The expedition
Peter Townsend had commanded fighter squadrons in the Battle of Britain, served as equerry to George VI and comptroller to the Queen Mother, and been posted to Brussels as air attaché in 1953 when his hope of marrying Princess Margaret became public; on 31 October 1955 she announced she would not marry him. On 21 October 1956 he drove east out of Brussels in a Land Rover to go round the world alone — partly, as the reviewers noted, as a way of healing. Midlands television news filmed his visit to the Rover factory on 10 July 1956.
By his own account he took far too much baggage at first and sent things home. What he kept was a case of spare parts, cooking things and a small petrol stove, an axe, crowbar and rope, a medicine chest, a bedding roll and a Bible; he had no spade until he was approaching the Sahara, 50,000 miles later. The Land Rover carried him across Europe and Greece, through the Middle East to Pakistan and India, Burma and down to Singapore, and by ship to Australia and New Zealand — he was photographed with the car in Wellington on 1 April 1957 — then to Japan, and across the Pacific to the United States, where he entered at Montana and drove south through Mexico, Guatemala and Panama, into Venezuela and on through Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Uruguay. From South America he shipped to Africa and drove north from South Africa through the Belgian Congo, calling on Albert Schweitzer at his jungle hospital at Lambaréné, and across the Sahara by the Hoggar massif, In Salah and El Goléa to the Mediterranean and home to Brussels, eighteen months and 57,000 miles after leaving.
Earth, My Friend was published in London in 1959 and by Coward-McCann in New York in 1960, 351 pages illustrated with his photographs. Kirkus found in it a man of integrity, fortitude and an essentially democratic spirit, struck by the instinctive kindness of the people he met — a Greek hotel-keeper, a Pakistani chieftain, a New Zealand sheep farmer, a Japanese geisha, a Montana petrol-pump attendant, a Venezuelan border guard, Schweitzer — and not a single mention of the royal family. Townsend settled in France, married Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959, and wrote Duel of Eagles, The Last Emperor and other books before his death in 1995. His Land Rover's identity and fate are not recorded in the sources fetched. He set out a month after the Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition's cars had come home, and in the same season as Barbara Toy's solo circumnavigation in Pollyanna.
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