In the early 1960s a young Englishman called David Newman took his Ford Zephyr from his home in London on a trip across the Sahara to meet his friend who had recently moved to Lagos.
It was a trip his friend thought idiotic. To drive across the desert in any car was a danger but, in a Zephyr,…His friend’s doubts spurred Newman on, he had some spare time before he began work on his engineering business and so he set about modifying his car to meet the six-week destination date he told his friend he would meet him on.
From the start he encountered problems, his chosen co-pilot proved to be a let-down, followed by his second and as with most foreign travel of that period he was beset with issues in obtaining visas to cross borders where pockets of military action (mostly by the French) meant travel was at best, risky and at worst, a death wish.
The book is a joy, it is the story of a mad Englishman ploughing through the desert in a beat-up old Ford much to the amazement of the tribe’s folk and French soldiers he met along the way. The French plied him with drink before setting off again in the blistering heat of the desert. Sign posts were, unsurprisingly, few and far between, wrong turns were often made, border posts dodged and precious time swallowed up waiting for bureaucracy to take its path.
Newman wrote an engaging book, he achieved what he had set out to do, not only in crossing the Sahara in the manner that he did but to fulfil a dream, turn it into a reality and finally a book. Reading this we see a young man who, like many of his generation, had thrown off the shackles of life in 1950s Britain and entered the sixties with a sense of carefree purpose. What the author shows, quite unwittingly, is the joy of life and the adventures to be had if we are brave enough to pursue our dreams and ambitions. Newman would return to Britain, work, marry and raise children in the blissful knowledge he lived his dream and got to write about it.
Categories: Uncategorized
retroculturati 
i must say i dont quite share the opinion of the above reviewer ! it looks like newman decided to have a vanity trek where he couldve sparked an international incident, and demanded the entire sahara cater for him ! BUT at least he helped out a bit in building the clinic in agadir AND that takes me to a real mystery here : who precisely was the woman in charge of the project, cherry creswell- turner ? ive spent a week blitzing the net and still not clear G L
LikeLiked by 1 person
I too like her up in vain, will keep trying though!
LikeLike
ive established that she worked extensively for ”save the children” then reforestation projects, met her husband in agadir about the same time as newman then settled down in scotland then moved to ireland
LikeLiked by 1 person
sorry- forgot to add that cherry was also a ”debutante” ! indeed one of the later independent minded ”degree debs” going up to oxford and captaining the rowing team. [dates uncertain for this] quite a career, but nothing after her mid 30s. i think newman missed out by not writing more about her !
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you for this, I love that and I agree, I wanted to know more about her, I really appreciate you sharing this
LikeLike
Cherry Scott, née Cresswell-Turner, was indeed a debutante. Got into overseas aid originally (I think) in 1956 with a gang of aristo types calling themselves ‘Aid to Hungary from Britain’ who took a convoy out and then helped run a refugee camp in Gussing Austria (see a non bestselling book by my father Noel Moynihan called ‘The Light in the West’). By all accounts Cherry got into some harum scarum activities there including crossing the border and going into Budapest —would have been fairly suicidal if detected. From that experience she hooked up (like others there including my father) with Save the Children Fund. Going down to Agadir she helped organise various aid activities for them. As a child of 12 I was taken there (by my father) as a summer holiday along with the rest of the family in about 1960 after the earthquake. Cherry was having an affair with a desert Sheikh and we got taken out to his camp where we had the most extravagant 12 course meal (sheep’s’ eyes etc). Cherry then met and married the mystically inclined Michael Scott, son of Sir Basil Scott (see wiki etc). He had lost an eye in the war as a bomb disposal expert. They lived in Dar el Qas in Tangier, in Rue Sir Basil Scott (qv Wiki). No mention now of the house, or indeed that street, on the internet. I stayed there in 1967. Huge ramshackle house + grounds. Some years later I saw it advertised for sale in Country Life. I believe they lost most of their money to a charlatan Sufi style mystic. They had twins in ?1966, I went to the christening in that ?Armenian (or something) church just by the Albert Hall on Prince Consort Road. I bumped into Michael a few years later, at a nut’s conference in London where Arthur Koestler was giving a speech on the paranormal. I then lost touch for decades, couldn’t find any trace of them whatever I did, until just now I see from the internet that Cherry died a very few years ago.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jon, welcome to the site and thank you so much for your comment. What a wonderful addition to this post and I am hugely grateful for you taking the time time to do it. Many thanks, that’s really interesting and appreciated.
