Armed with curiosity, humour and a gift for understatement, Newby turned failure, misadventure and self-mockery into a new kind of travel writing
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The London map retailer Stanfords celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2003 by inviting the leading travel writers of the day to a party at its Covent Garden shop. Among the celebrities was the legendary Eric Newby, who verified his reputation for modesty by being the only luminary in attendance to wear his name badge.
Newby always considered himself a traveller of modest means, with a sense of humour ever at the ready to deal with the unforeseen, which most people would consider setbacks. ‘Why do people travel?’ Newby was once asked. His reply reflected his geniality and sharp wit. ‘To escape their creditors. To find a warmer or cooler clime. To sell Coca-Cola to the Chinese. To find out what is over the seas, over the hills and far away, round the corner, over the garden wall – with a ladder and some glasses.’
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Which of these motivated Newby’s travels is a difficult question to answer. When not engaged in selling Coca-Cola to the Chinese, on the high seas as a sailor or serving as a soldier, Newby explained with typical irony that he set out on his journeys partly for amusement and sheer curiosity, or to satisfy the longing, romantic and reasonless, that he believed lay deep in the hearts of most of his fellow countrymen. He saw good cause to undertake his journeys, if for nothing else than to shun the celebrated spectacle of the tourist, or simply to set his feet where few civilised feet had trod.
Newby was born in the heart of London in 1919. His seafaring adventures began before his 20th birthday, when he joined a four-masted ship to take part in the Last Grain Race from Australia to Europe, by way of Cape Horn. This voyage inspired him to write an account of his experiences in The Last Grain Race, the first narrative in what would become a prolific publishing career that produced 25 travel books.
One of the most harrowing experiences in Newby’s life took place during the Second World War, while he was serving in the Special Boat Section. In August 1942, he was captured by the Italians off the coast of Sicily. Newby’s memoir Love and War in the Apennines is an engaging account of his escape and subsequent hiding, with the collaboration of anti-Fascist Italian civilians. He was recaptured shortly before 1944 and spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner – ‘a very disagreeable experience’, as he recounted with characteristic understatement.
The book, published in 1971, tells of guerrilla operations against the German occupying forces in Italy. Sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy, Newby caught the attention of Wanda Skof, a young woman of Slovenian origin. She helped him escape, and he spent several months in hiding, often living in a cave. Eventually recaptured, Newby spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Germany and Czechoslovakia. After the Allied victory, he returned to Italy to seek out Wanda and propose to her. They were married, and Wanda became Newby’s lifelong inspiration, standing steadfastly by his side until his death in 2006 at the age of 86. Once asked if there was one thing he couldn’t travel without, Newby simply replied, ‘My wife.’
Newby was nothing if not an atypical adventure travel writer. His civilian professional life began in 1946 at the age of 27, when he stepped into the world of fashion, of all unlikely endeavours, in a job that entailed such activities as dressing models for fashion shows. This period was interspersed with occasional visits to far-flung places – a dress rehearsal, one might say, for what was to come after his commercial interlude.
Newby remained in the fashion world for ten years, breaking out occasionally from pinning up models for the catwalk to travel farther afield. This was then followed by a brief stint with the London publishing house Secker & Warburg in the summer of 1956. Newby quickly cast aside his office job to embark on the expedition that would secure his fame as one of Britain’s great travel writers of the 20th century.
While working as head of promotions for Secker & Warburg, Newby persuaded his friend, the diplomat Hugh Carless, to accompany him on an expedition – first in a battered car, then on foot and horseback – to attempt an ascent of Mir Samir, an unclimbed 6,000-metre peak in the wilds of northeastern Afghanistan. The fact that he had never climbed a mountain didn’t deter Newby in the slightest. Three hundred metres below their goal, he pulled out a pamphlet with advice on how to climb mountains. Ill-equipped and ill-prepared, their bid to reach the summit was an outstanding failure.
Newby chronicled his ill-fated mountaineering debut in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, published in 1958 by Secker & Warburg. As in all his works, the narrative mirrored his characteristic self-effacement and penchant for understatement, and was also marked by moments of sheer hilarity.
They stopped at a village called Arayu, which Newby described as being inhabited by ‘savage dogs, surly-looking Tajiks and mud houses’, before carrying on to a resting place under a cluster of mulberry trees on the way to the Lower Panjshir. While preparing for bed, they spotted a figure approaching in the distance at the head of a small caravan, who turned out to be the explorer Wilfred Thesiger. He came to their campsite gushing vitriol about England ‘going to pot’ because his expensive travel garments were falling to pieces. Thesiger cast a disparaging glance at Newby and Carless as they blew up their inflatable airbeds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ he said.
In subsequent misadventures, Newby and Wanda travelled down the Ganges in an enormous boat that ran aground after just 200 metres and required 32 men to carry it overland. Newby’s account of the voyage was published in 1966 as Slowly Down the Ganges.
