Alex Bescoby chronicles the return leg of the mythical First Overland, with breathless gung-ho adventure and frequently moving personal context
Review by Charlie Connelly
In 1955, two Series One Land Rovers carrying six Oxbridge graduates set off from London with little more than a thirst for adventure, some maps and a vague promise of a documentary series from a young BBC producer named David Attenborough.
Six months and 29,000 kilometres later, the Land Rovers, named Oxford and Cambridge, arrived in Singapore, thus completing the previously mythical First Overland.
In those far-off days of epic adventuring, the crew became celebrities, as did their vehicles. Cambridge was lost almost immediately, abandoned after a road crash near the Iran–Turkey border. Still, Oxford’s post-Singapore life led first to Ascension Island then to St Helena, where it was first filleted for parts and then dismantled altogether.
In 2018, having been retrieved and rebuilt by a Yorkshire-based Land Rover obsessive, the old warhorse was spotted at a Land Rover convention by adventurer and documentary maker Alex Bescoby, who hatched a plan to complete that first journey by driving Oxford from Singapore to London alongside 86-year-old Tim Slessor, one of the original First Overlanders.
Last-minute health issues saw Slessor replaced by his grandson, but The Last Overland remains nothing less than a proper, old-fashioned travel yarn, charting an extraordinary journey through 23 countries of breathtaking landscapes, thrilling encounters and frustrating border bureaucracy.
Chronicling such a huge journey could have made for a superficial account, but Bescoby is a likeable travelling companion and able storyteller, distilling the histories and current affairs of a range of nations in a concise, even-handed way while striking the right balance between what goes on inside the expedition vehicles and what happens outside.
His use of Slessor’s account of the original expedition adds nuance, contrasting the world of 1955 with the one we know today. ‘We’re safer than the First Overlanders,’ says one of the party as they cross another Central Asian autocracy, ‘but much less free.’
Mixing breathless gung-ho adventure with frequently moving personal context, Bescoby’s book is the perfect riposte to the baffled Turkmen mechanic who, while helping Oxford get over its latest structural calamity, declares, ‘It makes no sense to travel just to travel.’
