Some more early Indiaman stuff:

.                                   Picture from the first link. . . .

"The year is 1957. The Suez Canal is blocked with ships scuppered by Gamal Abdel Nasser in the aftermath of the failed invasion by Britain and France to reclaim that waterway. The only sea route to Malaya, where I am headed, is via the Cape and beyond my means. All I can afford is 80 pounds Sterling for a seat on the first ever commercial overland bus that has just commenced operation."

These words are by Peter Moss, and are on the back of the first photograph in this link to Part 1 - London to Tehran; the second link is to Part 2 - Tehran to Penang.

The images are shown using a so-called Tilt-Viewer, which I didn't find easy to use at first. But it's good stuff, there are some superb photographs - and by coincidence only posted in May 2008.

In his account of an overland journey to India, Steve Abrams mentions that he saw an Indiaman bus crossing the border from Pakistan to India on 16th November 1968 (we'd gone through with the Safaris bus on 12th October '68) - the link to his site is here

.                                 

Peter Moss, a passenger on the second Indiaman bus journey from London to Bombay in August 1957, has not only put a lot of photographs of the trip on the website I gave the link to, here and here, but he's included a description of the experience in his book "Bye-Bye Blackbird: an Anglo-Indian Memoir" (ISBN: 0-595-31373-6). The pages covering his Indiaman trip are 186 to 218. It's not a full account of the trip, and doesn't set out to be, but it gives the atmosphere of it. It also allows a glimpse of the character of Mr. Paddy Garrow-Fisher - the man behind Indiaman - and the wheel. I'm not going to repeat it all here, but apparently that second Indiaman trip ended in tears. Mr. Moss and another bloke left the bus in Agra, before it sped on to its destination—Bombay—where for the passengers, things were to go wrong. I hope he doesn't mind if I include this extract:-

       "The following day, Robin and I bid our adieux to The Indiaman and all who would sail on her, bound for distant Bombay. Months later we would individually learn, through correspondence with those who remained in touch, of an explosive evening on the final lap, when around the campfire some minor disagreement mushroomed into a blazing row. All the pent up, unvoiced grievances, all the myriad and one suppressed recriminations, came flooding out. It was a bout of poison-letting that left them reeling from the discovery of those festering toxins running so close to the surface for so long."

Strong stuff—I wonder what Paddy had to say about all that? Whether the gripe was amongst the passengers themselves, between them and their driver, or the whole lot of them, is not revealed; but from what I can make of the man - it would have been water off a duck's back. The book is worth getting hold of - and not just to read the Indiaman bit. There were sixteen passengers on that second Indiaman trip. When I drove out of Delhi fourteen years later, there were nearly forty people on the AEC bus - I wonder if they were ever that close to boiling point? I think not, although I did get near it—when pulling a drunken passenger out of a putrid cesspit in the gardens of Greens Hotel in Ferozepur - where we'd stopped for the first night of the drive back to London. All good stuff - or so they say - afterwards.

Having read the (all too brief) account of Peter Moss' Indiaman experince, the only mention of any setbacks with the bus are of a broken spring and getting the thing bogged in mud and so on; however, the writer does comment on the restrictive ground clearance of the bus - something that was dealt with by raising the suspension of the Asian-Greyhound buses by five inches.

The thing that struck me about the Indiaman trip, was that the bus didn't have any (reported) engine problems; this was an AEC bus, and it appeared to live up to the slogan sign-written on its sides: 20,000 Miles through 15 Countries - by AEC of course!

It's now apparent that I should have called this thread "Overland in the Nineteen-Fifties", or something like that, because that's what it's turned into. Before Paddy began running his Indiaman company early 1957, closely followed Asian Greyhound in late December of that year, some students from Cambridge in 1955 had completed an expedition from London to Afghanistan—in a Landrover. All this is written up in the book "Afghan Interlude", by Oliver Rudston De Baer. The full text of it can be read here - it's not the easiest thing to read - due to the format; the photographs are not included, but it is certainly readable.

.                                               
Earlier than that, in 1954, Cambridge University Mountaineering Club's Expedition to the Korakaram in Northern Pakistan, was achieved in a Bedford Dormobile: that journey is covered in "Road to Rakaposhi". The photos below are scanned from the book - my copy is getting rather faded by now - but it looks to be in slightly better shape than the one on eBay - at the time of writing.

.                   

.

In the last post I forgot to include this picture of another Nairn bus, so here it is:-
.
. . . and in the "First Overland" book is an account of what it was actually like to ride in one of these huge buses; I'm sure that the prime-mover pictured here is a special, built-to-order model by Marmon-Harrington, an American truck manufacturer. I would love to have driven one of these semi-trailer buses - just the once. That'd be enough for me - one of Nairn's drivers did it for nineteen years...

The book - "First Overland" is a very good read, and although its title isn't strictly correct - it's very apt.