic inventory of tinned foods—to keep them going for a week if they should get stuck in the Burmese jungle; they also found a small lake (on a golf course) where they practised techniques for fording rivers: “Take the fan-belt off, spray the electrics with a water-repellent, put only one vehicle in at a time, and keep the revs as high as possible.”
Such was the state of the roads and the delays at umpteen river-crossings, that the 1,000 miles from Calcutta across Assam to Ledo—the start of that wartime road—took them more than two weeks. Then, not too surprisingly, there seemed to be no formal (or even informal) frontier with Burma. After a couple of hours driving up a steepening and ever-worsening jungle track, their Indian police escort (in old Jeeps) suddenly stopped and announced that this was as far as they were going. Evidently, the expedition was now in Burma.
On that first day there were some problems: fallen logs had to be winched and crow-barred out of the way, boulder-strewn streams had to be forded, they had to use those machetes to hack aside the encroaching jungle. But, amazingly, there was still just enough of the old Ledo Road left to allow progress. By evening, they had made 30 twisting miles. They camped in light rain—elated. The next day was even better and at dusk, after another 60 miles, the jungle thinned and the track wound down to a small village. The locals were even more amazed than they themselves were, and told them that the road would get better. The fact was that, while they had always planned to “hit” northern Burma in the driest month of the dry season, they later learnt that that year’s dry season had been the driest for at least a decade. On the third day, they came to the fabled Chindwin River where, to their relief, there was a raft big enough to take the Land Rovers—one at a time. Under the guidance of some locals, they poled themselves across. On the far side, in the undergrowth, was the rusting carcass of a Japanese two-man tank. A little later they came to what, eleven or twelve years earlier, had obviously been an airfield: there were the overgrown remains of what they judged to be a Bristol Beaufighter.
After all the problems that they had so long anticipated, the 270 miles and four days to Myitkyina (Mich-in-ah), the most northerly town in Burma, were a delightful anticlimax.
On several stretches of their way further across Burma, they were given a police escort—against the possibility of ambush by insurgents. But, so often did the escort’s Jeeps (of wartime vintage) splutter to a halt, that Henry and Nigel, the mechanics, in helping with repairs, reckoned their guardians were at least as dependent on the expedition as the expedition was on them.
Onward, they crossed the sluggish Irrawaddy on a bridge and, later, they crossed the rushing Salween on a raft. Beyond, were the hills and opium poppies of Kengtung. Here, in his remote and tiny capital, the local Sawbwa (“Just call me Shorty”; he had been evacuated to Australia during the war) welcomed them to afternoon tea and a bizarre game of cricket. Even today, looking back across over sixty years, if anywhere on the long journey comes back to Tim as being an earthly, even heavenly, Shangri-La, it would have to be Kengtung. In just a few days (yes, I know that it is cliché), they fell in love with the place. They were cosseted and looked after by Shorty’s two aunts, lovely ladies whose names (when translated) were Princess Lily of the Heavens and Princess Moonlit Waters. They were really sorry to leave. Another police escort took them 100 miles south to the Thai border where, after yet one more up-to-the-wheel-arches river, they splashed ashore to the thirteenth country. They had been five months on (and sometimes off) the road.
Bangkok, 600 miles further south, was now their destination. It was raining and, in their hurry to keep to a self-imposed schedule, they skidded one of their cars over onto its side. Nearby, a local bus lay immobile in a ditch. The expedition helped them; they helped the expedition. Then they hurried on. On arriving in the capital a day later, their priority was to ask about the one remaining barrier: a rumoured 100-mile roadless gap away to the south, some way short of the Malayan border. Paradoxically, while there was no road (and never had been), the map showed a railway line. So maybe (at, say, 20 or 25 miles a day?) they would have to bump along over the sleepers—having first checked the railway timetable. Alternatively also on the map, there was a wriggling line marked: “Elephant Path”. Once again, it seemed that the Gods who look after Land Rovers and All those who Travel in Them were listening to their prayers: the military attaché at the American Embassy got in touch with the news that, while in southern Thailand a few weeks earlier, he had learnt that some bulldozers were grading and widening that elephant track—so that surveyors could get in to plot the alignment of a future highway. Maybe the bulldozers would have finished their work…
And so it turned out. Several times they had to use one of those “powerful wenches”. But, in one very long day, they made it across the gap. The damage? Two fractured shock absorbers, a grumbling rear-wheel bearing, a broken spring and a big dent in one of Oxford’s doors. But there were no dents in their euphoria. With only 700 miles to go, and good roads now nearly all the way, nothing could stop them. Accordingly, the next morning they delayed while, on the back door of each Land Rover, B.B. painted a sign in bold capitals. He had been quietly carrying the paint and a brush since Cambridge.
A few days later, they crossed the famous causeway that leads from the Malayan mainland to the island of Singapore. It was a moment that they had talked about since long before they had even started—since, in fact, that evening of gas-ring coffee. Now, at last, they were almost there…six months, six days and nearly 14,000 miles.
They gave the expedition a motorcycle escort over the last few miles to the Rover showroom on Orchard Road. As they pulled in and switched off, everybody clapped and cheered, opened the champagne, flash bulbs popped, cameras whirred, reporters buzzed about. They were the centre of attention. Immodestly, they enjoyed every moment. After all, with the help of hundreds of people along the way, they had achieved exactly what they had set out to achieve. On cue and as if prompted, the reporter from America’s Time magazine commented: “I guess you boys have run plumb outta road.” Indeed, they had. And it was wonderful.
And the journey home?
Well, that’s a story for another time. Suffice it to say, almost a year later and 32,000 miles since they set out, they had another drink—this time for a road they now knew did exist.
Photos: digitalised historical b/w photographs from Tim Slessor’s personal collection
This article was first published in the Winter 2017 edition of Overland Journal Europe.
FIRST OVERLAND – THE BOOK
A full account of this epic, very first overland expedition can be found in Tim Slessor’s book: First Overland: London—Singapore by Land Rover. Foreword by Sir David Attenborough. ISBN 978-1-909930-36-0.