LikeLike
and id like to say thanks as well for this- ill try to track down your fathers book you mention [ if non bestselling still means it was published] i remain puzzled why newman didnt stay around as cherry was rather begging him to ! but thats just wonderful hindsight i suppose. intriguingly, theres another book, ”bridge at andau” by james mitchener which gives a fictionalised account of the hungarian crisis, and so its possible she may feature in that too, in fictionalised form. but like yourself, ive found it impossible to find anything after the 60s until her obtituary in ireland. GL
LikeLiked by 1 person
hello, me again- do we know the name of this ”charlatan mystic” who scammed her? i gather that she did know a few people in that line, but of course i dont want to tarnish anyones reputation. GL
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sorry about the cack-handed attempts above to leave a post. Anyway. Just got the Newman book. Turns out he was in Agadir at most a month or so, possibly as little as a week or two, after we had left Agadir to drive back to London. (The family –my parents, my brother and sister, and myself– had travelled down from London in a donated VW campervan stuffed with supplies for the Save The Children Fund earthquake aid effort that Cherry was running.) Newman’s description of the scene there and particularly the flies is very much what I remember. Being only 12 (I think) it was decided that I was not allowed to visit the devastated town and see or help with the rotting corpses etc (but my brother described them to me in much the same way as Newman does); so I stayed in a room with my 13 year old sister with nothing to do except killing 000s of flies all day while my parents and elder brother did whatever they did in similar work to what as far as i could gather Newman did (to the extent that he did; he doesn’t seem to have stayed for long. But then, I think we were not there for more than a couple of weeks, either). Newman’s remark about soldiers looting resonates –my brother told me that corpses had their fingers cut off so as to remove rings, etc. I note in his book that Newman says Cherry ‘has been living in a tent for months, and I was the first Englishman she had seen for almost as long.’ Well, given that she had seen family Moynihan who stayed with her for a goodly period only a few weeks prior, either she fibbed to him about that, or he is fibbing to us! I suspect the latter.
The remark above about the book ‘The Bridge at Andau’ is correct –the Bridge was another crossing point from Hungary into Austria, ?+/- 50 miles South of Gussing where the refugee camp ran by my father, Cherry and the rest was located. They did travel back and forth between the two crossings but Andau was essentially a different operation from Gussing. The book describes similar circumstances to the ones Cherry faced. I see that my father’s book, ‘The Light in the West’, can be picked up for 2 quid on Amazon. The index contains lots of entries on Cherry 🙂
Geraint’s remark about Forestry projects reminds me that her husband Michael was very involved in an early NGO/Charity called ‘The Old Men of the Trees’. i looked it up recently but it seems to have disappeared. they were into reforestation and there was some huge plan for the Sahara which i think came to nothing.
I finally found reference to Dar El Qas, the Scott’s house in Tangier, on the internet –it seems now to be owned by the Qataris and an attempt by some intrepid soul to visit there was repulsed by Security. Eheu Fugaces (to be pompous for a moment).
LikeLiked by 1 person
I think the charlatan mystic was an Arab of some sort, possibly Sufi, possibly involved in the reforestation stuff, certainly out to offer mystical enlightenment. i knew his name but that was nearly 60 years ago so it has vanished form the accessible memory. The Scotts were rich, and (as far as I know) after him they weren’t.
LikeLiked by 1 person
just going through my notes from last year and im most grateful to JM for filling in the huge gap in the life of CCT.
back to the author himself : perhaps the most perilous thing he did on the entire escapade was to take a diversion from the ”main” road at one point and follow a sign pointing to a ”Col. Robert” and thought he might drop in for a visit to, presumably, a local governor or similar. finally, baffled by the ever steepening and worsening track he turned back. that at least was very wise of him as he was heading to an utterly remote mountain pass, alone, in a vehicle hardly cut out to such a task. one would imagine it only suitable for a camel train. to be stranded in such a way is more dangerous than an encounter with unhelpful border forces, where there is always a chance theyll put you in touch with an embassy or someone. he only gives one paragraph to this. [according to online maps, road is now called RN50].
G L
LikeLiked by 1 person