Journey by farm tractor and caravan from London to Sydney in 1953-54

This Memoir is the story of the journey I, my husband Tom and another couple, Joan and Rod Johnson, took in 1953 to 1954 overland from England to Australia in a caravan pulled by a 30 hp farm tractor. The journey, initiated by Rod ,was an advertising stunt for David Brown Tractors and Stevenson’s Manufacturing, the company that built the caravan( trailer) in which the four of us lived while we travelled. The entire trip, from London to Sydney overland and the necessary voyages over water with the vehicles lashed onto boat decks, took us nine months from start to finish.

This journey is unique – it had never been accomplished before that time and has not been since. And, in fact, because of the political situation in the Middle East would be impossible today. In 1953 apart from a little drum-beating in Trieste the political situation along our route was calm – nobody was pointing a gun at anybody. We slid, with our little entourage, through a window in time.

The story was often picked up by local newspaper reporters as we travelled . Our trip, touted in some articles as “A Honeymoon By Tractor” was hardly that since the two couples, both newly married, lived in close proximity to each other in the eighteen by eight foot caravan.

The itinerary was as follows. England,, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Transjordan, Iraq down the Persian Gulf to Bombay – India, Ceylon by boat, via Singapore, to Sydney, Australia.

It was both exhilarating and difficult. Apart from near impassible muddy roads, for instance, in Yugoslavia that only a tractor could have got through and the difficult sands of the Syrian desert, the tractor chugged steadily along. From a low of 4 mph over the worst roads to a one-time high of 30mph on the short stretch of an Austrian Autobahn, our average driving speed was 16 mph – the entire way.

Awfully late ( I guess we could all agree) at sixty years after the date, I have been writing this story – initially prompted by my grandchildren’s interest in it and of a time gone by. Yes, that, of course ,is the nature of a memoir. All this time I have kept the letters, photos, write-ups and scrap book of the tractor trip. I also have a 45 minute movie that Shell Oil who, wanting a record of this journey for their archives, supplied us with blank film.

To date, I have finished 6 chapters for a total of approx. thirty thousand words. It is not so much a travelogue, and observations in country by country, as it is the chronicling of a journey, through stories, of the people we met and the interesting or amusing incidents .- all in story form. Most of the chapters are stories that stand alone as well as fitting sequentially into the entire journey.

Novelty   of transport flags flying , shopping locally filling up with water at town squares.