INDIA TO ENGLAND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 July 1938, Page 9

INDIA TO ENGLAND

SIX THOUSAND MILE JOURNEY IN £l4 CAR. NEW TRAIL ACROSS ASIA. Three Englishmen arrived in England recently, having driven 6500 miles from Delhi by a route through Asia never before attempted in a car. The car in which their journey, lasting ten weeks, was made, originally cost Mr O’Brien Thompson, the principal engineer of the party, £l4. Mr Thompson’s companions were Captain C. V. Griffin, of the Royal Engineers, and Lieut. G. W. M. Kenrick, of the South Staffordshires. The three cooked all their own food, slept in tents, native mud huts and luxury hotels, and mended on route a broken back axle and three springs. ARRESTED IN PERSIA. They were arrested in Persia for two hours for “taking photographs of a military subject”—the receding backs of two soldiers. They followed camel routes and tracks, forded rivers and were submerged by bogs. They drove once for three days and three nights without stopping—and suffering no ill-health, according to Mr Thompson, “a unique and tremendous experience which I would willingly undergo again.” And, when they eventually arrived at Calais, they found that they had only eighteenpence between Them. “For some time,” said Mr Thompson, “Griffin and I had planned to motor home from India. But we wanted to do it, not on the usual Baghdad route, that others have taken, but through the wild and unknown country further north.

THREE TO PUSH. “Kenrick joined us, which helped to pay the £lBO which the journey cost, and I knew it would be essential to have three to help push the car through the mud we would encounter! “After being inoculated against every conceivable disease, we started from Delhi on April'4. Our route took us through Lahore, Peshawar, Kabul, Herat, Meshed, Teheran, Tabriz, Erzerum, Sivas, Ankara, Instambul, and so, by the conventional roads of Europe to Ostend and London. “The first mishap was the breaking of the back axle, which happened in the mountains in a pass some 7000 feet up. The cold was extreme, and, to make matters worse, it happened in one pf the worst rain storms I ever remember. DIVERTED THE WATER. “Fortunately, I had brought a spare axle along, and so there and then got down to fitting it. While Griffin and I worked, Kenrick plied with a spade just above us, diverting the water, and saving us from a torrential stream. “Quite the worst difficulty of the trip was at Herat, where we suddenly found ourselves confronted with the Adaskan, a seasonal river 150 feet wide and four feet deep. CROWNING GLORY. “At first there looked nothing for it but to turn back, but eventually we enlisted the help of some coolies. At the edge of the river we took the engine out of the car, and, with the coolies’ help, body, engine and electrical fittings were taken across separately.” There was the night when, offered native hospitality in a small village, they slept in a mud hut with the native, his wife, his children, his female relatives, most of the village, including the local policeman, and—a cow!