A rare find.

I found this last week on a trip around Georgia last week (former USSR one!) Maybe a pre war style desert trip one day? Bagnold used similar on his pioneering trips between the Wars that have inspired so many of us. I think it’s a Model A Ford truck, but I could be wrong. It had no engine, sadly, but I guess any old engine could be adapted to fit.

Celebrity status

John Carroll borrowed the Willys this month for a feature he’s helping with in Land Rover Owner International Magazine and Practical Classics. The feature will pitch 4x4s from three different decades together and, naturally, the Jeep was compared with a Series 1 Land Rover. Interesting how the Land Rover dwarfs the Jeep, but it is a later Series 1, not an original 80 inch. The Land Rover that owed so much to the Jeep in design.

John pitched up here the evening before and we went and enjoyed an hour of pure Jeep talk over a couple of pints of Timothy Taylor’s Landlord bitter. Early the next morning he was off. We put the screen up, but there is no roof so John wrapped up warm for his 100 mile round trip to Peterborough and back.

Thanks to John for the location pictures and for wearing the right outfit for my photo.

Nice pair!

This week saw the final stage of the second Jeep’s restoration. The 1943 Willy’s MB is now finished and registered with the rather splendid registration number, 635 YUD. (Plates not yet fitted!) I took the Ford Jeep up to Matt’s place in Matlock to collect it and took the opportunity of leaving the Ford behind for a new coat of paint. It has been finished a couple of years now and we made the mistake of using a matt finish sand yellow. This has absorbed moisture and caused some surface rust. This will be cleaned off and a couple of fresh coats of 15% gloss applied for that eggshell finish that should repel water. This paint came from The Paint Man - a chap who really knows his paint and also owns an LRDG Replica Jeep, based on a Hotchkiss. Purists may argue that we have placed the condenser can a bit far back, but the LRDG did not have to worry about headlamp efficiency and an annual MOT test - plus, we think it looks a bit neater set back into the grille a couple of inches.

Over the last few weeks Sam, John and I have discussed revised dates for the LRDG Expedition, postponed due to the unsettled nature of North African politics right now. We are pleased to announce our LRDG trip through the vastness of the Western desert will now be Easter 2012. this should give all the displaced North Africans a chance to find their way home and leave the Desert available for adventure.

A good read.

In light of the chaos and mayhem in North Africa we have taken the regrettable decision to postpone our Expedition to Egypt. Rather than risk ourselves and all the vehicles it seems sensible to delay until maybe later these year, or early next year. This will give Egypt a chance to elect a Government and, hopefully, stem the flow of fleeing exiles from Libya. In the meantime we shall work hard to reduce costs in an attempt to make the trip more affordable and research more sights with the help of this excellent book that arrived this week.

Incident at Jebel Sherif, by Kuno Gross, Roberto Chiarvetto and Brendan O’Carroll is the definitive book on the Long Range Desert Group and a must for all those interested in the subject. It is informative, based on the exhaustive travels of the authors and historical reports from those brave men who fought with the LRDG. The book is well illustrated with current colour photographs and original black & white pictures taken at the time, supplemented with copies of old documents.

I shall enjoy reading it as North Africa settles down to some kind of status quo.

Inspector Gadget.

Having found the Fort, but been unable to photograph it without permission from ‘the top’ our next goal was to find the hanger that had been attacked so successfully on January 11th 1941. Pat Clayton and his party headed east towards the Airfield - little more that a cleared stretch of sand. They found the hanger with three Ghibli aircraft inside, but encountered some opposition from the Italians guarding the area, losing two of their own men. The French Colonel, d'Ornano and a member of T Patrol. We hoped to be more lucky! I am again grateful to Dr Martin Sterry for spending time searching both the 1958 Aerial Photograph and the contemporary Google Earth images to locate, what he thought, looked like 50m x 20m structure ‘with well defined edges’. Martin supplied a waypoint and we headed for it, turning south off the tarmac and out into open farmland. The hanger was soon visible, but surrounded by high hedges and looked harder to access than it had been in 1941. We stopped and asked a farmer how to get into it and he replied ‘Ahhh The old Italian Airfield?’. We had found it and here are a selection of pictures, the new ones showing it as it is today and the old B&W from Bill Kennedy-Shaw’s excellent 1945 book, ‘LRDG’. Just visible on the B&W are the two windows set high in the west facing (towards the town) wall.

It was an emotive experience to stand on the very spot, exactly 70 years on - to the hour! We hope to have many similar high points on the Easter trip to Egypt. One place still available!

Podcast info.

Fresh as a daisy after a 2000 mile haul back from Libya in my Land Rover, I presented a Podcast via Overland Live, administered in UK by the veritable Martin Solms in London. This relatively new means of communication allows the use of ‘meeting’ software to allow like minder people to broadcast their stories of Overland Travel to an International audience. It can also be watched retrospectively as a recorded item. Click here!

If you would like to watch/hear me talk about my recent trip to Libya and the motives behind the LRDG Expedition this Easter, please go to this link - You would be well advised to skip the first 10 minutes as we had a few ‘tekkies’.

The real Murzuq Fort attacked by the LRDG

As you enter Murzuq from the Sebha Road, as the LRDG did exactly 70 years ago, on January 11th., the ‘Fort’ is to the west of the town - A Medieval construction in pretty good condition and something of a tourist attraction. (featured in an earlier Blog) A hand painted sign proclaims ‘Fort - Murzuq’ so it would be a fair assumption that this was the fort the LRDG attacked on that victorious day in 1941. But standing there in the square it didn’t add up. It all the references I have read, nothing is mentioned of a Mosque, yet it dominates the central square. Also, in Bill Kennedy-Shaw’s book LRDG, he says the road led straight to the Fort. This road took in several turns! Within our team of Archaeologists we are lucky to have Dr. Martin Sterry. Martin’s specialist subject is the analysis of ariel photography in search of Archaeological sites and, by chance, he had a 1958 ariel photograph of Murzuq. On it can clearly be seen the old sand track into town, leading to another fort. This second fort is a more likely candidate, as it is still a military establishment today, meaning I was unable to get permission to photograph even the exterior, which may have shown a bit of original damage. I did, however, grab a shot as we drove along the very approach road the LRDG must have driven along as they ‘managed a good shot at the tower’. It is also far closer to the Airfield - something else mentioned in other reports.

So I present to you, probably for the first time, pictures of the Fort the LRDG attacked on January 11th, 1941.

Hope I don’t get a knock on the door from giving away any secrets!