Newby’s varied career also led him into journalism when, in 1964, he was appointed travel editor of The Observer, a post he held for nearly ten years. During this time he became an expert photographer, as demonstrated in What the Traveller Saw, a record of his journeys across the globe that reveals an innate sense of composition and an eye for telling human detail.
William O Douglas, the noted travel memoirist who by day was a justice of the US Supreme Court, called the book ‘a chatty, humorous and perceptive account’. Even the unsanitary hotel accommodation, the infected drinking water, the unpalatable food, the inevitable dysentery are lively, amusing, laughable episodes.
A Traveller’s Life, published in 1982, sparkles with autobiographical fragments from Newby’s life through the war and the travel years with Wanda. It is, in effect, an account of his travel dreams coming true: from his journey on the Orient Express and his love of fine food and wine to navigating the London sewer system, cycling to Italy and retracing the footsteps of Graham Greene. His life, in many ways, resembled a boy’s adventure tale. Those close to Newby remember him as perennially youthful and restless, an eternal optimist who flew fairly close to the sun and relied on his considerable wits to get him out of any spot of bother along the way.
British-Canadian travel writer Rory MacLean remembers Newby for his energetic, idiosyncratic and hilarious first-person narratives. ‘Who among us can improve on the opening of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush? he says. ‘A telegram sent to Carless – Can You Travel Nuristan June? – launched his travels and his career, as well as a narrative marked by genial self-effacement and overwhelming understatement. Few travel books, meanwhile, have moved me more than his masterful Love and War in the Apennines, with its marriage of war and young love.’
Ariane Bankes, curator at the Royal Society of Literature, recalls her first memory of Newby as that of a man with such a spring in his step that he did not so much walk as bounce along the corridors of Collins, the publishers where she worked and later became his editor. ‘With rucksack on back, craggy, good-looking face, penetrating blue eyes, a lopsided smile and a bark of a laugh, he was always a welcome sight, even when we were locked in editorial combat over just how much detail he would record about a particularly rain-soaked and bungalow-strewn stretch of his latest trip, by bicycle round Ireland,’ she says.
The New York Times journalist Margalit Fox remembered Newby as a dean of postwar British travel writing, who spent more than half a century visiting some of the world’s remotest places in journeys that, to his great delight, often went horribly wrong.
What endures about Eric Newby isn’t the scale of his journeys but rather the spirit in which they were undertaken. At a time when exploration was still often wrapped in the language of conquest, endurance and heroic suffering, Newby quietly dismantled the myth from within. He showed that curiosity mattered more than competence, and that admitting ignorance could be more illuminating than asserting mastery. His books gave permission to fail, to get lost, to laugh at oneself – and to discover that the misadventure is usually the story.
Newby’s influence can be traced through generations of travel writers who came after him: those who favoured candour over bravado, humour over grandeur and observation over expertise. He helped establish a distinctly British tradition of travel writing that prized understatement and self-deprecation, where the traveller is as much the subject of scrutiny as the place itself. In this lineage, the reader is invited not to marvel at the author’s prowess, but to recognise their own fallibility reflected back at them.
Above all, Newby wrote with humanity. Whether describing a failed Himalayan ascent, a becalmed boat on the Ganges or the kindness of strangers during wartime flight, his prose is marked by warmth, curiosity and a refusal to take himself too seriously. He remained sceptical of the very idea of the traveller as hero, preferring instead to cast himself as a participant-observer – muddling through, notebook in hand.
In an age of curated adventures and performative extremes, Newby’s work feels quietly radical. His legacy is a reminder that travel isn’t about triumph, but about attentiveness; not about arriving, but about noticing. Or, as he might have put it, about setting off with little more than a sense of humour – and, if possible, one’s wife.
The best of Eric Newby
The Last Grain Race (1956)
Newby’s first book and the origin story of everything that followed Written after he joined the last commercial sailing ships racing grain from Australia to Europe via Cape Horn, it captures a world on the brink of disappearance. Part maritime history, part coming- of-age tale, the book established Newby’s instinct for placing himself at the centre of larger historical forces.
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958)
The book that made Newby’s reputation and still one of the most beloved travel classics of the 20th century. His attempt, with Hugh Carless, to climb an unclimbed Afghan peak becomes a masterclass in comic understatement. Ill-prepared, ill-equipped and gloriously undaunted, Newby redefined travel writing by proving that failure could be more revealing than success.
Slowly Down the Ganges (1966)
Newby and his wife Wanda set out to drift serenely down India’s great river — and instead find themselves hauling their vessel over land within minutes. The journey unfolds as a sequence of mishaps, delays and encounters, rendered with warmth and curiosity. One of Newby’s funniest books, it shows his gift for turning logistical disaster into literary delight.
Love and War in the Apennines (1971)
Newby’s wartime memoir is a striking tonal shift, combining restraint with emotional depth. Captured in Italy during the Second World War, he recounts his escape with the help of local civilians – and his meeting with Wanda, who would become his wife. Often regarded as his finest book, it demonstrates that his understatement could carry profound moral weight.
