Barbara Toy, 92: Travelled the world in her Land Rover 'Pollyanna'
sankkuss
Obituary
Barbara Toy
Adventurous woman who travelled the world in a Land Rover called Pollyanna
BARBARA TOY travelled the world with only her Land Rover for company. In her
series of books she gave vivid glimpses of all that she saw through the
windscreen, but her casual, personal narratives were concerned as much with
the journey and the polyglot types of the road as with the enormous variety
of places through which she passed.
Barbara Alex Toy was born in Sydney, the daughter of Bert Toy, an Australian
newspaper editor and war correspondent who turned her towards writing.
Having moved to Britain before the war, she became a part of London’s
theatre scene and managed the Richmond Theatre. During the Blitz she was a
volunteer ambulance driver.
In 1949, with Moie Charles, she approached her friend Agatha Christie with
the idea of adapting her book Murder at the Vicarage. Despite her vow not to
let others adapt her plays, Christie agreed, and sanctioned a major change
to the denouement. Having opened at The Playhouse in December 1949, it ran
for 1,776 performances.
Toy’s life changed direction when she was in a theatre bar and the
conversation turned to travel. A colleague bet her that she could not cross
the Saharan desert. Having begged and borrowed, she purchased a new soft-top
Land Rover from Henley’s showroom in Piccadilly. She called it Pollyanna,
and never looked back.
Toy did not go travelling with the aim of writing about her experiences, but
on her return she could not avoid doing so. Her first book was titled A Fool
on Wheels (1955), the phrase of a brigadier who told her that she was mad to
go. Disregarding his advice, she drove first to North Africa and then from
Tangier to Baghdad, even though the region was still littered with
minefields from the war.
Her second book, A Fool in the Desert (1956) begins in Kuwait, where she
wrote to ask for permission to visit the King of Saudi Arabia: it was
granted, and she became one of the few people allowed to talk to his harem.
Toy also accompanied an officer from the German War Graves Commission to
find the graves of soldiers who were killed in the desert. They found
British as well as German bodies, identifying them by their boots and their
buttons.
Her boldest feat was her trip around the world, through Europe and Turkey to
Pakistan, through Asia, from Perth to Sydney and finally from San Francisco
to New York, a journey that she described in Columbus Was Right (1958).
Pollyanna, meanwhile, was showing her age. But the brakes may have prevented
a night-time robbery in Iran at “a block made from sacks”; unable to stop,
she “swung down into the ditch as the men scattered, kept up a fast pace and
swung back the other side of the block” to relative safety.
In 1958 Rover made Toy exchange Pollyanna for a newer vehicle, because she
could not be seen representing the company in an old 1950 model. Rover gave
Pollyanna to a boys’ school, and the vehicle was eventually bought and
restored by a Land Rover enthusiast, but Toy bought her back from his estate
when he died. A passage in her book In Search of Sheba (1961) recalls how
she felt about being forced to trade in Pollyanna for a newer model.
In the replacement, Toy drove from Timbuktu to Tripoli, which she described
in The Way of the Chariots (1964). Her aim was to follow up the discovery by
a French officer in 1933 of hundreds of rock drawings in mountains in
southern Algeria.
She also hoped to find out whether there had been, as some historians had
claimed, a great highway from the Mediterranean to the Niger that was
traversed by chariots. She did not claim to be an archaeologist or an
historian, and made no strong conclusions.
In 1990, as vice-president of the Land Rover Registry, Toy set off on her
second world tour in the original Pollyanna. She succesfully completed a
second circumnavigation and was home just in time for Christmas.
She was married briefly to Ewing Rixson. They had no children.
Barbara Toy, travel writer, was born in Sydney on August 11, 1908. She died
in Banbury on July 18, 2001, aged 92.
Scott Berg
By an odd coincidence, I was also born on August 11 and
I just bought a Land Rover. Perhaps when I retire I can pick
up where Ms. Toy left off.
Scott