PREFACE

Bridging a Half-Century

With the passage of time Tony Thompson had begun to suspect that before long his children and grandchildren would start asking what all those papers yellowing and gathering dust in the loft were all about. Inveterate traveller, former athlete, he still hikes long distances with a 40-pound pack. He graduated from Cambridge in law, only to abandon it for a more rewarding career in teaching the English language to foreigners. Thus the world was, in different ways, his oyster. Hidden amid those yellowing pages of diaries and scribblings from half a century ago was the story of a combination of travels – the Cambridge Afro-Asian Expedition 1961–2, by eight young men from Cambridge (plus one from Oxford) on the eve of different careers. Tony’s travelling companions of that time also had lofts, cellars or places under the stairs hiding papers, maps, photographs and other memories of thousands of miles travelled across three continents at a time when officialdom of all kinds did its damnedest to obstruct free movement. After all these years most of them were still in touch. Traicho Belopopski, a swarthy Bulgarian Communist youth activist and former army officer, had died not long before. Anthony Swanwick, the dapper gentleman from Oxford, was lost somewhere in America.

At his seventeenth-century farmhouse on the edge of the Cotswolds Tony hosted the group for a first brainstorming as winter drew nigh in 2008. What should be done with all these papers, photos, files and other mementos? ‘How about a book?’ And so it was to be.

Work started in real earnest the following summer under the bougainvilleas at the home in Bodrum, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, of Mehmed Arif Demirer. Mehmed is a businessman with fingers in several pies, volumes of writing on the state of his native Turkey and elsewhere to his credit, and is now dipping his toes once more in the swirling waters of Turkish politics. He had been the father of the Expedition when he was a restless young Cambridge engineering student. Most available floor-space at Mehmed’s house was soon covered with old papers, pictures and newspaper cuttings. Tried and stretched memories were put to work over several days of sorting this stuff out. Tim Parkinson, the expedition’s ‘chief engineer’, with a career behind him in industry ranging from diesels to aircraft, when not dinghy-sailing, applied computers and scanners to all this stuff. Evening sundowners, the delicious Turkish cooking of Mehmed’s wife, Gül, or sea-fresh fish at a nearby cove, boosted enthusiasm for distilling life out of these half-century-old mementoes into some form of recognizable shape. Then followed months of writing and related head-scratching. Three of the companions particularly wielded their pens: Roger Sherwin, a former senior executive with major British engineering firms in their heyday, an aggressive rugby wing-forward in his youth, now a sculptor of no mean talent; Tony, as ‘supervisor’; and Bob Cox, once a journalist and then a ‘Eurocrat’, that breed held in high suspicion in today’s Britain, working in different guises from diplomatic, to managerial, to peace-keeper. Bob wrote the final edit of this book; Roger, in addition to writing, would mastermind the photographs. Most participants’ pens have left their traces. Absent from this Turkish fray were: Nigel Robertson, ebullient historian turned accountant, with a most prodigious memory; and Peter, now Lord, Temple-Morris, barrister and politician with a keen nose for geopolitics.

More will emerge about these characters as the story unfolds.

Oh – and before one forgets – there are two other key characters in this saga, two little ladies: the two vehicles which conveyed the Expedition during its travels and travails – a brace of Volkswagen Kombis whose little engines and rugged bodies, with good nature and occasional protest, suffered the abuse of their young masters over some 28,000 miles and 12 months between them.

What’s so special? Well, travel of this sort in those days was not undertaken lightly. It was travel, moreover, in a region fraught today with uncertainty and insecurity and no soft option then. Over the span of half a century the companions of this journey, in the light of their different backgrounds, profiles and professional experience, but of one generation, offer here in this book special glimpses into a fast-changing world.

The Expedition prospectus concluded: ‘… with the material obtained, to write a book on return.’

It took another 50 years to get that book written. Here it is.

Writing it was a great pleasure and educative. Hopefully, it will entertain you, the reader, as well.