Snaking across the gravel deserts of Syria and Iraq, Algeria and the old Soudan in the s and 30s were lines of oil-drums. Crossing the Syrian desert they were a mile apart: after Adrar, going south across the Sahara, they stood every kilometre along Bidon V, marking water depots, and neatly numbered. They indicated motor-routes, on which first heavy-duty cars and then huge custom-built buses roared across the hard surface of the desert, making unprecedentedly fast land-links across empires and for a couple of decades competing successfully with nascent air services on price and occasionally on speed.
It is a wonderful story β or pair of stories. Both stories are old stories, and I re-tell them with pleasure but not originality. Two of those left behind by the tide of war after fighting under Allenby in Palestine and Syria, with a fascination and an aptitude for motor mechanics, were a pair of New Zealand bothers called Norman and Gerald Nairn.
Without capital but very determined, they set up and ran a transport business, first as a cross-country taxi route between Haifa and Beirut β in those days a very difficult journey of 19 hours with no road south of Akka, and stretches of driving along beaches and across ploughed fields β and later as a longer-distance service running to Baghdad and eventually to Tehran.
Interestingly, both routes more or less coincided with projected but unbuilt railway lines. The British had planned a line from Haifa to Baghdad the only other line into Baghdad was an Indian Army narrow-gauge line from Basra , but it was unfinanceable. Cars and trucks made better financial sense. The Nairn business really got under way with an exploratory drive in April , supported by the British representatives in Beirut and Damascus, the former, Captain McCallum, accompanying the expedition with his wife.
Three cars β a Buick, a Lancia and an Oldsmobile β crossed in three days from Damascus to Baghdad, and the Nairns quickly tried more crossings, five that summer alone. The British authorities in Iraq were unwilling to support the service, though Nairn quite quickly won a five-year contract for delivery of Iraq government mail from the Baghdad Post Office, which underwrote a successful business between Haifa on the Palestine coast and Baghdad, a journey of miles or so across some of the more hostile terrain on earth.
