A bus pass to India
AS LONDONERS we’re so used to seeing our bright red London buses all over the capital they just become part of everyday life.
We know they generally get us wherever we want to go.
But what if you wanted to go a bit further away – to India say.
Well, once upon a time back in the 1950s, there was such a bus that could transport you thousands of miles across continents all the way from London to Calcutta.
Way back in 1957 an almost mythical bus journey followed such a route and the passengers who rode on this incredible adventure described it as “20,000 miles of thrills”.
Just imagine boarding that bus in the smoky heart of 1950s London at Victoria Coach Station knowing you would be crossing deserts, forests and mountains and ending up in such an exotic destination! Wow!
The bus was owed and driven by one incredibly brave 40 year-old called Oswald-Joseph GarrowFisher and it had ‘London to Calcutta’ emblazoned right across it.
The bus itself – an AEC Regal III model for those in the know – departed from London on April 15, 1957. Tickets cost the equivalent of just £85 for the London to Calcutta leg and £65 for the return journey.
Just 20 brave passengers made the outward trip and only 7 boarded the return journey back to London.
Apparently the passengers slept overnight in hotels but in some cases had to camp overnight if there was no other accommodation available.
A magazine article about the route from the AEC Gazette publication from September 1957
Some of the tour’s thrilling highlights included Banaras on the Ganges, The Taj Mahal, The Raj Path, The Rhine Valley and The Peacock Throne.
Passengers got free shopping days in New Delhi, Tehran, Salzburg, Kabul, Istanbul and Vienna.
The bus was apparently equipped with sleeping compartments, fans, even music for the passengers’ pleasure but it can’t have been that much of a comfortable ride as the roads in many areas would have been horrific.
Every major town the bus stopped in, press photographers eagerly snapped pictures of the passengers, keen to capture their stories of such an exotic journey.
The bus travelled through France,
Italy, Yugoslavia (as it was then known as), Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan and arrived in Calcutta after some six weeks on June 5. One can only imagine that the passengers must have had seriously sore bums by this time. But what a journey!
When the bus finally arrived back in London, it had completed more than 20,000 miles.
In a New York Times newspaper report on the journey, GarrowFisher said he was not as alarmed by the cliffs and hairpin bends of Mount Ararat region in Turkey as of the ‘narrow roads with soft shoulders and wandering cyclists’ in India.
In Iran, plans had to be placed
Advert for the bus run by Oswald-Joseph Garrow-Fisher under the wheels to prevent the bus sinking into the desert sands. There were sandstorms and torrential rains, dust, energy-sapping heat which must have made progress nightmarish. On the return trip, they had to make a huge 1,200-mile diversion because the Pakistan-Iranian border was closed due to an outbreak of Asian influenza.
A rumour circulated at one point that everyone on the bus had been murdered by bandits in Iran. Apparently staff at the British embassy in Tehran were so relieved when they found out it was in fact just a rumour that they threw a cocktail party for the passengers.
One of the passengers, Peter Moss, 22, did not return to London but continued his journey eastwards, by sea, to Malaya.
He wrote a diary which he later turned into a book called ‘The Indiaman – When the Going was Good by Land and Sea’ which is a colourful description of his once-ina-lifetime bus journey.
But that wasn’t the end of the road for the Indiaman.
Just days after its arrival back in London, Garrow-Fisher was preparing the bus to set off again.
After this first incredible trip, three further round trips were made using the same bus.
In the 1960s similar routes became fashionable amongst hippies who boarded all manner of vehicles including clapped out buses, Landrovers and camper vans to make the journey along the socalled ‘hippie trail’ to India.
Unfortunately in the 1970s, political and military conflicts made the route too dangerous to travel and it has remained so ever since.
In a massive understatement so typical of the time, a brochure for the bus journey advertised it modestly saying: “Travelling by Indiaman is, in fact, an adventure”.
Travelling by Indiaman is, in fact, an adventure